**Section A: Project Summary**

**Title: **Urban Environmental Geography, Public Health, and Pest
Animals in US Cities, 1850-Present

Although they did not know of the germs the animals might carry,
residents of US cities in the 1 860s and 70s cited the flies, roaches,
and rats who swarmed the tenements in arguing for community sanitary
programs. In the 1 950s vermin provided justification for housing and
health agencies to pursue urban renewal, and also gave tenant activists
a striking symbol of officialsneglect of their neighborhoods. Today,
though we know that vermin produce indoor allergens, and we have
pesticides designed to keep vermin at bay, the fact that both may be
hazardous confuses parents, health officials, and other advocates who
seek to protect health. As long as people have lived in cities, pest
animals have joined us in our homes and buildings, affected our health,
and propelled our policies on the urban environment. The social
geography of pests, however, reflects the social position and physical
surroundings of our neighborhoods.

The researchersobjective is to use the ecological history and social
geography of pest animals, which have been blamed for several kinds of
disease exposures throughout the past two centuries, to investigate how
health and environmental conditions are connected with poverty in
cities. Specifically, why is poverty linked to infestation, and what
political-economic, scientific, and cultural factors have influenced
interventions in pest problems? Since the development of US cities,
animals living with humans have posed both public health threats as well
as practical quandaries for a range of groups: residents, especially
those with low incomes; housing and public health officials; and animal
rights activists to name just a few. Though by the twentieth century
many vector-borne illnesses such as plague and typhus posed less of a
threat, pest animals continued to create stressful and injurious
conditions for the low-income people who disproportionately live with
them. In addition, scientists and activists increasingly regard as
dangerous especially in intimate settings such as homes and schools the
very chemicals designed to protect people from pests. Furthermore,
emerging zoonoses and other illnesses problematize human contact with
wild and domestic animals. A closer look at the historical case of urban
pests will help inform a social approach to urban ecology, and highlight
key tasks that lie ahead for ecologists and housing and public health
officials.

The ***broader impacts ***of this research lie in its potential to
explain historical relationships among low-income communities, the urban
physical environment, and populations of pest animals such as rodents,
roaches, mites, bedbugs, and stray domestic animals, and to use this
history to inform present-day actions on pest issues. The project will
benefit society by pointing out gaps in urban, health, and environmental
policy and science. These arenas have insufficiently addressed the
intersections between poverty and environmental conditions in US cities.
A social-geographic analysis broadens the questions we may ask of urban
nature, and this project will use interviews to expand participation of
low-income communities and communities of color in setting the agenda of
urban ecology. Environmental history and history of science have
revealed parallels between past and present policy discourses, thus
lending a unique perspective on current problems. Like any examination
of the past, this one will reveal a deeper history to current debates
and conditions than what policy-makers today recognize, a history which
they may use as a fund of knowledge. Specifically, what have been the
mistakes, successes, and injustices in past pest control interventions
in poor neighborhoods? By tracing the evolution of political and
institutional responses to vermin by a range of sectors, the researchers
will be able to inform present-day efforts to protect urban communities
from vermin-related disease and damage. It also bears implications for
the ways cities accommodate nature, including pests and emerging disease
vectors along with other sorts of animals.

The ***intellectual merit ***of the proposed activity lies in its
exploration of interdisciplinary work at the confluence of urban
geography, environmental history, and history of science and medicine.
Our primary methods will include archival work, interviews, and spatial
and quantitative analysis. Our sources will include literature from
industrial, public, scientific, community, environmental, and military
institutions concerned with pest management and pest ecology;
demographic and housing data from US and state censuses; records of
infestations and reports of related disease from health agencies at
local and national scales; and interviews with surviving community
residents who have experienced infestations. Urban geography will
provide the basis for understanding the spatial patterns of human-pest
interactions, the politics of the urban environment, and popular and
scientific representations thereof. The city is a relatively recent
focus for researchers in environmental history and history of science,
so this project will help expand the geographic purview of those fields
while employing their strengths at interpreting past relationships
between humans and nature. Finally, this project will bring together
health geographies and animal geographies for a fuller understanding of
the non-human life of cities.

**Section C: Project Description**

**C.1. Research objectives and hypotheses. **Urban geographers and
environmental historians have only recently begun to account for the
nexus of social, political, physical, and non-human factors that
constitute urban environmental problems. While poverty and disease have
been major concerns for researchers, few advance a broad notion of the
urban environment that accounts for human dimensions such as
neighborhood social differences and the aging of infrastructure
alongside non-human features such as animals, water, and pathogens. This
project proposes to use the suite of environmental, social, and health
issues associated with urban animal pests to show how poverty, the
politics of a changing urban environment, including housing and
development, and pest control strategies have influenced the historical
geography of human-pest interactions in US cities since 1850.

The researchers will employ the tools of urban geography, environmental
history, and history of science and medicine including archival work,
interviews and spatial analysis to develop a view of human-pest
interactions that integrates material changes to the city and its human,
animal, and disease ecology, with the history of representations and
discourse about pests, people, and place.

**C.1.1. Hypotheses. **The following hypotheses will guide our research:
First, pest animals and associated health problems have affected poor
neighborhoods disproportionately because of the lack of investment in
maintaining the physical environment and the kinds of pest management
strategies deployed there. This uneven geography of pests has had
political effects as well as physical ones: while outside officials
represented lower-income neighborhoods as infested, unhealthy,
backwards, and possibly in need of invasive renewal measures,
communities have used their own pest problems as a rhetorical tool to
gain recognition for urban environmental problems. Second, conceptions
of disease and environment, along with politics, have affected
interventions in pest problems. While public agencies have assumed
increasing responsibility for managing pests in all parts of cities, a
private pest control industry has also grown to promote products and
services that are used to different levels of effectiveness by various
sectors of the urban population. Though animal rights and animal welfare
ideas have recently influenced pest control strategies, as exemplified
by preventive methods and humane trapping, these have been deployed
mostly among more affluent clients, resulting in an unequal urban
ecology of health risks and human-animal interactions across
communities.

