shifts the perspective to the collective initiatives of inhabitants to secure health in their living and working environments. Those who lived in proximity to one another often shared infrastructures and hygienic routines. Court cases featuring neighbourly disputes reveal how inhabitants routinely tried to secure access to fresh water and hygienic domestic facilities such as cesspits, drainage pipes and latrines, and sought to ban stench and other nuisances from living environments. Expressed in a discourse revolving around damage and disturbance, local well-being – a “good neighbourhood” – was guaranteed by combining social harmony and material or infrastructural functionality, and resulted in forms of community formation and civic participation.