During what the French called a posteriori the ”Trente Glorieuses” (Thirty Glorious Years), the economic boom of the Reconstruction coincided with a period of increasing air pollution, from industry but also from domestic heating and from car exhaust pipes...The problem touched many countries and many cities and was put into ...
(Show more)During what the French called a posteriori the ”Trente Glorieuses” (Thirty Glorious Years), the economic boom of the Reconstruction coincided with a period of increasing air pollution, from industry but also from domestic heating and from car exhaust pipes...The problem touched many countries and many cities and was put into the media headlines through a dramatic accident in the 1952 London smog. Governments started to consider legislative answers, which supposed to ground political decision on scientific expertise and norms.
The paper will examine how the air pollution issue was faced by public authorities and also by people involved in science (climatology, public health, toxicology...) and in industry and engineering. It will address the question of the formation – and of the activity – of informal and official transnational networks which worked on the aspect of health hazards related to air pollution and on the measures to reduce it.
Three main sources will be used : firstly, the documents linked to the activity of transnational experts committees, such as EUROTOX, which expressed the wish, in a symposium held in Royaumont, France (1960), towards the creation of a large international cooperation in the field of air pollution control and prevention ; the 1964 Conference on Air Pollution organised by the Council of Europe, will also be studied, in order to compare the French and the German impulse in the agenda setting and in the elaboration of general recommendations.
Secondly, “Pollution atmosphérique”, the journal edited from 1959 by the APPA, French Association for the Prevention of Air Pollution, will provide a national viewpoint on experiences that were at work abroad, especially in the U.K and in Germany.
Thirdly, the paper will use archival sources, both from local records and from the French national archives, to study the reception of experts' recommendations, particularly from the O.E.C.D and from the E.E.C.
In choosing these sources and various scales of analysis, I hope to light up what was at stake in the origins of the Europeanisation of Air Pollution, which is still a work in progress and to propose keys of interpretation of the shift from a public health perspective to a more environmental approach that took place between the 1950s and the 1970s.
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