**C.1.2. Project significance. **An historical examination of the
interrelationships among human social conditions, pest animal
populations, and the urban environment will reveal a poorly understood
but potentially controversial aspect of the ecology of cities, and shed
light on present efforts to control urban pest animals and also on
similar environmental projects. Environmental history and history of
medicine can inform current discussions by illuminating parallels
between past and present situations, and also reveal contradictions,
misrepresentations, or silences in present policy discourses about
environmental and health problems (Cronon, 1993; Leavitt, 1997;
Craddock, 2000b). The proposed project will also inform research
frameworks in use among urban environmental historians, animal
geographers, urban political ecologists, and historians and geographers
of health. These fields are just beginning to grapple with dialectical
relationships among social difference, politics, physical conditions,
and non-human nature, particularly in an urban setting.

This project will advance understanding of the ways social inequalities
structure urban residents exposure to health threats and decaying
physical surroundings. Poor communities and communities of color have
often borne the greatest environmental and health impacts of industrial
development, and also of disinvestment in infrastructure as urban
populations and economies have declined (Hurley, 1995; Hurley, 1997;
Pulido, 2000; Gandy, 2002; Curtis, 2004). Furthermore, projects to
improve urban environments have often been less accessible for these
communities, or failed to address their specific needs (DiChiro, 1996;
Brownlow, 2003; Heynan, 2003). Discourse on urban environmental problems
has often blamed communities rather than analyzing the ecological,
political-economic, and social forces that produce poor conditions and
environmental injustice (Anderson, 1991; Craddock, 2000b; Klinenberg,
2002). At the same time, communities attempt to resist both negative
images imposed from outside and the lack of recognition of their
environmental and social situations (Gottlieb, 1993; Pulido, 1996;
Craddock, 2000a; Gandy, 2002).

Urban policies and discourses also disregard urban animals, and
researchers have yet to develop ways to ensure their well-being
alongside that of marginalized human communities (Philo, 1995; Wolch et
al, 1995). The populations of many urban species are stable or growing,
and strategies used to keep them out of buildings in older neighborhoods
rely on frequent application of killing traps or poisons rather than
more preventive measures. Encounters between animals and humans in
cities and other settings will only become

a more urgent concern with the spread of actual and possible zoonoses,
diseases which may jump from non-human animals to humans (Deem et al,
2000; Cook et al, 2004). These include hantavirus (Mills et al, 1999),
Lyme disease (Klein et al, 1996; Peavy, 1997; Patz et al, 2004), monkey
pox (DeGulio and Eckburg, 2004), West Nile virus (Daszak, 2001), SARS,
avian flu, and prion diseases. The wide range of factors affecting the
pest environment of cities exist in tension with one another: dire
limitations on urban health and infrastructure budgets; the political
and economic exclusion of low-income communities; conflicting notions of
responsibility for environment; conflicting notions of health and
ecology; and differing cultural values of animals. These are tensions to
which this project will speak.

**C.2. Historical case studies, geographical scope, and relevance to
project. **The following situates our hypotheses in the history of
science and urban politics, society, reform movements, public health,
and the environment from 1850 through today. To best show how we will
frame these research questions, we have outlined our questions and
narrative as dissertation chapters. We will identify case studies for
these chapters as part of Phase I research. Case studies will draw
primarily from large US cities of the Northeast and Midwest because of
their similar histories and ecological conditions, but we will also
address broader trends in professions such as public health and pest
control. We briefly name the kinds of sources on which these chapters
will be based; for further discussion of sources, see section **C.4.**

**C.2.1. Animals, knowledge, and ideas of infestation. **How has the
context of social, urban, and health history influenced beliefs about
pests among professionals, scientists, and layfolk? The purpose of this
chapter is to explore evolving knowledge of the species that will play a
starring role in the narrative, from the mid-nineteenth century to
today. Only by learning how science and other discourses represented
these animals can we proceed with subsequent chapters. Species include
the Norway rat, the black rat, the house mouse, the house fly, two
species of cockroach, bed bugs, mites, fleas, lice, mosquitoes,
termites, raccoons, and stray dogs. We will also discuss disease agents
associated with these animals, for example the pathogens that cause
typhus or allergens in the feces of domestic arthropods. We will examine
recent zoonoses, which lend a sense of urgency to discussions of urban
pests that live intimately with humans. We expect that discourses about
pests cast value judgments on places, peoples, and environmental
practices associated with them. For this reason we will also discuss the
evolving use of terms such asi nfestation, pest,vermin,andzoonoses,along
with animal rights and welfare. Sources will include literature from
natural history, medicine, public health, ecology, pest management, and
the popular press. **C.2.2. Pests, immigrants, and urban sanitary
reform. **This chapter asks three major questions, and it addresses our
first hypothesis which concerns the distribution of pests and their
political implications. What was the state of pest control knowledge and
practice in the US at the dawn of urban sanitary reform in the 1 880s?
How did popular and professional discourse map pest problems onto
immigrants and immigrant spaces? What variables were associated with
pest problems? Using a local case study we will examine spatial patterns
of three factors: first, the urban physical environment, including
housing, open space, and solid waste; second, perceived and documented
health threats from pest animals; and third, the social composition of
neighborhoods based on ethnic identity and income level. Sanitary reform
emerged just as waves of human (and animal) immigration from Europe
crested and population growth strained basic infrastructure and housing.
The filth theory of disease was prominent, and both the general public
and health professionals believed that miasma attracted vermin.
Policy-makers and affluent residents used economic and ethnic
segregation to avoid pests, but reformers soon made the case for
community sanitation reform (Melosi, 1981; Duffy, 1997). A few disease
outbreaks affected ethnic communities most severely, and established
residents conflated immigrant neighborhoods, backward hygiene practices,
and diseased vermin (Craddock, 2000b). We expect to find that while
miasmas led cities to take action on some of the conditions that
facilitated pests, health departments applied sanitary strategies
unevenly across the city, and immigrants bore the brunt of both rhetoric
about infestation and also of the underfunding of sanitation. This
chapter will draw evidence from sanitary program records, censuses of
population and housing, and literature on pest problems in the popular
and professional press.

