Urban environmental history: what lessons are there to be learnt?

The paper traces the emergence of urban environmental history first in the United States and since the 1990s increasingly also in Europe. It identifies the development of large technical networks which provide cities with water and energy and which serve to take problematic substances and waste out of urban areas as a central theme of this new subfield where scholars from urban history, environmental history and history of technology converge. The concepts of ‘path dependence’ and ‘urban metabolism’ are introduced as useful heuristic devices to assess long-term effects of these infrastructures in a holistic manner. The paper shows that the implementation of networks and related household technologies was accompanied by comprehensive processes of social and cultural adaptation which fundamentally altered the attitudes and behavioural patterns towards resource use. Lessons of urban environmental history are seen in providing long-term horizons to current debates over urban technologies and their environmental consequences.