The ‘Sanitary Crisis of the Cities’--Water Infrastructures and Public Services in Reval (Tallinn), Riga and Vilnius (1870s to 1921)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Lutz Häfner
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561078483

In 1913, the Tsarist Ministry of the Interior lamented a "sanitary crisis in the cities". The high mortality rate in cities due to typhoid, cholera etc. called for action. Clean drinking water and the hygienic disposal of waste water promised relief. The comparative project examines water infrastructures at the interface of urban, technical, hygiene, environmental, imperial, social and economic history. Using the cities of Reval (Tallinn), Riga and Vilnius from the 1870s to the 1921 as examples, it addresses three fields relevant to the provision of basic human needs: drinking water supply, wastewater disposal and sewerage, and the nexus of public health, infrastructure, environment and water pollution. The project opens up a fundamental perspective on the politicization of public services and the close interrelationship between infrastructures and political systems. The hypothesis is that despite the political differences between autocracy, the German occupation regime and the establishing democratic nation states after WWI, the significance of water infrastructures was undisputed. The project asks when, how and why water infrastructures were created. Who was responsible for these processes? How did the planning, financing and practical realization of network expansion take place? Who used the water infrastructures and to what extent, who benefited from them, how did resistance manifest itself and how did people react to supply crises? These questions are considered with attention to continuities and discontinuities across time and across regimes. The allocation of water is a question of political power; and in the Baltic cities, in times of nationalism, water allocation was subject to contestation. Water infrastructures are both inclusive and exclusive, integrating and socially segregating, a mark of distinction and a means of exercising power. They were democratizing in essence because they were to be accessible to everyone, expensive, and financed by municipal bonds. Because administrators in the three cities were interested in rapid amortization, construction began in the inner cities, where the wealthy city dwellers, disproportionately Baltic Germans, lived, while the periphery, mainly inhabited by Latvians, Estonians and other ethnic groups, benefited from the services later at best. There were "limits of commonality" in the usage of infrastructure but this study posits that they were rather socially than ethnically defined. An inter-ethnic modus vivendi was essential in order to realize the idea of the common good. Conceptually, the project addresses the phenomenon of "transnational municipalism", while also considering the internal perspective of municipal cooperation across borders. The project historicizes "critical" infrastructures. Their fundamental importance was recalled by Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Since then, it has been a deliberate goal of the invasion to destroy the infrastructure of Ukrainian cities

• DFG Programme: Research Grants