McShane, Clay and Joel A. Tarr. The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century.
Gordon, Peter
McShane, Clay and Joel A. Tarr.
The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 242 pp.
ISBN: 9780801886003.
The character and form of cities are shaped by transportation. It
is well known that the "pedestrian city" was followed by the
"horse-drawn transport city" which then gave way to the
"automobile city"--with a brief appearance by steam power and
a cameo role for electric powered transport. This informative,
clearly-written and well-paced book focuses on "living
machines," showing how horses were once the major mode of travel
for people and freight, as well as a major source of power, first on the
farm and then in the city. Horses used on a large scale in cities
offered huge advances in terms of their mobility benefits, and complex
industrial infrastructures emerged to both support them and address the
challenges they brought.
As a response to this transport and manufacturing revolution,
central business districts emerged and residential uses were removed to
other neighborhoods. Rights on streets were among the new challenges
facing city governments. The authors note, "It]he horsecar clearly
transformed the meaning of urban space and advanced the process by which
the compact walking city became the extended network city" (p. 75).
Large-scale use of public transit also required new norms for public
behavior in tight spaces. Interestingly, New York transit desegregation
occurred about 100 years before racial segregation was challenged on
transit buses in the Deep South.
Chapter 4, "The Horse and Leisure: Serving the Needs of
Different Urban Social Groups," recounts the well-known leisure
pursuits of the wealthy, but also mentions that, "[a]lthough horse
shows and promenades may have provided the middle and working classes
with leisure activity based on viewing, the horse also had a major role
in giving these groups access to recreation" by making possible
access to far-flung parks and resorts as well as rural cemeteries (p.
95). Chapter 5, "Stables and the Built Environment,"
introduces the reader to the problems posed by fires and
sanitation-linked nuisances. We also learn that the rise of the
department store brought the challenge of delivery services, which
prompted storeowners to build and maintain their own stables.
Chapter 6, "Nutrition: Feeding the Urban Horse," takes
readers through the complexity of how better use of horses on farms made
haymaking cheaper and thereby made hay more plentiful for urban horses.
Work and horses' nutrition requirements in cities had to be
carefully balanced. Chapter 7, "Health: Equine Disease and
Mortality," takes us back to a time when the health effects of
humans and animals living and working in close proximity were poorly
understood. But horses had it better in cities than in rural areas: the
water was cleaner, the food slightly improved and the best match between
work and the age of the horse had to be found. Chapter 8, "The
Decline and Persistence of the Urban Horse,"reminds us that motor
vehicles presented not simply newer travel possibilities but also
superior ways to support manufacturing.
At a time when the U.S. and Ontario governments have engaged in
unprecedented bailouts of Detroit-based auto corporations because the
disruptions from letting them go are feared, authors McShane and Tarr
remind us that the decline of the urban horse almost 100 years ago did
not cause drastic harm to the greater economy. This book is a welcome
addition to the urban transportation literature.
Peter Gordon
School of Policy, Planning, and Development
University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
