Broken Cities. Deborah Potts

been much worse. Life expectancies were higher in rural than in urban areas – in antithesis to the usual patterns in the GS since urbanisation began to pick up pace there.⁴ Certainly not all these circumstances were due to poor housing alone. The conditions of poverty tend to combine in deadly ways: people who cannot afford decent housing may also have poor nutrition because they cannot afford proper food. More importantly, the engineering solutions (and the required public investment) to the deadly water and sanitation conditions in low-income housing areas in Europe’s and America’s industrialising cities did not emerge until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Mass vaccination against childhood diseases and antibiotics came much later, in the twentieth century, but they were in time to make a difference to health in the cities of the GS and help explain their relatively positive demographic outcomes during the twentieth century compared with those of the GN in the nineteenth century.

Box 3.1 Dickens’ slums

      Jo lives – that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s. It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people, where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who after establishing their own possession took to letting them out in lodgings. Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery … that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever … Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and each time a house has fallen. These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital. The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish.

      

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      Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three – fruit and ‘sweet-stuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics … a ‘musician’ in the front kitchen, and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one – filth everywhere – a gutter before the houses and a drain behind – clothes drying and slops emptying from the windows …

      Sources: Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852–53; Sketches by Boz, 1836.⁵

      The conditions in which the majority of the urban population in the GN were housed contributed significantly to their poor welfare. They were described in the literature of the time: for the UK that of the revolutionary left (e.g. Engels’ classic study The Condition of the Working Class in England),⁶ of academics (e.g. Charles Booth’s classic mapping of poverty in London in the nineteenth century),⁷ and in fiction. Dickens’ novels about London are full of descriptions of poor people living in overcrowded, unhealthy rooms, of the fear and reality of evictions because of being unable to pay the rent, and frequent deaths as a result (see Box 3.1). Indeed, this was deliberate, as he partly wished to shock society into recognising how unacceptable these situations were. In Edinburgh in 1862 it was common for households to share one room: one survey found 1,530 rooms with occupancy rates of 6–15 people per room.⁸ Due to Edinburgh’s topography, there were some multi-storey tenements with essentially subterranean conditions in which families were sharing rooms without any natural light. Rickets were common. The shocking conditions could be found across Europe. In Moscow and St Petersburg, for example, workers often lived in bunks in factory dormitories, and one estimate for 1900 suggested that about one in six Muscovites were renting corners of rooms rented to others.⁹ In 1912, on average there were eight people living in each apartment in these two cities.¹⁰ A central feature of Frank McCourt’s best-selling autobiography Angela’s Ashes is his description of the series of cold, damp, pest-ridden rented rooms that were all his family could afford in New York and Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s, and, worst of all, the associated deaths of three of his siblings as well as his own near fatal typhoid and his mother’s pneumonia. At one point, assessors deciding whether the family deserved charity admitted that their housing conditions were similar to the slums of Calcutta (see Box 3.2).¹¹ Policies to address such conditions in GN cities emerged rather slowly but eventually appeared to have consigned tragic outcomes such as these to the past (see Chapters 6 and 7). Cowgate’s infant mortality rates were exceptionally shocking in the nineteenth century but they were high in Edinburgh as whole, at around 130. They fell only slowly to about 115 in 1915 and then steeply to 20 in 1950; today they are around five deaths per thousand.¹²

Box 3.2 Desperate slums in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s

      Mam tells us there was a terrible flood, that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door … People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain … One night there is a knock on the door and Mam sends me down to see who it is. There are two men from the St. Vincent de Paul [Catholic charity] and they want to see my mother and father. I tell them my parents are … [u]pstairs where ‘tis dry …

      

      They want to know what that little shed is beside our front door. I tell them it’s the lavatory. They want to know why it isn’t in the back of the house and I tell them it’s the lavatory for the whole lane and it’s a good thing it’s not in the back of our house or we’d have people traipsing through our kitchen with buckets that would make you sick.

      They say, Are you sure there’s one lavatory for the whole lane? I am …

      They tell Mam and Dad … the Society has to be sure they’re helping deserving cases … They want to know why we’re living upstairs. They want to know about the lavatory … Dad tells them the lavatory could kill us with every class of disease, that the kitchen floods in the winter and we have to move upstairs to stay dry … I have to go downstairs again and show the men where to step to keep their feet dry. They keep shaking their heads and saying, God Almighty and Mother of God, this is desperate … upstairs, that’s Calcutta.

      Source: McCourt, F. 1997. Angela’s Ashes. London: Flamingo, pp. 113–14.

      Students from countries in the GS doing urban studies in Britain are sometimes astonished to learn that the housing problems with which they are familiar from their own societies were so common across the urban GN, and that, as demonstrated by Angela’s Ashes, these were sometimes still occurring within living memory. This is usually because, in tune with so much of the housing literature, they have been taught to think that the urban housing problems of the GS are separate, with different underlying causes, from those of the GN. When they recognise that the starting point is that people can only be housed in the sorts of accommodation that they can afford, no matter where you are, they swiftly realise the significance of the hard constraints of typical incomes for the lower-paid members of any society. Often they suggest that the difference must be that the state mediates the situation in the GN by enforcing proper standards. However, when it is pointed out that this inevitably means that the cost of the cheapest housing will rise, making it unaffordable for many residents for whom there is nowhere else to go, the true nature of the global housing dilemma at the heart of this book begins to become clear, as does the double-edged sword of standards in a market economy. The solution of tackling the gap between the market-determined prices of labour and decent housing through the state boosting low incomes with housing allowances or providing subsidised housing is the next logical step in the discussion.

      

      In real life, in most societies the situation is far messier than the logical conclusions of discussions