Editor’s note: This is the first post in our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world.

By Can Gümüş-İspir and Marianne Dhenin

When Egyptian engineer and administrator Ali Mubarak traveled to Paris in the 1860s, he took a much-anticipated tour through the bowels of the enormous sewage system built beneath the wide, tree-lined boulevards of Baron Haussmann’s new city.^[1] When he returned to Egypt, Mubarak was appointed the country’s Minister of Public Works. Over the following decade, he began planning and building the modern city of Cairo—widening and straightening its thoroughfares to accommodate increasing traffic, supervising the execution of plans for a new central quarter, and drawing up a master plan for the entire city according to the styles he had observed in Paris, with which Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha was enamored.^[2]

Growing numbers of scientists and administrators from around the world visited Cairo during this period to experiment on its population, learn in its institutions, or present their work in one of the city’s many thriving periodicals or professional societies. The burgeoning Egyptian capital is one of many examples elaborated upon in historical texts or documents, some of which remain tucked away in archives waiting to be rediscovered, which demonstrate how science and scientists have shaped cities and their populations.

This month, contributors to The Metropole tell some of these stories. They also observe and detail how cities are active participants in science rather than simply spaces where science is performed or implemented. Their work investigates: How does science shape the built environment? What roles do scientific institutions play in cities, and how do cities shape those institutions? How have urban space and those that inhabit it been made subjects of scientific knowledge? What places do science and the city occupy in our cultural imaginary?

Infrastructure and Sanitation
While modern Cairo was being reshaped according to new understandings of sanitation and standards of urban planning in the nineteenth century, the same was happening in other cities around the globe. The scientific developments of the time fostered an obsession with urban sanitation and personal hygiene among rulers, urban planners, and medical professionals, which created an enabling ground for interventions toward “cleaner” cityscapes.^[3]

British reformer Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain highlighted the role of the environment in fostering disease.^[4] Chadwick believed it was imperative to eliminate the filth and foul odors emanating from London’s dysfunctional water and sewage system. Although he was right in identifying contaminated water as a cause of cholera, he could not identify why it caused the disease. It was not the odors of wastewater that caused diseases like cholera, but rather the bacteria or viruses that thrived within it.

During this period, engineers introduced innovative changes to the construction, maintenance, and cleaning of sewer and water infrastructure, and new systems were introduced in European metropoles. The modern sewage system that Ali Mubarak toured on his trip to Paris was the culmination of construction started years earlier in the context of repeated nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks. The system was only 14 km long in 1832–33 but reached a length of 96 km in 1840, and expanded to 143 km in 1853 when the city’s last open sewer was covered.^[5]

A year later, in 1854, British scientist John Snow demonstrated the link between cholera and contaminated water by transforming London neighborhoods into makeshift laboratories.^[6] When a German medical mission under Robert Koch’s leadership identified the bacteria that causes cholera amid outbreaks in cities in Egypt and India in 1883 and 1884, respectively, it further strengthened this novel understanding of the disease.^[7] These developments provided a new empirical basis for the work of sanitary experts, who had been making efforts to improve urban sanitation based on earlier theories.

Even as the boundaries between old and new theories of disease remained blurred, new urban sanitation systems became widespread in Europe and beyond. While there was concern about dust in Haussmann’s Paris, urban planners in London fought filth and odors.^[8] Soon, contamination, pollution, and hygiene became prominent themes related to urban space and the built environment around the globe.

Nonhuman Neighbors in Urban Space
Recent scholarship in environmental history, science and technology studies, and political ecology have questioned the primacy of human agency, as well as the assumed boundaries between nature and the urban environment. Many have explored the consequences of certain science-driven interventions in the built environment on the natural environment and nonhuman animals. A major concern in the construction of modern Cairo, for instance, was the city’s population of free-roaming dogs, which the state administration made every effort to expel.

