From body and home to nation and world: The varying scales of transnational urbanism in montreal and brussels at the turn of the twentieth century

Urban History

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 223-242

  Kenny, Nicolas ^a  

^a SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

TWENTIETH CENTURY; URBAN HISTORY; URBAN PLANNING; URBANIZATION;

BELGIUM; BRUSSELS [BELGIUM]; BRUSSELS [BRUSSELS (RGA)]; CANADA; MONTREAL; QUEBEC [CANADA];

EID: 76749140500     PISSN: 09639268     EISSN: 14698706     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963926809006269     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. Archives de Montréal (hereafter AM), VM45, Fonds du comité de santé (hereafter CS), S1. Letter from the Board of Health to the Finance Committee, dated 12 Aug. 1889.
2. See, in particular, the work of Pierre-Yves Saunier, 'La toile municipale aux XIXe-XXe siècles: un panorama transnational vu d'Europe', Revue d'histoire urbaine, 34 (2006), 163-76;
3. Pierre-Yves Saunier, 'Transatlantic connections and circulations in the 20th century: the urban variable', Informationen zur modernen Stadgeschichte, 1 (2007), 11-24.
4. AM, VM21, CS, S2. Letter from J. George Adami on behalf of the Montreal League for the Prevention of Tuberculois to the city council, dated 11 Apr. 1905.
5. Laberge's battle, it should be noted, was waged within an ongoing war between the two departments. In a time when municipal sanitation departments were increasingly organized in the growing cities of industrialized countries, Montreal's health officials frequently found themselves pleading the validity of their cause to the city's budgeters. Thus, when, 10 years later, Laberge attended the 27th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Minneapolis, he was forced to dip into the budgets for the public baths and milk inspection service to cover the costs. AM, VM45, CS, S1. Health board departmental note, dated Oct. 1899. On Montreal's municipal health service, and Laberge's career in particular, see Benôit Gaumer, Georges Desrosiers and Othmar Keel, Histoire du Service de santé de la ville de Montréal (Sainte-Foy 2002).
6. AM. A.B. LaRocque, 'Rapport annuel de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1882', 23.
7. 'Le tracé des villes', Tekhné, 2 (6 Apr. 1911), 17.
8. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 112.
9. Pierre Chabard, 'Competing scales in transnational networks: the impossible travel of Patrick Geddes' Cities Exhibition to America, 1911-1913', Urban History, 36 (2009).
10. Astrid Lelarge, Bruxelles, l'émergence de la ville contemporaine: la démolition du rempart et des fortifications aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Brussels, 2001).
11. Chloé Deligne, Bruxelles sortie des eaux: les relations entre la ville et ses cours d'eau du moyen âge à nos jours (Brussels, 2005).
12. For a comprehensive examination of these projects, see Thierry Demey, Bruxelles, chronique d'une capitale en chantier, vol. I: Du voûtement de la Senne à la jonction Nord-Midi (Brussels, 1990).
13. On the Parisian influence on urban development in Brussels, see Anne Van Loo, 'L'Haussmannisation de Bruxelles, 1865-1880', Revue de l'Art, 106 (1994), 39-49.
14. Isabelle Gournay and France Vanlaethem (eds.), Montreal Metropolis, 1880-1930 (Toronto, 1998);
15. Paul-André Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération, 2nd edn (Montreal, 2000).
16. As historian Alan Mayne argues, the result of nineteenth-century urbanization was that more people lived in 'constellations of urban places' than in 'the handful of metropolitan centres with populations over a million inhabitants'. These smaller cities, he continues, 'were networked components of an interactive urban world system. The exchanges amongst this hierarchy of towns and cities consisted not only of products and capital, or even of the movement of peoples. They also comprised the circulation of ideas.' Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914 (London, 1993), 5-6.
17. Saunier, 'La toile municipale aux XIXe-XXe siècles: un panorama transnational vu d'Europe', 46.
18. AM, VM45, S1. Report entitled 'Assainissement des villes', by Jules Thomas Emilien, addressed to the members of the Comite de sante de la Ville de Montreal. Undated, c. 1891. Original citations in French have been translated by the author throughout.
19. Travel diary of Charles Buls, 1903. Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, Fonds Buls, Box 95. On the former mayor's conception of urbanism, see Charles Buls, Esthétique des villes (Brussels, 1893).
20. On culturalist approaches to urban planning, see Françoise Choay L'urbanisme. Utopies et realit́es (Paris, 1965), 21-30.
