ABSTRACT
A sunny Helsinki was the backdrop for the 13th biannual conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH). The EAUH was established in 1989 with the aim to create a common platform to historians, geographers, sociologists, planners, and other scholars working with a multidisciplinary approach on urban history in different time periods. The first EAUH conference took place in Amsterdam in 1992 and the next one will take place in Rome during 2018 (for further information about EAUH, please visit the website: http://www.eauh.eu/). The ambitious theme of the 13th conference was Reinterpreting Cities. For planning historians, this theme held ample promise on programmatic, methodological, and theoretical levels. With 592 participants, 44 main sessions, and 30 specialist sessions, we decided to look at the conference through a specific lens. Based on a selection of relevant panels, therefore, we formulated two questions: first, how can a reinterpretation of cities lead to new theories on the city and connect to existing theories in other disciplines? And second, how can a reinterpretation of urban history connect to the ‘real world’, for example, planning practices? This conference report explores the ways in which this conference actually reinterpreted the city, in particular, how it connected to the spatial dimension and planning history.
Reinterpretation?
That the notion of ‘reinterpretation’ is open to various interpretations became apparent from the different approaches of the four keynote speakers during the conference. The first speaker, Riita Nikula, emeritus professor of Art History at the University of Helsinki, addressed the planning history of the ‘heart’ of Helsinki in the twentieth century. Although this was an interesting introduction to the history of the guest city, it set the tone for many papers that interpreted urban history in a traditional, design-oriented way. A more explicit attempt to reinterpret came from Maarten Prak, professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Utrecht, who argued for a different approach to the research field in general. Building on some of the conclusions of the 12th European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Conference in Lisbon in 2014, he urged urban historians to connect more directly to research agendas, thus making their work relevant for a broader public. He introduced three themes that should be central, in his opinion, to present day urban historical research: migration, citizenship, and creativity. Prak expected his speech to be controversial and, indeed, it proved to be the subject of discussion inside and outside the sessions.
Swati Chattopadhyay from the University of California argued for a methodological reinterpretation of the discipline. Contrary to Prak, she argued that urban historical research should be driven by the sources, preferably on the smallest scale. To really be able to understand the urban system, Chattopadhyay argues, the street, the house, or even cabinets in a house should be the place to start. In this line of reasoning, she reacted against smart city rhetoric which is, according to her, merely ‘modernist clichés repeated with new technologies’. She used the example of the Bottle-khana (the pantry in an Indian colonial home) to show that even this type of space can have meaning for the city and can be exemplary for the transnational connections at play, following the colonial adage that ‘the Empire needs to be controlled from home’. Furthermore, she advocated the study of temporary constructs, such as Puja pavilions, to study the interchangeability of capital, being both a permanent and impermanent concept.
The keynote speech during the closing ceremony, held by Friedrich Lenger of the Justus Liebig University, connected the themes of the conference both to the longue durée and to the planning reality. With the latter, Lenger alluded to segregation as a result of new liberalism and gentrification, but also of the effects of terrorism and growing military surveillance on the accessibility and quality of public spaces. Furthermore, he argued that through thinking about new city typologies, urban history would be better equipped to connect to other disciplines. In this respect, Lenger mentioned the efforts during the conference to look at global cities, second cities, and systems of cities from an urban historical point of view. In this vein, he also addressed the problem that urban history often leans on theories adapted from other disciplines, but that there is a lack of theorizing in the own field.
The issue of theorizing was already raised in regard to planning history during the last IPHS conference in Delft and now it has been discussed also in urban history field. Why are planning and urban historians reliant on theories from other fields without constructing theories themselves? This issue did not just come up in Lenger’s keynote, but also became apparent in the sessions; sometimes because it was explicitly addressed, but more often because it was not. There were ample case studies that focused on source materials, while the methodology, approach, and conclusions were not always clear. Moreover, the relevance of the approach to the broader research field, research agendas, other disciplines, or to present day planning practices was scarce. Here, we will discuss a selection of some relevant sessions, focusing first on the extent to which urban history was being reinterpreted, and second, on their relevance for the field of planning history.
