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This book uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to
understand how professionals, administrations, scholars, and social
movements have surveyed, evaluated and theorized the city,
identified problems, and shaped and legitimized practical
interventions in planning and administration. Urbanization has been
accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a
distinct domain of knowledge. This volume uses 'politics of urban
knowledge' as a lens to develop a new perspective on urban history
and urban planning history. Through case studies of mainly 19th and
20th century examples, the book demonstrates that urban knowledge
is not simply a neutral means to represent cities as pre-existing
entities, but rather the outcome of historically contingent
processes and practices of urban actors addressing urban issues and
the power relations in which they are embedded. It shows how urban
knowledge-making has reshaped the categories, rationales, and
techniques through which urban spaces were produced, governed and
contested, and how the knowledge concerned became performative of
newly emerging urban orders. The volume will be of interest to
scholars and students in the field of urban history and urban
studies, as well as the history of technology, science and
knowledge and of science studies.
What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity's
interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the
more nature is said to be "urbanizing": turned into a resource,
mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then
striking back with a vengeance as "natural disaster". Confronting
insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology
Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter
teleological perspectives on the birth of modern "urban nature" as
a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological
schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities
from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
In contemporary society it would seem self-evident that people
allow the market to determine the values of products and services.
For everything from a loaf of bread to a work of art to a simple
haircut, value is expressed in monetary terms and seen as
determined primarily by the 'objective' interplay between supply
and demand. Yet this 'price-mechanism' is itself embedded in
conventions and frames of reference which differed according to
time, place and product type. Moreover, the dominance of the
conventions of utility maximising and calculative homo economicus
is a relatively new phenomenon, and one which directly correlates
to the steady advent of capitalism in early modern Europe. This
volume brings together scholars with expertise in a variety of
related fields, including economic history, the history of
consumption and material culture, art history, and the history of
collecting, to explore changing concepts of value from the early
modern period to the nineteenth century and present a new view on
the advent of modern economic practices. Jointly, they
fundamentally challenge traditional historical narratives about the
rise of our contemporary market economy and consumer society.
This book presents a new view on the relation between labour and
community through a focus on craft guilds. In the Southern
Netherlands, occupational guilds were both powerful and governed by
manufacturing masters, enabling the latter to imprint their mark
upon urban society in an economic, socio-cultural and political
way. While the urban community was deeply indebted to a corporative
spirit and guild ethic originating in medieval Germanic and
Christian traditions, guild-based artisans succeeded in being
accepted as genuine political (and, hence, rational) actors - their
political identity and agency being based upon their skills and
trustworthiness. In the long run, this corporative spirit and power
inexorably waned. Yet this book shows that an adequate
understanding of the development of European modernity - i.e.,
proletarianisation and the emergence of a modern economy and modern
economic and political thinking - requires taking seriously the
ruins upon which it is build. These histories can actually be
recounted as purifications of sorts, in which the economic was
separated from the political, the individual from the social, and
the transcendent from the material. While the religiously inspired
corporative nature of the urban body politic waned, the urban
artisans lost their credibility as political (and rational) actors.
This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate
from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban
studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which
concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative
industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of
human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has
challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why
we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of
change and innovation. What processes have been at work
historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing
creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this
question, the editors of this volume have collected case studies
ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth-century Antwerp to
early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, Paris, to industrializing
Sheffield and nineteenth-and twentieth century cities covering
Scandinavian port towns, Venice, and London, up to the French
techno-industrial city Grenoble. Jointly, these case studies show
that a creative city is not an objective or ontological reality,
but rather a complex and heterogenic "assemblage," in which
material, infrastructural and spatial elements become historically
entangled with power-laden discourses, narratives and imaginaries
about the city and urban actor groups.
Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles
of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities
in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century
northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how
did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments
produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How
did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and
creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in
this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of
case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They
set out to examine the relationship between institutional
arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and
guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and
early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why
regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity,
and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and
economic sphere.
Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships
between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period
when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed.
Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly
caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and
global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern
period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature
and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations,
impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the
entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern
urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and
knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks
in which human and non-human elements continually interact and
acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new
conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices,
shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of
cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal
starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban
institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and
the development of the so-called 'modern' knowledge society, this
is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern
history and knowledge.
What do we mean when we say that cities have altered humanity's
interaction with nature? The more people are living in cities, the
more nature is said to be "urbanizing": turned into a resource,
mobilized over long distances, controlled, transformed and then
striking back with a vengeance as "natural disaster". Confronting
insights derived from Environmental History, Science and Technology
Studies or Political Ecology, Urbanizing Nature aims to counter
teleological perspectives on the birth of modern "urban nature" as
a uniform and linear process, showing how new technological
schemes, new actors and new definitions of nature emerged in cities
from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles
of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities
in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century
northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how
did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments
produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How
did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and
creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in
this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of
case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They
set out to examine the relationship between institutional
arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and
guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and
early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why
regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity,
and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and
economic sphere.
