2 - The Purged Urban Heart

Summary

reconstructs the organisation of urban sanitation. Clean streets and waterways involved ongoing negotiations between governmental bodies and inhabitants, and the latter’s contribution to the upkeep of communally used (water)ways was regular and substantial. From the part of the urban authorities, sanitary-policing officials were the principal group to put policies into practice. They were a permanent presence throughout the Low Countries and developed a variety of measures to fight issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or otherwise threatening health. The chapter revolves around two brigades, in Ghent and Deventer, and the reconstruction of their activities challenges the dismissive assessment of the enforcement of hygienic laws in earlier historiography. Sanitary officials performed routine inspections and coordinated waste disposal, and by doing so increased governmental presence in urban spaces and supervised the quotidian affairs taking place in them. Health interests therefore helped to legitimate municipal claims to power, in particular over a specific network of spaces deemed essential to keep clean and accessible.