This special issue is devoted to ‘Infrastructural Europeanism, or the Project of Building Europe on Infrastructures,’ its concept and contents organized by Frank Schipper and Johan Schot. Many readers will recognize this research as the product of Tensions of Europe, a collaborative, transnational scholarly project that has been at work for more than a decade.Footnote 1 In 2005, this journal shared some of the first fruits of this research effort in a special issue, entitled ‘Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe.’Footnote 2 This attention to the project through a period of years reflects the historiographic importance of its two principal aims, inextricably linked: to re-think European history through the lens of technology and to highlight the significance of infrastructure as a defining aspect of historical experience in the last two centuries. In combination, these two aims speak not just to history of technology as a discipline, but to the broader historical community and strategies of explanation. The Introduction by Schipper and Schot gives a detailed reconnaissance of these historiographic concerns, and is followed by a series of case studies of prominent types of infrastructure.
The theme of infrastructure continues in this issue’s Images, Technology, and History feature. Peter Soppelsa examines the role of images in the politics of the Paris Metro during the 1880s, when design and policy were in negotiation, and Max Hirsh, from the perspective of an urban studies scholar, takes on the use of images in shaping perceptions of local and global for different social groups in what he calls ‘airport cities,’ with Hong Kong’s International Airport as primary example.
Notes
1. For background on and the conceptual orientation of the project see: http://www.tensionsofeurope.eu/www/network
2. History and Technology 21, no. 1 (2005).