Soon after American entry into World War I, Colonel Charles Keller of the Army Corps of Engineers confronted an emergency on the home front that threatened to stymie victory abroad. For several years, the West Point career officer had been in charge of overseeing the development of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls, New York. Now Keller began receiving urgent messages from manufacturers in nearby Buffalo complaining that shortages of electricity were preventing them from producing vital materials such as high-grade steel for shell casings, aluminum for airplanes, chlorine for poison gas, and other electrochemicals.

Just after midnight on 17 January 1900, a special train pulled out of Chicago carrying a contingent of public officials on a secret mission to Lockport, about 30 miles to the southwest along the Des Plaines and Illinois River Valleys. They were racing to beat an injunction that was expected to be issued later that day by the United States Supreme Court. The managers of the Sanitary District of Chicago (SDC) were headed for a dam that controlled the water level in a brand new, 30-mile ship canal and drainage channel. Touted as the world's largest earth-moving project, the $33, 000, 000 waterway promised not only to solve the city's sanitation problems but also to boost its economy as the centerpiece of a grand, deep-water highway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Reaching their destination before noon, they ordered the dam's “bear trap” doors lowered, sending a rush of water down the Illinois River. The opening of the canal was so hurried that unfinished construction projects five miles downstream at Joliet were swept away in the ensuing flood, creating a sudden danger of inundating the city.

The three books under review represent the origins and promise of a relatively new field of study, urban environmental history. Joel Tarr's collection of previously published essays retraces the intellectual odyssey of its single most important pioneer. Concerned about contemporary pollution problems, he has spent a quarter of a century exploring the frontiers of scholarship on the relationship between cities and their technologies. In contrast, monographs by R. Bruce Stephenson and Andrew Hurley are typical of current trends to build on this foundation, enriching and broadening its parameters from a wide variety of perspectives. Here the insights of town planning and social history illuminate case studies of St Petersburg, Florida, and Gary, Indiana, respectively. Other recent works draw heavily upon the sciences, especially medicine and public health. Reversing decades of academic fragmentation – knowing more and more about less and less – the study of the urban environment is encouraging creative applications of cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches.