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Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun
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.
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.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published July 16, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 12, 2025
Highly recommended.
This book is about science and how the direction of research has come to be influenced by big money in the US, about the early life of concepts like cybernetics and networked research, about urban policy, twentieth century debates about nature and nurture, and about the value of unorthodox creative thinking, as much as it is about how rats behave in various overcrowded environments. I highly recommend it for braiding all those subjects together in a marvelous study of interconnectedness that exemplifies its subject
As I was reading Richard Reeves Of Boys and Men for one of my book groups Ii kept thinking back to how frightening it was to read in the early 1970s about the studies of mice who were overcrowded. (Along with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.) The male mice became pathologically aggressive and antisocial. In some experiments with different variables, males became extremely passive and asocial. It was easy to extrapolate to humans in the abstract in 1970, and to the men and boys in Reeves book now.
So I went looking for information about what those studies actually found and chanced on this new book. It goes back to Jack Calhoun’s rat-crowding experiments and puts them in the larger context of evolving urban policy, nature v nurture debates, the rise and fall of the population control movement, and the defeat of psycho-social research by drug research in the 1980s. It is important to note that his work evolved alongside physiological research that was illuminating the role of adrenalin in behavior under stress.
His mid-career research:
Calhoun’s research grew out of his experience in rat-eradication programs in Baltimore in WWII. That and subsequent decades about studying rats in both nature and in varieties of closely managed environments led him to believe environmental factors were the best way to manage stress from overcrowding. That is because he believed that social interactions had physiological consequences. Reduce trauma of those interactions, reduce stress. Translated to humans, it meant stress arose from the poverty, grime, etc caused by not only overcrowding, but overcrowding in streets and housing that offered insufficient privacy and secure space. Bad housing (e.g. Baltimore in the 1930s) and should not be worsened by community-destroying high-rise projects (e.g. Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis in the 1960s). Instead, improve existing communities by clean-up, jobs, and research-based design interventions that allowed people privacy and safe space.
Calhoun was a visionary scientist who set up inter-disciplinary work teams before anyone in charge appreciated their value. He used rats as subjects in the eddies of political turmoil about eugenics, whether genes could determine behavior, whether US policy should bar aid to countries that wouldn’t adopt population control programs, and so on. Suggesting that rat behavior said anything about human behavior was suspect. Calhoun was cautious at first, but he became bolder as he became more convinced that improving urban environments was absolutely crucial to improving urban mental health.
Unfortunately, as he was starting up his final long-term experiment that was meant to illustrate that properly designed, even if crowded, environments could produce rats with sufficient ‘culture’ (ability to negotiate rather than fight, normal breeding and pup-rearing behavior, and so forth) to thrive, big pharma was pushing the national institutes toward funding drug-based solutions to mental health issues. Prozac, not social science.
I think this is a fine example of deep research that illuminates a major arc of how public debate interacts with science to shape government spending and public policy.
This book is about science and how the direction of research has come to be influenced by big money in the US, about the early life of concepts like cybernetics and networked research, about urban policy, twentieth century debates about nature and nurture, and about the value of unorthodox creative thinking, as much as it is about how rats behave in various overcrowded environments. I highly recommend it for braiding all those subjects together in a marvelous study of interconnectedness that exemplifies its subject
As I was reading Richard Reeves Of Boys and Men for one of my book groups Ii kept thinking back to how frightening it was to read in the early 1970s about the studies of mice who were overcrowded. (Along with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.) The male mice became pathologically aggressive and antisocial. In some experiments with different variables, males became extremely passive and asocial. It was easy to extrapolate to humans in the abstract in 1970, and to the men and boys in Reeves book now.
So I went looking for information about what those studies actually found and chanced on this new book. It goes back to Jack Calhoun’s rat-crowding experiments and puts them in the larger context of evolving urban policy, nature v nurture debates, the rise and fall of the population control movement, and the defeat of psycho-social research by drug research in the 1980s. It is important to note that his work evolved alongside physiological research that was illuminating the role of adrenalin in behavior under stress.
His mid-career research:
More and more young males now gathered on the floor of the pen, doing less and less. Calhoun noted how “the frustrated, rebuffed younger males begin to avoid their older associates, and participation in courtship activities with females declines, then disappears.” Rejected first from possession of property [ a burrow] and latterly excluded from reproductive activity, then to huddle in listless pools at the center of the pen where the divider spindles converged to form a sort of no-man’s land. In Calhoun’s terms, “they had ceased trying to acquire a normal social role.” Although these mice were still physically present, and relatively healthy, they played no part in the social life of the universe [pen]: “Socially speaking, they had removed themselves from the universe, they had psychologically emigrated.”
Calhoun’s research grew out of his experience in rat-eradication programs in Baltimore in WWII. That and subsequent decades about studying rats in both nature and in varieties of closely managed environments led him to believe environmental factors were the best way to manage stress from overcrowding. That is because he believed that social interactions had physiological consequences. Reduce trauma of those interactions, reduce stress. Translated to humans, it meant stress arose from the poverty, grime, etc caused by not only overcrowding, but overcrowding in streets and housing that offered insufficient privacy and secure space. Bad housing (e.g. Baltimore in the 1930s) and should not be worsened by community-destroying high-rise projects (e.g. Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis in the 1960s). Instead, improve existing communities by clean-up, jobs, and research-based design interventions that allowed people privacy and safe space.
Calhoun was a visionary scientist who set up inter-disciplinary work teams before anyone in charge appreciated their value. He used rats as subjects in the eddies of political turmoil about eugenics, whether genes could determine behavior, whether US policy should bar aid to countries that wouldn’t adopt population control programs, and so on. Suggesting that rat behavior said anything about human behavior was suspect. Calhoun was cautious at first, but he became bolder as he became more convinced that improving urban environments was absolutely crucial to improving urban mental health.
Unfortunately, as he was starting up his final long-term experiment that was meant to illustrate that properly designed, even if crowded, environments could produce rats with sufficient ‘culture’ (ability to negotiate rather than fight, normal breeding and pup-rearing behavior, and so forth) to thrive, big pharma was pushing the national institutes toward funding drug-based solutions to mental health issues. Prozac, not social science.
I think this is a fine example of deep research that illuminates a major arc of how public debate interacts with science to shape government spending and public policy.
May 5, 2024
Rat City is two books. One is a biography of John B. Calhoun, the researcher behind a series of experiments designed to study the effects of overcrowding in rat populations. Calhoun set up artificial warrens, eventually called "universes," designed to cause the rats to live in a crowd that would naturally occur, but in the process to be sure that all other material needs of the rats were met.
The research itself arises out of counterintuitive results that Calhoun discovered in trying to kill rats. Soon, though, Calhoun starts to see broader interpretations of his work pertaining to human society, and achieves a bit of fame both popular and academic over it.
The other book is a study of the the research done on the effects of the constructed environment on humans and their mental health, mostly in the 60s and 70s. Calhoun was an important member of these Space Cadets (get it?). It is primarily the first book, but the second allows it room for generous but informative digressions on the people and things influencing him, and who in turn he influenced.
Calhoun strays close to the tropes of a mad scientist. The authors bring up his awareness of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it feels like he tried to make it into an instruction manual. While excellent in Kuhn's 'normal science,' (Calhoun literally writes the book on rat behavior) he possessed a pressing need for greatness, leading him to start quoting Revelations in science lectures and trying to devise a systemic framework for a future Republic of Letters.
The book is equally as big in approach and passion. I could have read it in a single sitting. This is not a Golden Retriever of a book: this is a Cattle Dog on Ritalin kind of a book. I love this. The authors do an excellent job of predicting questions. The bifurcated style has a rough start but it pays off in getting to explore the intellectual milieu of Calhoun's work and the history influencing it.
The problem is the book's conclusion. The authors do a good job of explaining Calhoun's struggles to explain his research, and his struggles with people misinterpreting it. Generally, it is fair, and it explores different ideas about his work. The ending feels like a different book.
I think that what happens is the 'tyranny of narrative' kicks in. Calhoun's end feels so ignoble, abruptly forced into retirement due to shifting priorities within the agency he worked for and his own failing health, his work not completed to his satisfaction. There is no subsequent academic reappraisal. His scholarship is a quirky footnote.