Alan Mikhail writes that the “radical alteration of Cairo’s urban environment,” underpinned by emerging notions of disease etiologies, hygiene, and urban sanitation, cast dogs in new roles as “disease vectors, noise polluters, sources of filth, and menaces to social order.”^[9] These new ideas reinforced the need to remove dogs from the city and, Mikhail argues, ultimately created “a divergent evolutionary pathway for dog species in Egypt.”^[10]

The same four-legged problem appeared in New York City, London, Paris, and Istanbul.^[11] In the Ottoman capital, the desire to remove dogs from the city was framed in terms of sanitation and hygiene. There, the Union and Progress Government launched an initiative to “clean” dogs from the city in 1910. Thousands of dogs were captured and carried by boat to Hayırsız Ada, an island in the Marmara Sea, where they were abandoned without food or water. Some scholars point to the threat of rabies as the impetus for this mass culling, while others argue that it was carried out simply because the dogs were not part of the government’s vision for a modern city with its complex schemes for maintaining hygiene, sanitation, and public order.^[12]

Similarly, Catherine McNeur describes a campaign to eliminate free-range pigs in New York City in the 1840s.^[13] Juliana Adelman’s recent book on nineteenth-century Dublin details the city’s negotiations with all manner of what one contemporaneous Irish lawyer called “beasts.”^[14]

While some uncontrolled populations of nonhuman animals have been expelled from modern cities, spaces to observe flora and fauna for scientific inquiry or leisure have proliferated. Eric Baratay shows how urbanization and colonization aided the expansion of zoos, for example, writing that “the zoo made concrete, in an enclosed space, what society wanted to do in nature, as with the advance of urbanization, people felt an increasing need to preserve the wild.”^[15]

Other populations of nonhuman animals have adapted to urban life, forming sometimes symbiotic and sometimes parasitic relationships with their human neighbors. For an example of the latter, Kathryn Olivarius’s recent monograph, Necropolis, paints a stunning picture of how explosive urban growth in antebellum-era New Orleans fostered conditions amenable to yellow fever-carrying mosquitos, and how the disease they spread underpinned the Crescent City’s racialized white-supremacist labor regime and shaped its identity and economy, including making health sciences its third-largest industry.^[16]

Moving further into the realm of urban environmental histories, scholars, including William Cronon, Matthew Gandy, Ari Kelman, Matthew Klingle, and Matthew Vitz, have illuminated the relationships between elements of the natural environment and the cities that have sprouted around them.^[17] In their Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Los Angeles, Greg Hise and William Deverell explore how “the concerted regional effort to harness nature in service of an early Eden in Southern California has required enterprise and given rise to technological innovation.”^[18] The ways that urban conglomerations necessitate and enable scientific development is a potent theme.

Histories of sanitation and transportation infrastructure provide many examples of this.^[19] Another example is industrial agriculture. Cities of the size now common throughout the world could not exist without some method of producing food on a mass scale. Today this production is facilitated by chemical pesticides, mechanized tools, and the medicalized maintenance of exploited workforces and livestock.^[20]

Even the issue of stray dogs in nineteenth-century metropolises gave rise to significant scientific developments. Kathleen Kete shows how an intense fear of rabies in nineteenth-century Paris spurred scientific research, eventually leading Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux to develop the world’s first successful rabies vaccine in 1885.^[21] Following their breakthrough, Ottoman authorities, who were also concerned about populations of free-roaming dogs in their cities, sent a delegation of researchers to the Pasteur Institute in Paris to learn more about rabies and the new vaccine.^[22]

When the Ottoman delegation returned from their studies in Paris, they brought a sample of bone marrow injected with the rabies virus to further their research. Two years after this fruitful interaction, the Ottomans established the Rabies and Bacteriology Laboratory (Dâu’l-Kelb ve Bakteriyoloji Ameliyathanesi), where scientists later developed an anti-diphtheria serum. Research continued under the roof of the Imperial Vaccine Laboratory (Telkihhâne-i Şâhâne) when it was established in 1892, and Ottoman scientists reencountered their Parisian contemporaries during the cholera epidemic that struck the empire the following year.^[23]

Practicing Science in the City
Exemplifying the city as a site of experimentation, scientists often turned to the neighborhoods of the urban poor and those in colonized territories to conduct experiments as they sought treatments or cures for diseases.^[24] The results of many of these experiments continue to inform science and medicine today. The satellite communities of the twentieth-century Garden City Movement and the model villages and compounds of the colonial era also typify the city as a laboratory of experimentation.^[25] As the zoological garden or the Imperial Vaccine Laboratory in the nineteenth-century Ottoman capital demonstrate, the city also fosters spaces of scientific practice and exchange.

