EAUH Conference 2026
«City Networks in Europe and Beyond»
EAUH2026 Sessions
Please note that actual rooms are still to be confirmed and minor schedule changes may occur
Session 1 - The Cities that made the Empire: Connectivity and Urban Networks from Late Republican to Imperial Times
This session explores the role of urban networks in consolidating Roman hegemony from the Late Republic to the 2nd century AD. It assesses how Rome integrated, altered, or dismantled the various types of ties between city networks to strengthen control, highlighting the mechanisms that shaped urban connectivity within and beyond the Empire.
Coordinators: Noelia Cases Mora, Borja Martín Chacón, Sabine Panzram
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Coordinators: Noelia Cases Mora, Borja Martín Chacón, Sabine Panzram
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Session 1 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Mobility and social promotion in the Roman city of Aeso (Isona, Pallars Jussà, Catalonia)
Ignasi Garces Estallo, Borja Martín Chacón
abstractIgnasi Garces Estallo, Borja Martín Chacón
Aeso (Isona, Pallars Jussà, Catalonia) was one of the many small Roman towns located in Hispania. Founded in the Republican era and preceded by an earlier indigenous settlement, its inland position might suggest a community that lived largely in isolation; however, nothing could be further from the truth. The remarkable epigraphic evidence preserved for the 1st and 2nd centuries AD reveals significant geographical mobility and active social promotion among its elites.
This contribution reviews and re-examines several aspects: the geographical origins of certain members of the community with outstanding cognomina (e.g. Celtibero; Numantina), the notable frequency with which women’s inscriptions record their place of origin, the existence of collegia and their activities beyond the local sphere, and, finally, the relationships maintained by the inhabitants of Aeso with the elites of other cities. Although these four topics are already known, the paper proposes new interpretations and offers a comprehensive view of Aeso’s external relationships, allowing comparison with the dynamics observed in neighbouring urban centres.
Connecting cities from inside: work-related mobility between (and within) Roman cities from Iberia
Arnau Lario Devesa
abstractArnau Lario Devesa
In Roman Hispania, as in many other regions of the empire, finding (and keeping) steady employment was not an easy task, particularly for members of the non-elite classes. Although overly simplistic interpretive models (such as the “consumer city” theory) have largely been discarded, the fact remains that urban productive output in services and manufactured goods was often limited. This limitation was visible in cities that lacked an “industrial” specialization based on local natural resources or a dominant artisanal tradition.
As a result, for a sizable portion of the urban lower and middle classes, access to work did not necessarily guarantee subsistence. The irregularity of demand for many goods and services meant that employment could be unstable, and earnings unpredictable. In response to this, occupational mobility became a crucial strategy for survival. Craftspeople, professionals, and service providers often had to travel (either seasonally or regularly) to reach a sufficient and stable clientele. This mobility could take the form of movement within a city, between urban centres, or even into the surrounding rural hinterlands.
This paper examines the economic and social role of these mobile workers in the broader context of Roman urbanism, focusing on how their movements contributed to the development of the city as a functional link between rural areas (spaces of agricultural production) and major urban centres of regional and provincial power (spaces of “industrial” transformation, administration, and trade). Epigraphic evidence relating to teachers, artists, doctors, potters, masons, metalworkers, and other skilled labourers will illustrate how individual workers participated in and shaped the urban economy, as well as how they articulated their social networks with several local communities. Additionally, an examination of the archaeological record will highlight the “ephemeral” yet crucial role played by itinerant manual labourers (particularly those in the construction sector) in shaping the physical layout of Roman cities. These workers were especially important in the building of public structures, which often served as displays of civic generosity intended to rival similar projects in neighbouring cities.
In sum, these professionals’ mobility played a key role, alongside politics, trade and religion, in articulating a dynamic framework of regional urban connectivity that helped sustain economic and social cohesion across Roman Hispania.
« City, town, and port society: the case of Narbo Martius ».
Maria Luisa Bonsangue
abstractMaria Luisa Bonsangue
« City, town, and port society: the case of Narbo Martius ».
In the 1st century AD, the poet Martial celebrated Narbonne as “pulcherrima Narbo” (Mart., Epigr. 8, 72). Indeed, the monumental adornment of the first Roman city in Gaul, which was also the capital of one of the richest provinces of the Empire, must have been sumptuous and elegant. The large Carrara marble temple that stood in the heart of the forum, the provincial sanctuary dedicated to the imperial cult, with its imposing amphitheater, undoubtedly caught the eye of visitors. However, this city, the seat of Roman power in the province and the place where the emperor and members of the imperial and provincial aristocracy (proconsuls, flamines, etc.) were received, also played the role of a major port in the Roman Mediterranean. According to Strabo, Narbonne was “the port of the whole of Celtic Gaul” in the Augustan period. The mosaic in the Place des Corporations in Ostia, dating from the 2nd century AD, shows the nauicularii Narbonenses among the provincial personnel involved in supplying Rome. The port of Narbonne initially prospered thanks to the import of Italian wine in exchange for metals and slaves, then, during the Empire, thanks to trade in Hispanic products and the Mediterranean export of local wine, metals, and ceramics. Recently unearthed archaeological remains show a complex fluvial-maritime port system that attempted to adapt to various environmental constraints. In this context, it is legitimate to ask to what extent the city's port activity shaped local society. Did the port's influence on municipal society have a greater impact than that exerted by the colony's political or administrative dimension? To attempt to answer this question, we will draw on a particularly rich collection of epigraphic documentation (1,200 inscriptions, supplemented by recent discoveries). This data allows us to identify the links between the different groups of local society and the port world: the civic elite and the merchant elite; the plebs and port professionals; the possibilities for social advancement at different levels and the resulting stratification. We will attempt to broaden the perspective by studying the commercial actors from outside the port who were attracted by its dynamism and business environment. This port was not only a place for the transit of goods, but also engaged in redistribution trade on a regional scale, using its storage capacities.
Session 1 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
From Peer-Polity to Imperial Interactions: Sicilian Diplomatic Connectivity under Rome
Alfredo Tosques
abstractAlfredo Tosques
Roman Sicily has long been read as a province in decline, its civic life effaced by Roman power. Drawing on the epigraphic record rather than the literary tradition of the Verrines and Diodorus, this paper asks instead what strategies Sicilian communities used to negotiate their position.
The evidence is examined along two axes. Vertically, proxeny is progressively refunctioned into an instrument for managing relations with Rome. From the grant made by Entella to the praefectus Tiberius Claudius during the First Punic War to the late-Republican tablets recovered from a Roman house, Sicilian poleis use a familiar civic idiom to redescribe manifestly asymmetrical bonds and to write Roman officeholders into roles carrying obligations of their own. Horizontally, intercity ties all but vanish from the record until the Augustan age, when Mediterranean connections resurface in a different register: mediated by veterans and administrators rather than civic elites, increasingly westward-facing, and expressed in Latin as well as Greek.
A Network of Ceremonial Cities: The Cases of Tarraco and Athens in the Age of Hadrian
Carmen Alarcón-Hernández, Manuel Ruiz-Román
abstractCarmen Alarcón-Hernández, Manuel Ruiz-Román
A Network of Ceremonial Cities: The Cases of Tarraco and Athens in the Age of Hadrian
Carmen Alarcón Hernández (University of Seville)
Manuel Ruiz Román (Pablo de Olavide University)
Cities across the Roman Empire shared in the phenomenon of celebrating imperial power. Dialogue, cooperation, interconnection, and competition among them accelerated the development of the so-called “imperial cult” and, consequently, the consolidation of the authority of the domus imperatoria throughout the Mediterranean. Even so, the cult always adapted to regional specificities, promoting different narratives concerning the divinity of the imperial family according to the heritage and cultural particularities—the micro-identities—of provincial communities. In any case, the phenomenon of the imperial cult reveals the inter-city connections shaped by the geographical mobility both of the personnel involved in its celebration—flamines/flaminicae, priests, agonothetai, etc.—and of those who attended these festivals from different urban centres. Likewise, the presence and agency of the emperor in certain cities stimulated the development of the cult organised around his person and his domus. In particular, the presence and actions of Hadrian in many of these cities consolidated a model of urban centre in which the celebration of imperial power became especially prominent.
