Abstract

Hygienic Domestication of Urban Fish and the Wild Life in the Water Pipes. Home Aquaria and the City in the Nineteenth Century. The paper focuses on the interrelations between the domestic aquarium and its urban environment in the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the city plays a crucial role in the invention and history of the aquarium. Not only is the material culture of the aquarium a product of urban technologies and infrastructure; the aquarium's early definition as a confined and closed, self‐contained and purified space can be seen as a response to increasing environmental problems, particularly urban water and air pollution. The paper describes how the aquarium and the city together form a laboratory for the exploration of new sanitary and climatic techniques in terms of ventilation and water supply. Furthermore, the paper stresses the crucial role that early amateur aquarium‐keeping plays in the practical construction and regulation of artificial environments as well as in the historical and theoretical reformulation of fundamental notions such as dynamic balance and models of circulation. Getting more and more intertwined on a material and discursive level, the aquarium and its urban environment not only provide specific habitats where the living conditions of humans and animals can be studied. In fact, both become objects and simultaneously media of sanitarian programmes in the name of public health.