While analyzing the rise of anatomo-clinical medicine in Paris, Dora B. Weiner and Michael J. Sauter demonstrate that the city’s population was as important as its inherited medical institutions to the development of clinical medicine at the turn of the nineteenth century. Paris had more patients available for examination than other European cities, and if the patients died, their cadavers were available for necropsy. “These bodies, both living and dead, were absolutely essential to the research and teaching” of the medical institutions in Paris.^[26]

The characteristics of scientific institutions also affect the lives of those around them, acting as lightning rods for scientific exchange, accelerating scientific developments, employing a vast number of the modern workforce, and dictating health outcomes.^[27] When scientists at the Pasteur Institute received news of the cholera outbreak in Istanbul in 1893, Pasteur himself wrote to the Ottoman Embassy in Paris to offer support based on bilateral relationships the groups had established years earlier. After receiving approval from the sultan, Dr. André Chantemesse traveled to the Ottoman Empire, where he worked with Ottoman scientists to identify the structural causes of the cholera outbreak and devise sanitary measures to stop its spread. The existing relationship between the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Ottoman Imperial School of Medicine influenced the course of the epidemic and accelerated the institutionalization of public health in the Ottoman Empire.^[28]

Over the following decade, Ottoman authorities built more spaces of science across their capital city, including four disinfection stations (tebhirhane) and the Imperial Bacteriology Institute. This institute hosted experts and machines from far-flung places.^[29] Much more than brick and stone, it was a space where knowledge of new technologies and scientific discoveries were produced and exchanged. Building on the relationships Chantemesse established during his time in Istanbul, Dr. Maurice Nicolle led the Imperial Bacteriology Institute for almost a decade, conducting bacteriological analysis and training future generations of Ottoman scientists.^[30]

The City and City Dwellers as Objects of Science
The urban has also influenced or produced whole scientific disciplines. The increasing institutionalization and politicization of public health that Michel Foucault situates in the eighteenth century were driven by growth in urban populations and anxieties over the spread of disease or social disorder.^[31] With the intention of creating a healthy population, governments took steps to increase their control over populations and eliminate disease and disorder, including things that were cast as social or moral maladies.^[32] Controlling the built environment was part of this process. Or, as Foucault put it, “The city with its principal spatial variables [became] a medicalisable object.”^[33]

New technologies facilitated the surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment of urban space and its maladies, including new infrastructure, architectural styles, and tools of policing. To the former, Nurçin İleri reveals how concerns over prosperity and civility drove the installation of outdoor lighting and the rise of the surveillance state in fin-de-siécle Istanbul. She explores how the new technology transformed the city’s nocturnal landscape and demonstrates the complex interplays between light, order, and progress, as well as their inversion through darkness.^[34] Avner Wishnitzer also illustrates how the introduction of street lighting in late-Ottoman Istanbul reshaped the city’s nightlife, limiting activities that were perceived as a threat to public morality, productivity, and integrity while carving out new spaces of well-illuminated leisure on the boulevards and in the taverns and theatres of Beyoğlu.^[35]

Beatriz Colomina’s X-Ray Architecture demonstrates how medical discourse and diagnostic technologies influenced modern architecture.^[36] Fabiola López-Durán’s Eugenics in the Garden traces the influence of eugenics on architecture and urban planning from France to Brazil and Argentina and back again.^[37] Burçak Özlüdil Altın illustrates the two-way interaction between architecture and medical sciences in her work, demonstrating how spatial interventions in Istanbul’s Toptaşı asylum complex between 1873 and 1924 emerged in response to a desire to medicalize psychiatry across the Ottoman Empire.^[38]

Medical technologies also shaped criminology and police science. Using Egypt as his example, Khaled Fahmy traces the introduction of forensic medicine to the nineteenth-century Egyptian criminal legal system in his book In Quest of Justice.^[39] He also devotes a chapter to how ideas about miasmas and bad air influenced Ali Mubarak’s plans for Cairo.^[40] Mina Elias Khalil details the development of poison- and wound-identification technologies and forensic psychology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt in the context of increasing urbanization.^[41]