But that feels bad, so instead the end spends way too much time engaged in pearl-clutching over psychotropic medication taking over our lives, then turns incoherent with its own framework.
There is this sort of paradox where to avoid a political statement is to avow the status quo, which is itself a political statement. The book describes Calhoun's work not as political, but as capable of being politicized. This is that paradox. There is too much of the book asserting that Calhoun did not say X, where the citation to Calhoun has him saying X, but with extra steps. Part of the problem here is Calhoun, who often did not know what Calhoun was trying to say.
But it feels like the authors spend the book being warmly critical of his thought and work, only to shift that in the penultimate chapter in order to fashion him a tragic hero. Likewise, it feels like the bifurcated nature of the book allows for so many other topics that get dropped, mostly, in the interest of a tight narrative around Calhoun, one that does not match up the rest of the book.
I liked this book, but the concluding both sides-ism or the need to make a grand exit or mask-off moment frustrates what is otherwise a well-written and exciting book. And at any rate, I am still waiting to hear whether I caught ASD from the Loop.
My thanks to the authors, Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Melville House Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
The research itself arises out of counterintuitive results that Calhoun discovered in trying to kill rats. Soon, though, Calhoun starts to see broader interpretations of his work pertaining to human society, and achieves a bit of fame both popular and academic over it.
The other book is a study of the the research done on the effects of the constructed environment on humans and their mental health, mostly in the 60s and 70s. Calhoun was an important member of these Space Cadets (get it?). It is primarily the first book, but the second allows it room for generous but informative digressions on the people and things influencing him, and who in turn he influenced.
Calhoun strays close to the tropes of a mad scientist. The authors bring up his awareness of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it feels like he tried to make it into an instruction manual. While excellent in Kuhn's 'normal science,' (Calhoun literally writes the book on rat behavior) he possessed a pressing need for greatness, leading him to start quoting Revelations in science lectures and trying to devise a systemic framework for a future Republic of Letters.
The book is equally as big in approach and passion. I could have read it in a single sitting. This is not a Golden Retriever of a book: this is a Cattle Dog on Ritalin kind of a book. I love this. The authors do an excellent job of predicting questions. The bifurcated style has a rough start but it pays off in getting to explore the intellectual milieu of Calhoun's work and the history influencing it.
The problem is the book's conclusion. The authors do a good job of explaining Calhoun's struggles to explain his research, and his struggles with people misinterpreting it. Generally, it is fair, and it explores different ideas about his work. The ending feels like a different book.
I think that what happens is the 'tyranny of narrative' kicks in. Calhoun's end feels so ignoble, abruptly forced into retirement due to shifting priorities within the agency he worked for and his own failing health, his work not completed to his satisfaction. There is no subsequent academic reappraisal. His scholarship is a quirky footnote.
But that feels bad, so instead the end spends way too much time engaged in pearl-clutching over psychotropic medication taking over our lives, then turns incoherent with its own framework.
There is this sort of paradox where to avoid a political statement is to avow the status quo, which is itself a political statement. The book describes Calhoun's work not as political, but as capable of being politicized. This is that paradox. There is too much of the book asserting that Calhoun did not say X, where the citation to Calhoun has him saying X, but with extra steps. Part of the problem here is Calhoun, who often did not know what Calhoun was trying to say.
But it feels like the authors spend the book being warmly critical of his thought and work, only to shift that in the penultimate chapter in order to fashion him a tragic hero. Likewise, it feels like the bifurcated nature of the book allows for so many other topics that get dropped, mostly, in the interest of a tight narrative around Calhoun, one that does not match up the rest of the book.
I liked this book, but the concluding both sides-ism or the need to make a grand exit or mask-off moment frustrates what is otherwise a well-written and exciting book. And at any rate, I am still waiting to hear whether I caught ASD from the Loop.
