4. Coping with urban risks

In one of the chapters of a collective work devoted to the history of science and knowledge, Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas distinguish three successive phases in the history of what they call the "government of a contaminated world". In developed countries, the prevention of technical, health and environmental risks would have gone through an initial phase, from the 19th century to the 1950s, characterized by government by norm (with, for example, the imposition of more or less arbitrary toxicity thresholds), followed by a phase, from the 1950s to the 1990s, of government by risk (with more scientific assessments), to find ourselves...