Contrary to earlier views of preindustrial Europe as an essentially
sedentary society, research over the past decades has amply
demonstrated that migration was a pervasive characteristic of early
modern Europe. In this volume, the theme of urban migration is
explored through a series of historical contexts, journeying from
sixteenth-century Antwerp, Ulm, Lille and Valenciennes, through
seventeenth-century Berlin, Milan and Rome, to eighteenth-century
Strasbourg, Trieste, Paris and London. Each chapter demonstrates
how the presence of diverse and often temporary groups of migrants
was a core feature of everyday urban life, which left important
marks on the demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural
characteristics of individual cities. The collection focuses on the
interventions by urban authorities and institutions in a
wide-ranging set of domains, as they sought to stimulate, channel
and control the newcomers' movements and activities within the
cities and across the cities' borders. While striving for a broad
geographical and chronological coverage in a comparative
perspective, the volume aims to enhance our insight into the
different factors that shaped urban migration policies in different
European settings west of the Elbe. By laying bare the complex
interactions of actors, interests, conflicts, and negotiations
involved in the regulation of migration, the case studies shed
light on the interrelations between burghership, guilds, relief
arrangements, and police in the incorporation of newcomers and in
shaping the shifting boundaries between wanted and unwanted
migrants. By relating to a common analytical framework, presented
in the introductory chapter, they engage in a comparative
discussion that allows for the formulation of general insights and
the identification of long term transformations that transcend the
time and place specificities of the case studies in question. The
introduction and final chapters connect insights derived from the
individual case-study chapters to present wide ranging conclusions
that resonate with both historical and present-day debates on
migration.
This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate
from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban
studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which
concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative
industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of
human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has
challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why
we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of
change and innovation. What processes have been at work
historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing
creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this
question, the editors of this volume have collected case studies
ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth-century Antwerp to
early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, Paris, to industrializing
Sheffield and nineteenth-and twentieth century cities covering
Scandinavian port towns, Venice, and London, up to the French
techno-industrial city Grenoble. Jointly, these case studies show
that a creative city is not an objective or ontological reality,
but rather a complex and heterogenic "assemblage," in which
material, infrastructural and spatial elements become historically
entangled with power-laden discourses, narratives and imaginaries
about the city and urban actor groups.
Contrary to earlier views of preindustrial Europe as an essentially
sedentary society, research over the past decades has amply
demonstrated that migration was a pervasive characteristic of early
modern Europe. In this volume, the theme of urban migration is
explored through a series of historical contexts, journeying from
sixteenth-century Antwerp, Ulm, Lille and Valenciennes, through
seventeenth-century Berlin, Milan and Rome, to eighteenth-century
Strasbourg, Trieste, Paris and London. Each chapter demonstrates
how the presence of diverse and often temporary groups of migrants
was a core feature of everyday urban life, which left important
marks on the demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural
characteristics of individual cities. The collection focuses on the
interventions by urban authorities and institutions in a
wide-ranging set of domains, as they sought to stimulate, channel
and control the newcomers' movements and activities within the
cities and across the cities' borders. While striving for a broad
geographical and chronological coverage in a comparative
perspective, the volume aims to enhance our insight into the
different factors that shaped urban migration policies in different
European settings west of the Elbe. By laying bare the complex
interactions of actors, interests, conflicts, and negotiations
involved in the regulation of migration, the case studies shed
light on the interrelations between burghership, guilds, relief
arrangements, and police in the incorporation of newcomers and in
shaping the shifting boundaries between wanted and unwanted
migrants. By relating to a common analytical framework, presented
in the introductory chapter, they engage in a comparative
discussion that allows for the formulation of general insights and
the identification of long term transformations that transcend the
time and place specificities of the case studies in question. The
introduction and final chapters connect insights derived from the
individual case-study chapters to present wide ranging conclusions
that resonate with both historical and present-day debates on
migration.
Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities
In the early modern age technological innovations were unimportant
relative to political and social transformations. The size of the
workforce and the number of wage dependent people increased, due in
large part to population growth, but also as a result of changes in
the organization of work. The diversity of workplaces in many
significant economic sectors was on the rise in the 16th-century:
family farming, urban crafts and trades, and large enterprises in
mining, printing and shipbuilding. Moreover, the increasing
influence of global commerce, as accompanied by local and regional
specialization, prompted an increased reliance on forms of
under-compensated and non-compensated work which were integral to
economic growth. Economic volatility swelled the ranks of the
mobile poor, who moved along Europe's roads seeking sustenance, and
the endemic warfare of the period prompted young men to sign on as
soldiers and sailors. Colonists migrated to Europe's territories in
the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while others were forced overseas
as servants, convicts or slaves. The early modern age proved to be
a "renaissance" in the political, social and cultural contexts of
work which set the stage for the technological developments to
come. A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age presents
an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations
of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society,
politics and leisure.
The importance of training and education is on the increase. While
the production of 'human capital' is seen as a motor for a
competitive economy, skills and expertise proof to be necessary for
social mobility. Remarkably, in conceiving modern forms of
'apprenticeship', several mechanisms from the acien regime, seem to
return. The difference between public and private initiative is
disappearing, education and training is being confused, and in
order to acquire generic skills as flexibility, communicability,
self-rule, creativity and so on, youngsters have to learn 'in
context'. Even for maths, scholars now talk of 'situated learning'.