My thanks to the authors, Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Melville House Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
April 2, 2025
“Rat City” is close to home for me, as the Towson Enclosure was located about a mile and a quarter from where I live now. One of the reasons Baltimore is synonymous with rats is because of Calhoun’s work here- it’s not like we are *that* much more infested than other cities. “Rat City” is fun and readable, gives the standard pop science pop history blend of biography and description of discovery and historical context- it’s a reliable formula. Anyone interested in social science can’t help but be a bit romanticized by the mid 20th century: so many smart people doing gonzo lab experiments and drawing seemingly wild conclusions, many very right, some very wrong, often leading to real life policy changes that impacted the lives of people going forward in significant ways. I remain surprised that “Rat City” hasn’t really taken off around Baltimore - Baltimore County Public Library doesn’t even own a copy. I plan to talk it up a bit because I don’t see why it shouldn’t join “Not in my Neighborhood” and “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” as essential reading for the locals here.
October 19, 2024
This is probably one of those average level books. The topic is interesting enough to entice me to borrow it from the library, but the content is not as engaging as I had expected. Part of the reason is that I don't feel shocked by Dr. Calhoun's main findings (overpopulation leads to behavior problem, sort of common sense), and the other part is that the book feels a bit too stretched (if the book cuts about 100 pages, I might have enjoyed it more).
It was a pity that Dr. Calhoun and his cohorts' findings on the influence of environment on society were not explored further in practice, but I couldn't blame the politicians too much at that time. Were their support for a pharmacological solution short-sighted? Yes, for sure. Yet were there any alternatives that were equally easy to implement and show results in as turmoil a time as the 60s and 70s? Maybe, but most likely not one of Dr. Calhoun's or the Space Cadets' ideas.
It was a big shame that Dr. Calhoun were not allowed to see his final three projects to the end. The third one involving indexing information was too ahead of his time, but the first two could yield very interesting outcome. In particular, his musing that enhanced conceptual capacity (i.e., the "educated" rats) may help individuals maintain social and physiological functions even in an overcrowded environment is quite foreboding. I believe we have witnessed such enhancement ourselves: the arrival of the Internet. Whether the age of the Internet has helped us cope with overpopulation is unclear, but without doubt it is as important as, if not more than, all the previous key revolutionary events to expand the horizon of humanity.
Another interesting observation is that birth control and contraceptive was pushed hard as a conservative ideology in the 60s and 70s. How fascinating the wind has completely flipped in today's politics. Sadly, whichever way the wind blows, the victim of these whims has always been the poor and the underprivileged people.
Finally, I noticed the name Nicodemus, which belongs to a smart rat in the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Interestingly enough, this peculiar name also belongs to a wise old bunny in one of my favorite fantasy books War Bunny. I suspect one of the naming was inspired by the other.
It was a pity that Dr. Calhoun and his cohorts' findings on the influence of environment on society were not explored further in practice, but I couldn't blame the politicians too much at that time. Were their support for a pharmacological solution short-sighted? Yes, for sure. Yet were there any alternatives that were equally easy to implement and show results in as turmoil a time as the 60s and 70s? Maybe, but most likely not one of Dr. Calhoun's or the Space Cadets' ideas.
It was a big shame that Dr. Calhoun were not allowed to see his final three projects to the end. The third one involving indexing information was too ahead of his time, but the first two could yield very interesting outcome. In particular, his musing that enhanced conceptual capacity (i.e., the "educated" rats) may help individuals maintain social and physiological functions even in an overcrowded environment is quite foreboding. I believe we have witnessed such enhancement ourselves: the arrival of the Internet. Whether the age of the Internet has helped us cope with overpopulation is unclear, but without doubt it is as important as, if not more than, all the previous key revolutionary events to expand the horizon of humanity.
Another interesting observation is that birth control and contraceptive was pushed hard as a conservative ideology in the 60s and 70s. How fascinating the wind has completely flipped in today's politics. Sadly, whichever way the wind blows, the victim of these whims has always been the poor and the underprivileged people.
Finally, I noticed the name Nicodemus, which belongs to a smart rat in the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Interestingly enough, this peculiar name also belongs to a wise old bunny in one of my favorite fantasy books War Bunny. I suspect one of the naming was inspired by the other.
May 5, 2025
Last year, a few months after moving to the city, I woke up in the middle of the night to find a rat in my bedroom. I've been more aware of rodents ever since. Recently I looked at reviews for a nearby theater, and one of the most frequently mentioned words is "mice". A city for people is also a city for rats. Of course I picked up this book when I saw it at the library.
