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Cleaning, Draining, and Sanitizing the City: Conceptions and Uses of Water in the Montreal Region
Abstract
How are political dynamics embodied in the city's materiality, and how, in turn, is the environment used in the moulding of social bonds and power relations? Through an examination of the presence of water in Montreal, in particular of wastewater, this article explores the ways in which this problem, and the solutions advanced to solve it, were constructed and presented. At the turn of the twentieth century, water constituted a central factor in the process of reconfiguring the relations between human beings and natural elements, the effects of which had repercussions on both the relationship between individuals and groups and between city and surrounding areas. This article analyzes certain social and political consequences of this process that transformed the relationship with water, rendering it at once more widespread and more regulated. After presenting the terms on which questions relating to the disposal of wastewater were raised in a context where both the availability of water in the city and its consumption were increasing, the article considers the fallout of wastewater disposal on the shores of the Island of Montreal. On the outskirts of the city, as much as within its boundaries,
ways of perceiving and of solving such problems were not only shaped by social and political relations, but also mirrored them.
Comment les dynamiques politiques s'incarnent-elles dans la matérialité des villes et comment, en retour, l'environnement est-il mis à contribution dans le modelage des relations sociales et des rapports de pouvoir ? Examinant les débats provoqués par la présence de l'eau à Montréal, en particulier de l'eau souillée, cet article s'interroge sur la manière dont ce problème et les solutions avancées pour le résoudre ont été construits et présentés. Au tournant du XXe siècle, l'eau représente un élément central dans le processus de reconfiguration des relations entre les humains et les éléments naturels dont les incidences se répercutent à la fois sur les rapports entre individus et collectifs et entre ville et milieu environnant. L'article analyse certaines des conséquences sociales et politiques de ce processus qui transforme le rapport à l'eau en le rendant plus généralisé en même temps que plus réglementé. Après une présentation des termes suivants lesquels se posent les problèmes soulevés par l'évacuation de l'eau dans un contexte où sa disponibilité dans la ville et sa consommation s'accroissent, l'article s'attarde aux retombées provoquées par l'évacuation des eaux usées sur les rives de l'île de Montréal. Autant aux marges de la ville qu'à l'intérieur de ses limites, la manière de percevoir les problèmes liés à la gestion de l'eau tout comme de les solutionner se révèle être façonnée par les rapports sociaux et politiques, tout comme elle en constitue une traduction.
... En cette fin de siècle, les experts du Bureau de santé doivent s'attaquer à plusieurs problèmes d'ordre sanitaire : collecte et élimination des déchets et des cadavres d'animaux, vaccination, vérification de la qualité du lait, élimination des fosses d'aisance, dépistage des maladies, isolement des contagieux, identification des logements insalubres, désinfection, élimination de la vermine, etc. À Montréal, deux problèmes, résultant de l'urbanisation, ont monopolisé l'énergie des principaux acteurs de l'administration municipale au milieu du siècle : la distribution de l'eau et l'évacuation des eaux usées. En effet, le besoin en eau potable s'est accru, pendant que les sources d'approvisionnement, comme les petits cours d'eau, devenaient de plus en plus polluées 9 . De nouveaux besoins se sont fait sentir, comme le nettoyage des rues à l'aide de jets d'eau. ...
Résumé
Cet article a pour objet les ingénieurs sanitaires à Montréal depuis leur émergence, au XIX e siècle, jusqu’au milieu du siècle dernier. Peu étudiés par les historiens de la médecine et, plus généralement, par les spécialistes de l’histoire urbaine, ces experts ont pourtant joué un rôle de premier plan dans la mise en place de certaines infrastructures liées à la santé publique. Il est cependant difficile de retracer l’histoire d’un groupe qui ne s’est pas incarné dans des organismes de représentation et dont la formation, à l’intérieur des écoles de génie ou des facultés de médecine, ne s’est pas complètement autonomisée. En retraçant l’itinéraire de carrière de quelques ingénieurs sanitaires et en analysant le développement de l’enseignement du génie sanitaire à Montréal, nous avons tenté de jeter un peu de lumière sur un groupe d’experts relativement méconnus en histoire urbaine.
... Cities do not exist as independent entities; they exist within social and technological networks across which information flows are substantial [47]. Indeed, similarities in paradigm shifts across cities have been observed for other water management issues [48]. Furthermore, cities are subject to similar cross scale drivers; in the United States, federal requirements are an important example [12,47]. ...
