Main description:

This book offers a new, salutogenic, perspective on the development of early modern cities by exploring profound and complex ways in which architecture and landscape design served to promote public health on an urban scale. Focusing on fifteenth- through nineteenth-century Europe, it addresses the histories of spaces and institutions that supported salubrious living, highlighting the intersections of medical theory, government policy, and architectural practice in designing, improving, and monumentalizing the infrastructure of sanitation and healthcare. Studies in this book highlight the joint role of design thinking and scientific practice in reforming the facilities for treating and preventing disease; the impact of cross-cultural exchange on early modern strategies of urban improvement; and the creation of new therapeutic environments through state, communal, and private initiatives concerned with the preservation of physical and mental health, from recreational landscapes to spa resorts.

Contents:

Chapter 1: Salutogenic Urbanism: Early Modern European Cities in Pursuit of Public Health.- Part I Dynamics of Isolation.- Chapter 2: Health, Architecture, and Urban Identity: The Hospital Real de Todos-os-Santos in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon.- Chapter 3: Architecture and Plague Prevention: The Development of Lazzaretti in Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean Cities.- Part II Salutogenic Infrastructure.- Chapter 4: Architecture and Infrastructure: The Salutogenetic Plan for Karlsruhe.- Chapter 5: "Private Vices, Public Benefits": Self-interest and Salutogenesis in Early Modern York.- Part III Spaces of Madness.- Chapter 6: Madness in the Early Modern City: Florence and the Public Health Nexus (1642-1788).- Chapter 7: Rationalization of Space, Rationalization of Madness: Louis-Hippolyte Lebas and the Development of Psychiatric Hospitals in Nineteenth-Century France.- Part IV Spa cities.- Chapter 8: Cure, Leisure, and Exercise: The Emerging Spa Landscapes in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Hungary.- Chapter 9: Promoting Health through Urban Planning: Spa Towns and Urban Development in Nineteenth-Century Greece.