Moral Geographies: Social Science and the Urban Environment in Mid-Nineteenth Century England

This paper examines a theme in the history of geographical thought: the role played by conceptions of the urban environment in nineteenth-century social science. Nineteenth-century social inquiry was committed to social action and moral improvement, and this commitment was shaped by contemporary attitudes towards the environment. The concept of 'social science' emerged at the confluence of several streams of thought, including sanitary science, moral statistics and medical geography. It is argued in this paper that the relationship between 'environmentalism' and 'moralism' in contemporary social science has often been misinterpreted, a consequence in part of the writing of its history from the perspective of modem sociology. I argue instead that there was no necessary contradiction between environmentalism and moralism, because social science was a science of the morale of the population; it was concerned with the conduct of populations in particular habitats. The environmentalist project of social science was more than a simple reflection of patterns of urbanization; it signalled the emergence of new notions of space and society.