Realizing healthful housing: Devices for data travel in public health and urban redevelopment in the twentieth century United States

Abstract

The field of housing is dependent upon data from a wide range of sources, as issues of architecture, engineering, finance, sanitation, public health and social relations must all be considered in policy, planning and design. This chapter documents the efforts of housing and public health experts in mobilizing housing data across different disciplinary and social spaces in the 1930s and 40s. To overcome the immense challenge of making such extensive and diverse information available and useful, we will explore how actionability was built into the very methods of collecting, processing, and circulating information. New standards and appraisal techniques were devised by the Committee on the Hygiene of Housing of the American Public Health Association that would shape and determine housing data journeys in critically important ways. It was by devising new ways to simultaneously collect, organize, package and translate data in a way that was meaningful for planners and policy-makers, that led to healthful housing surveys and public health ideals playing a critical role in a period of intensive urban redevelopment and renewal in the mid-twentieth century United States.