21. 'Were we American, we would have no scruples; with a few strokes of a pencil, we would trace a series of perfectly rectilinear streets, intersecting at right angles on perfectly level ground.' Buls, Esthétique des villes, 8.
22. For a Better Montreal: Report of the First Convention of the City Improvement League (Montreal, 1910), 4.
23. G.A. Nantel, La métropole de demain: avenir de Montréal (Montreal, 1910), 11-12.
24. For more on this theme, see Patrice Bourdelais (ed.), Les hygiénistes: enjeux, modèles et pratiques (Paris, 2001).
25. Anne Rasmussen, 'L'hygiène en congrès (1858-1912): circulation et configurations internationales', in ibid., 220.
26. See, for example, Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989);
27. Alain Corbin, 'Du Limousin aux cultures sensibles',inJean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (eds.), Pour une histoire culturelle (Paris, 1997);
28. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Oxford, 2000);
29. David Le Breton, Anthropologie du corps et modernité (Paris, 2005);
30. Anthony Synott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (London, 1993).
31. In Montreal and its immediate suburbs, the population increased from 170,000 to 530,000 between censuses in 1881 and 1911. Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération. In the same period, Brussels' population swelled from 437,000 to 757,000.
32. Frank Daelmans, 'La démographie au XIXe et XXe siècle', in Arlette Smolar-Meynart and Jean Stengers (eds.), La région de Bruxelles: des villages d'autrefois à la ville d'aujourd'hui (Brussels, 1989), 212-13.
33. E.E.M. Gouin, 'Le logement de la famille ouvrière. Ce qu'il doit être, ce qu'il est, comment l'améliorer', L'école sociale populaire, 9-11 (1912), 18. The word 'prosperous' is in quotes in the original, to denote irony.
34. Christian Topalov, 'La ville "congestionnée": acteurs et langage de la réforme urbaine à New York au début du XXe siècle', Genèses, 1 (1990), 90.
35. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 65.
36. For the international context, see Sally Sheard and Helen Power (eds.), Body and City: Histories of Urban Public Health (Aldershot, 2000), 6;
37. Georges Vigarello, Histoire des pratiques de santé: le sain et le malsain depuis le moyen âge (Paris, 1999), 217.
38. On Montreal in particular, refer to Michèle Dagenais, Des pouvoirs et des hommes: l'administration municipale de Montréal, 1900-1950 (Montreal, 2000), 21-5;
39. Gaumer, Desrosiers and Keel, Histoire du Service de santé, 62.
40. Association pour l'amélioration du logement ouvrier, Annual Report (1896), 25.
41. AM, VM 47 Fonds de la Commission de l'aqueduc, S4. Letter from Alfred Bertin to Montreal city council, dated 23 Jul. 1890.
42. Emile Hellemans, 'Rapport sur les bains populaires en Allemagne', in Comite de Patronage des Habitations Ouvrieres et des Institutions de Prevoyance, Rapport sur l'exercice 1897 (Brussels, 1898), 32-43.
43. On the evolution of western norms of cleanliness and bodily deportment, see Elias, The Civilizing Process.
44. AM. Louis Laberge, 'Rapport annuel de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1885', 99.
45. Bulletin communal de Bruxelles (27 Dec. 1901), 973.
46. See, for example, Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women 1870-1900 (Montreal, 1996);
47. M.J. Daunton (ed.), Housing the Workers, 1850-1914: A Comparative Perspective (Leicester, 1990);
48. Mayne, The Imagined Slum;
49. Harold Platt, 'From hygeia to the garden city: bodies, houses and the rediscovery of the slum in Manchester, 1875-1910', Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 756-62.
50. Herbert Brown Ames, The City Below the Hill. A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (Toronto, 1972), 40.
51. On the links between health and home, see Adams, Architecture in the Family Way. On the medical discourse shaping understandings of the home environment in this period, see also Platt, 'From hygeia to the garden city'.
52. Elzéar Pelletier, 'Unsanitary dwellings', in For a Better Montreal, 43.
53. These were sparked, in particular, by the discoveries of Robert Koch in the 1870s and 1880s. See Jean-Pierre Goubert, La conquête de l'eau: l'avènement de la santé à l'âge industriel (Paris, 1986), 50. When it came to ensuring the health of a house, 'ce qu'on ne voit pas est plus essentiel que ce qui est exposé à la vue', warned hygiene professor, and Brussels water-service engineer, Félix and E. Putzeijs.
54. Félix Putzeijs and E. Putzeijs, Hygiène appliquée. Les installations sanitaires des habitations privées et collectives (Brussels, 1904), 10.
55. Michèle Dagenais and Caroline Durand, 'Cleansing, draining and sanitizing the city: conceptions and uses of water in the Montreal region', Canadian Historical Review, 87 (2006), 650.
