Abstract
Reviewed by: Questions d’égouts: Santé publique, infrastructures et urbanisation à Montréal au XIXe siècle Claire Poitras (bio) Questions d’égouts: Santé publique, infrastructures et urbanisation à Montréal au XIXe siècle. By Robert Gagnon . Montréal: Les E´ditions du Boréal, 2006 Pp. 263. $25.95. During the summer of 2007, a section of a major street in Montreal's city center was closed to traffic indefinitely due to the collapse of a sewer main. This event highlights the lack of adequate attention given to urban infrastructure by city officials. Like most Frost Belt cities, Montreal possesses an aging infrastructure that is in dire need of repair. Now, Robert Gagnon's book on the implementation of a comprehensive sewerage system to discharge wastewater during the nineteenth century takes us back to a time when urban growth and industrialization forced local authorities to rethink the ways in which the built and the natural environment interacted. The design and development of Montreal's sewerage system is a multifaceted story that involved many actors who advocated a salubrious urban environment. As the largest industrial and port city in Canada, Montreal grew from 90,323 inhabitants in 1861 to more than 500,000—including the inner suburbs—in 1911. Gagnon's analysis is centered on the role played by four groups in cleansing the city: sanitary and civil engineers, medical practitioners, local elected officials, and the citizenry. While the experts' efforts to improve the living conditions of the city—considered one of North [End Page 282] America's unhealthiest milieus—were successful, their struggle for a cleaner environment also led to the radical transformation of small rivers and creeks flowing through the expanding city and to the degradation of the Saint Lawrence River. Divided into five chapters, Gagnon's book offers a chronological and thematic narrative. Building on the work of historians such as Joel Tarr, Martin Melosi, and Joanne Goldman, the first chapter presents an overview of the development of sanitary systems and urban infrastructure in North American and European cities during the nineteenth century. Here, Gagnon divides the timeframe into two phases of infrastructure development, 1860 to 1880 and 1880 to 1910, the break marking the shift from the pedestrian to the networked city. The following three chapters cover the first phase, which saw the building of sewer lines to collect filthy water and discharge it into the Saint Lawrence River, along the Montreal harborfront. Gagnon analyzes the ways in which social and political concerns about urban salubriousness evolved, his research essentially resting on reports and plans that were submitted to local authorities. The analysis of debates shows that financial, technical, and organizational problems largely explain why the city lagged in implementing its first comprehensive sewerage system. Prior to the 1880s, officials such as the city surveyor dominated the decision-making process. In the last chapter, Gagnon argues that after 1880 sanitary engineers contributed to the expansion of the main sewer lines and tackled the issues of sewer ventilation, regulating the installation of plumbing systems, and outlawing privies. Questions d'égouts provides us with the first history of Montreal's sewerage system. Although Gagnon covers themes addressed in previous scholarship, such as the role played by sanitary engineers and public health experts, his main contribution to the history of technology is to shed light on the role played by ordinary citizens who demanded a cleaner urban environment. He also addresses city-suburb relationships, analyzing how infrastructure planning and building became a key question in the annexation of suburban communities located on Montreal's fringe. However, Gagnon does not draw on the scholarship developed in the last decade by urban environmental historians. He fails, for instance, to explore the ways in which Montreal's physical features—for example, the Saint Lawrence River's impressive flow or the extreme weather conditions that characterize the city—influenced technical choices. While maps are provided to show the expansion of sewer main lines, additional visual material would have enabled the reader to gain a better sense of Montreal's river system and its topography, and the problems—such as flooding and poor housing conditions in working-class districts—the city was facing. This said...
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