Books in the History of the Urban Environment series

New insight into how modern New York City transformed its air, land, and water as it grew.

Examines the Intersection of Energy Policy and Environmental Regulation after the 1973 OAPEC Oil Embargo

A Negotiated Landscape examines the transformation of San Francisco's iconic waterfront from the eve of its decline in 1950 to the turn of the millennium.

The weekly magazine Garden and Forest existed for only nine years (1888-1897). As Hou shows, the publication also promoted forest management and preservation, not only as a natural resource but as an economic one. Shen Hou's study gives Garden and Forest its due and adds an important new chapter to the early history of American environmentalism.

In January 1969, the blowout on an offshore oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and the resulting oil spill proved to be a transformative event in pollution control and the nascent environmental activism movement.

The US shale boom and efforts by other countries to exploit their shale resources could reshape energy and environmental landscapes across the world.

Michael Zeheter offers a probing case study of the environmental changes made to fight cholera in two markedly different British colonies: Madras in India and Quebec City in Canada. He examines the complex political and economic factors that came to bear on the reshaping of each colony's environment and the urgency placed on disease control.

Examines the natural and economic resource competition between Phoenix and Tucson and the other factors contributing to the divergent growth of the two cities.

Comprised of essays by geologists, ecologists, and historians, this study examines the development of Los Angeles as an example of the complex interactions between urban planning and nature.

Urban Rivers examines urban interventions on rivers through politics, economics, sanitation systems, technology, and societies; how rivers affected urbanization spatially, in infrastructure, territorial disputes, and in flood plains, and via their changing ecologies.

Throughout history, rivers have run a wide course through human temporal and spiritual experience. Rivers in History is a broad environmental history of waterways that makes a major contribution to the study, preservation, and continued sustainability of rivers as vital lifelines of Western culture.

Metropolitan Natures presents original histories of the diverse environments that constitute Montreal and its region. It explores the agricultural and industrial transformation of the metropolitan area, the interaction of city and hinterland, and the interplay of humans and nature.

Garbage, wastewater, hazardous waste: these are the lenses through which Melosi views nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In broad overviews and specific case studies, Melosi treats the relationship between industrial expansion and urban growth from an ecological perspective.

As people crowded into British cities in the nineteenth century, industrial and biological waste byproducts, and then epidemic followed them. Britons died by the thousands in recurring plagues.

The contributors also view the environmental impact of energy industries and demonstrate how, in the depletion of reserves or a shift to new energy sources, regions have or have not been able to recover economically.