City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago by Carl Smith
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Abstract
In City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago (2013) Carl Smith sets out to write an intellectual and cultural study of how people conceptualized the development of urban waterworks in nineteenth-century Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. His analysis rests on the proposition that “cities are built out of ideas as much as they are of timber, bricks, and stone, and that the discussion of city water is a kind of a universal solvent that reveals this in striking ways” (2). Thus, Smith sophisticatedly explores the development of waterworks as an “infrastructure of ideas” that serves to reveal larger lessons about the cultural and intellectual changes brought forth from rapid urbanization in three of America’s prominent nineteenth-century cities.
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Pennsylvania History is the official journal of the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and copyright remains with PHA as the publisher of this journal.