Houses, neighbourhoods and health

The demand for cheap labour in the cities led to acute housing crises in most European industrial cities in the nineteenth century. Workers were housed in over-crowded, poorly constructed tenement buildings, which provided breeding grounds for the feared epidemics that spread through them, such as tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid.1 Housing reforms were seen as one of the key social reforms needed to improve health, though the causal mechanism advanced at the time was erroneously seen as reducing miasma.2 It took a number of social revolutions, increased prosperity and the advent of welfare states to make good quality housing widely available, but housing’s key role as a material factor in promoting health still is part of the central paradigm of public health. Recently, there has