Third Watson Seminar in the Material and Visual History of Science

“How to write an urban history of science:
New approaches and case studies”

Barcelona, 6 June 2014

In recent years the modern city as a specific place of scientific (as well
as medical and technological) practices has attracted a fair amount of
interest among historians of science. Yet following this “urban turn” much
remains to be explored. The lion’s share of the research on science and
the city (in the formative period around 1900) has focused on the
metropolis (London, Paris, Berlin etc.). Yet what about “second cities”
such as Barcelona, Hamburg, Glasgow, Athens, Lisbon and so on? These
cities have been under the radar of much of recent scholarship but surely
deserve an in-depth-investigation.
What is more, there are thorny methodological issues to be resolved. In
short: how to write an urban history of science? The sheer complexity of
the topic, its abundant sources, innumerous actors, questions of scale and
so on pose a serious historiographical challenge. One may argue for
example that it makes no sense to neatly disjoin the spheres of art,
architecture, science, medicine, politics etc. These spheres need to be
understood as a seamless web with numerous intersections. Yet how would
one describe such a seamless web? It seems clear that the urban space is
always both: product and producer. Therefore the guiding research question
is always a double one: how have science (technology and medicine) shaped
the modern city? And inversely: in how far did the urban space condition
the practices of producing, communicating and applying new knowledge?
We will pursue and discuss these questions in the Third Watson Seminar in
the Material and Visual History of Science entitled: “How to write an
urban history of science: New approaches and case studies”. It will take
place on 6 June 2014 at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC), Carrer
Carme 47, 08001 Barcelona. Organizers are the Centre d’Història de la
Ciència (CEHIC) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona  and the Societat
Catalana d'Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica (SCHCT).
There is no admission fee. Yet it would be of great help to inform us
whether you will attend the Seminar. Please write to Agustí Nieto-Galan
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Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan

Program

9:15  Welcome Address
9:30-10:20 Miriam Levin (Case Western Reserve University): “Science and
the City: Museums, Expositions and the Modern Urban Context in the long
nineteenth century”
10:20-11:10 Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan (IMF-CSIC and
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “Barcelona: A new urban history of
science and modernity (1888-1929)”

11:10-11:40 Coffee Break

11:40-12:30 Maria Rentetzi and Spiros Flevaris (National Technical
University of Athens): “Envisioning a New European Metropolis: The Athens
Observatory, Greek astronomy, and the imposed path to modernization”
12:30-13:20 Ana Simões (Universidade de Lisboa): “Science in the capital
city or a city turned into a scientific capital? Science, Technology and
Medicine in Lisbon as seen through the press (1900-1910)”

13:30-15:30 Lunch

15:30-16:20 Diego Armus (Swarthmore College): “Hygiene in a modern
peripheral city. Buenos Aires, 1870-1930”
16:20-17:10 Dorothee Brantz (TU Berlin): "The Urban Discovery of Nature:
Science, Education, and the Display of Animals, 1850-1930"


17:10-17:40 Coffee Break

17:40-18:30 Ben Marsden (University of Aberdeen): “’Glasgow is our
laboratory’: metropolis, province and philosophical engineering c. 1840s –
1900”
18:30-19:00 Mitchell Ash (Universität Wien) “Concluding Remarks”


The Watson Seminar
The “Watson Seminar in the History of the Material and Visual History of
Science” is an annual conference made possible by the generous support of
the History of Science Publisher Neale Watson. The first of these one-day
international workshops was held in 2012 in Florence (on the role of
tennis in early modern science, published as special issue of Nuncius
(http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/18253911)), the second
one in 2013 also in Florence on the history of fakes and hoaxes in science
(http://www.shpusa.com/2012/10/2nd-watson-seminar-in-the-history-of-
material-and-visual-science/).


Dr. Oliver Hochadel
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

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