The pathogenic city: disease, dirt and the planning of Dublin’s Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Markets

Public health crises always have a visual impact on cities. Examples can be short lived, such as the signage encouraging social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Other effects can be long lasting. During waves of epidemics over the nineteenth century in Dublin, Ireland, officials responded with projects such as fever hospitals. At first glance, market halls do not seem to correspond with these kinds of emergency initiatives. Markets are lasting fixtures of everyday life in cities, and they typically embody notions of sustenance and nourishment rather than disease. Yet in Dublin, the planning of covered markets is bound to the histories of infectious disease and epidemics. This article uses the storey of one market hall in Dublin, the City Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Markets, as a lens to elucidate the intersection of public health and urban planning between 1850 and 1900. Market halls are rarely planned as clean slates: historically, they typically stand in places that hold close connections to buying and selling. As such, purpose-built halls should not be read simply as urban, commercial interventions, but instead as buildings that monumentalize in three dimensions emergent social and moral conventions about public health in the context of the crowded city.