AP® European History · Unit 6 · Topic 6.4
Urbanization and the Industrial City
Industrial cities grew explosively because factory jobs paid more than farm work, even though overcrowding made cities deadlier than the countryside until sewer and water systems broke the link between city life and disease.
People moved to cities like Manchester because wages there beat anything the countryside offered, even as city death rates climbed well above birth rates. Manchester's population rocketed from around 45,000 in 1750 to over 300,000 by 1850, but packed row housing with no sewers meant human waste soaked into the same ground that supplied drinking water. Cholera and typhoid spread fast in that mix. In 1854 the physician John Snow mapped cholera deaths in London's Soho neighborhood and found them clustered around a single water pump on Broad Street; he had the pump handle removed and deaths in the area dropped. His map was early evidence that contaminated water, not bad air, carried the disease.
That finding pushed cities to build sewer systems that physically separated wastewater from drinking water. Where that infrastructure went in, death rates from cholera and typhoid fell sharply within about a generation, since the water people drank stopped carrying the waste that made them sick. By 1900 a much larger share of Europeans lived in towns over 20,000 people than in 1800, when such towns held only a small fraction of the population; sanitation made that density survivable.
Once cities were safer, transportation reshaped them again. Streetcars let workers travel real distances quickly and cheaply, so factory employment no longer required living within walking distance of the factory. Working-class housing spread outward along car lines into new neighborhoods, loosening the crowded cores that had made disease so deadly in the first place.
Key terms
- Urbanization
- The shift of population from rural areas into cities, driven in this period by factory jobs.
- Cholera
- A severe intestinal infection spread through water contaminated with human waste, common in unsanitary industrial cities.
- Sewer system
- Infrastructure that carries wastewater away separately from the supply of drinking water.
- John Snow
- A London physician who traced an 1854 cholera outbreak to a single contaminated water pump using a map of deaths.
- Streetcar
- A rail-based urban vehicle that let workers commute from homes farther from factories than walking allowed.
Watch it explained
- How it worksShow me Manchester's population curve from 1750 to 1850 against its death rate.
- How it worksWalk me through John Snow mapping cholera deaths onto a single water pump in Soho.
- How it worksHow does a sewer and clean-water system change a city's mortality within twenty years?
- Worked exampleTrace what share of Europeans lived in towns of over 20,000 in 1800 and in 1900.
- Going furtherWhat happens to a city's shape once streetcars let workers live away from the factory?
Check yourself
End of topic.