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Abstract

To the bougeoisie in the last quarter of the 19th century, the housing problem seemed to be the key problem regarding the "social issue" (Soziale Frage). This was the background on which a number of Swiss cities undertook extensive surveys of the living conditions towards the end of the century. These surveys, which were methodologically based on the quantifying and therefore objective instruments of statistics, also attracted attention in other European states. Scientific hygiene supplied its values as the seemingly objective material criteria for the surveys. These values consisted among others of the limiting value "Luftkubus" (air volume), the natural human need for air expressed in exact numbers, as well as the rules for social behaviour in connection with this value. Together they justified "sanitary living", which a closer examination reveals as being a scientifically constructed bourgeois reality. This reality was guarded by sanitary officials, who were under the municipal sanitary authorities' supervision. These officials disposed of the means of criminal law in their struggle against "unsanitary living". The obligation to maintain health mandated by the public authorities ultimately aimed at integrating the workers into the Swiss bourgeois state and ensuring and increasing national power in modern industrial society.