**C.2.3. Pests and infectious disease in the Progressive Era up to World
War II. **How did the approaches of experts working on pest control from
1880 through 1940 differ from those of activists, and what led to
declining incidence of vector-borne disease? This chapter speaks to our
second hypothesis, concerning interventions in pest problems. We expect
to find that differing theories of disease influenced pest control
strategies. During the Progressive Era (1880-1920) scientific and
political institutions grappled seriously with urban sanitation
problems, and a guild of exterminators developed just as public health
agencies came to accept germ theory. Incidence of infectious disease
abated after a few major outbreaks, such as plague in

San Francisco (Craddock, 2000b), but pest animals continued to affect
poor residents by biting, spoiling food, destroying homes, and
depositing wastes. Meanwhile, lay and professional activists saw links
between pest problems and other social and urban ills, notably housing
(Addams, 1945; McBride, 1991). Though bacteriology had prevailed,
activists continued to focus on sanitary concerns. In spite of poor
conditions, the late Depression era saw a moment of improvement in
preventive efforts through the work of New Deal sanitation programs.
This chapter will use literature from exterminator associations, New
Deal work relief records, and activist groups (for example, settlement
houses and African-American civic organizations) to contrast their
scientific and political assumptions and their practices in
neighborhoods. **C.2.4. The development of institutions for pest control
science and practice. **The purpose of this chapter, addressing our
second hypothesis, is to trace the expansion of the pest control
industry, and the divergence of private and public work in the field in
the 1940s and 50s. How did pest control institutions diverge into
distinct niches the chemical industry, private pest-control companies,
public health pest control bureaus, and academic research programs and
what were the effects of this divergence? These institutions
contradicted one another in their assumptions about neighborhood
responsibility for pest problems; in the stage of pest population growth
at which they chose to deploy eradication strategies; and the kinds of
clients or spaces they served (Snetsinger, 1983; Russell, 2001;
Sullivan, 2004). Meanwhile, as the next chapter will show, domestic pest
populations were growing as housing conditions degraded in older,
lower-income neighborhoods. Did the differences between these sectors
leave gaps literal and figurative in the walls between pests and people?
Like the previous chapter, this one will use records, when available,
from the relevant institutions, but in this case we will focus on a few
cities to illustrate the specific intra-urban geographic logics of the
different sectors. We will frame our discussion around these
institutionsapproaches to particular species.

**C.2.5. Pests, urban renewal, and urban tenants. **The purpose of this
chapter, addressing the first hypothesis, is to explore the
relationships among urban renewal, pest problems, and tenant activism in
the

1 940s through the 1 970s. How and why did public health agencies and
urban redevelopment authorities use vermin as an indicator of blight for
renewal programs? How did blight elimination affect pest problems? And
how did resident organizations make pests a major issue in protests
against landlords and urban governments, and whether environment was a
major term with which they framed their protests? We expect that urban
renewal not only dislocated human communities and deprived families of
affordable housing but also facilitated pest populations (Sullivan,
2004). We also expect that pests such as rats, roaches, and bedbugs,
menaced residents in two distinct ways: by stigmatizing their
communities in blight surveys, and by causing continued illness and
injury. We will use events from selected cities, examining the
environmental surveys used in the middle 1 940s to establish pest
problems and set blight elimination priorities; allocation of federal
and local pest control funding across neighborhoods; and distribution of
pest conflict reports. We will also interview surviving members of
community and tenant associations, church groups, real estate interests,
housing officials, and public health bureaucracies involved in local
actions. **C.2.6. Pests, chemicals, and the indoor environment.
**Speaking to our second hypothesis, in this chapter we will examine the
convergence and contradictions between concerns about pests that produce
indoor allergens and about the use of indoor pesticides to control these
animals since the 1960s. How did communities, parents, and health,
school, and housing officials navigate the conflicting needs to protect
people from allergens and from the acute and chronic effects of
pesticides? What leads different neighborhoods, schools, and housing
projects to different strategies for controlling pests and allergies? We
expect to find that older and poorer neighborhoods have relied on
fumigation in their public and private facilities because of inability
to maintain buildings. In this chapter we will conduct a brief case
study on the scientific and pest control literature on one pesticide
that has been controversial since the 1 970s, chlorpyrifos, to trace
disagreement about its value and the dangers it may pose (Davis and
Ahmed, 1998); in addition we will examine other pesticides and survey
and interview school grounds departments, parent groups, public health
bureaucrats, and EPA pesticide researchers and regulators.

**C.2.7. Pests and urban ecology. **What is the potential for urban
ecology, based on its development since the 1 970s, to bring about
education and urban environmental change and thereby healthy
relationships between humans, animals, and the urban landscape? Can
urban ecology as a science and as a community movement address the
implications of our closeness with animals in domestic and urban spaces?
We expect to find that attention to social difference and decaying
environments is critical for urban ecologys potential to intervene in
pest problems. Like miasma theory in the nineteenth century, urban
ecology stresses holism and the creation of healthy overall conditions
in the physical environment. Urban ecology speaks to ways cities can
have positive interactions with nature, but research and programs to
date may neglect the social

and health implications of urban wildlife for low-income neighborhoods.
A research program that is more attentive to older neighborhoods could
help advance preventive approaches to infestation and possibly show how
species typically regarded as pests can share the city with humans,
healthily. This chapter will analyze the practices of urban ecological
science, along with urban nature center programming, and present
interviews with scientists and staff about their priorities and goals.
It will contrast this discourse with research on emerging zoonoses which
have been of limited concern to urban ecology.