Reinterpreting urban history
When looking at the relevance of urban history for society, one of the important concerns (that was also raised in Lisbon two years ago) was the issue of communication, both to the larger public and to other disciplines and professions. These issues have become increasingly important, for example, in the context of bottom-up planning initiatives. The session ‘The City on Display. How to Interpret and Share Urban History’, organized by Rosa Tamborrino (Politecnico di Torrino) and Minna Sarantola-Weiss (Helsinki City Museum) explicitly addressed this issue of communication. Implicitly relating to Prak’s focus on increasing the social relevance of urban history, the aim of the session was to show innovative approaches to improve the access to the work developed in this field for a more general audience. Approaches from different disciplines, like semantic modelling and storytelling, but also the use of technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality, might make it possible to bring the relevance of urban history beyond heritage practices or the museum environment. The session on ‘Writing Urban History Today’, organized by Peter Olausson (University of Karlstad) and Christer Ahlberger (University of Gothenburg), also addressed both the question of theory in the field, and the relationship between urban historians and heritage professionals.
That new digital approaches can also be used for a deeper or different understanding of sources was addressed in the session ‘Digital Cities: a New Paradigm for Urban Historical Research’, in which new digital tools were described as a new paradigm or a new way to read and represent the city. While some of the papers stopped at describing the process of digitization to make sources accessible to other scholars, others have gone beyond the concept of sharing, trying to use and promote the digital tool as a way to read and highlight the existing intangible relationships in cities. New methodological approaches were also the topic of the session ‘Reinterpreting Space and Spatial Relationships’, organized by Richard Rodger (University of Edinburgh) and Susanne Rau (University of Erfurt). The focus was the idea of using new digital tools to study the city ‘as a space of relationships’ and how new modes of analysis help us understand and reinterpret these relationships. Justin Colson (University of Essex) in his paper entitled ‘Mapping Personal Relationships in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City of London’ stressed the need and the importance of mapping social relations, using GIS analysis and social network analysis. Through the analysis of property deeds and registry of house numbers, Colson proposed a reinterpretation of these data and thus of social relationships in a spatial dimension. The paper of Keti Lelo, Giuseppe Stemperini, and Carlo Maria (Roma Tre University) showed how building a GIS database opens up new possibilities for more interdisciplinary ways of studying urban history, and how it allows data to be used for future research. Being part of the research project ‘The Historical Atlas of modern Rome’, their reinterpretation of nineteenth-century documents and cadastral maps of Rome draws new spatial relationships and connects their research to a broader public. A similar effort was made by Gergely Baics (Barnard College, Columbia University), who uses the New York Public Library Map Division's digitized version of the landmark Perris Fire Insurance Atlas of 1852–1854 to map the extent of residential segregation nineteenth-century New York City. While the question remains whether the results of these ways of processing data are as innovative as the methods themselves, it is without a doubt good for the relevance of the field and its connections to other disciplines to keep connecting old sources to new methods and research agendas.
Reinterpreting urban culture
In this session, despite the complexity of providing innovative approaches to planning and urban history, we found plenty of ways of reinterpreting the city. The session ‘Culture and Cities: Cities as Agents of Urban Cultural Development Since the 1920s’ (Lars Nilsson and Mads Berglund, Institute of Urban History, Stockholm) examined the relationship of culture and urban development, and how the inclusion of, for example, cultural events can work as a catalyst of urban regeneration and interventions. In her paper on the 1951 Festival of Britain in Liverpool, Caterina Benincasa-Sherman (University of Huddersfield) explained how this initiative boosted urban regeneration after the Second World War. She focused on how citizens relate to culture, even in dramatic situations, and the role culture can play to recover the ‘spirit’ of a city heavily damaged by war. Another way of using urban culture was presented by Kivanc Kilinc (Yasar University) and Duygu Kaçar (Eskisehir Osmangazi University). Using Eskişehir's riverfront as a case study, they described how the landscape, in particular the Porsuk river, played an important role in the definition of an image and idea of the city from a cultural and social perspective. In recent years, however, this image has been intertwined and superimposed with a different image promoted by the local authorities producing a ‘commodification of the landscape’.