The aim of this paper is to analyse Hadrian’s role in shaping a network of ceremonial cities—including Italica, Tarraco, Athens, Ephesus, Pergamum, and Jerusalem—that structured a significant part of the Empire’s religious life. The cases of Tarraco and Athens are examined in detail: cities on opposite sides of the Mare Nostrum that not only benefited from the emperor’s presence and patronage in their transformation into ceremonial centres, but also from the actions of their civic elites—interconnected with other cities—which played a decisive role in turning them into focal points for the celebration of imperial power. Although displaying certain shared features, the celebration of imperial power manifested itself heterogeneously across this network of ceremonial cities, as the cases of Tarraco and Athens demonstrate, particularly through their specific sacred topographies, which shaped each community’s religious experience of the emperor’s sacrality.
Homonoia coinage and inter-city connectivity in Roman Asia Minor
Tom Gavin
abstractTom Gavin
The cities of Roman Asia Minor are often noted in scholarship as being particularly well evidenced in comparison to other provincial regions. As well as the literary works of orators such as Dio Chrysostom, the record of public inscriptions, and the archaeology of cityscapes, the region exhibits clear vitality in its coinage issues. Indeed, one group of coin types that has drawn particular scholarly attention was almost entirely geographically isolated to Asia Minor: the so called ‘homonoia issues’. These coins, minted from the first to the third centuries CE by the Greek poleis of Asia Minor and Thrace, commemorated favourable relations between cities, most often represented by the image of two local deities clasping hands, glossed by the legend homonoia (‘concord’). Scholarship has traditionally focused on identifying the circumstances behind individual issues, citing a variety of political, social, economic, and religious reasons dependent on local contexts. However, relatively little has been offered on the phenomenon as a whole: why homonoia issues emerged when they did, where they did, what value the commemoration of concord had for the minting city, and what evidence the practice in toto provides for provincial networks.
In this paper, I argue that homonoia issues are not only vital evidence for specific relationships between cities in the Roman East but also attest to a political environment in which diplomatic and social links between communities were of great importance for navigating provincial politics and asserting civic prestige. This serves to nuance characterisations of the diplomatic landscape of the Roman Empire. While vertical links between the imperial centre and provincial communities were of course of great importance, the evidence of homonoia issues indicates that networks of peer relations continued to remain relevant in the Roman imperial period. By interpreting the phenomenon holistically in light of other evidence for inter-city concord, I show that the formation and promotion of inter-city connectivity served crucial functions for both negotiating with Roman authorities and mediating relations between provincial communities.
Session 2 - Transportation Networks and Urban Organisation in the Roman Empire: Analysing the backbones of Rome
The Roman Empire was a vast pancontinental territory configured around network of cities. However, the creation, subsistence, and evolution of these population centres depended on a complex transportation network. This session will be focused on this transportation infrastructure and how it affected urban development in the Roman world.
Coordinators: Pau De Soto, Clara Filet, Adam Pažout
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Coordinators: Pau De Soto, Clara Filet, Adam Pažout
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Session 2 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Modelling Roman Connectivity: Coast–Hinterland Corridors in Western Baetica
Mª Del Mar Castro García, David Laguna-Palma
abstractMª Del Mar Castro García, David Laguna-Palma
This paper examines the coastal–interior connectivity linking the Strait of Gibraltar—Sierra de Cádiz and Ronda territory during the Roman period. We test the hypothesis that Roman coastal sites and upland centres formed a complex system in which maritime access and overland corridors co-determined settlement patterns and the trajectories of urban enclaves. To evaluate this, we develop a reproducible GIS workflow that combines documented Roman centres with Least-Cost Path (LCP) modelling and Focal Mobility Network (FMN) analysis. First, the LCP model produces a path-density raster that highlights least-cost routes and convergence nodes. Second, the FMN analysis identifies natural pathways that likely channelled past movement trajectories across the entire landscape. Together, these corridors and routes represent areas of preferential mobility and accessibility, offering the least resistance to movement as determined by a cumulative analysis of cost surfaces. By integrating a range of variables, the models highlight the interplay between topography, hydrography and human agency in determining connectivity between urban areas. The raster-based outputs illustrate the spatial configuration of the network, revealing high-potential corridors that align with documented routes and suggesting new areas of interest for further archaeological research.
Diachronic study of the Segre valley between roman and medieval periods: the case of the Strata Ceretana as the axis of Pyrenean circulation
Álvaro Auir, Catalina Mas, Pau de Soto
abstractÁlvaro Auir, Catalina Mas, Pau de Soto
In mountain contexts such as the Pyrenees, where topography and frontier control were key factors in shaping settlement and exchange, roads played a crucial role in connecting local and transregional economies. Within this framework, the Strata Ceretana emerges as a strategic communication corridor linking the Pyrenean pass near Iulia Lybica (Llívia) with Ilerda (Lleida), traversing the Segre valley and articulating the historical territory of the Ceretani. Although its existence is documented by archaeological and literary references, the precise route and long-term evolution of the road remain uncertain.
This research introduces a diachronic and landscape-based approach to the study of the Strata Ceretana, aiming to reassess its trajectory and its integration into the broader Pyrenean and Mediterranean networks. By combining archaeological and topographic data with spatial modelling, the study applies Least-Cost Path (LCP) analysis and Circuit Theory (CT) modelling as a methodological framework for reconstructing and interpreting the possible course of the road between roman and medieval periods. The use of this Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tools allows for the identification of the most plausible corridors of movement in relation to slope, hydrology and settlement distribution, generating a spatial hypothesis to be tested through future fieldwork.
Rather than proposing a definitive map, the work demonstrates how GIS-based landscape analysis can serve as a heuristic tool for understanding ancient mobility in hilly routes. It addresses the Strata Ceretana not as an isolated road but as part of a dynamic communication system that structured economic exchange, military logistics and territorial control across the Pyrenean frontier. The methodological framework integrates archaeological evidence – including settlement patterns, bridge remains or even a roman milestone – with environmental variables to explore how geography conditioned circulation and connectivity between Hispania and Gaul. By situating the Strata Ceretana within broader discussions on Roman infrastructure and post-roman continuity, this research highlights the resilience of mountain communication networks, their capacity to adapt over time and their impact in the urban development. Ultimately, it argues for the importance of integrating spatial technologies and archaeology to reconstruct the backbones of mobility that underpinned the organization of mountainous landscapes.
