"...mein Acker ist die Zeit", Aufsätze zur Umweltgeschichte - Oapen

City and Nature (2007)
the countryside showed death rates of about 25- 30 percent. But the lower-classes
contributed much more to the total mortality in infants, as for example in nineteenth-century
Halle (Germany), were 55 percent of all deaths were of lower-class
children who died before the age of 10, whereas only 27 percent of all deaths in
that age group were of upper-class children. Among other things, this points to
different parental investment strategies, as well as to specific fertility behaviour. As
dying is generally unpredictable, influencing fertility is the recommended strategy
for manipulating the numbers of the living. For Renaissance Tuscany, for example,
the fertility of upper-class urban people was increased by reducing the age of marriage
for females.
All this leads into attitudes toward sexual behavior birth control, as well as into
public and tacit moral mentalities. There should not be many differences between
social rules in towns and in the countryside with respect to sexual regulations and
moral settings, whereas everyday life and common practices may have differed
enormously. Differences in the numbers of males and females of urban populations
are important though not well investigated. Due to traditional gender roles in
Western societies, females mostly outnumbered males in cities from medieval to
recent times, because of warfare loss among males.
No doubt there is a higher density and therefore probably a higher number of
people in cities than outside, at least in the urban hinterlands. But what are the
measures for population density in cities? Throughout the eighteenth century Prussia
(core area) was a genuine farming state. Therefore I use it here as a model for
calculating the average numbers for a reasonably advanced agrarian regime in preindustrial
times. The population density by 1725 is around 10 residents per square
kilometer (approx. 25 residents per square mile), and the numbers for 1801 are
about 20 residents per square kilometer (50 residents per square mile).210
The increase in residents is due to the beginning of the demographic transition
after the 1750s, active population policy, and some minor progress in farming methods.
Therefore a number between 25 and 50 residents per square mile might be
taken as a benchmark for the carrying capacity of a reasonably advanced agricultural
regime in low fertility areas. The number of residents in more fertile farming
areas is unlikely to have exceeded this figure by more than four times. This gives
for non-urbanised areas, given advanced agriculture and one harvest per year, an
estimate of at most 200 residents per square mile for prime soil regions. These
numbers give a vague idea of the carrying capacities of thinly urbanized areas dedicated
to agriculture, where human life is essentially triggered by primary production
(plant growth and harvest by humans or domesticated animals). By comparison
cities carry immense numbers of people, especially as they are totally dependent
on primary and secondary production of non-urban places. Table 4 shows
selected data on population densities in various cities.
210 The population data taken from Friedrich W.A.Bratring, Statistisch - topographische Beschreibung
der gesamten Mark Brandenburg (1809, reprinted Berlin: de Gruyter 1968)
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