Thus, urbanization—undergirded by scientific and technological developments—and its resultant anxieties and an increasing tendency toward state-centralization came together to create or shape fields as diverse as criminology, epidemiology, and public health.^[42]

As new fields of expertise have emerged to meet the demands of urban dwellers and the desire of their governments to identify and order them, urban dwellers and cities themselves have also become scientific disciplines. In his recent text Against the Commons, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago situates the emergence of a professionalized field of urban planning and new administrative professions, such as surveyor, within a context of increasing urbanization and the advent of enclosure laws in eighteenth-century England.^[43]

Returning to Turkey, in Hotels and Highways Begüm Adalet describes how Turkish cities became testing grounds for experts in urban planning, public policy, and economics from the United States. Her text illustrates both the growth of new city-based professional-scientific spheres and cities as laboratories of scientific experimentation and knowledge production.^[44]

Science and the City in Our Cultural Imaginary
As one of these professional urban planners, Ali Mubarak enjoyed great success in his reorganization of Cairo in the late nineteenth century. He also played a significant part in reorganizing Egypt’s public education system as the Minister of Education. As part of this effort, he authored a fictional work in which the protagonists travel from Egypt to France. The text was intended for instruction and compared the conditions of life in French cities to those in Egyptian ones. His imagined Marseille and Paris are full of well-swept, ordered streets and industries. Their people moved about with initiative, earnestness, and relative quiet—quite unlike the bustle and din characteristic of Cairo’s winding and traffic-choked alleyways.^[45] 

As Ali Mubarak imagined clean, well-organized, and industrious French cities opposite a loud and chaotic Cairo to teach the virtues of discipline to young Egyptians, others have also created utopic or dystopic cities in historical art and literature as tools to examine current contestations and influence the future. López-Durán explores this theme at length in her text, beginning with the example of Francis Galton’s eugenic novel Kantsaywhere and continuing with analyses of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American utopian narratives.^[46] Vitz also opens his text with the details of a 1949 artistic competition in which artists imagined the future of Mexico City as an apocalyptic wasteland to express their concern about the ongoing capitalist modernization of the city.^[47]

Likewise, in a recent article, Ingy Higazy examines a pair of Egyptian novels about Cairo’s Ring Road, showing how fiction and science fiction can “complement a macro-political economy analysis of urban development [and] infrastructure” and “reconstruct trajectories of urban development by centering often marginalized and silenced stories of dispossession, destruction, and violence.”^[48]

As Higazy observes, the narratives of an imagined urban future are powerful tools—as are the stories historians tell about the past. At the intersection of science and the urban, narratives can help us imagine and build alternate futures through critical understandings of the fruitful or fraught encounters of the past.

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Can Gümüş is a research assistant and PhD candidate at Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University. Her dissertation project investigates the interaction between sanitation practices, the institutionalization of public health, and urbanization in late Ottoman Istanbul. She is part of the Ottoman History Podcast team and produces podcasts in Turkish for the platform. Between 2014-2019, she worked at various NGOs as an editor, researcher, and project manager.

Marianne Dhenin (@mariannedhe) is a disabled journalist and historian. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel, a researcher in the Leibniz Cooperation Project “The Historicity of Democracy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds,” and a member of the academic staff at the Leibniz Institute of European History. Her dissertation explores how disease and public health shaped the social and spatial order of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptian cities.

Featured image (at top): The Bacteriology Unit of the Hamidiye Etfal Hospital in the 1890s, Sultan Abdülhamid II Photography Album Collections, NEKYA90870/19, İstanbul University Rare Collections Library.

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^[1] Ali Mubarak, Al-Khuṭaṭ al-Tawfīqiyya al-Jadīda li-Misr al-qāhira wa-mudunihā wa-bilā dihā  al-qadīma wa-l-shahīra (Bulaq: Matbaʿat al-Amiriyya, 1305h (1887/8), vol. 9: 49. See also Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 63. On street trees in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, see Henry W. Lawrence, City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008) 236–9. See also, Sonja Dümpelmann, Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Jill Jonnes, Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape (New York: Viking, 2016).

^[2] Mitchell, Colonising Egypt 63–94; Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious, Princeton Legacy Library Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) 98–117. On modern Cairo and its new sewage system, see also Shehab Ismail, “Engineering Metropolis: Contagion, Capital, and the Making of British Colonial Cairo, 1882-1922” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2017).

