Page 171 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Marketing as Social Control 163

eventually quarantined, in spite of stiff opposition from local politicians
and citizens who saw it as an unwarranted intrusion of federal authority
and control.
Nevertheless, precedents established in law tend to take on a life of their
own, and over time, more and more federally mandated medical interven-
tions emerged, based on the success of many such programs implemented
in the southern United States and elsewhere. Unlike the uneven and er-
ratic impetus toward public health law that emerged in the United States,
though, England’s public health initiatives happened earlier and, on the
whole, were better planned and managed. The Public Health Act, passed
in England in 1848, was in response to

the gross damage to human life engendered by the industrial revolution. To
seek work and financial security, there was mass emigration from rural into
urban life. The towns were not prepared for this and the consequent over-
crowding, squalor and poverty created serious misery and disease affecting
a large proportion of the working population. Over time, this threatened to
engulf English society as a whole as disease spread across the poverty line
into “polite” society. (Eskin, 2002, pp. 6–7)

Some of the earliest mapping of cities occurred in Britain as citizens—
and especially city administrators—increasingly became concerned with
the public health of industrial cities. In 1842 Edwin Chadwick, secretary
of the Poor Commission, published detailed maps of cities such as Leeds
and Bethnal Green (in London), indicating by color less-clean houses (in
brown) and outbreaks of diseases such as cholera (in blue). Authorities
could, in effect, exert social control through political surveillance of cities,
keeping tabs not only on publicly avowed health issues, but also enabling
“cartographic surveillance of centres of social radicalism” (Short, 2006,
pp. 204–205).
This concern over housing, as public policy, can be traced at least as far
back as Friedrich Engels’ writings on the “housing question” in the 1870s.
New concerns about housing were exacerbated by the population growth
in urban industrial areas and the fact that existing housing stock was not
keeping up with demand. Engels (1872) noted that the poorest of the poor
among newly arriving immigrants were not finding proper housing ac-
commodations and that disease from the crowded and unsanitary condi-
tions threatened all sectors of society, not just the shantytowns or the
squatter areas along the perimeters of heavy industry districts. In 1866 the
Lord Provost of Edinburgh launched an “improvement scheme” to clean
up and relocate those living in the urban slums. This involved not only