Call for Papers: Urban peripheries? Science in “Second Cities” around 1900 

Proposal for a session at the 9th STEP Meeting, Lisbon, 1-3 September 2014

Organizers: Agustí Nieto-Galan (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Oliver Hochadel (IMF-CSIC, Barcelona)

Science and the city, but also, science in the city, has become a hot topic for historians of science. How did science, medicine and technology shape the urban space? And inversely: how did the city condition the practices of scientific research and the flow of communication? Despite the valuable existing scholarship on the urban history of science we feel that much remains to be explored. Most of the research focused on the metropolis or what we may call the “first” cities (Paris, London, Berlin, etc.). Yet in how far can their results be transferred to other “second” cities such as Barcelona, Hamburg, Glasgow, Rotterdam, Copenhagen and so on? These cities have been under the radar of much of recent scholarship but surely deserve an in-depth-investigation. “Second” may refer to not being to capital of a country, or to sheer size, to its political or economical importance or its “peripheral” location. True, the concept of “second cities” is quite vague. But for the time being we would like not to endeavor a precise definition in order to amass case studies first. The idea of this session is to pull together such case studies on “second cities” in Europe but also from the Americas etc. A possible chronological focus might be the decades around 1900 (ca. 1870-1930) where the modern city took form.

Furthermore we should like to advance the discussion on a methodological level. In short: how to write an urban history of science? The sheer complexity of the topic, its abundant sources, innumerous actors and so on pose quite a historiographical challenge. We would 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 best describe such a seamless web?

The topic is very rich, hence numerous perspectives might be taken. To mention but a few:

- Science in “second cities”?

- Urban and green? Science and the city and environmental history

- Pure modernity? Science and the city around 1900

- Science and the city as micro-history

- Liasions fécondes? Science and art in the modern city

- The architecture of modern science: universities, labs and museums in the city

- Comparative approaches: port cities, cities of engineers, the park in the city, technologies of entertainment in the modern city etc.

- Bright, clean and exclusive: New spaces of medical practice the city around 1900

- Far from gone. Animals in the modern city

- Le quotidien. The interaction between science and urban everyday life

In case you are interested in contributing to this session on Urban peripheries? Science in “Second Cities” around 1900 please 

send an abstract of roughly 250 words by December, 31, 2013 to [log in to unmask] AND to [log in to unmask].