The Topography of Wellness: How Health and Disease Shaped the American Landscape


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Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has reignited discussions of how architects, landscape designers, and urban planners can shape the environment in response to disease. This challenge is both a timely topic and one with an illuminating history. In The Topography of Wellness, Sara Jensen Carr offers a chronological narrative of how six epidemics transformed the American urban landscape, reflecting changing views of the power of design, pathology of disease, and the epidemiology of the environment. From the infectious diseases of cholera and tuberculosis, to so-called social diseases of idleness and crime, to the more complicated origins of today's chronic diseases, each illness and its associated combat strategies has left its mark on our surroundings. While each solution succeeded in eliminating the disease on some level, sweeping environmental changes often came with significant social and physical consequences. Even more unexpectedly, some adaptations inadvertently incubated future epidemics. From the Industrial Revolution to present day, this book illuminates the constant evolution of our relationship to wellness and the environment by documenting the shifting grounds of illness and the urban landscape.

Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund



Author: Sara Jensen Carr
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 10/05/2021
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 7.60w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780813946306
ISBN10: 0813946301
BISAC Categories:
- Architecture | History | General
- Medical | Health Risk Assessment

About the Author

Sara Jensen Carr is Assistant Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape at Northeastern University.