An Economy under the Sea: Commercial Networks along the European Atlantic façade during the Late Roman Empire
Álvaro de Balbín-Bueno
abstractÁlvaro de Balbín-Bueno
The creation, subsistence, and evolution of the Roman economy was necessarily linked to its relationship with maritime transportation networks across the Mediterranean and the European Atlantic Ocean. Despite the demonstrable relevance of the Mare Externum in producing prestige goods (from daily used metals to gold) and salted fish manufactures, amongst other probably exchanged merchandise, the Atlantic façade does not appear as frequently as it should in classic discussions on the infrastructure of the Roman Empire. This paper aims to update current perspectives about the role of the Atlantic within the Roman economy by synthesising the latest archaeological evidence about shipwrecks, and coastal and port settlements beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. Likewise, the idea of these territories conforming a marginal side of the main Empire’s network will be discussed in depth. The documented magnitude of nodes with Roman chronologies on the western coasts of Iberia, Gaul and the British Isles, is enough of an argument to start highlighting relevant hubs and dynamics within a complex and entangled network. Furthermore, this landscape is progressively proving to be independent to the Mediterranean Roman economy, or, at least, sufficiently coherent within itself to avoid interpreting it as a subsidiary of the Mediterranean circuits after the expansion of the Empire in the 1st c. AD. More interestingly, this may be the case too for the Late Empire and the transition into Late Antiquity beyond the 4th c. AD.
Going Through Changes: The role of seasonal changes to mobility in patterns of Roman urbanism
Hèctor Orengo Romeu, Andrew Mclean
abstractHèctor Orengo Romeu, Andrew Mclean
Movement and mobility are key to human development and to our understanding of past human interactions. Mobility, particularly on a large continental scale, facilitated trade, cultural co-evolution, dispersion and migration and the diffusion of technologies and social developments such as urbanism. However, direct evidence for movement is rare and difficult to interpret. As such, determining the exact way past societies were connected often requires proxies and/or novel approaches to understanding the routes and costs associated with traversing them.
Developments in quantitative computational approaches in archaeology have allowed for the creation of highly nuanced models for understanding much of the complexity of the ancient world, including mobility and urbanism in past societies. However, few models consider the seasonal changes inherent in mobility. Of course, maritime travel is significantly impacted by seasonal changes, as is reflected in most studies assessing ancient maritime movement. However, the role of seasonal changes for terrestrial movement is often overlooked in comparison. While the impact of these changes on terrestrial mobility might not be as acute as with maritime mobility, this paper shows that there are observable changes to the lowest cost routes across the Empire depending on the prevailing seasonal conditions, notably observed in the patterns of urbanism.
In this paper, we utilise a novel cost surface creation, with dynamic temporal factors based on seasonal conditions, and use these to create cost corridors across the expanse of the Roman Empire. This landscape of mobility provides quantified values for potential mobility that change with the seasons. The database of urban centres is then used to assess how different cities of the Empire compare to one another in terms of this seasonal mobility. All of this shows clearly that mobility had an undeniably important role in Roman urbanism. Furthermore, we show that the relative values of potential mobility change quite notably between seasons. Ultimately, this paper seeks to better understand the role of mobility in Roman urbanism, with a novel focus on the seasonal changes for terrestrial mobility. We show that these seasonal changes in cost for terrestrial movement may have been far more important than previously assumed.
Session 3 - Between Institutions and Geography: Cities as Hubs of Medieval and Early Modern River Transport and Trade
This session explores how the geography of rivers interacted with urban governance and institutions in medieval and early modern commerce. Focusing on cooperation, competition, and legal exchange it highlights rivers as arenas of multi-level governance and invites global case studies on urban roles in riverine commercial systems.
Coordinators: Maurits Den Hollander, Bart Holterman, Cornelis Marinus (marco) In 'T Veld
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Coordinators: Maurits Den Hollander, Bart Holterman, Cornelis Marinus (marco) In 'T Veld
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Session 3 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Rivers as transit routes in northern Portugal between the 13th and 14th centuries
Rúben Filipe Teixeira Da Conceição
abstractRúben Filipe Teixeira Da Conceição
Rivers played a vital role in the formation of the Kingdom of Portugal, at first acting as a defensive barrier against the Muslim powers in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, until the conquest of the Algarve in 1249. But they also served as a barrier against the neighbouring Christian kingdoms to the north and east, with the border only stabilising with the signing of the Treaty of Alcanizes in 1297 between King Dinis of Portugal and Maria de Molina, the regent Queen of Castile and León.
But even in more politically turbulent times, rivers played an important role in establishing communications between the coast and the hinterland, taking on the vital role of enabling the transport of people, goods and commodities in greater quantities and at greater speed when compared to land transport. Rivers such as the Minho, Cávado and Douro gained greater economic importance, connecting the towns of the interior of the Kingdom - which throughout the 13th and 14th centuries received fair charters, with the aim of boosting the economy of the Kingdom, but also the commercial relations with Castile - to the seaports on the coast, which benefited from royal intervention throughout the 13th and 14th centuries to become part of international trade routes.
With this in mind, this paper seeks to explore the role of rivers in the relationship between these different spaces, but also the intervention of the various powers – led by the Portuguese Crown, but also the religious powers, especially the Bishop of Porto – in managing these dynamics, particularly regarding the legislation. At the same time, we aim to compare, as far as possible, the land routes with the river navigation, both in terms of travel times and the associated costs.
“Blessed inhabitants of the Rhine”. Cologne’s Merchants, the Wine School, and the Regulation of the Staple
Ester Zoomer
abstractEster Zoomer
With Cologne’s highly advantageous location on the Rhine, the city managed to maintain a strong position within the urban networks connected to the river trade. Most notably, Cologne was a mandatory stop for merchants and skippers transporting Rhenish wine to the markets of, among others, the markets of Dordrecht, Antwerp, and Bruges. Through its highest supervisory institution and authority for the urban wine trade and wine sales in the city, the so-called Wine School (Weinschule), Cologne regulated its staple through strict market controls and toll systems. Cologne’s involvement in the wine trade was closely tied to the Middle Rhine and Moselle regions, which were famous for producing high-quality wines. The city’s merchants kept close ties to the nearby towns and vineyards along the Rhine, via a trade network that consisted mainly of close-knit family and friends. These mercantile networks similarly expanded themselves through the urban institutions. For instance, Cologne’s urban council was dominated by members of prominent merchant families.
In this paper, Cologne’s Rhenish wine trade network and the urban institutions closely tied to its interests will be the main focus. How did the urban authorities (such as the city council and the Wine School) and the merchants – two groups that often involved the same individuals holding different positions within the city or people who were closely related to each other through family ties or partnerships – regulate the Rhenish wine staple rules? In what way did Cologne’s institutional actors and merchants implement urban networks along the Rhine? The river was both a means of transport and travel as well as a strong geographical claim to economic dominance in the Rhine trade. And, finally, how did they balance cooperation and rivalry with other towns and institutions along the Rhine, for the common good of Cologne?
Cooperation and Conflict over Waterways in the County of Flanders, 1588-1700
Brent Lievens
abstractBrent Lievens
Waterways were essential to transport, trade, and economic integration in the early modern County of Flanders. Because the construction and maintenance of canals required resources beyond the capacity of individual towns, urban authorities were compelled to cooperate, for example through provincial institutions such as the Estates of Flanders. Yet such cooperation was frequently accompanied by conflict, as cities sought to defend their own economic interests, and influence provincial policy. This paper examines how cooperation and conflict over waterways developed in seventeenth-century Flanders, with particulier attention to the unequal distribution of political power among cities.
Drawing primarily on the archives of the Deputation of the Estates of Flanders, including resolutions, correspondence, and petitions, the paper analyses two case studies. The first explores the construction of the Ghent-Bruges canal in the early seventeenth century and the tensions it generated with Ypres. Although Ghent and Bruges had long opposed one another on canal projects, changing political and economic circumstances, particularly the disruption of access to maritime routes during the Dutch Revolt, encouraged closer cooperation between them. Ypres, however, feared economic marginalisation and resisted contributing to a project from which it expected no benefits. By exploiting its position within the Estates of Flanders and challenging the consensus on which provincial governance often depended, Ypres succeeded in securing funding for its own canal connection to the sea. The case demonstrates how formal representation within provincial institutions could be used to influence infrastructure policy.