Before the advent of a formal schooling system, training took place
on the shop floor, under the roof of a master. The apprentice not
only worked but also lived in his master's house and was thus
trained and educated at the same time. In cities, this system was
formally complemented by an official apprenticeship system,
prescribing a minimum term to serve and an obligatory masterpiece
for those who wanted to become masters themselves. Traditionally,
historians see this as an archaic and backward way of training, yet
this book's aim is to show that is was instead a very flexible and
dynamic system, perfectly in tune with the demands of an early
modern economy. In order to understand it fully, however, we should
differentiate the informal training system organised via a 'free
market' of indentures on the one hand and the institutionalised
system of craft guilds on the other. In Antwerp, early modern
guilds had a project of 'emancipating' their members. They didn't
simply produce certain skills, but through a system of quality
marks defended the honour of craftsmen. This is the difference with
current practices. By representing hands-on skills as superior,
guilds supplied a sort of symbolic capital for workers. Bert De
Munck is lecturer at the University of Antwerp and member of the
Centre for Urban History. His research focuses on the history of
the guilds, vocational training and social capital.
Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities
In the early modern age technological innovations were unimportant
relative to political and social transformations. The size of the
workforce and the number of wage dependent people increased, due in
large part to population growth, but also as a result of changes in
the organization of work. The diversity of workplaces in many
significant economic sectors was on the rise in the 16th-century:
family farming, urban crafts and trades, and large enterprises in
mining, printing and shipbuilding. Moreover, the increasing
influence of global commerce, as accompanied by local and regional
specialization, prompted an increased reliance on forms of
under-compensated and non-compensated work which were integral to
economic growth. Economic volatility swelled the ranks of the
mobile poor, who moved along Europe's roads seeking sustenance, and
the endemic warfare of the period prompted young men to sign on as
soldiers and sailors. Colonists migrated to Europe's territories in
the Americas, Africa, and Asia, while others were forced overseas
as servants, convicts or slaves. The early modern age proved to be
a "renaissance" in the political, social and cultural contexts of
work which set the stage for the technological developments to
come. A Cultural History of Work in the Early Modern Age presents
an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations
of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society,
politics and leisure.
Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships
between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period
when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed.
Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly
caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and
global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern
period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature
and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations,
impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the
entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern
urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and
knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks
in which human and non-human elements continually interact and
acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new
conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices,
shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of
cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal
starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban
institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and
the development of the so-called 'modern' knowledge society, this
is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern
history and knowledge.
This book presents a new view on the relation between labour and
community through a focus on craft guilds. In the Southern
Netherlands, occupational guilds were both powerful and governed by
manufacturing masters, enabling the latter to imprint their mark
upon urban society in an economic, socio-cultural and political
way. While the urban community was deeply indebted to a corporative
spirit and guild ethic originating in medieval Germanic and
Christian traditions, guild-based artisans succeeded in being
accepted as genuine political (and, hence, rational) actors - their
political identity and agency being based upon their skills and
trustworthiness. In the long run, this corporative spirit and power
inexorably waned. Yet this book shows that an adequate
understanding of the development of European modernity - i.e.,
proletarianisation and the emergence of a modern economy and modern
economic and political thinking - requires taking seriously the
ruins upon which it is build. These histories can actually be
recounted as purifications of sorts, in which the economic was
separated from the political, the individual from the social, and
the transcendent from the material. While the religiously inspired
corporative nature of the urban body politic waned, the urban
artisans lost their credibility as political (and rational) actors.
In contemporary society it would seem self-evident that people
allow the market to determine the values of products and services.
For everything from a loaf of bread to a work of art to a simple
haircut, value is expressed in monetary terms and seen as
determined primarily by the 'objective' interplay between supply
and demand. Yet this 'price-mechanism' is itself embedded in
conventions and frames of reference which differed according to
time, place and product type. Moreover, the dominance of the
conventions of utility maximising and calculative homo economicus
is a relatively new phenomenon, and one which directly correlates
to the steady advent of capitalism in early modern Europe. This
volume brings together scholars with expertise in a variety of
related fields, including economic history, the history of
consumption and material culture, art history, and the history of
collecting, to explore changing concepts of value from the early
modern period to the nineteenth century and present a new view on
the advent of modern economic practices. Jointly, they
fundamentally challenge traditional historical narratives about the
rise of our contemporary market economy and consumer society.
Apprenticeship or vocational training is a subject of lively
debate. Economic historians tend to see apprenticeship as a purely
economic phenomenon, as an 'incomplete contract' in need of legal
and institutional enforcement mechanisms. The contributors to this
volume have adopted a broader perspective. They regard learning on
the shop floor as a complex social and cultural process, to be
situated in an ever-changing historical context. The results are
surprising. The authors convincingly show that research on
apprenticeship and learning on the shop floor is intimately
associated with migration patterns, family economy and household
strategies, gender perspectives, urban identities and general
educational and pedagogical contexts.
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