^[3] See, e.g., Nadi Abusaada “‘The Pit and the Pond’: Hydraulic Projects and Municipal Rights in Modern Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 51, no. 4 (2022): 8–23; Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of İstanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986); Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Martin Melossi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999).

^[4] Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (House of Commons Sessional Paper, 1842) https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/coll-9-health1/health-02.

^[5] Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 26. For a detailed analysis of infrastructure projects in Istanbul during  the second half of the nineteenth century, see K. Mehmet Kentel, “Assembling ‘Cosmopolitan’ Pera: An Infrastructural History of Late Ottoman Istanbul,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2018).

^[6] John Snow, Cholera and the Water Supply in the South Districts of London (London: T. Richards, 1856).

^[7] William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976), 369-372; William Coleman, “Koch’s Comma Bacillus: The First Year,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61, no. 3 (1987).

^[8]  Mari Kessler, “Filters and Pathologies: Caillobotte and Manet in Haussmann’s Paris,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27,  No. 3 (2006): 245–68; David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the 19th Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

^[9] Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88.

^[10] Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 88–9.

^[11] Jessica Wang, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Chris Pearson, Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

^[12] Irvin Cemil Schick, “İstanbul’da 1910’da Gerçekleşen Büyük Köpek İtlâfı: Bir Mekân Üzerinde Çekişme Vakası,” Toplumsal Tarih 2010 (200), 22–33; Ekrem Işın, “Dört Ayaklı Belediye, ya da İstanbul Köpekleri,” in Istanbul’da Gündelik Hayat: İnsan, Kültür ve Mekân İlişkileri Üzerine Toplumsal Tarih Denemeleri (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayınları, 1995), 205–14; Cihangir Gündoğdu, “Doksan Yıl Önce İstanbullu Hayvanseverler: İstanbul Himaye-i Hayvanat Cemiyeti, 1912”, Toplumsal Tarih 116 (2003): 10–17; Catherine Pinguet, İstanbul’un Köpekleri, transl. Saadet Özen, (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2009); Ümit Sinan Topçuoğlu, İstanbul ve Sokak Köpekleri (İstanbul: Sepya Kitaplar, 2010).

^[13] Catherine McNeur, “The ‘Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 5 (2011): 639–60. See also McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

^[14] Juliana Adelman, Civilised by Beasts: Animals and Urban Change in Nineteenth-century Dublin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

^[15] Eric Baratay, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2004) 281. See also Gary Bruce, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

^[16] Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2022). On pests in the city, see also Mohamed Gamal-Eldin, “Cesspools, Mosquitos, Fever: An Environmental History of Malaria Prevention in Ismailia and Port Said, 1869–1910,” in Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History, eds. Onur Inal and Yavuz Köse (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2019); On Barak, “Scraping the Surface: The Techno-Politics of Modern Streets in Turn-of-Twentieth-Century Alexandria” Mediterranean Historical Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 187–205; Samuel Dolbee, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

^[17] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).; Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Matthew Vitz, A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). See also ​​Ian Douglas, Cities: An Environmental History (London: IB Tauris, 2013); Martin V. Melosi, “The Place of the City in Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17, no.1 (1993): 1-23; Christine Meisner Rosen & Joel Arthur Tarr, “The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History,” Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (1994): 299–310.

^[18] William Deverell & Greg Hise, eds., Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 16.

^[19] Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1999); Owen Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Alexander Schweig, “Progressing into Disaster: The Railroad and the Spread of Cholera in a Provincial Ottoman Town,” History of Science (Aug. 10, 2022).

^[20] See Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Christopher Henke, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

^[21] Kathleen Kete, “La Rage and the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Context of Rabies in the French Nineteenth Century,” Representations 22 (Spring 1988): 89–107.

^[22] Nuran Yıldırım, “A History of Healthcare in Istanbul,” The Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency and Istanbul University Project No. 55-10, trans. İnanç Özekmekçi (Istanbul: Ajansfa, 2010).

^[23] Yıldırım, “A History of Healthcare in Istanbul.”

