Regulating the City

Streetscaping, Sewers, and the Project of Universal Drainage in Philadelphia

Abstract

At the end of the eighteenth century, amidst devastating outbreaks of yellow fever, there were multiple plans to deliberately inundate the streets of Philadelphia to clean dirt and rubbish from the ground and to purify potentially miasmatic air. This essay examines the infrastructure lying beneath this project—an urban drainage system capable of rapidly and completely moving large quantities of water across and underneath the city’s streets without leaving residual fluid to stagnate. From William Penn’s initial planning for a gridded city in the 1680s to the creation of projects of deliberate inundation at the end of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s streets were the objects and sites of projecting as Philadelphians crafted an urban envirotechnical system that used, repurposed, and replaced elements of the area’s pre-existing hydrology. Efforts to produce this system consistently encountered problems as city authorities attempted to produce knowledge that could be synthesized across multiple scales.