Rat City

How one experiment in rat behavior effected the re-making of society in the post-WWII boom years.

During the 1960s, America is in faced with rising crime, social upheaval, sexual deviancy, and civic unrest, blame increasingly falls on the pressures of overpopulation. The stress of city life is driving everyone mad.

Enter John B. Calhoun, an ecologist-turned-psychologist employed by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the effects of crowding on rats. Over three decades, Calhoun builds a series of “rodent utopias” where every need is met—except space. As population density ratchets up, his rats descend into a vortex of behavioral derangements that lead inexorably to their violent extinction. The derangements he provoked—and the term he coined to describe them, "behavioral sink"— seemed to mirror the rising wave of social problems sweeping 1960s males formed violent gangs, mothers neglected their young—eventually all reproduction ceased and the populations dwindled to extinction.

Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden’s RAT CITY is the first book to tell the story of John Calhoun and his rodent utopias, culminating in the terrifying world of Universe 25: a rodent habitat where the only strategy for survival is complete social withdrawal.

Following the rats from the baiting pits of Victorian London to the laboratories of NIMH, and Calhoun from rural Tennessee to inner-city Baltimore, RAT CITY explores how his work informed the understanding of personal space, public housing, and debates about the animal urges underpinning human nature in midcentury America-—while challenging the popular assumption that Calhoun’s deteriorating Rat Cities necessarily predicted a bleak future for humanity.

Providing a fascinating account of the intellectual milieu in which Calhoun moved, as well as a detailed look at how the rats cities functioned and why they implode, RAT CITY is an enthralling mix of dystopian science and urban history whose relevance becomes more obvious as societies confront ecological collapse and social unrest in an increasingly crowded world.

A photo insert will be included.