^[24] See, e.g., Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Marianne Dhenin, “How Pests, Pathogens, and Pesticides Shape Geographies: A Story from the Early DDT Years in San Francisco Tlalneptantla,” Environmental History Now Dec. 17, 2022, https://envhistnow.com/2022/12/16/how-pests-pathogens-and-pesticides-shape-geographies-a-story-from-the-early-ddt-years-in-san-francisco-tlalnepantla/.

^[25] On the Garden City Movement see Stanley Bruder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Stephen Ward, ed., The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1992). On the Garden City Movement in colonial Africa see Liora Bigon, “Garden Cities in Colonial Africa: A Note on Historiography,” Planning Perspectives 28, no. 3 (2013) 477–85; Bigon, “‘Garden City’ in the Tropics? French Dakar in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 1 (2012): 35–44. On model villages and compounds, see Samuël Coghe, “Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–45,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 1 (2016): 16–44; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 44–8; Zandi Sherman, “Infrastructures and the Ontological Question of Race,” e-flux Architecture, Sept. 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/411239/infrastructures-and-the-ontological-question-of-race/.

^[26] Dora B. Weiner and Michael J. Sauter, “The City of Paris and the Rise of Clinical Medicine,” OSIRIS 2, no. 18 (2003): 23–42, 25.; Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund & J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Introduction: Toward an Urban History of Science,” OSIRIS 2, no. 18 Science and the City (2003): 1–19.

^[27] See Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2021); Sven Dierig, Jens Lachmund & J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Introduction: Toward an Urban History of Science,” OSIRIS 2, no. 18 Science and the City (2003): 1–19.

^[28] Nuran Yıldırım & Hakan Ertin, “European Physicians/Specialists During the Cholera Epidemic in Istanbul 1893-1895 and their Contributions to the Modernization of Healthcare in the Ottoman State,” Anadolu Kliniği Tıp Bilimleri Dergisi 25 (2020): 85–101.

^[29] See, e.g., Ufuk Adak, “The Sterilization and Disinfection Machines: Sanitation and Public Health in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 58, no. 6 (2022): 917–30.

^[30] Yıldırım & Ertin, “European Physicians/Specialists During the Cholera Epidemic.”

^[31]  Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham & Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980): 166–82.

^[32] See, e.g., Palmira Brummett, “Dogs, Women, Cholera, and Other Menaces in the Streets: Cartoon Satire in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-11,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 4 (1995): 433–60.

^[33] Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” 175.

^[34] Nurçin İleri, “Allure of the Light, Fear of the Dark: Nighttime Illumination, Spectacle, and Order in Fin-de-Siècle Istanbul,” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 37, no.2 (2017): 280–98.

^[35] Avner Wishnitzer, “Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 2 (2017): 245–61.

^[36] Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Zürich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2017).

^[37] Fabioloa López-Durán, Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

^[38] Burçak Özlüdil Altın, “Psychiatry, Space, and Time: Case of an Ottoman Asylum,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 5, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 67–89.

^[39] Khaled Fahmy, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).

^[40] Fahmy, In Quest of Justice, 132–78.

^[41] Mina Elias Khalil, “A Society’s Crucible: Forging Law and the Criminal Defendant in Modern Egypt, 1820-1920” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2021), 152–75. For an analysis of how Ottoman women used poison for murder in an era that witnessed increasing state efforts to control the circulation of toxic substances, see Ebru Aykut Türker, “Toxic Murder, Female Poisoners, and the Question of Agency at the Late Ottoman Law Courts, 1840–1908,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016): 114-137.

^[42] Jim Downs shows how the international slave trade, colonialism, warfare and resultant population migrations also shaped epidemiology in Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2021).

^[43] Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

^[44] Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

^[45] Ali Mubarak, ʿAlam al-Din (Alexandria: Matbaʿat Jarīdat al-Mahrūsa, 1882). See also Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 63–4.

^[46] López-Durán, Eugenics in the Garden, 19–42.

^[47] Vitz, A City on a Lake, 1–3.

^[48] Ingy Higazy, “The Violence of Memory and Movement: Reading Cairo from Its Ring Road,” Égypte/Monde arabe 1, no. 23 (2021): 105–20, 106. On science fiction and the city, see Stephen Graham, “Vertical Noir: Histories of the Future in Urban Science Fiction,” City 20, no. 3 (2016): 389–406.