Urban History April Exam

Question 1

What’s the deal with that slumming book?

Answer 1

Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London by Seth Koven 2004
describes how dirt is both political and gendered and how women and men took up tourism of the slums in great numbers, rarely defining the term but rather using it to distance themselves from the practice, though many reformers partook in formative, brief exposure to the slums early in their lifetimes. it says a lot about spectacle, reform, the role of reform societies, etc.
/Traditional histories of public health show how the medical inspection of school children, rate funded school baths, slum clearance, housing, protective labour legislation etc. resulted in the gradual but inexorable victory of the bureaucratic forces of order over the chaos produced by unregulated industrial capitalism and urbanization/
Salvation Army slum lassies - 500.000 in 1893
women who slummed were more likely to be judged for it
there was a sexual aspect depicted to it, with the slums often considered more sexual and lurid
the way some women describe the physical interaction with dirt raises further questions

Question 2

what’s a casual house?

Answer 2

a workhouse where you only have to/can stay one night out of the month. they were established in the 1840s, and exposed in James Greenwood’s 1866 piece, “A Night in A Workhouse” for the Paul Mall Gazette detailing some of the disgusting, scary stuff he endured but also sexualizing the people there, describing at once how his keeper recommended he ‘flip [his mattress] over and [he’ll] be alright’ and the bodies of the beautiful youths in lurid detail

Question 3

How did the industrial revolution affect leisure times?

Answer 3

There are arguments that leisure activities have, over time, become more capitalist. Time and discipline were unarguably less structured before industrial work schedules became more regulated. The post-industrial world had specific time set aside for leisure activities.

Question 4

What’s types of leisure were reform societies not so into?

Answer 4

Animal cruelty was decreasingly part of recreation as pro-animal societies emerged. Other moral societies included temperance and teetotal societies and movements. Whereas I’m pretty sure temperance societies in the states advocated for the prohibition of all alcohol, temperance societies in Britain argued for responsible alcohol consumption and the banning of ‘Irish Spirits.’

Question 5

What’s the spatial triad?

Answer 5

Henri Lefebrve’s Spatial tried considers the three types of space to be representational space, ideas, imagination, theory and personal meaning of space, representations of space like maps and images and practice, the way you use space and spatial realities

Question 6

What’s governmentality?

Answer 6

intellectual machinery for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is amenable to political programming ~according to patrick joyce in the rule of freedom - as I understand it, government is the state, governance is the work of the state and of governing but inclusive of extragovernmental socities, community groups, religious orgs etc. and governmentally is even broader, encompassing the logic and ideology which underpins and preconditions the maintenance of the SQ

Question 7

what does modernity have to do with cities?

Answer 7

Frisby and Featherstone call cities “one of the crucial sites of modernity - the point of its intensification.”

Question 8

what is modernity?

Answer 8

not just a condition, but a discourse - simon gun

i understand it to be associated with faith in progress and faith in main, inextricably bound to the enlightenment

Question 9

what is modernity?

Answer 9

not just a condition, but a discourse - simon gun

i understand it to be associated with faith in progress and faith in main, inextricably bound to the enlightenment

Question 10

When did Municipal Reform occur and what was it?

Answer 10

1833 in Scotland, 1835 in England, Wales, 1840 in Ireland - - established London’s municipal government - meant to increase transparency and recreate burghs in a more efficient and honest way

Question 11

What’s a popular criticism of governmentality discussions?

Answer 11

That they don’t interact well with the other historical work already done on government in cities, which is more focused on the composition of local governments, who runs them, how they are corrupt etc. Shane Ewen in ‘What is Urban History’ says that governmentality doesn’t do the work to assert its theory around the UK, but rather explains a broad structure that doesn’t interact well with the existing historiography, but in Patrick Joyce’s Rule of Freedom, Joyce uses the Municipal Reform Act as a sort of starting point and focuses on the underlying ideologies and structures that allowed the sort of power consolidation seen elsewhere before to continue, with a more professional state yet similar preponderance of power working to maintain the SQ

Question 12

What year was the contagious diseases act passed?