If I'd ever seen The Secret of Nimh, I would have made some connections sooner. The movie is based on a children's book whose author took inspiration from ethologist Jack Calhoun's work studying rodent overcrowding at the National Institute of Mental Health, among other places. The book is about Jack's work and, appropriately for a researcher who cared deeply about scientific communication, others in his sphere of influence--which was significant. But science doesn't always have the influence that scientists expect. Science can also have unexpected impacts on the scientist; early on, Jack discovered that rats tend to form groups of 12, and that number became meaningful to him in forming human groups (like the Space Cadets, multidisciplinary researchers focused on the effects of physical space on people).
I have a renewed (and somber) appreciation for everything humans owe to the animals we use for testing. I was fascinated by the development of standardized lab rats, something I'd given very little thought to. Helen Dean King, instrumental to that endeavor, conducted her work on the Wistar rat right here in Philadelphia. It was also interesting for me to read about Jack learning to think like a librarian: "The librarian views content differently to the scientist. Where Jack is tied up with the meaning and significance of his work, Edith [Jack's wife] views the information not in terms of its connections with the world, but in terms of its connections to other information."
This is the most compelling nonfiction book I've read in some time. I was distracted, though, by a glut of typos (a la "choose-you-own adventure" on page 317), inconsistent ligatures, and changing tenses. For me, this got in the way of enjoying the content a bit. I would still recommend this book to someone interested in urban design, sociology, and networks of science communication. Or maybe someone else whose encounters with rats left them curious.
If I'd ever seen The Secret of Nimh, I would have made some connections sooner. The movie is based on a children's book whose author took inspiration from ethologist Jack Calhoun's work studying rodent overcrowding at the National Institute of Mental Health, among other places. The book is about Jack's work and, appropriately for a researcher who cared deeply about scientific communication, others in his sphere of influence--which was significant. But science doesn't always have the influence that scientists expect. Science can also have unexpected impacts on the scientist; early on, Jack discovered that rats tend to form groups of 12, and that number became meaningful to him in forming human groups (like the Space Cadets, multidisciplinary researchers focused on the effects of physical space on people).
I have a renewed (and somber) appreciation for everything humans owe to the animals we use for testing. I was fascinated by the development of standardized lab rats, something I'd given very little thought to. Helen Dean King, instrumental to that endeavor, conducted her work on the Wistar rat right here in Philadelphia. It was also interesting for me to read about Jack learning to think like a librarian: "The librarian views content differently to the scientist. Where Jack is tied up with the meaning and significance of his work, Edith [Jack's wife] views the information not in terms of its connections with the world, but in terms of its connections to other information."
This is the most compelling nonfiction book I've read in some time. I was distracted, though, by a glut of typos (a la "choose-you-own adventure" on page 317), inconsistent ligatures, and changing tenses. For me, this got in the way of enjoying the content a bit. I would still recommend this book to someone interested in urban design, sociology, and networks of science communication. Or maybe someone else whose encounters with rats left them curious.
January 25, 2025
Fascinating! This was an insightful look at an intriguing scientist from a different era, when iconoclastic scientists had considerably more freedom to explore their passions. While Calhoun started with studies of rats, the implications for public policy were immense, whether they have been heeded or not.
March 3, 2025
A sad story of how a miscellaneous group of idealists showed how different environments could affect the development of society, but eventually had to abandon their experiments in the face of cost constraints and big-pharma opposition.
didn-t-finish-or-didn-t-reread
July 8, 2025The book became difficult to read as it jumped around too much - from the career of John Calhoun, to the use of rats as lab animals, to other scientists' work on the subject, to the project in the city of Baltimore to address a rat problem. I decided it wasn't worth my time to continue.
Want to read
October 31, 2024found in greenlight bookstore in Brooklyn.
December 12, 2024
Honestly the rat stuff was pretty interesting. The scientist stuff less so.
January 2, 2025
Thoroughly engaging read chronicling the life of an incredible polymath. Learnt a huge amount about the works of the man, and his impact on social sciences and planning.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 13, 2025
Every time I told someone I was reading a book about rats, nobody wanted to know anything else. It was a really interesting book, even if the subject matter was about rats.
November 6, 2025
Thought-provoking history of mental health research in the 20th century. Parts are too detailed and the author seems to lose the point.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews