Cities and technology, a line of inquiry dating back to the seminal works of Lewis Mumford, appears to have lost some of its vigor. Of course, Mumford did not invent the topic; as the bibliographies of his books demonstrate, the connection between technology and the urban phenomenon intrigued philosophers, engineers, and statesmen in ancient times and provoked Marx and Weber, Georg Simmel and Robert Park. How resources are organized to support cities, and how systems are built and maintained on their behalf—these are deeply political issues, with implications for social structures, centralization, public procurement markets, and territorial control. But of late, much of the impetus to dig deeper into this topic has reflected specialization within the field of the history of technology, with considerable loss to the synthesizing, generalizing mode of thought so often necessary to carry the field forward.

Hence the welcome arrival of Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp. viii+351, $47). This collection of essays, edited by Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, covers essentially the last 150 years, when the impact of technology on cities has been manifest most conspicuously in the form of networked utilities and of districts or even whole cities primarily given over to heavy manufacturing or to research. The spatial scope is heavily concentrated on northwest and central Europe; the British Isles and Mediterranean Europe appear as references, not as primary subjects. Airports, canals and ports, and railroads, which connected and served cities but had a major impact on regional and rural landscapes, do not figure in this book either. The usual caveats about collective works apply.

The question, then, is whether the strengths are of larger interest. There are two heuristic and interpretive issues at the heart of this book. The first has to do with the diffusion of technologies in specific urban contexts when these reflect different historical, institutional, social, and cultural settings. The question of diffusion is an old one. Are the editors on solid ground when they assert that “the nations of Europe are more similar today than they have ever been” (p. 5)? Nations? Or cities? Nations in the form of nation-states, e.g., since about 1848 or 1919? What about empires, either the Roman, Christian, or Napoleonic? And what generates homogeneity? If it is urban technology, the Romans come first; if it is about concepts of fit spatial design and governance, then we need to look at the high-water mark of the Enlightenment. Hård and Misa are right to state that “A crucial question remains whether we have ‘room for maneuver’ in the face of these homogenizing and universalizing pressures” (p. 4). But if this is a concern of the editors and the authors, it is a concern they do little to address explicitly.

The second issue has to do with the transforming impact of large-scale technologies over time, and specifically the question of whether the technological transformation of European cities has made these cities, and indeed even nations, more similar, more homogeneous. Europe is the world’s densest urban civilization: in no other region of the world are there so many cities so near each other. The shape and structure of cities help to define their identity. This is no trivial matter in a political culture such as Europe’s, where the municipality extends back to the Middle Ages and antedates the dominant political structures of today. To the extent that technological choices affect not only how cities function but how they are appropriated by citizens to help them define their identity, policies and public and private investment that are applied to cities are, deservedly, the subject of politics. Fortunately many of Hård and Misa’s authors, echoing the importance of urban politics to the very essence of European cities, have addressed this question.

To this reader, however, the interest in urban politics has been shaped too much and too often by postmodernist concerns about discourse, about how cultural ideas and values are formed and diffused, and not enough by hard facts about whose money is being spent, on whose behalf, and for what purposes. Postmodernist terminology that matters so much in academic discourse is largely irrelevant when a city council is voting, when editorials are drafted and petitions signed. Historians are in danger of imposing conceptual frameworks on the grounds that people—actors, if you will—are unconscious of what they are really doing. This has to be kept in mind when reading about the impulse to adopt modernity through technology, whether for its symbolic or political value, or simply to help solve basic urban management problems. Contributions such as coeditor Hård’s and Marcus Stippak’s on “The German City in Britain and the United States,” and Martina Hessler’s on science in the city, looking at university and research towns, are rich enough empirically to transcend the otherwise-obligatory use of academic phraseology.

So what do we find in this book? Chapters on port competition on the Rhine by Cornelis Disco and on individual cities as different as Istanbul, Kraków, and Budapest by Noyan Dinçkal, Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, and Pál Germuska, respectively; and on urban phenomena such as European cities of consumption by Paolo Capuzzo, Hessler’s piece on “Science in the City: European Traditions and American Models,” and Per Lundin’s “Mediators of Modernity: Planning Experts and the Making of the ‘Car-Friendly’ City in Europe.” There are chapters on technology and streets in the Netherlands by Hans Buiter, on gas and electricity networks by Dieter Schott, and on the modernist style of architecture and planning, with links to environmentalism, by coeditor Misa, Per Lundin, and Andrew Jamison.

Clearly, ideas flowed, engineers and planners traveled, information crossed borders. But what about that most liquid and symbolic of artifacts, money? How can one write about post-1919 central Europe, or post-1947 eastern Europe, without an economic frame of reference? How can we treat the era from the 1880s to this decade without recognizing the enormous difference between the economic views of the future that people had before 1914 and after 1918? One finds scarcely a reference to bonds and loans, taxes, regulated pricing, and profit margins. This is a gap which suggests a collective blind spot. Labor practices and the costs of materials in long economic cycles matter vitally to the investment in and maintenance of urban technologies. An exception in this book is Schott’s contribution on utility networks for gas and electricity.
Urban Machinery remains, on reflection, a rich collection, and Americanists in particular—who are less likely to be familiar with historical examples from within Europe or of the patterns of diffusion between Europe and North America—will benefit from close attention to a number of the contributions which make explicit comparisons and bring material to light about the movement of practitioners and of practices in both directions across the Atlantic. The barriers to diffusion are not overlooked, either: Misa, for example, asks why the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and modernism did not penetrate the United States.

This book appears at a turning point. Green technology, especially in Asia and Europe, and policies to respond to global climate change, will have a dramatic impact on housing, transport, and urban form, and on the productive and distributional functions for which cities remain the platform. The solutions—technological, political, cultural—will test innovation as an urban activity. The trend toward homogenization which is a thread linking the chapters in this collective work may have reached its high-water mark. Given environmental constraints and the imperative to adapt solutions to local circumstances, the next phase of urban technological development will accentuate diversity.

After two decades on the history faculty of Michigan State University, Josef Konvitz joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where he is now the head of division, Regulatory Policy. This review is written on his personal responsibility.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 2 (April 2010)