Answer 12

1864 and it mandated that any woman suspected of being a ‘common prostitute’ were subject to fortnightly examination - after 5 years it was extended from ports and military towns to 18 districts in city centre.

Question 13

what were some general anecdotes which show changing attitudes about sexuality?

Answer 13

age of consent raised in 2nd half of 19thc, some women worried about being misidentified as prostitute for being in public, see 1865 lithograph, how women are visible/clean is especially key (see slumming) and other women like nurses started to wear uniforms to quickly visually communicate why they were out in public at night, people thought the commercialisation of intimacy could disrupt family structure as everything became transactional, prostitutes were seen as a social ill and while STDs and the effects of men losing vital fluids was a concern, the wellbeing of prostitutes was not, and ulysses depicts them but none of the impoverishment

Question 14

What was that place for reformed prostitutes?

Answer 14

The Magdalen Asylum, which increased in popularity through the first half of the 19th century and raised money partially through laundry and partially through tourism

Question 15

Whats the deal with Louis Settle?

Answer 15

she wrote about prostitution in Edinburgh and Glasgow using modern urban history methods. She mapped arrests and found that prestigious areas like Princes Street were where many arrests were made, as prostitutes went there to seek out clientele, breaking boundaries of class and gender.

Question 16

Why was health such a concern in the 19th century?

Answer 16

there was too much excrement and all the sewage became overwhelmed

Question 17

What was the voluntary hospital movement? How was it funded?

Answer 17

In the 18th century there was a voluntary hospital movement. Rich people were treated at home, so poor people were treated in hospitals for free. This meant that hospitals were usually in urban areas where there was a high enough concentration of medical professionals who were already wealthy or had other sources of income from academic institutions or private practice. They would do research, develop skills and build up a reputation working as volunteers to bolster their private sector careers. These hospitals treated injury exclusively, with ‘houses of recovery’ treating fever patients in the 19th century. It wasn’t until later that hospitals would come to treat chronic illness and disease. These hospitals made appeals fro money in newspapers and in sermons.

Question 18

When was the NHS formed?

Answer 18

1948

Question 19

When did glasgow gain control of water?

Answer 19

The Glasgow Corporation passed legislation allowing it to gain control of water sources in the 1850s and 1870s and they have retained that control through today.

Question 20

What’s that smell?

Answer 20

The Great Stink of 1858 was when the Thames had been polluted throughout the 40s and 50s and then there was an especially hot summer and everyone suffered. It didn’t just affect the poor people; it could be smelled from parliament so wealthy people started to use chemically treated curtains. Afterwards, they created a gorgeous ‘cistern chapel’ outside of London. The idea that you could deal with sewage by simply pumping it out of the city stayed in practice through the 1950s, however, leading to the ‘crisis of the beaches’ where city waste was washing up in resort towns.

Question 21

When did the government get to intervene in domestic spaces?

Answer 21

Logding houses were the first domestic spaces to come under the purview of government regulation, receiving scrutiny because they were so gross, with many using a shift system for beds where one person would sleep during the day and one person would sleep at night with no changing of the sheets in between. This all changed in 1851 when legislation permitted local governments to regulate them.

Question 22

How did city planners improve living conditions in the slums?

Answer 22

slum clearance and rebuilding started to address some of the worst domestic living conditions, although relocation of people could last a very long time.

Public housing as an idea faced a lot of resistance. Partial philanthropy was the name of the game for awhile - they were only allowed small profits, like 5%. There was the Octavia Hill scheme in London. All early public housing was for the employed working class. By the 1890s there was some public housing, but it was depoliticised by WW1 and that’s when there were meaningful efforts to establish public housing for the first time. Homes for Heroes were the start, directed at veterans.

Question 23

What movement is Ebenezer Howard associated with?

Answer 23

the garden city movement, which sought to incorporate ideas of pre-planned, clean modernity with a nostalgic, rural past

Question 24

what’s scary in a city?

Answer 24

disease, pollution, contaminated water, drug abuse, crime and darkness itself.