56. Marie Du Caju, Manuel domestique d'alimentation et d'hygiène (Termonde, 1889), 9, 45.
57. One of the most meticulous examinations of the evolution of this distinction is Elias, The Civilizing Process. The following address the public and private divide within a specifically urban context: Viviane Claude, Faire la ville: les métiers de l'urbanisme au XXe siècle (Marseilles, 2006);
58. Goubert, La conquête de l'eau;
59. Jean-Luc Pinol, Le monde des villes au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1991);
60. Platt, 'From hygeia to the garden city'. On the way it evolved in Montreal, see Michèle Dagenais, Faire et fuir la ville: espaces publics de culture et de loisirs à Montréal et Toronto au 19e et 20e siècles (Quebec, 2006).
61. On Brussels, see Claire Billen and Jean-Michel Decroly, Petits coins dans la grande ville: les toilettes publiques à Bruxelles du moyen âge à nos jours (Brussels, 2003).
62. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York, 1990), 26.
63. Alexandre Bidart, L'exposition du mobilier ouvrier à Saint-Gilles (Bruxelles) (Brussels, 1901), 3.
64. Émile Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1903,1904 et 1905. Rapport presenté au Comité de Patronage de la Ville de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1905), xi.
65. Gouin, 'Le logement de la famille ouvriere', 18,32.
66. Elzéar Pelletier, Nos logis insalubres. Our Unhealthy Dwellings (Conseil d'hygiène de la province de Québec, 1910), 16. Without enough fresh air and light, cautioned one doctor, 'we inevitably see the appearance of a series of morbid symptoms caused by alteration of the blood'. Inadequate hygiene led to higher death rates, preceded in all cases by 'a chronic degeneration of the organism'. Report by Dr Lantsheere, in Ville de Bruxelles. Comité de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance. 'Rapport sur l'exercise de 1899', 23.
67. Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale: l'hygiène du corps depuis le moyen âge (Paris, 1987), 227.
68. Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières, ix-x. Emphasis in the original.
69. 'Urinating or defecating anywhere but in the home, outside in the streets or public places, is socially proscribed.' This dynamic, explains Goubert, had a definite sensorial imperative, the priority being 'épargner la vue et supprimer l'odeur.' Goubert, La conquête de l'eau, 88- 90. Emphasis in the original. The Belgian housing specialist Maurice Falloise noted that buildings with several apartments, as many workers lived in, should be designed such that each household had access to its own balcony on which all water-related facilities were located, thus reducing the possibilities for people to come into contact in the context of henceforth highly private activity. Maurice Falloise, De la construction d'habitations ouvrières (Liège, 1906), 41.
70. AM. Louis Laberge, 'Rapport de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1885', 12.
71. AM. Louis Laberge, 'Rapport de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1899', 10.
72. AM, CS, VM 45, 28 Aug. 1882.
73. Province de Québec, Rapport de la Commission Royale de la Tuberculose (Province de Québec, 1910), 78.
74. Pelletier, Nos logis insalubres, 16.
75. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 2.
76. Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, 207.
77. On the moralizing discourse in Brussels specifically, see Patricia Van Den Eekhout, 'Brussels', in Daunton (ed.), Housing the Workers, 67-106, as well as Peter Scholliers, 'Construire le bon et le mauvais. Les ouvriers à Bruxelles vers 1900', and Janet Polasky, 'L'approche moralisante de la question sociale. Le modèle du bon ouvrier', in Cahiers de la Fonderie, 36 (2007), 12-19 and 25-30.
78. Gouin, 'Le logement de la famille ouvrière', 16. Emphasis in the original.
79. Albert Soenens, Les habitations ouvrières en Belgique (Brussels, 1894), 27.
80. A. Vander Moere, Habitations ouvrières (Brussels, 1901), 4.
81. Maurice van der Bruggen,inVilledeBruxelles. Comité officiel de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance. Rapport sur l'exercice 1905 (Brussels, 1906), 178.
82. Gouin, 'Le logement de la famille ouvrière', 7. Such references to incest were often veiled and hushed, at other times explicit and direct, but in all cases expressed with a sense of profound discomfort. Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, R éponses au questionnaire concernant le travail industriel, vol. I (Brussels, 1887),
83. Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières;
84. Charles Lagasse and Charles De Quéker, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1890 (Brussels, 1890).
85. For more on this theme, see Stanley Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920 (Philadelphia, 1989), 113.