The second case study focuses on Ostend, the county’s principal seaport after the loss of Dunkirk. Unlike Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, Ostend possessed no voting rights in the Estates. Nevertheless, it exercised influence through its strategic geographical position together with its military governor. Disputes during the 1670s and 1680s concerning navigation rights, a provincial sluice, and the obligation of ships to unload cargo in Ostend reveal how the port city sought to defend its commercial interests against the cities represented in the Estates. In response, the Estates portrayed themselves as representatives of the common good of the province, while Ostend emphasized its indispensable role in maritime commerce.
Invitation along the River: Visual Rhetoric and Urban Anticipation on an Early-1730s Canton–London Plate
Xiaomin Jin, Jiang Feng, Wenwen Xiu
abstractXiaomin Jin, Jiang Feng, Wenwen Xiu
The rim vignettes on an early-1730s Chinese export porcelain plate juxtapose the Pearl River at Canton (Guangzhou) and the Thames at London, rendering the object a persuasive medium that stages contrasting urban futures. Far from indexing reciprocal pictorial influence between Britain and China, the object casts Canton as a site of latent potential and London as a fully realized metropolitan model, an asymmetry that operates as a visual summons to commercial action. The Pearl River vignette records a pre-Thirteen-Factories shoreline of low, scattered waterfront stores and open, village-like lots, producing an image of an underdeveloped riverine landscape; the Thames view, by contrast, emphasizes metropolitan signifiers—densely packed riverside buildings and a prominently domed St Paul’s—presenting an intensified, organized urbanity. This deliberate juxtaposition generates a persuasive logic in which London’s consolidated commercial form becomes a template for imagining Canton’s future development. The plate thus operates less as topographical reportage than as a portable projection—a material prompt encouraging English merchants and investors to conceive the Pearl River as a tract for transformation. Fine-grained visual analysis of enamel linework and compositional strategies is combined with archival research into merchant correspondence, Canton porcelain pattern circulation, and production records. Tracing the adaptation of European engravings and printed views, sent to Canton as templates, to ceramic formats reveals how Canton painters simplified or emphasized elements to serve strategic purposes rather than strict topographical accuracy. Comparative readings with later Canton export paintings and Thirteen-Factories period images demonstrate how this plate offers an alternative face of the river city—one foregrounding promise and malleability rather than dense urbanization. Small decorative objects are treated as active instruments within commercial imaginaries: circulated in domestic and mercantile display contexts, the plate could function as a spur to investment, a visual prospectus for urban development, and a mnemonic device that normalized transoceanic ambitions. Foregrounding the plate’s role in shaping expectations about urban form and commercial opportunity repositions material culture as a generative component of early modern urbanization processes.
Session 4 - Mediterranean and Baltic Medieval Merchant and Urban Networks in contrast
Mediterranean-Baltic interconnection was one of the major achievements of medieval maritime trade, and contributed to the articulation of European markets. By promoting a compared reflection on the characteristics and evolution of merchant and urban networks in both spaces, this session focuses on the process that led to their final integration
Coordinators: Roser Salicrú i Lluch, Tobias Boestad, Louis Sicking
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Coordinators: Roser Salicrú i Lluch, Tobias Boestad, Louis Sicking
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Session 4 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 1 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
The 'recesse' of the Hanse: documentary production and urban networking (1360-1450)
Tobias Boestad
abstractTobias Boestad
The Hanse was a network of German merchant cities that developed from the mid-fourteenth century onwards with the aim of securing and promoting the activities of its merchants in Northern Europe. With a view to comparing it with Mediterranean city networks, this paper aims to examine how this inter-city cooperation led to the production of new written standards and specific documentation. To this end, it will focus on the study of one of the most emblematic documentary genres of the Hanse: the ‘recesse’, a kind of assembly protocol in which the deliberations and decisions of the Hanse diets were recorded.
The first ‘recesse’ appeared in the 1360s, precisely when the Hanse cities began to gather in diets. While historians often simply use the texts edited in the nineteenth century, a return to the original manuscripts of these ‘recesse’ allows us to understand the conditions of their appearance, institutionalisation and dissemination. The first isolated manuscripts, produced in a context of war with the King of Denmark (1362–1365), were soon followed by the creation of series of ‘recesse’ archived together, and then by compendiums of copies of ‘recesse’, demonstrating the growing institutionalisation of this documentary genre – and of the Hanse. At the same time, the ‘recesse’ spread. While the first ones were produced by Lübeck and the so-called ‘Wendish cities’ (Rostock, Stralsund, etc.), they were soon adopted by Hamburg, Bremen and the cities of Prussia, Livonia and the Zuiderzee. The study of the evolution and conditions of production of the ‘recesse’ thus sheds new light on the emergence of the Hanse as a network of cities; it also raises, more generally, the question of the role of documentary normativity in the formation of urban networks in the Middle Ages.
Civic Seas.
The Terms of Citizenship in Late Medieval Europe across the Baltic and the Mediterranean
Carolina Obradors Suazo, Roser Salicrú I Lluch
abstractCarolina Obradors Suazo, Roser Salicrú I Lluch
Research on medieval citizenship has for long been set within a solid tradition of urban studies interested in government, hierarchies, migration, inclusion and exclusion, sociabilities and social mobility in the medieval city – most strongly from the laboratory of the Italian city-states. Within this framework, explorations into the meanings and uses of citizenship have mostly focussed on local variations, as the privileges of citizenship rested on requirements that varied strongly from one city to another. While some scholars claimed that an integrative and global history of medieval citizenship was therefore difficult or even meaningless to undertake, more recent studies have explored the possibilities of comparative histories of premodern citizenship. Furthermore, deep microanalytical explorations have also uncovered models of citizenship operating within larger frameworks, such as the Mediterranean.
Building on these developments, this paper advances a more integrative European perspective on medieval citizenship. To this end, it shifts attention from cities to those actors who mostly used their citizenship beyond strictly local frameworks, cultivating flexible and pragmatic identities: merchants. Exploring thus how medieval merchants influenced European notions of citizenship, the paper aims at studying how traders’ identities were framed and named – and thus, negotiated - across the two major commercial spaces of late medieval Europe: that is the Hansa in Northern Europe and the Western Mediterranean in the South.
At a time when European economies underwent a deep process of transformation, the flexible strategies of Hanseatic traders permeated a Western Mediterranean commercial sphere where strong hierarchised companies had previously dominated. From this evolving context, the paper starts discussing the role of (civic) identity in European trade by assessing the nature of citizenship sources in two major Baltic and Mediterranean towns such as Lübeck and Barcelona, comparing and tracing in both how merchants were identified.
Representing and Housing Merchants in the Mediterranean and the Baltic: A comparative perspective on institutions and networks of merchants and cities in two medieval seascapes
Louis Sicking
abstractLouis Sicking
This paper examines how representatives of merchant communities – particularly consuls of the Italian Maritime Republics and Vögte of Hanseatic towns – and their respective merchant networks shaped economic cooperation and growth across regions in the late Middle Ages. Traditionally, studies of Mediterranean and Northern European merchant communities have developed separately. This study contributes to bridge that gap by comparing how these groups, often coexisting in the same cities or trade zones (such as Byzantium or Scania), interacted, collaborated, and negotiated privileges with local rulers. Special attention is given to the institutional role of consuls and Vögte as intermediaries between merchants and their home cities, and to how their authority and actions reflected the interests of broader urban networks. The comparison focuses on one area of privilege in particular: the scope of consular or Vogt jurisdiction.
