--- title: Cities: why they grow, and how water and sewers made them safe — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Cities: why they grow, and how water and sewers made them safe», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Imagine your street with no bins, no drains and no taps: every bucket of dirty water poured out of the wind --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / Cities: why they grow, and how water a… # Cities: why they grow, and how water and sewers made them safe Lesson 73 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/0/) — Imagine your street with no bins, no drains and no taps: every bucket of dirty water poured out of the window, and the drinking water drawn from the same river; for most of history big cities were exactly like that, and many of them often saw more deaths than births. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/1/) — People still came, because cities had what villages lacked: jobs, markets, temples, schools, doctors and walls for safety; in Europa Universalis you just click «develop» on a province, but real cities grew where farms had extra food and traders met. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/2/) — Then, step by step, cities learned to keep people alive: a doctor in London mapped where people fell ill and found a poisoned water pump, an engineer built huge sewers after a summer called the Great Stink, and new rules followed fires and floods. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/3/) — Only in 2007 did more than half of all people live in cities, so the city world is very new, and about 2 billion people still have no safe drinking water at home. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/4/) — Your tap and your toilet are among the greatest life-savers ever invented, even if no game gives them a wonder. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/5/) — Cities grew where farms made extra food and where traders and rulers gathered; Uruk in Mesopotamia may have had tens of thousands of people about 5,000 years ago. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/6/) — For most of history only a small share of people lived in cities: around 1800 perhaps 1 person in 14 did. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/7/) — In 2007 more than half of the world's people lived in cities for the first time, and the share is still rising. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/8/) — In the hot summer of 1858 the River Thames in London smelled so bad from waste that it was called the Great Stink; the engineer Joseph Bazalgette then built a huge sewer system, mostly finished by the 1870s and still in use. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/9/) — In 1854 the doctor John Snow mapped cholera cases in London, found many around one water pump on Broad Street, and the pump handle was removed; his work helped show that dirty water, not bad air, spreads cholera. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/10/) — An early flush toilet was designed in England in 1596 by John Harington, but flush toilets became common in homes only in the 1800s and 1900s, and billions of people today still lack safe toilets. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/11/) — In old Edinburgh people sometimes threw waste from upstairs windows with the shout «gardyloo», probably from French for «watch out for the water»; it was against the rules, and towns fined people for it. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/12/) — In 1666 the Great Fire of London burned much of the City for four days; afterwards new buildings had to be of brick and stone, and fire insurance and fire brigades grew. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/13/) — Gas street lights first lit a London street in 1807, and electric street lights spread later in the 1800s. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/14/) — The London Underground opened in 1863 as the world's first underground railway; horse-drawn buses had begun in Paris in 1828. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/15/) — Central Park in New York was planned from 1858 to give crowded city people green space; it did not just happen. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/16/) — About 2 billion people in the world still have no safe drinking water at home, and girls often spend hours fetching water. - ← previous: [Why some places grew rich](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/) - next →: [Cities then and now: the biggest cities of every age and of today](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/74-the-biggest-cities-of-every-age-and-of-today/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)