Introduction
Human society has always been searching for the better way of its organization. People tried the tribe society, moved from feudalism to capitalism and finally to industrial and even post-industrial societies. During all this stages, people have had pros and cons of them, and there has never been a uniform opinion of what is the best for the human. The topic of this paper is one of the stages of the social development called “organic city” by Ted Steinberg whose ideas are the matter of analysis.
Main body
To begin with, let us define the organic city as seen by Mr. Steinberg in his work “The Death of Organic City”. To put it simply, the organic city means for the author the state when one could easily “find cows” (Steinberg, “The Death of Organic City”, p. 157) in the streets of a huge city like Atlanta. Pigs roaming the streets were also natural scenery for the cities of America in the middle of the 19th century. All these facts, together with the walking horses, tons of animal and human excrements found in the slums and transferred to hinterlands as fertilizers were the typical signs of the organic city.
However, such a state of things did not satisfy numerous fighters for the sanitation and high standards of living for human beings in the cities, including Jane Adams, Robert Woods, etc, in 1880s. The overall striving for the clean and orderly streets, water supply without the risk of getting the typhoid fever and the garbage cleaning resulted in the death of the organic city which became oriented upon money economy and upon the buying of the goods produced with the help of city waste in the suburbs.
Despite the fact that “the nineteenth century was a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization” (Warren, “American Environmental History”, p. 2), the trend towards the suburban lifestyle could be traced already at that time. People who were not satisfied with the rejection of natural production did not want to spend their money on the goods that they could produce by themselves in their households. After the World War II, especially, the trend towards suburbanization was clear and evident. The reasons for it were numerous but the major ones were poverty and the controversial trend in the society towards the return to nature but in a non-organic way. In other words, people wanted to preserve the sanitation, water supply and conveniences level as they could have in cities, but live at the artificially created natural sites where the return to the basics of organic cities had never been possible.
Moreover, after the World War II, the environmental movements were on the rise due to the difficult environmental conditions and inability of the society to fight them. Drawing from this, people who moved from cities as places of huge rates of environmental pollution, fought for nature preservation in the suburbs. “The suburban population in North America exploded after World War II” (Economic Expert, “Suburbs”, p. 1), however the actual return towards the ideals of the organic city or the organic suburb had never been in question due to the fact that the modern standards of living of the human society are incompatible with the needs of those organic societies. People are not ready to see cows or pigs walking naturally in the streets under their windows or find themselves surrounded by “privy vaults and cesspools” (Steinberg, “The Death of Organic City”, p. 165) filled with human and animal waste. People want to live in a clean and safe environment, which is therefore bound to be inorganic.
Works Cited
- Steinberg, T. The Death of Organic City. pp. 157-172 In Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Warren, Louis S. American Environmental History Blackwell Publishing, 2003
- Economic Expert. Suburbs. 2008.