The European Cities And Technology Reader

The European Cities and Technology Reader is divided into three main sections presenting key readings on: Cities of the Industrial Revolution (to 1870), European Cities since 1870 and the Urban Technology Transfer.

Cities & Technology, a series of three textbooks and three readers, explores one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human society: the transition from predominantly rural to urban ways of living. This series presents a new social history of technology, using primarily urban settings as a source of historical evidence anda focus for the interpretation of the historical relations of technology and society. Drawing on perspectives and writings from accross a number of disciplines involved in urban historical studies - including archaeology, urban history, historical geography and architectural history - the books in the series explore: how towns and cities have been shaped by applications of a range of technologies and how such technological applications have been influenced by their social contexts, including politics, economics, culture and the natural environment. European Cities and Technology is designed to be used on its own or as a companion volume to the accompanying European Cities and Technology Reader in the same series. The book is divided into three principal sections: cities of the Industrial Revolution including case studies of Manchester, Glasgow, London and Paris; European cities since 1870, including London, Paris Berlin, the rise of modern urban planning and post-war reconstruction; and a variety of topics including Milton Keynes, Colonial India and Russia. It investigates the relative importance of technology, economics, politics and social conditions in relation to urban change.

Designed to be used on its own or as a companion volume to the textbook, this book offers in-depth readings on the technological dimensions of US cities from the earliest settlements to the internet communications of the 1990s.

Complied as a reference source for students, this Reader is divided into three main sections, presenting key readings on: Ancient Cities, Medieval and Early Modern Cities, and Pre-Industrial Cities in China and Africa.

This text explores one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human society - the transition from rural to urban ways of living. It covers a range of urban technologies, including new building materials and designs.

This third edition juxtaposes the very best publications on the city. It reflects the latest thinking on globalization, information technology and urban theory. It is a comprehensive mapping of the terrain of urban studies: old and new.

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).

Designed to be used on its own or as a companion volume to the American Cities and Technology textbook. Chronologically, this volume ranges from the earliest technological dimensions of Amerindian settlements to the 'wired city' concept of the 1960s and internet communications of the 1990s.Its focus extends beyond the US to include telecomunications in Asian cities in the late 20th century. The topics covered: * the rise of the skyscraper *the coming of the automobile age * relations between private and public transport * the development of infrastructural technologies and systems * the implications of electronic communications * the emergence of city planning.

This book offers a fresh appraisal of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s urban design legacy and his involvement in the design of modern Athens in the 1830s. It challenges the common perception of Schinkel’s proposed palace atop the Acropolis of Athens (1834) as a utopian scheme, detached from the realities of nineteenth-century Greece.

This book presents new research on spaces for science and processes of interurban and transnational knowledge transfer and exchange in the imperial metropolis of Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters discuss Habsburg science policy, metropolitan natural history museums, large technical projects including the Ringstrasse and water pipelines from the Alps, urban geology, geography, public reports on polar exploration, exchanges of ethnographic objects, popular scientific societies and scientifically oriented adult education. The infrastructures and knowledge spaces described here were preconditions for the explosion of creativity known as 'Vienna 1900.'