Session 4 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 1 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
Genoese Networks between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: Facts and Reflections on Iberian Examples (15th-16th Centuries)
David Igual-Luis
abstractDavid Igual-Luis
The aim of this paper is to examine the activities of the Genoese in the Iberian Peninsula during the transitional period from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, roughly between 1450 and 1530. The study approaches this subject from the particular perspective of the relationship between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, drawing primarily on social and economic arguments. It combines a historiographical overview with the author’s own contributions, in both cases bringing together earlier and more recent approaches. The study is divided into two main parts. The first is general in scope and provides elements for a synthesis of the Ligurian presence in Iberia during the period under consideration. The second is more specific, focusing on the axis between Valencia and Seville and its extension to the Canary Islands. It examines the individual trajectories of two merchants, Francesco Palomar and, to a lesser extent, Antonio Cerezo, and concludes by raising a number of problems and questions.
The dynamics of medieval slave trade networks in the Mediterranean and the Baltic: a comparative overview
Ivan Armenteros-Martínez
abstractIvan Armenteros-Martínez
During the Middle Ages, slavery constituted a widespread and deeply entrenched phenomenon across many regions. Both the Mediterranean and the Baltic were subject to these dynamics. In each of these areas, the capture of individuals, their subsequent reduction to slavery, and their commercialization and sale are well attested in contemporary sources.
The Baltic Crusades conducted in Livonia from the early 13th century — launched against the pagan populations of what is now Latvia and Estonia — are, in several respects, analogous to those undertaken in the western Mediterranean during the Catalan-Aragonese conquests of Mallorca (1229), Ibiza (1235), and Murcia (1265). Both contexts involved the enslavement of large numbers of people — men, women, and children — who supplied the principal slave markets of the period. Similarly, the periodic raids carried out by Lithuanian forces against Prussia and Latvia during the 14th century, in which the capture of people constituted a significant portion of the spoils, recall the attacks conducted by the mercenaries of the Great Catalan Company in Anatolia and Thrace — episodes during which the almogavars enslaved numerous men, women, and children of Turkish and Greek origin.
In parallel, and as a consequence of the processes of enslavement that unfolded in both regions, networks for the transportation and trade of enslaved individuals developed across the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Although the chronological trajectories do not entirely coincide —with the Baltic slave trade declining in the early decades of the 14th century, while trans-Mediterranean trafficking reached its apogee toward the close of the same century — both regions exhibit comparable structural dynamics that invite systematic comparative analysis.
The objective of this proposal is, therefore, to undertake a comparative analysis of the dynamics of capture and enslavement, as well as the organization of the networks for the distribution and trade of enslaved individuals that emerged in the Mediterranean and the Baltic during the 13th and 14th centuries.
Session 6 - Premodern European small towns and their networks (1200-1550)
Small towns in pre-modern Europe were urban settlements typically hosting a market and that had a significant portion of their inhabitants engaged in non-agricultural occupations. The session encourages researchers to engage in a set of new or revisited debates: the role of these settlements, demographic change, inequalities and lordship.
Coordinators: James Davis, Richard Goddard, Albert Reixach Sala, Lluís Sales Favà
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Coordinators: James Davis, Richard Goddard, Albert Reixach Sala, Lluís Sales Favà
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Session 6 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 2 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
Small towns in medieval Sweden – fair and market courts?
Karin Ehrenkrona
abstractKarin Ehrenkrona
Towns in medieval Sweden were, as a rule, small, and from the late 13th century charters were issued for these towns. Sweden was a vast and sparsely populated country, where towns and villages were largely dependent on each other. The hinterlands covered a big area, and farmers sometimes had to travel great distances to visit the bigger fairs and markets in the country. From the late 13th century, ‘landsköp’, trading on the countryside, was forbidden, although the charters and royal decrees offered some exceptions. Instead, charters for fairs and markets to be held in specific towns were issued by kings and regents, which made fairs and markets a mainly urban phenomenon. As a result, the rural population had to travel, sometimes great distances, into towns to participate in markets and fairs. This gathering of people from both town and country included other aspects aside from trade, and, for example, legal regulations concerning the markets were needed. In other parts of Europe, both pie powder-courts and market courts are known from at least late Middle Ages, which were a way of assisting traders and merchants in different disputes. In Sweden, however, there are no existing records from a market-court or something alike, even though it was not unusual for fairs, and perhaps markets, to be held around the local ‘ting’.
Is it possible that a fair/market court-system existed in medieval Sweden? People travelled longer distances for fairs and markets in Sweden, compared to more densely populated areas, and from a purely practical standpoint, there would have been a need for speedy verdicts, since farmers had to return to their villages and farms and perhaps could not afford to stay for long. Traders and merchant would also want to continue their travels, perhaps to a fair in another town. Fairs and markets are not a well-researched topic within Swedish medieval research, and market-courts have only briefly been discussed as a possibility. Furthermore, the scarcity of the preserved medieval sources does not render a full picture, which calls for a close reading of the extant sources to find traces of these possible courts. Where were market courts (possibly) held? What was the nature of the courts, i.e. what kind of cases were handled there? What did it mean, legally, for someone outside of towns to visit markets and fairs? This paper will attempt to investigate the possibility of Swedish medieval fair/market-courts in relation to different social groups.
Small Towns in the Process of Peripheral Centralization: New Functions of the Former Borderland on the Example of the Transformations of the Old Polish–Halychian Frontier in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Janusz Szyszka
abstractJanusz Szyszka
I would like to demonstrate the role of small towns in the transformation and pacification of the functions of a borderland, as well as their participation in the dismantling of the defensive marches, using the example of the former frontier between the Kingdom of Poland and the Principality of Halych. As a result of the union of the Polish realm with Halych Ruthenia in the mid-fourteenth century, the defensive functions on both sides of the erstwhile frontier began to fade and were gradually replaced by commercial and economic activities. This process was politically inspired by the Polish and Hungarian monarchs, yet local lords from Poland and Halych Ruthenia likewise took part in its implementation.
The influence of rulers and magnates on the development of small towns within the former borderland zone is also evident, for these towns played the decisive rôle in that transformation. Of particular importance is the reception of Central European models of estate formation (Ger. Stadt–Land–Kolonisation) in the territories of Poland and Halych Ruthenia, wherein small towns served as the principal integrators the rural world into broader urban networks. Such estates, organised around urban centres, replaced the earlier system of fortified border strongholds.
The works of Polish, Ukrainian, Swiss, and German scholars—especially in the context of the defensive frontier (Janusz Kurtyka, Michał Parczewski, Andrzej Janeczek, Zdzisław Budzyński, Ivan Krypâkevyč, Mykola Krykun, Yurij Zazulâk, Gotthold Rhode and others), and, to a lesser degree, concerning its later transformations (Janusz Kurtyka, Andrzej Janeczek, Maciej Wilamowski, Thomas Wünsch, Stefan Rohdewald, Christophe von Werdt, Sven Jaros and others)—have not yet exhausted this subject.
The presented example illustrates the process whereby a military barrier was transformed into a communication corridor facilitating an important East–West European trade route. This route connected the European trade network, from the Hanseatic towns (via Toruń in the Teutonic Order’s State) and the cities of the Holy Roman Empire (via Wrocław in Silesia), with the Silk Road and the trading centres of Asia (through Lwów, Kamieniec Podolski, Kiev, Caffa, and Tana). This process pacified social relations and enabled peaceful interpersonal contacts across Europe and Asia, thereby strengthening the economic development of the whole of Europe, still recently afflicted by the spectre of the Black Death.
Taverns and the Origin of Small Towns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Second Half of the 15th – the Early 16th Century
Mikola Volkau
abstractMikola Volkau
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a region of late urbanization. Until the early 16th century, the term “town” (civitas, oppidum, место, stat) was applied exclusively to trade-and-craft settlements attached to castles, some of which had been endowed with German town law. They were few in number, and in locally produced sources we were able to identify 46 such towns. Researchers also draw attention to taverns (tabern, корчма), which are regarded as one of the preconditions for the emergence of small towns (oppidum, местечко) in the GDL. This topic is the focus of our study.
Taverns begin to appear en masse in the GDL at the end of Casimir Jagiellon’s reign (Grand Duke, 1440–1492) and during the reign of Alexander Jagiellon (1492–1506). Based on the study of Metrica of the GDL, the Vilnius Catholic diocese records, and some other sources, we were able to identify mentions of taverns in 100 settlements. For most of these settlements, the term “town” was not used before 1506; however, later sources confirm the existence of small towns at these locations. This provides grounds to consider taverns as their initial form.
A notable feature is the regional specificity. Taverns outside towns with castles appear before the early sixteenth century only in the so-called Lithuania proper. Their emergence in this region resulted from two factors: taverns were built at the courts of the Grand Dukes to accommodate their households, and it was also common to grant the right to operate taverns to Catholic churches to support their needs. The association of taverns with the travels of the monarchs points to an important factor in urbanization in the GDL: small towns emerged as an element of the development of road logistics.
This study also focuses on the establishment of new trade-and-craft settlements before 1506. We know of the establishment of three towns (место, oppidum) with castles, as well as two towns (oppidum) without castles (they belonged to the Catholic Church). In addition, there are 19 privileges for weekly markets (торгъ) and 2 privileges for annual fairs (ярмаркъ) in Ruthenian language, which do not mention the term “town” itself. Ruthenian was the administrative language of the GDL, so this fact indicates that by the early 16th century the concept of a “small town” did not exist in this region in principle.
Small Imperial Cities in Germany
Regina Schäfer, Rebecca Kleinort
abstractRegina Schäfer, Rebecca Kleinort
In southern Germany, more than 40 small imperial cities emerged during the 13th century, most with a population of less than 2,000 inhabitants. The cities were directly subordinate to the king, and most of them managed to resist the neighbouring rulers until the beginning of the 17th century and maintain their imperial status. Influenced by central place theory, research has generally dismissed these towns as satellite towns. As a result, the small imperial towns, which were much more numerous than the large ones, have hardly been studied as independent historical phenomena, nor has their function in their respective landscapes or their relationship to one another been researched. This is where the RCI project on small imperial cities comes in, which also aims to make the sources of 34 small imperial cities in southwestern Germany, often still stored in local archives, available to researchers as open source regesta.
Within the framework of this section, we would like to conduct an initial analysis of six very different imperial cities in the Franconian/Swabian region (Bopfingen, Dinkelsbühl, Donauwörth, Nördlingen, Rothenburg, Bad Winsheim, Weissenburg). These cities acted together in an alliance – independently of the two large imperial cities of Nuremberg and Augsburg.
Our analysis is guided by the following questions:
To what extent did a fully developed urban structure comparable to that of large cities also develop in small imperial cities?
How was the alliance between cities that were very different from one another structured? Did a hierarchy develop here as well? Did the relationship between the cities shift when one city—as Rothenburg did—joined a higher-level entity, in this case the Franconian Pact (Landfrieden)? Did this effect the city itself and its position within the alliance?
What significance did imperial immediacy have for the city's scope of action? To what extent did the king support the city? How did the cities cope with the financial burdens imposed by their ruler, the king?
What role did the large neighbours play for the cities, and what was demanded of them? Did this change during the period under investigation, particularly with the increased territorialization by the princes since the second half of the 15th century?
Interdisciplinary approach to understanding European small towns and their networks – an example of Southeastern Slovenia
Črtomir Lorber
abstractČrtomir Lorber
The development of small towns in medieval and early modern period is a complex issue, especially considering that these settlements existed in a system that included individual farms, smaller villages, noble estates, castles and larger urban settlements as well. Their importance in this system and in the processes of social evolution of medieval and early modern societies is well recognized. They represent a link between rural communities and urban communities of larger cities and a communication relay between different social classes, communities and regions. Due to their importance small medieval and early modern towns are studied by several different disciplines ranging from archaeology and anthropology to history, urban studies and ethnology, however often without interdisciplinary overlap. This is especially the case in areas of Central and South-eastern Europe, where history often concerns itself only with written sources, while archaeology looks primarily to material culture and environmental issues. This has led to a lack of larger studies aimed at understanding of the interconnection of different factors in the development of said small towns and consequently to a lack of scholarly understanding. As scholars, we must consider the influence political history and social issues had on the wider material culture. We should discuss how environment and the material world define our urban spaces. Such issues were tackled before, one such example being spatial studies of castles, especially when discussing the control of movement, which are prevalent in archaeology and history. We will focus on the lack of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the development of small medieval and early modern towns by analyzing a concrete example in South-eastern Slovenia, Novo mesto (founded in 14th century). By presenting the current state of historical, archaeological and urbanistic research we will highlight the strengths of different disciplines such as large collections of written historical sources, multi-periodical archaeological contexts and relatively clear cut historical urbanistic comparisons, but we will also take note of a glaring weakness – lack of interpretative synthesis, a consequence of a fractured research approach. Recognizing this we aim to formulate a step-by-step case model for an interdisciplinary interpretation of a historical development of the chosen example, focusing on the role of the town in its’ wider regional network.
Small towns on the border of the Principality of Transylvania and within the Transylvanian Principality: a comparative analysis of early modern mining towns (16th and 17th century)
Petra Mátyás-Rausch
abstractPetra Mátyás-Rausch
Mining towns (known as market towns in the legal terminology of the time) played a very important role in the economy and urban network of the Transylvanian Principality, which became an "independent" state in the second half of the 16th century. These mining towns were established either by rulers (Kings of Hungarian Kingdom) or landowners (church-founded) in the Middle Ages. In my presentation, I will compare the early modern history of a mining town founded by Hungarian kings (Nagybánya, Baia Mare RO) and a mining town founded by the Transylvanian chapter (Abrudbánya,Abrud RO).
I will primarily examine the impact these smaller towns had on their immediate surroundings. The immediate surroundings of mining towns were primarily mining estates. These estates usually consisted of several villages. These estates played an important role in mining activities. However, the population of the mining estates also benefited from this close relationship (here we can highlight the opportunities for social mobilization). I also consider the relationship between small towns and larger towns ( these towns served as centers at the time) to be an important aspect of the study. In the case of Baia Mare, I would examine its relationship with Kassa (Kosice, SK) as a financial administrative center, while in the case of Abrud, I would examine its relationship with the princely capital (Gyulafehérvár, Alba Julia RO). Their relationship with more developed, larger centers can be perfectly described through the economic and political elite living in these small towns. Through the network of influential families, we can also find out how much the network of the elite from Baia Mare differed from that of the elite from Abrud (how many and how close were their ties with members of the princely court, among others). Despite of “lower” status of the Transylvanian mining towns, because they were “just” market towns ( Latin : oppidum), played a very important role in the economic system of the Transylvanian Principality because the benefits came from these mines gave the half part of the annual incomings of principal treasury.
Through the early modern history of these small towns, I would like to find out what role the will of the rulers or landlords played in the development of the town (mainly through the granting of privileges). I would also like to find out how and to what extent mining activity determined this development.
The Urban Network of Transylvanian Saxons during Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Razvan Pop, Liliana Cazacu
abstractRazvan Pop, Liliana Cazacu
A separate chapter in the history of European urban system is that of the cities founded by Flemish and German colonists in Transylvania. Founded on royal land, they developed generation after generation, becoming a case of medieval European urbanism on its periphery, at the meeting point with the Muslim world but also with that of the two Romes.
The leading question that we are trying to answer and clear is if this Medieval urbanization of Transylvania by the German colonist can be a study case for the European historiography? We are trying to discover if the urban development is similar to other European spaces. Also our aim is to discover the particularities of Sibiu urban law apart from other such legislations like the ones in the Holy Roman Empire. Also we want to explain how these cities developed between two kingdoms, one Principality, two empires and two modern republics. All in all we can say that they are a unique example of urbanization, little known in European historiography. This is our main reason in the attempt to present our case. Sibiu, Brașov, Mediaș, Sebeș, Bistrița, Sighișoara and Cluj Napoca are the names of the most important localities, all founded in the 12th - 13th centuries by colonists brought by the Hungarian royalty to develop, defend and structure Transylvania. They are a special example of urbanization little known in European historiography.
Our main themes are: 1. The founding of the medieval Transylvanian cities, 2. The urban systems adopted by the medieval Transylvanian cities, 3. The main legal and administrative aspects structured by the medieval Transylvanian cities, 4. Their comparison with other European urban structures.
We are considering the analysis and a possible comparison with the Bohemian urban system, with the Flemish one and obviously with the Franconian and Swabian one. We are also trying to observe if there are any influences from the Ottoman urban system, in whose spheres of influence, for several centuries, Transylvania was also.
Our team is formed by two specialists, one historian and the other urbanist, from two of the top Romanian universities in the researched topic.
Session 6 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 2 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
The Role of Small Towns in the Medieval Capital and Land Market in Tyrol
Stephan Nicolussi-Köhler
abstractStephan Nicolussi-Köhler
This paper departs from two observations: Firstly, the term “small towns” is often seen as a negative theory of cities, i.e. a community that has (not yet) reached a specific economic level or financial sophistication. Secondly, the relationship between “city” and “countryside” is often characterised as one of conflict. However, agricultural production forms the basis of both the rural and urban economies. Historically, there has never been a clear-cut division between the two. In mountainous Tyrol, “small towns” inhabitants were centres with relatively high economic productivity surrounded by villages. Nevertheless, these centres were closely linked to the hinterland economically. Therefore, it is questionable whether separate urban and rural economic systems can be identified. This paper examines the economic relationship between small rural towns and cities in the 14th century. It is based on recent research into late medieval rural society in Tyrol.
As previous research has shown, a vibrant capital and land market already existed in medieval Tyrol in the 13th century. The paper asks (1) about the impact of investors from small towns on agriculture, and (2) if during the so-called crisis of the later Middle Ages in the 14th century a change occurred in relationship between peasants (producers) in the countryside and landowners or investors (capitalists) from small towns. This is related to the question (3) of ownership and control structures.
Although the growing commercialisation fostered investment of urban capital in the countryside, this did not automatically lead to economic exploitation of the countryside. The paper argues that economic integration allowed not only urban dwellers, but also the rural population, to invest in land and the capital market. A middle class of “rural entrepreneur” emerged from the small towns, but also in the countryside, and invested in the land and capital market. The differences were not so much in the way investments were made, but rather in their scope. The results were twofold: On the one hand, these investments offered new profit opportunities to both peasants and urban dwellers; on the other hand, many people in the poorer social strata were excluded from access to resources in this way. However, in contrast to urbanised regions such as Northern Italy, the fault lines in Tyrol were more evident between different socio-economic strata than between urban centres and rural areas.
The economy of small towns and the construction of a local network. The cloth trade in the town of Peralada around 1300
Víctor Farías Zurita
abstractVíctor Farías Zurita
Small towns have been considered by historians the most distinctively product of a process of urbanization in the medieval world beginning in the 11th century. My paper proposes to examine the role these small towns play, as centers of economic activity, in the construction of local networks, as elements that help integrate a (not only) economic space. My examination will be carried out for a specific case: the vila of Peralada (northeast Catalonia), around 1300, for which the sources (notary public protocols) allow us a detailed understanding of the dynamic businesses of the group of men (drapers) dedicated to the cloth trade (draperia), not only within the vila but also in its rural surroundings.
Small maritime towns and the commercial expansion of Late Medieval Catalonia: The case of Sant Feliu de Guíxols
Pere Orti Gost
abstractPere Orti Gost
TThe small towns of Old Catalonia (roughly, the stretch above Barcelona), which emerged primarily through seigneurial initiative between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were characterized by populations largely devoted to artisanal and commercial activities. These towns acted as focal points within predominantly rural territories composed of scattered farmsteads. At the same time, they were interconnected, forming an integrated urban network.
In many instances, the role of these small towns within this network was relatively passive. They were often utilized by merchants from larger cities who, on the one hand, sold goods and extended credit to the inhabitants of these towns and, above all, to the surrounding peasantry; and, on the other hand, purchased agricultural and livestock surpluses for subsequent speculation in urban markets.
Nevertheless, certain small towns assumed a more active role, particularly during the phase of commercial expansion observable between 1370 and 1420. These were the towns capable of providing the network with specialized products and services, as well as human and financial capital, thereby fostering broader economic dynamism. Without their participation, the commercial vitality of the larger urban centers cannot be fully understood.
Among these, Sant Feliu de Guíxols stands out as an especially well-documented example. The town, which grew in the twelfth century under the protection of the Benedictine monastery, had the defining features of the small urban centers in the period. Despite its modest demographic scale — it likely never exceeded 1,500 inhabitants throughout the Middle Ages — Sant Feliu functioned as the hub of a permanent market, with a population primarily engaged in trade and craft production.
The town and its port became a crucial node within the broader urban network. On the one hand, its advantageous geographic position and ease of access to the interior facilitated the connection between the city of Girona and the sea; on the other, its increasingly close relationship with Barcelona linked it to the principal maritime routes of the Mediterranean, contributing to them with ships, captains, sailors, merchants, and capital.
The purpose of this study is to exemplify the role of Sant Feliu de Guíxols in shipbuilding and in the organization of commercial voyages across the Mediterranean — two activities that were inseparable from the town’s close association with Barcelona, yet without which the full extent
Demographic Dynamics of Small Towns in the Pyrenees after the Black Death
Joan Busoms
abstractJoan Busoms
This paper proposal aims to examine several demographic dynamics of small towns in the Catalan Pyrenees between the Black Death and the end of the fifteenth century. It will focus in particular on the central role played by certain small urban settlements located in sparsely populated areas, where the peasantry was not everywhere predominantly subjected to serfdom. Beyond the services these towns provided to their surrounding countryside—such as notarial functions, judicial courts, or access to consumer goods—the study will assess their ability to attract migrants and offer new life opportunities for peasant families during a period traditionally characterized by demographic decline and recurrent mortality crises caused mainly by epidemics.
This phenomenon must be situated within the broader and multilayered effects of the Black Death and its subsequent resurgences, including the supposed rise in real wages resulting from labour shortages (a phenomenon currently under revision in several European regions, such as England) and the interconnected rural-to-urban migration flows. In this context, particular attention will be paid to the trajectories of non-inheriting sons and daughters who left farmsteads to seek employment or make a living in urban centres. The study will aim to determine the scale of these movements and identify the sectors that employed them—whether in crafts, domestic service, or as labourers and hired hands temporary connected to agriculture—while also considering cases of downward social mobility in comparison to their families’ rural origins.