This commodification of culture and the built environment was also addressed in the sessions on town halls, organized by Christoph Strupp (Forschungsstelle fur Zeigeschichte) and Malte Thiessen (Carl von Ossietzky University), and pre-planned model cities, organized by Gabor Sonkoly (Eötvös Loránd University) and Rosemary Wakeman (Fordham University). The design and changing meanings of town halls and town squares show that culture, heritage, and identity are important shapers of space, but also signifiers of changing uses of space. While the Rathausplatz in Hamburg, for example, is rented out for big commercial events, the Marienplatz in München still has an important political (demonstrations) and sociocultural meaning (football celebrations). On the other hand, large-scale planning in, for example, Cancún and Dubai shows how culture is increasingly being used as a tourist attraction. This does not only hold consequences for the built environment, but also for the creation of the ‘ideal user’, which can eventually lead to alienation of citizens from their own city or downright segregation.
How urban culture and its connection to the built environment are used as a governance strategy was also an important theme in the session on European Seaport Cultures, organized by Carola Hein (Delft University of Technology) and Dirk Schubert (HafenCity University Hamburg). This extensive session built on earlier discussions on port cultures, for example, the sessions and the round table discussion during the last IPHS Conference in Delft in 2016 and the discussions about transcultural change in Atlantic port cities during the EAUH Conference in Lisbon in 2014.
Most of the existing scholarship on ports has focused mainly on the technical and economic issues of the port as a functional machine, separate from city dynamics. For this reason, it is important, nowadays, to talk about the cultural aspects or even the ‘soft values’ of the port. In this stage, however, the discussion is still dominated by questions: are there images or representations that help us to spell out this cultural identity? Furthermore, what do we exactly mean by culture of the ports and is it possible to distinguish between the regenerations in port cities and developments in other deindustrialized cities?
It is undeniable that the port still is a source of inspiration, stemming from a distinct labour culture (dockworkers), merchant elites, and specific economic and infrastructural traits. This ‘port city identity’ was explored in diverse practices, ranging from European cultural capital celebrations to present-day waterfront regenerations. Considering the importance of waterfront regenerations in the last three decades, it is crucial to take an interdisciplinary approach. For planning teams working on ports and port cities, often mainly formed by engineers, urban history could have a role regarding the discussion about the city's identity, forcing to look beyond port functions and, furthermore, consider the city as part of the port-city landscape. In conclusion, the session stressed the need for deeper explorations from different perspectives, especially questioning the image that we have of port and city, which agents promote or hinder the image of the city and port as part of the same landscape, and finally, why it is so important to integrate the port, once again, in urban dynamics.
A large number of interesting papers on Eastern and Southern Europe addressed the issue of reinterpretation in urban culture. The session on the concept of ‘Emerging Cities’ – organized by Heidi Hein-Kircher (Herder Institute for Historical Research) and Oliver Hochadel (Institució Milà I Fontanals) – in Eastern and Southern Europe addressed how these places adapted to western knowledge. Because European urban history is in the midst of integrating the Eastern European urban experience into broader scholarship, this could be an interesting line of inquiry. Moreover, it considers how this changes traditional theories about urban development and regional imaginaries, and how we reinterpret cities in general.
Reinterpreting urban agency
Whom are cities and neighbourhoods built for, who are the ideal, imagined citizens, what are the narratives that are being used to sell new developments, and whom are they directed at? This session, like many, also raised the question which agents urban historians study, and whom they work for. A recurring theme this year was Henry Lefebvre’s adage of the right to the city. This was illustrated by an increasing attention for outlaws, expulsion, segregation, and even social cleansing. Moreover, there seemed to be a recurring attention to Actor Network Theory in using material goods as actors, with examples like meat, photographs, or indeed, Chattopadyay’s pantry as ‘new actors’.
The session ‘Out! Expulsions and Removals from Urban Communities from the Middle Ages to the Present’ addressed this theme perhaps in the most explicit way. Organizers Hilde Greefs (University of Antwerp) and Anne Winter (Free University of Brussels) brought together papers across time and space. New methodologies were used to also illustrate the spatial component of exclusion through mapping, for example, by Torsten Feys (Free University of Brussels). One of the most critical approaches to post-war planning practices came from Stefan Couperus (University of Groningen) in his paper on social exclusion after bombings during the Second World War, showing how governments created ideal types of citizens who were allowed to live in the new cities.
On a smaller scale, a surprising approach to the question of who owns the city was given in a session on outdoor spaces for children, organized by Catharina Nolin (Stockholm University, Sweden) and Åsa Klintborg Ahlklo (Swedish University of Agricultural Science). The session addressed the different kinds of actors involved in childhood spaces (governments and architects, mothers and children, but also gym teachers and other caretakers). The paper on childhood spaces in Lisbon during the Estado Novo not only gave a perspective on the position of the child and the representation of urban space during a dictatorial regime, but also addressed the decreasing space for children in present-day redevelopments in inner cities. The paper on playgrounds in post-war high-rise estates in Glasgow also raised interesting methodological questions: how should we define ‘play’ and how do positive memories of now-adults relate to criticism in the 1970s? Furthermore, it addressed the tension between formal and informal spaces, stressing the importance of risk and dirt in childhood play. This session proved that not only the major sessions addressed some of the key issues of the conference, but that a specialist session could also perfectly capture some of the big challenges of urban historians today.
Reinterpreting the post-war
Although urban history traditionally focuses more on the pre-and early modern period than, for example, planning history, the post-war period seemed to gain importance in urban historical research. While the session on post-war reconstruction consisted of a quite traditional set of case studies, a few interesting ideas and approaches came to the fore. Tim Verlaan (University of Amsterdam) discussed the role of construction companies in urban planning, stressing the technocratic, corporatist approach to the 1970s’ megastructure of Hoog Catharijne in Utrecht, the Netherlands. With this focus, he almost ruled out the exceptionalist role architects and planners often get in the discourse on post-war planning. Some questions arose from the session as a whole with regard to the innovativeness and the transnationality of the discipline. Should urban historians (or planning historians) be looking at transnational exchange of ideas or also, for example, to the transnational flows of building materials (literally making the research more concrete)? To what extent is the discipline able to formulate a theoretical framework on post-war urban planning? One of the commenters suggested such a theory should be about the accumulation of wealth rather than a constant reinterpretation of design ideas.
Conclusion
The conference offered a wide range of approaches to reinterpretation, ranging from innovative methods, new sources, new ways of communicating, and new agents. However, some issues that have been raised in previous conferences of the EAUH and, for example, the IPHS, remain still problematic. In an age where the interweaving of disciplines has become really important to understand and reinterpret the complexity of urban transformations, the identification of new approaches, and the way in which they can help in understanding cities, has become increasingly important. In this context, the conference offered new perspectives on old questions, and these new perspectives deserve follow-up in next conferences. The planning historians among the urban historians, with their more explicit link to planning practices, can have an important role in fulfilling the development towards a more flexible and alternative urban or planning history that is more focused on processes than on results. The theme of the 2017 conference of the Society for American City & Regional Planning History (SACRPH), which is “Theory and Practice in Planning History”, is promising in this respect.
This connects to the ideas of André Corboz, who imagined territories as an immense palimpsest.Footnote1 Urban historians deal with a territory that has been repeatedly written and re-written. Sometimes, these modifications were planned; in other cases, they developed according to spontaneous logic. However, the city is not only an archive of documents, it is rather an inventory of possible actions. There is a need to use what is available, what already ‘has been written’, thus transforming problems to opportunities. Historians and urban planners are important actors in this palimpsest, working in the ‘interstices’, in the ‘fragments’, on new re-combinations and hybrids. They rank among the study of the past and the imagination of a possible future.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Paul van de Laar (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and José Manuel Pagés Sánchez (HafenCity University, Hamburg) for contributing to this report. Furthermore, we thank the three anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve and clarify this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Reinhilde Sennema studied the history of architecture and urban planning at the University of Groningen. As an independent researcher, she broadened her scope to urban history and specialized in the role of entrepreneurs in post-war urban developments. In 2015, she started her PhD research at the history department of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she analyses the economic, social and cultural dimensions of the post-war reconstruction of Rotterdam and Liverpool as port cities.
Paolo De Martino graduated in architecture at the University of Naples Federico II (DiARC) in 2008. He has over six years of professional experience in Italy working on new building and interior design. He is now pursuing his PhD at the Technical University in Delft at the department of architecture. He studies the issue of port cities, through a critical reflection and comparison between the Netherlands and Italy, with particular reference to the cities of Rotterdam and Naples.
Notes
1 Corboz, “Il Territorio Come Palinsesto.”
Bibliography
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