Stormwater management has significant consequences for urban hydrology, water quality,
and flood risk, and has changed substantially over history, but it is unknown how these paradigm
shifts play out at the local scale and whether local changes in stormwater infrastructure use follow
similar trajectories across cities. This research addressed: (1) How does current infrastructure use
and past infrastructure transitions vary across three cities with similar biophysical and climatic
contexts but different development histories? and (2) How did stormwater and flood management
paradigms change from early urbanization to current day in a single city? The use of storm sewers,
detention basins, and canals for stormwater management was quantified for three cities in Utah, USA,
over the 20th century. Stormwater management paradigms were quantified using media content
analysis of newspaper articles from historic and recent periods in Salt Lake City. Results suggest
that stormwater infrastructure development is decoupled from imperviousness across cities, and
that newer and smaller cities follow different trajectories of stormwater management over time.
This research highlights that there is no single model of urban hydrology and that heterogeneity in
urban water management over time and space reflects shifting priorities and social learning.
... Adoption of secondary treatment by bacterial digestion and trickling filters was a genuine innovation, the first on this scale in North America. 33 Montreal managed to postpone action on this front until the 1970s, thanks to the depth and swift current of the St. Lawrence River that bore most of the run-off, sediment, human wastes, and industrial contaminants out of the city. Baltimore was forced to action by the shallowness and tidal behavior of its Inner Harbor: the downstream sump was right downtown. ...
For two centuries, each surge of city-building has consumed massive amounts of raw materials and restructured flows of materials, as merchants and manufacturers reached out to capture resources from greater distances but persisted in accumulating a large share of the wastes close to home. Eight such surges of growth can be seen, and synchronized, in Baltimore, Maryland, and Montreal, Quebec. The environmental impacts are marshalled to appeal for more attention to material flows at scales that reflect the boom-and-bust context of urban decision making.
... The mortality differences between neighbourhoods were well recognized, and a matter of recurrent political debate from the late 1860s to the end of the century. What environmental factors (Gagnon 2006), there can be no doubt that the great defect lay in the system of main drainage, and the real issues were willingness to invest public money, from whose purse the money would come, and by whose authority 'improvements' would be imposed (Dagenais and Durand 2006;Desrosiers and Gaumer 2006). Despite agitation on these issues, the minute municipal budget for health did not increase Note: Shown from left to right, upper panel, are district percentages of households situated on low ground ( B20 m above the river), in blocks with work horses, at high densities of population per hectare; in lower panel, percentages living in low-rent streets, crowded households (low rent per person), French neighbourhoods (!70 per cent French) Source: City of Montreal, Taxroll of occupants, June 1880; Census of Canada 1881, and Goad Atlas of 1881 (Farley et al. 1982), and investment in the drains did not keep pace with urban growth. ...
In the City of Montreal, 1881, the presence of three cultural communities with different profiles of economic status makes it possible to observe the way social settings affected survival over a lifetime. Regression models show culturally determined maternal factors dominant for infants, and persistent throughout childhood. For post-neonates, children aged 1-4, and adults aged 15-59 household poverty has a comparable effect. Among adults, a gender penalty differs among the three communities. Models are improved when differentiated by cause of death. Locating households using a GIS reveals high levels of residential segregation by ethnicity and income, spatial correlation of environmental hazards, and constraints on exit from zones of risk, which together produce neighbourhood effects as large as household effects. Attention to groups excluded (foundlings and inmates of institutions) confirms that models limited to full household-level information significantly underestimate the impacts of poverty and exclusion.
This essay surveys the past 20 years of Canadian environmental historiography in order to understand how scholars in this field have conceptualized and applied nature to the study of the past. The essay argues that Canadian environmental historians, even as they foreground nature as an historical actor, nevertheless continue to focus their attention and orient their investigations around questions of how human social, cultural, economic, and political power reshaped both nature and human experience in the past. This emphasis is not interpreted as fundamentally problematic. However, the author maintains that it is important for environmental historians to recognize that their practices diverge from their prescriptions in this regard and that practitioners should continue to push toward new ways of incorporating nature into Canadian historiography.
The vast transformations that shaped western cities at the turn of the twentieth century were the product of global processes and interactions. Drawing on the cases of Montreal and Brussels, this article argues that underlying these broad dynamics were questions and preoccupations pertaining to more localized and personal scales of the body and the home. Concentrating on the discourses that circulated in these distinct, yet analogous cities, the article shifts the focus of the transnational approach from specific contacts between individuals and places, to the wider web on which circulated the ideas and initiatives that reshaped people's living environment.
Until the 1970s Canadian public works had been adequately described, but never extensively studied in the literature of urban history, which has focused on other aspects of the city-building process. Since then, Canadian public works history has been dominated by debates about the public versus private ownership of utilities. This paper aims to show that the historical provision of sewerage in Canadian cities was a fundamental part of the city-building process. It focuses on the provision of sewers in Toronto between 1870 and 1913 and argues that sewerage influenced and was influenced by contemporary debates about public health, local government intervention in the lives of citizens and the role of technology in the urban environment. -from Author