CFP: “Urban Peripheries?” Emerging Cities in Europe’s South and East, 1850-1945
CALL FOR PAPERS
“Urban Peripheries?”
Emerging Cities in Europe’s South and East, 1850-1945
26-27 September 2016 •
Institució Milà i Fontanals, Barcelona, Spain (first part)
March 2017 • Herder
Institute or Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany (second part)
“Science and the city”
has become a trending topic in recent historiography, both in history of
science, technology and medicine (STM) as well as in Urban Studies. So far
there has been a strong focus on the metropolis and their multifaceted scientific
culture. Yet what about “peripheral cities” in Eastern and Southern Europe? Are
they only smaller copies of London, Paris and Berlin? What is to be gained from
studying the scientific culture of “non-metropolitan” cities? So far these
cities have been described as being on the receiving end. Knowledge in STM,
blue prints for scientific institutions, urban models and other practices were
created and tested in the metropolis and then passed on. This postulates a
transfer from the center to the periphery and hence a clear epistemological
hierarchy.
The double workshop,
organised in Germany by the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East
Central Europe (Germany) and in Spain by the Institució Milà i Fontanals
(CSIC), and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, would like to question this
assumption. Our methodological point of departure is that cities in Southern
and Eastern Europe (our specific geographic focus) were part of an “inter-urban
matrix” (N. Wood). Through the daily press, but also through other channels
such as scholarly networks and professional contacts people were quite
conscious of what was happening elsewhere in Europe. There are virtually no
studies on the connections between peripheral cities, the exchange of knowledge
and expertise and the formation of networks and collaborations. This workshop
intends to open new perspectives on the exchanges in the areas of science,
technology, medicine and urban planning between “urban peripheries” such as
Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Lemberg, Lisbon or Tallinn? In what follows we
sketch three possible research agendas:
Nationalism
As highly multiethnic
and multireligious contact and cultural transfer zones, the East European and
Southern Borderlands are located on the peripheries of the Empires, between
Germany and Austria-Hungary, Russia, Great Britain and the Ottomans. In these
borderlands, the imposing of homogenizing structures by the Empires before
World War I and the emerging local nationalisms generated a dynamic in the
urbanization and modernization processes. This workshop will focus on the
assumed specificities of the urbanization in the South and East of Europe which
is characterised by different forms and modes of knowledge transfer.
Comparing modernities
The inhabitants of
allegedly “peripheral” of “backward” cities felt that they had to “catch up”
with London and Paris (or less frequently with Berlin and Vienna). This
“yearning for metropolitanism” (J. Morrell) was both a rhetorical exercise and
a practical struggle. Many of these “peripheral” cities tried to present
themselves as “progressive”, that is to say as promoting science, technology,
medicine (hygiene) and rational city planning. Yet the meaning of modernity was
highly context-dependent and historically contingent. The challenge of the
comparative research agenda of the workshop lies in teasing out the differences
between these modernities.
“Best practices”
Peripheral – or emerging
– cities understood that the experience of similar cities was much more helpful
in solving their concrete problems than much of the metropolitan model.
Therefore this workshop will try to reconstruct the mechanisms and strategies
behind of choosing certain “best practices”, i.e. urban models that serve
smaller cities. Therefore special attention might be paid to fields such as
urban planning, sewage systems and infrastructure of supply, which played a
crucial role in the modernisation of many “peripheral” cities in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. This search for practical models will thus help to
elucidate the networks between these urban spaces.
This workshop will try
and unveil the directions and channels through which knowledge was created and
disseminated in these interurban networks. Conferences, research trips,
lectures, private visits and correspondence would have to be investigated. The
aim would be to render these transnational communities visible again, not least
by bringing their practices and networks back to a tangible space: the city. To
enable a thorough discussion we plan a double workshop (ca. one and half days
long). Precirculated papers will be presented at the first workshop and revised
versions of these papers at the second workshop. In the end we plan to publish
these papers as a book a special issue of a journal. The first workshop will
take place on 26-27 September 2016 at the Institució Milà i Fontanals in
Barcelona (Spain), the second part at the Herder Institute in Marburg (Germany)
in March 2017. The organisers will cover travel and accommodation costs of the
invited speakers.
Please submit your
proposal of ca. 250 words and a short CV as well as contact details by February
15, 2016 to: forum@herder-institut.de
ORGANISERS
Heidi Hein-Kircher/Eszter
Gantner
Herder Institute for
Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz
Association
Oliver Hochadel
Institució Milà i
Fontanals – Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Agustí Nieto-Galan
Centre d’Història de la
Ciència (Cehic)
Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Institució Milà i Fontanals
C/Egipcíaques, 15
08001 Barcelona
Spain
T: +34 93 442 34 89
F: +34 93 443 00 71
E: oliver.hochadel@imf.csic.es