**C.3. Analysis of relevant research. **This project will trace the
history of human-pest interactions in US urban areas and of responses to
animal pests by public health, housing and urban development, community,
industry, scientific, and environmental interests since the
mid-nineteenth century. We will also attempt to explain associations
between pest animals and geographies of human poverty. The history of
urban pests and human health bears implications for a diverse array of
research themes to which we intend to speak: geography; history; history
of science and health; ecology; disease ecology; environmental studies;
and urban studies. We will use this project to engage four broad areas
of current research: first, urban environmental history; second,
geographies of urban environmental politics, including environmental
justice, political ecology, and cultural geography; third, histories and
geographies of health, particularly those that address health
inequalities; and fourth, geographies of human-animal interactions.
**C.3.1. Urban environmental history and urban nature. **Environmental
history scholars disagree about whether the field should address issues
of human difference or environments constructed by people, such as
factories or neighborhoods. Some insist that the disciplines aim should
be to privilege the place of nature (that is, those aspects of the world
not created by humans) in human history in order to correct the
subordination of nature at the hands of people, as well as in historical
research in general (Worster, 1990). However, this view would constrict
the kinds of city research that would be considered part of the field
because the urban environment is so highly humanized. Furthermore,
industry, the state, environmentalists, and other agents produce
environmental change and deploy ideas about nature along lines of power
and human difference (Williams, 1980; Hurley, 1995; Taylor, 1996;
Warren, 1997).

Urban environmental historians have explored how reform movements,
including lay activists as well as professionals, contributed to the
development of urban infrastructures and ecological systems that cope
with the physical challenges of running a city. These include systems
for water, sewage, sanitation, energy, and transportation that channel
flows of material, energy, and people into, through, and out of the city
(Blake, 1956; Warner, 1968; Melosi, 1981; Steinberg, 1991; Tarr, 1996;
Melosi, 2000b; Tarr, 2004); similar systems played a role in disease
prevention see below in section **C.3.3. **For reform groups sanitary
and environmental infrastructure connoted moral and social uplift for
urban residents (Melosi, 2000b; Rawson, 2004). Similarly, historians of
fields such as landscape architecture, planning, and restoration
ecology, have shown how these professions have worked to change the
order of humans and nature in the city, including constructing ideas of
sustainability and creating healthier and more ecologically sound spaces
in cities (Spirn, 1984; Schuyler, 1986; Spirn, 1996; Hall, 2002).

Urban environmental historians have developed narratives of thebrown
environmental agenda concerned with pollution and human health, a
political movement that has existed just as long as its
better­knowngreencounterparts concerned with wildlands issues (Gottlieb,
1993; Melosi, 2000a). Framed in settings of great human diversity,
political struggles over the urban environment are informed by the
social and locational position of groups, for example
racially-segregated communities; the effects of pollution and
environmentally-mediated disease are felt unequally by residents and
workers in cities (Hurley, 1995; Flanagan, 2000; Greenberg, 2000;
Merchant, 2003). Communities of color and lower-income groups have
historically lacked prerogative to choose where they live and to control
their economic destinies; environmental historians have demonstrated how
real estate dynamics and industrial practices burdened these communities
with poor environmental quality (Hurley, 1997).

This project enters the debate about the scope of urban environmental
history by questioning whether we can draw a line between the non-human
environment and the parts of our surroundings constructed by people. It
does this by highlighting two aspects of urban nature that are both
deeply influenced by people and yet only partly under human control: the
ecology of pest animals and their pathogens, and the human body itself.
Furthermore, we will show that the politics of urban housing and
processes of neighborhood change, intimately connected with human race
and class, help create the niches that make up the habitat of urban
wildlife. Environmental historians have written little on the place of
housing in the urban environment, and we intend to highlight its
importance as a physical and social entity. The ecological factors of
interest to historians of the larger urban infrastructure, such as
sanitation, play out at the smaller

scale of the neighborhoods, blocks, and buildings that make up the
habitat of urban pest animals. Finally, reformers and community
activists involved with pests and health issues deserve a place in the
narrative of environmental politics because of their unique articulation
of problems and solutions at the interface of society, environment, and
health.

**C.3.2. Geographies of urban environmental politics. **Based on the
environmental justice movement, geographers and sociologists have
developed a theoretical framework for understanding inequities in
exposure to toxics and other risks to residents and workers at the scale
of the city or region (Bullard, 2000). This approach, in its most
geographical form, analyzes systemic processes of racial and economic
segregation; racism may act through the real estate market, allowing
white residents the choice to live in neighborhoods far from toxic
facilities and leaving people of color with limited options in
potentially hazardous areas (Pulido, 2000). Some of these researchers
have documented how communities of color develop activist movements to
demand inclusion in planning processes; members of these movements have
framed their work through place-based and ethnic identities at a very
local level (Gottlieb, 1993; DiChiro, 1996; Pulido, 1996). Hazards
researchers model the factors that mediate environmental risks and
disasters at a somewhat larger scale in human processes such as
planning, decision-making, and the use of technology, though they tend
not to explicitly consider the political-economic systems underlying
those processes (Cutter, 1994; White, 1994; Cutter, 2001). The hazards
literature attempts to explain why particular demographic groups are
more vulnerable than others (Kates, 1994); factors of identity and
place, however, have appeared less frequently than in the environmental
justice literature (Cutter, 1994).

Recently, other geographers have applied the framework of political
ecology, typically used in rural settings in less-developed countries,
to urban problems, showing that environmental degradation in cities
occurs through the same processes of capitalist development, state
control, land management, and place-making operate dialectically (Heynan
and Swyngedouw, 2003). Economic restructuring is one expression of
capitalism that contributes to the degradation of urban environments in
the Northeastern and Midwestern US; the cities of the rustbelt share
ecological and political factors such as toxic and abandoned landscapes;
rehabilitation and re-use of these landscapes; and the formation of new
political alliances to fight toxic exposure and exclusion from the
planning process (Gandy, 2002). Political ecologists insist that
production-side analyses of urban amenities and urban nature are at
least as important as those stressing consumption; private firms dealing
in lawn care (Robbins et al, 2001), real estate, ecological restoration
(Robertson, 2000), environmental remediation, and waterfront
redevelopment (Keil and Desfor, 2003) do not only satisfy individual
aesthetic desires but benefit from public policies that may ultimately
degrade social justice, non-human nature, or human health. Furthermore,
funding schemes and market-driven policies limit access to critical
urban resources such as water, trees, or open space, and also deny
participation to groups who would contest such policies (Swyngedouw,
1999; Heynan, 2003; Kaika, 2003; Bond, 2004). Cultural geographers
working in a less ecological vein have shown that entrepreneurial local
agencies, including boards of health and redevelopment authorities, have
constructed negative representations of urban groups, such as immigrants
(Anderson, 1991; Craddock, 2000b) or African-Americans (Weber, 2002),
condemning their environmental practices to justify invasive policies of
neighborhood renewal. Few political ecologists have examined health,
particularly in the urban context of industrialized nations (Mayer,
2000). Some geographers have criticized political ecologists for
ignoring the agency of nonhumans, and propose ways of valuing nature
while tracing histories of scientific knowledge and political ecology
(Braun and Castree, 1998; Whatmore, 2002); this includes the agency of
animals in cities (Wolch, 2002) see section **C.3.3 **and **C.3.4
**below.

This project will build on both environmental justice and urban
political ecology research by addressing how disinvestment in poor urban
neighborhoods contributes to the creation of ecological niches for pest
animals and thereby variation across the landscape. The animals
themselves have agency to change environments, in tension with and
through human practices. Furthermore, though urban development, housing,
and public health work are important functions of the state that produce
urban environmental change, political ecologists have given these
processes little attention; environmental justice movements have been
more committed to such policy areas. Poor building maintenance and
public sanitary conditions, which facilitate the growth of pest
populations, are embedded in the processes of housing development,
redevelopment, and disinvestment. The ecology of pest populations also
plays a role in health and landscape, but urban reformers have largely
understood this role through changing scientific and popular conceptions
of pests, not the political and economic forces that influence urban
ecology. Pest management, like so many other environmental industries at
work in cities, has benefited from urban policies but is also applied
unevenly across the city. Public health strategies addressing pests have
also resembled other

invasive redevelopment policies, in the way they change environments and
the way they target and represent low-income communities. Like
environmental justice communities, however, those affected by urban
renewal and pest populations have resisted such representations and
demanded opportunities to participate in urban politics, and to have
their environmental problems recognized in their terms. **C.3.3.
Histories and geographies of health. **Historians of health in the US
context have examined the influence of urbanization and resulting
changes in environmental dynamics such as overcrowded housing and
exposure to human wastes in causing epidemics, and the concurrent rise
of public health and sanitary experts to address urban health problems
and develop infrastructure as a preventive measure (Blake, 1956;
Rosenberg, 1962; Melosi, 1981; Tarr, 1996; Duffy, 1997; McMahon, 1997).
In fact, they have shown that practices such as environmental sanitation
have contributed more to declining urban mortality rates than medicine
itself, although the formers benefits were indirect (McKeown, 1979;
Leavitt, 1982; Duffy, 1990). A strong thrust of health historiography,
whether addressing cities or rural areas, has used the lens of
environment to evaluate past practices and ideas about public health,
often arguing that reformers who subscribed to the miasma theory of
disease in the 1 800s and ecological theories in the 1900s were more
likely to pursue preventive measures and environmental improvement than
their counterparts who conformed only to germ theory (Jordanova, 1979;
Melosi, 1981; Valencius, 2002; Anderson, 2004). The ecological view also
called into question the security of borders on a variety of scales
national, local, and bodily (King, 2004). Along with shifting theories
of disease, historians of public health have documented changing notions
of where responsibility for health and health care lies: with
individuals and families, community, or the greater public (Melosi,
1981; Leavitt, 1982; Klinenberg, 2002). Some have highlighted lay health
knowledge and lay activists, who argued for more holistic theories of
disease, and in the age of ecology called on the notion of uncertainty
to question medical knowledge and the safety of toxins (Brown and
Mikkelson, 1990; McBride, 1991; Krauss, 1998; Sellers, 1999; Bullard,
2000; Warren, 2000; Fortun, 2001; Sellers, 2004). The social
construction of disease is an important framework for historians of
health; researchers working in this vein have shown how popular and
scientific discourses represent people and place, often stigmatizing
ethno-racial groups and particular locations or neighborhoods (Kraut,
1995; Leavitt, 1997; Valencius, 2002; Mitman, 2003; Mitman et al, 2004).

Geographers and other researchers concerned with health inequalities
have also used a social constructivist approach to address the
representation of places and communities as healthy or unhealthy,
including policy responses by public health departments such as the
surveillance of immigrants or people of color communities thatmarksthem
as deviating from proper environmental and health practices (Philo,
1989; Peterson and Lupton, 1996; Craddock, 2000a; Craddock, 2000b). To
recognize lay understandings of health conditions, and to support a goal
of well-being rather than merely freedom from disease, some have called
for a move from medical geographies to geographies of health (Gattrell,
2002; Gesler and Kearns, 2002; Curtis, 2004). Based on concerns about
social justice, health geographers have documented local health
inequalities rooted in environmental and structural factors such as
racial segregation, exposures in the home and the workplace (Macintyre
et al, 1993; Sooman and Macintyre, 1995; Schell and Czerwinski, 1998;
Neumann et al, 1998), and differential access to care and preventive
services, all patterned spatially (Gattrell, 2002). Resources such as
housing belong to networks of factors that influence health (Smith et
al, 2003). Because such structural or environmental theories of health
inequalities are not always related to medical issues per se, health
geographers frequently look outside the realm of medicine to poverty,
racism, industrial practices, and environmental policies as possible
means for correcting such problems (Curtis and Taket, 1996; Wilkinson,
1996).

