Realizing Healthful Housing: Devices for Data Travel in Public Health and Urban Redevelopment in the Twentieth Century United States

Edmund Ramsden

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37177-7_17

Abstract

AbstractThe field of housing is dependent upon data from a wide range of sources, as issues of architecture, engineering, finance, sanitation, public health and social relations must all be considered in policy, planning and design. This chapter documents the efforts of housing and public health experts in mobilizing housing data across different disciplinary and social spaces in the 1930s and 40s. To overcome the immense challenge of making such extensive and diverse information available and useful, we will explore how actionability was built into the very methods of collecting, processing, and circulating information. New standards and appraisal techniques were devised by the Committee on the Hygiene of Housing of the American Public Health Association that would shape and determine housing data journeys in critically important ways. It was by devising new ways to simultaneously collect, organize, package and translate data in a way that was meaningful for planners and policy-makers, that led to healthful housing surveys and public health ideals playing a critical role in a period of intensive urban redevelopment and renewal in the mid-twentieth century United States.

Highlights

The field of housing is dependent upon data from a wide range of sources, as issues of architecture, engineering, finance, sanitation, public health and social relations must all be considered in policy, planning and design
New standards and appraisal techniques were devised by the Committee on the Hygiene of Housing of the American Public Health Association that would shape and determine housing data journeys in critically important ways
It was by devising new ways to simultaneously collect, organize, package and translate data in a way that was meaningful for planners and policy-makers, that led to healthful housing surveys and public health ideals playing a critical role in a period of intensive urban redevelopment and renewal in the mid-twentieth century United States

Summary

The Problem of Data in Housing

Huntington Williams, Baltimore’s Commissioner of Health, described the improvement of housing as the health oficer’s “real opportunity” (Williams 1942, 1001). Ramsden housing quantity and quality to identify shortages, specify problem areas, predict future needs, establish housing standards and promote new designs They needed data on the relationship between health and housing that could travel from the laboratory and field studies of the physical, medical and social sciences to the planning offices of federal, state and municipal government. Rather than producing repositories of data that could be applied by local agencies in various ways and to their own ends, the series of tools constructed by the CHH, most notably their standards and appraisals, allowed them to continue to exert control over key stages of data journeys from production to application These tools were mutually reinforcing, ensuring that once local agencies availed themselves of CHH information and instruments, they were encouraged to understand the city and its problems in terms of physical measures and classifications of “healthful” housing and neighborhood environments

Re-considering Housing Data

Public Health and Housing Standards

The Appraisal Method

Conclusion