Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities

Front Cover
Mikael Hård, Thomas J. Misa
MIT Press, 2008 - 351 pages

Urban Machinery investigates the technological dimension of modern European cities, vividly describing the most dramatic changes in the urban environment over the last century and a half. Written by leading scholars from the history of technology, urban history, sociology and science, technology, and society, the book views the European city as a complex construct entangled with technology. The chapters examine the increasing similarity of modern cities and their technical infrastructures (including communication, energy, industrial, and transportation systems) and the resulting tension between homogenization and cultural differentiation. The contributors emphasize the concept of circulation--the process by which architectural ideas, urban planning principles, engineering concepts, and societal models spread across Europe as well as from the United States to Europe. They also examine the parallel process of appropriation--how these systems and practices have been adapted to prevailing institutional structures and cultural preferences. Urban Machinery, with contributions by scholars from eight countries, and more than thirty illustrations (many of them rare photographs never published before), includes studies from northern and southern and from eastern and western Europe, and also discusses how European cities were viewed from the periphery (modernizing Turkey) and from the United States.ContributorsHans Buiter, Paolo Capuzzo, Noyan Din kal, Cornelis Disco, P l Germuska, Mikael H rd, Martina He ler, Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, Andrew Jamison, Per Lundin, Thomas J. Misa, Dieter Schott, Marcus StippakMikael H rd is Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology. His books include The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (coedited with Andrew Jamison; MIT Press, 1998). Thomas J. Misa is ERA-Land Grant Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directs the Charles Babbage Institute. His books include Modernity and Technology (coedited with Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg; MIT Press, 2003).

 

Contents

Technological Uniformity and Cultural Distinction
1
Economic Connection and Urban Competition
23
Modernizing Istanbul in the Late Ottoman Empire
49
Modernism in East and West
71
European Cities as Sites of Consumption
99
The German City in Britain and the United States
121
A Melting Pot of European Technologies
141
Gas and Electricity in the Urban Environment
165
European Traditions and American Models
211
Planning Socialist Cities in Hungary
233
Planning Experts and the Making of the CarFriendly City in Europe
257
Urban Environmentalism from Mumford to Malmo
281
References
299
Contributors
337
Inside Technology
341
Index
343

Steel Towns in Postwar Eastern Europe
187

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About the author (2008)

Mikael Hård is Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology. His books include The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (coedited with Andrew Jamison; MIT Press, 1998). Thomas J. Misa is ERA-Land Grant Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directs the Charles Babbage Institute. His books include Modernity and Technology (coedited with Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg; MIT Press, 2003).

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