Environmental epidemiology and environmental health examine the role of
the quality of the physical environment in health problems, including
such threats as toxic pollutants in air, water, soil, and indoor areas
(Meade and Earickson, 2000; Gattrell, 2002). Health and medical
geographers have adopted the frameworks of disease ecology and landscape
change to examine the spatial patterns of pathogens and other disease
agents and their response to environmental conditions such as climate,
land cover, and animal populations (Learmonth, 1988; Parkes et al,
2003). A number of historians and biologists have brought microbes to
the study of the human past, often using exchanges of pathogens at
various scales to explain and embed social, political, and demographic
processes (Crosby, 1972; McNeill, 1976; Crosby, 1986; Denevan, 1992;
Lederberg, 1992; Diamond, 1997; Cliff et al, 1998). Meanwhile, studies
of emerging diseases focus on many scales of environmental change that
influence disease ecology, as mediated by humans: global-scale climate
change; regional desertification and deforestation; and local and
regional urbanization (Dubos, 1952; Garrett, 1994; Cook et al, 2004;
Patz et al, 2004). A fairly new vein of disease ecology in geography
builds on the insights of political ecologists by analyzing not only the
environmental

and biological influences on spatial health patterns, but also the
political and economic factors that with them make up the complex
phenomenon of landscape change (Mayer, 1996; Mayer, 2000).

Our research will contribute to knowledge of the geography and history
of health inequities by adding to the literature a little-studied kind
of problem, pest-borne and pest-related disease, and connecting these
problems not just to gradients in the natural landscape but also to
physical features of neighborhoods such as garbage and waste, decayed
housing and the aging of the built environment, open space, food
sources, and the chemicals and other technologies used for pest control.
The health threats of concern to this project encompass several types,
from toxic exposure to infectious disease, from allergies to injury and
emotional stress. The project will help weave a complex web of
associated social, physical, and biological causations of disease, all
turning on the central pivot of vermin. This implies that we must reckon
with factors of urban political economy. We will build on the use of
spatial methods, in particular by applying them in a historical
framework with multiple human and non-human variables. The project may
also reveal ways in which some strategies for controlling pests, such as
the broad application of pesticides that continues today, are unsuitable
for the most intimate urban environments such as homes and schools.
Finally, our research will situate the human body in relationship to
several small scales that are under-studied in geography: the home and
other buildings, blocks and neighborhoods, and city ecology.

**C.3.4. Animal geographies. **Geographers of wildlife have examined how
conflicts develop among human groups over their valuations of animals,
and over perceived threats of animals to safety or property
(Naughton-Treves and Sanderson, 1995; Treves and Naughton-Treves, 1999).
Researchers working in agricultural, urban, and wildlands settings have
revealed how land managers respond to animals that damage their crops,
and construct ideas about which animals are pests, who is responsible
for damage by pests, and how to address pest problems (Child, 1995;
Davies et al, 1999; Naughton-Treves, 1999). Environmental policy
agencies and resource users have clashed over endangered species laws
and wildlife preserves; such policies often act through channels of
power to further marginalize small holders, subsistence hunters, or poor
farmers (Warren, 1997; Neumann, 1998); this research emphasizes both the
cultural meanings of wildlife and the property and conservation regimes
in which conflict is embedded. Studies of human-wildlife conflicts often
stress the potential for community-based conservation to bring about
more democratic, socially just, and effective practices with wildlife
(Lewis and Alpert, 1997). Perhaps because urban residents engage in only
limited degrees of agricultural activity, and only a small number of
urban residents are dependent upon urban gardens and farms, there has
been little research on such conflicts over animals in urbanized
settings. Notable contributions have highlighted the ways pets and stray
animals in cities may threaten health, and while these advanced
ecological insight they considered only to a limited degree the social,
political, and economic dimensions of urban animal problems (Beck,
1973).

Cultural animal geographers show how societal practices and discourses
assign value to different sorts of animals in different locations, and
their work reveals inconsistencies and contradictions in the ways we
privilege nature and culture (Hinchliffe, 1999; Whatmore, 2002). The
very notion of human-animal conflict reveals a human-centered bias.
Similarly, subjective human values are implicated in debates over
whether animals should be allowed to occupy certain places in the city
(Philo, 1995; Hinchliffe, 1999). Discourse maps negative views of
vilified human groups onto animals and vice-versa, for example Roma and
their pet animals (Sibley, 1995); such discourses are bad for both
subaltern humans and animals in that both are denied a place in the city
as full residents or citizens (Tuan, 1984; Elder et al, 1998; Anderson,
2000; Griffiths et al, 2000). To secure a more positive and visible
place in cities for animals, these geographers reject anthropocentrism
and argue for urban theory that places animals on a level equal with
humans (Wolch et al, 1995). Both within and outside of geography, other
researchers have highlighted the ways agriculture, science, technology,
and other practices and discourses have created tight biological and
cultural bonds among humans and animals (Haraway, 1989; Diamond, 1997;
Swabe, 1999; Haraway, 2003). Scientists, businesses, entertainers,
activists, and pet owners have used animals as icons for ideas about
race, class, and gender (Ritvo, 1987; Haraway, 1996; Davis, 1997;
Nelson, 1997; Mitman, 1999; Price, 1999).

Our project will bring questions about conflicts between humans and
wildlife, typically employed in the global south and in rural areas, to
US cities. This setting, while still replete with human groups who hold
varied social positions, livelihoods, and valuations of wildlife,
differs because of the ways cities are culturally constructed in
opposition to nature. The idea of apestitself is a construction, fraught
with conceptions about rights to occupy urban spaces. If cultural animal
geographers are correct that urban policies and practices have written
animals out of the city, then we should look to the role of health

departments in constructing boundaries between humans and so-called
pests. Health policy and pest control rhetoric, as well, helps
marginalize urban spaces and the people and animals associated with
them. We intend to take a critical position on anthropocentrism,
recognizing power differences exist among humans as well as between
humans and animals. Whether real, perceived, or exaggerated, health
problems and injury caused by pests complicate animal
geographersarguments for multi-species cities. The fact that some urban
animals pose health threats, or threats to the quality of life for
groups of urban residents whose status in the city is already tenuous,
demands that animal geographers re-imagine the animal-human interface.
Those humans with less power to determine their environmental
conditions, then, may find nature in the city more hazardous than
others. The framework we propose uses historical perspectives from a
variety of community and professional perspectives to illuminate
evolving discourses about pests, and will also examine the role of
physical environment in facilitating interactions between humans and
pests.

**C.4. Methods. **The proposed research will employ a range of
qualitative methods complemented by retrospective spatial and
quantitative analysis. The phases of the project are dynamic, and though
they will proceed mostly in sequence they will also feed back into one
another. The initial stage (Phase I) of the project entails two
concurrent efforts: one involves *analyzing *national-level literature
from professional and popular sources dealing with pest management,
public health, ecology, and urban development, much of which will be
possible to do with the resources available at the home institution. The
other involves *identifying *local-level cases to focus on for each of
the questions addressed above in **section C.2. **The next stage (Phase
II) will involve collecting data from archives that pertain to the case
studies in Phase I, and identifying informants and conducting interviews
cases with surviving human subjects. The final stage (Phase III)
involves qualitative, spatial, and quantitative interpretation and
analysis of the epidemiological, demographic, housing, and development
and health policy data gathered from archival work and interviews.

**C.4.1. Archival research. **This research task will account for most
of the work in Phases I and II of the project, and it will provide the
data for the analysis and interpretation in Phase III. Archival research
will be the most important method in our tool kit for reconstructing
past scientific and popular ideas about and approaches to urban pests in
general, and for developing a narrative of evolving political and public
health responses to specific local problems. Archives will also provide
us with the qualitative and quantitative data necessary to describe
physical, socio-economic, and political conditions in urban areas
believed to suffer from pest problems, as compared to those areas
believed to be relatively free from vermin.

There are four main objectives for our work with archival research.
First, as part of Phase I, we must identify prominent themes political,
professional, and popular content; controversies; knowledge claims;
language and terminology; contradictions; and silences in literature and
discourse pertaining to the professional and political interest groups
involved in pest problems that affected urban neighborhoods. Our content
analysis of these sources assumes a social constructivist view of
health, disease, nature, place, and people. That is, ideas about these
items are constructed in specific historical and geographical contexts,
and cultural representations from all fields are mutually constitutive
with material and political processes carried out by historical actors
(Mitman et al, 2004).

Many of the documents necessary for conducting this phase of research
are available in facilities on the University of Wisconsin Madison
campus: Steenbock Library (life sciences, agriculture, and human
ecology), Ebling Library (health sciences), State Historical Society
(primarily state records, but also literature from popular activist
movements), and the University Archives (personal papers of faculty, for
example the rodent ecologist John Emlen). Others will be available
through inter-library loan. We will also use the documents in these
facilities to identify the local and institutional archives the co-PI
will visit in Phase II. Some categories of documents we will use
include:

§ Results of scientific research on ecology, entomology, and health in
peer-reviewed journals

§ Surveys of pest problems by health and housing agencies

§ Proceedings of conferences on pest control science, urban ecology, and
the pest management business

§ Published trade journals for the pest control industry

§ Advertisements for pest control services and products

§ Pest-control guides for householders distributed by pest control
businesses and health departments

§ Representations in the popular national press of epidemics involving
vermin

The remaining three objectives of archival research rely on documents
the co-PI will collect as part of visits to archives and informants
outside of Madison; funding for travel will make it possible for us to

fulfill these objectives. The sorts of documents we expect to find in
local archives in Phase II (which we will analyze in Phase III) include:
records of local vermin management programs; local health department
surveys; records of housing and redevelopment programs; documents from
local activist and advocacy programs aimed at improving environmental
conditions and democratic process; popular media representations of pest
problems; and local historic business directories listing pest control
businesses. We will obtain qualitative, quantitative, and spatial data
from these sources. Our second objective is to use evidence from mostly
local literature from health, housing, urban development, and advocacy
agencies to qualitatively describe the physical environment of
neighborhoods that were perceived to have pest problems. Given the
representations we find in these items are themselves part of
socially-constructed discourses, it is necessary to both triangulate on
these descriptions using several sources, and interpret the social
position of the sourcesauthors. Our third objective is to identify and
describe interventions policies, practices, and protests staged by
public agencies, private businesses and researchers, and activist groups
to address pest problems. We intend to learn what strategies pest
management professionals, public health officials, and housing agencies
employed to address and prevent pest problems in specific locales, and
what rules governed their use of these methods. Our fourth objective is
to collect and analyze spatial and quantitative data about reported
health problems related to pests, the allocation and use of funding for
pest management, and demographic and housing census data. See below in
section **C.4.3 **for further discussion of how we will proceed from
collecting documents through archival research, to spatial analysis.
**C.4.2. Interviews. **While content analysis of written sources found
in archival research will produce the most valid results because the
authors of the materials cannot tailor their answers to what they
perceive the interviewer wants interviews will be important for
supplementing the information available in written sources in those
cases where there are surviving human subjects. The most important set
of potential informants includes individuals who live in communities
affected by pest animals and pest control programs, because unlike
scientists, pest control professionals, and health and housing officials
these residents are less likely to have produced much written, archival
material. We will also pursue interviews with surviving scientists, pest
control workers, public health and housing officials, and landlords when
possible. Like archival research, interviewing involves the three-step
process of first identifying informants, then conducting the interviews
and producing transcripts, and finally analyzing and interpreting
interview transcripts. We intend to seek interviewees from locations
identified in Phase I by contacting community organizations such as
block clubs, resident associations, churches, and schools whose members
have been involved in past and continuing activism around pest animal
issues and the local environment. Our goal in interviewing people from
community organizations is to learn about their perceptions of pest
problems and the methods they and others have used to manage them. The
inclusion of these voices is also a key step in making claims about
social justice movements and the agency of activist groups, and bolsters
the possibilities for this project to achieve the broader impacts we
seek.

**C.4.3. Quantitative and spatial analysis of social, health, and pest
data. **In Phase III we will analyze qualitative and quantitative data
using spatial methods in a GIS with the goal of fusing ecological
history and urban social and health geography. Historical GIS analysis
is a relatively new field of endeavor (Knowles, 2002), and we intend to
contribute to its growth and development by showing how four kinds of
variables demographic, housing, health, and ecological can be analyzed
to reconstruct past urban environments. Environmental historians and
historians of health have used basic mapping techniques to support
interpretations of qualitative analysis and to make distinctly spatial
arguments (Cronon, 1991; Hurley, 1995; Craddock, 2000b; Beveridge and
Weber, 2002). Medical and health geographers have found GIS to be an
important technique for revealing and explaining health inequities
(Gattrell, 2002; Curtis, 2004). We will use overlay techniques to
enhance analysis of the correlation between variables including reported
health problems, pest populations, housing age and condition, crowding,
socioeconomic factors, and pest control funding and program activities.
We hypothesize that housing age and low incomes will correlate strongly
with pest problems. Speaking to our second hypothesis about
interventions in pest problems, we also wish to ask, what sorts of pest
control programs have been deployed in various sorts of neighborhoods?
Some of the necessary analysis is likely to have been begun by municipal
health departments, national health surveys, and to some extent national
and state agencies that funded local efforts and collected data to
monitor infestation, epidemics, sanitation, and other pest-related
items. Peer-reviewed ecological studies, which we intend to identify in
Phase I of the project, will also present quantitative animal population
and spatial data for relevant species of pest animals that we wish to
integrate with demographic, housing, and health data. The objective of
this set of analyses is to use these in conjunction with demographic and
housing data from the US census to discover what characteristics, such

as neighborhood socio-economic trends, health program funding, and age
and quality of housing and other community buildings have been
associated with pests and related health problems. This objective speaks
directly to our first hypothesis and to the questions we pose in the
above sections C.2.2., **C.2.5, **and **C.2.7. **This technique will
also help us disseminate a visual message that may reach a broad range
of readers including both policy makers and popular audiences.

**C.5. Research schedule. **The co-PI began the literature analysis for
Phase I as part of an earlier project that resulted in a paper
presentation at the 2004 meeting of the Association of American
Geographers. We have already identified two research programs that
occurred at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in the
mid-twentieth century as appropriate case studies for chapters in
sections **C.2.4, C.2.5, **and **C.2.7 **above. Analysis of these
projects and their relationship to urban neighborhoods and environmental
conditions revealed that they incorporated assumptions about the class,
race, and environmental practices of residents in their study areas, and
that these assumptions affected the policy and technical recommendations
of the researchers. The initial stage of research will proceed through
July 2005, and will employ resources at the indicated library facilities
on the campus of UW-Madison along with the inter-library loan system.
Prior to July 2005 the co-PI will also establish contact by telephone,
mail, and email with collection specialists at the relevant archives,
and with potential informants among community groups, scientists, and
urban ecology center staff. Beginning in July 2005 the co-PI will begin
Phase II, visiting archives and sites for interviews. This is the phase
of research for which we are requesting funding. The co-PI will visit
six cities with at least one archive each; we have tentatively
identified three cities for case studies of recent activities where we
are likely to conduct interviews: Baltimore, New York City, and Chicago.
The co-PI will spend the duration of city visits collecting materials at
archives and meeting with informants, and she will conduct analytic and
interpretive work (Phase III) while at the home institution between city
visits in order to save on accommodations and subsistence needs.
Conducting these Phases in tandem will permit the co-PI to identify
additional data needs when visiting subsequent archives. The co-PI will
conclude archival visits and interviews in July 2006; she will continue
with data analysis (qualitative, spatial, and quantitative) through
September 2006. The processes of data gathering, data analysis, and
writing are dynamic, but the bulk of writing work will begin in
September 2006.

5.  **Research experience. **Both the PI (William Cronon) and co-PI
    (Dawn Biehler) have significant experience conducting archival
    research in environmental history and historical geography in the
    North American context. William Cronon has examined environmental
    change and ecological history, western history, and the history of
    environmentalism. His monographs include *Changes in the Land:
    Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England *(1984) and
    *Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West *(1991). William
    Cronons work in history is noted for the degree to which it reaches
    popular audiences and policy makers; his influence on this project
    will help make it both accessible and applicable to wider audiences.
    Dawn Biehlers experience researching urban animals in
    nineteenth-century New York City has given her a good command of the
    use of local, state, and institutional records and the
    interpretation of historical sources. She conducted most of her work
    at the New York State archives, the New York City municipal
    archives, and the New-York Historical Society; these institutions
    are likely to be important sources of information in this project as
    well. Dawn Biehler has also conducted research which involved
    identifying and interpreting historic legal documents such as court
    cases pertaining to attacks and property damage by dogs and wolves
    as a collaborator with Professor Lisa Naughton. Dawn Biehlers
    undergraduate degree is in Biology with a focus in Ecology, and she
    spent two summers as a field crew assistant collecting data for a
    long-term ecology research project. This background in ecology and
    biology prepares her to interpret historical and present-day
    ecological data and ecological theories. Dawn Biehler has
    co-authored three guide books, one for naturalists and two for
    community food advocates. This work has prepared her to interview
    activists, write for a broad audience, and address local political
    concerns; these research and writing skills will translate into a
    written dissertation that has an impact on public social and
    environmental issues.

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