At the same time, the research will explore these migrants’ possibilities of establishing new households (examining, for instance, the proportions who married versus those who remained single) and the extent to which they maintained links with their places of origin. All of this forms part of broader demographic dynamics that remain poorly understood in northeastern Iberia, such as possible differences in average family size between urban and rural environments.
To this end, the paper—conceived as part of a larger project analysing several urban and rural communities—will focus on a paradigmatic case study: La Pobla de Lillet, a small town within the examined area that possesses an exceptional series of wills. These documents, which provide the best available proxy for family composition among preserved documentary sources, will allow a detailed exploration of the demographic dynamics outlined abov
Session 6 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 2 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
La Bisbal d’Empordà (Catalonia): A capital of fabric at the dawn of the Sixteenth Century
Mireia Ribot Avellí
abstractMireia Ribot Avellí
As assessed by Albert García-Espuche, the sixteenth century was a period during which numerous small towns consolidated in the interior of Catalonia. These towns would ultimately develop into the chief markets of the modern counties (comarques). One such town was La Bisbal d’Empordà, established by the Bishop of Girona as early as the eighth century and under episcopal control ever since. By the end of the fifteenth century, having survived the late medieval crisis, the town was a relatively prosperous hub, attracting peasant populations from the surrounding countryside. It offered a variety of services to both locals and neighbouring peasants, including a weekly market, notarial offices, and a civil court.
Situated near the Massif of Les Gavarres, where sheep were grazed, the town progressively specialized in the processing of woolen cloth. These products were not only consumed locally by townspeople and peasants but also earned prestige in wider marketing networks.
This paper aims to explore the reorientation of the local economy between 1500 and 1530. It approaches the subject in two ways: first, by examining the local sectors that mastered the production of woolen textiles and tracing their social evolution over time; and second, by analyzing the marketing networks through which these products were sent, particularly to the city of Barcelona. This study is made possible thanks to the extant archival records in Catalonia: on one hand, a set of notarial ledgers from the town, and on the other, the accounts of the Lleuda de Mediona, a tax register documenting commercial transactions in Barcelona.
Municipal government and urban funcions in the Kingdom of Valencia: an approach from the books of ordinances (14th-15th centúries)
Pau Viciano Navarro
abstractPau Viciano Navarro
Among the main powers of municipal governments was the ability to establish legal norms that regulated all aspects of local society. These ordinances were often compiled in books that facilitated their consultation and application. The study of this source allows us to analyse the areas of the urban world that were regulated, such as the organization of market and artisanal activities, or moral behaviour and urban planning. In the case of Valencian cities and towns of the late Middle Ages, these ordinances also regulated the agricultural space that surrounded them and that also constituted an important sector of their economy. Based on a quantitative methodology, this paper studies the nature of the ordinances of centres located at different levels of the urban network, from middle commercial cities to small towns with rural characteristics. The aim is to analyse the relationship between the strictly urban functions and those of a more agrarian nature that the Valencian cities of the 14th and 15th centuries exercised in relation to their demographic dimensions and socioeconomic structure.
The Estaus and the formation of commercial centralities in small portuguese towns: architecture, hospitality, and control (15th–16th centuries)
Daniela Nunes Pereira
abstractDaniela Nunes Pereira
The royal decree of 1439 ordering that “estaus be built in all cities and towns” led, throughout the 15th century, to the creation of a network of buildings with hybrid functions that transcended mere public hospitality. Present in small and medium-sized Portuguese towns, the Estaus embodied a policy of territorial structuring of trade and fiscal control over mercantile mobility, integrating spaces for lodging, storage, surveillance, and transaction. The ambiguous etymology of the term estau, between ostau (hostel) and the fiscal usage associated with lodging, precisely reflects this functional fusion. The Cortes of 1439 required merchants and travellers to stay in the Estaus rather than in villages off the main roads, revealing a deliberate effort by royal authority to centralise and monitor commercial exchanges. Much like the Mediterranean fondacos, the Portuguese Estaus formed part of a broader European logic of urban regulation of mercantile circulation through public infrastructures. Recent studies, about commercial architecture between Venetian territories and the Ottoman Empire along the Adriatic coast, point to the existence of distinct yet functionally analogous regional models across various parts of Europe. The architecture of the Estaus reinforced this disciplinary function: multi-storey buildings, with ground-floor arcades opening onto the square for trade and upper floors reserved for lodging, transformed the urban space into a stage for observation, taxation, and regulation of mercantile flows. The Estau of Tomar, composed of two parallel wings and sixteen arches per side, commissioned by King Afonso V in 1422, exemplifies this model of a covered market. These buildings not only facilitated trade but also shaped mercantile behaviour, restricted unauthorised circulation, and encouraged temporary population concentration during specific periods of the year (fairs and big markets), with potential demographic and social impacts that remain insufficiently studied. However, the trajectory of the Estaus was brief: by the early 16th century, the term had almost disappeared from documentation, and in 1520–1521 the great Estaus of Lisbon was converted into a royal residence by King Manuel I, signalling the transition. This proposal examines the Estaus as instruments in the formation of urban commercial networks, contributing to debates on the role of small towns in mediating between rurality and urban centrality (15th–16th centuries).
Session 7 - Moving people: residential mobility and the housing market in European cities (1200-1800)
Residential mobility has long been neglected in the urban history of premodern Europe. In this session, we aim to comparatively examine patterns, causes and effects of urban residential mobility, linking them to developments regarding the housing and rental markets, social topography, inequality and social mobility.
Coordinators: Colin Arnaud, Herbert Krammer, Arie Van Steensel
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Coordinators: Colin Arnaud, Herbert Krammer, Arie Van Steensel
show/hide introduction
Session 7 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 CSIC
Digital Traces of Late Medieval Mobility. From Tax Registers to Neighborhood Patterns in Fifteenth-Century Ochsenfurt
Anna-Lena Schumacher
abstractAnna-Lena Schumacher
Medieval residential mobility, long neglected in urban historiography, offers an opportunity for comparative analysis across various European towns. Despite high turnover rates in premodern towns, the moment of residential change remains difficult to capture and compare systematically. This study addresses the session's core questions through a datadriven methodology designed for cross-urban comparison: How did homeownership versus tenancy influence mobility patterns across different urban contexts? What common patterns of neighborhood formation emerge when cities are analyzed using standardized frameworks?
The approach expands on the existing ontology of the HiSMaComp project, which was created for comparative analyses of urban morphology and the development of the urban fabric. To this end, the topographical features of the urban space are documented and associated with a plethora of ancillary information. However, other units, such as building blocks and neighbourhoods, are also considered. While HiSMaComp captures topographic objects and spatial units, this ontological extension incorporates social actors and their attributes: occupations, marital status, economic indicators, and residential histories. Crucially, this framework generates linked open data using standardized vocabularies, ensuring interoperability with datasets on other towns. The Franconian town of Ochsenfurt, which is abundant in sources relevant to this investigation, is employed as a case study in this paper. The implementation of semantic web technologies and deep mapping facilitates the conversion of Ochsenfurt's sources into comparable datasets with those of other towns. It links ontology, graph database, and GIS enabling parallel analysis of multiple towns.
Transforming Ochsenfurt's tax registers and so called “Viertelbücher” into linked open data creates queryable datasets that can be compared. Preliminary results from Ochsenfurt reveal patterns that are suitable for comparative analysis, including mobility relationships between owners and tenants, indices for occupational clustering, and rental market structures.
The extension of the HiSMaComp ontology to include aspects relevant to residential mobility and the housing market facilitates the investigation of phenomena such as social topography, neighbourhood formation and residential mobility. Furthermore, it enables the analysis of urban morphology in conjunction with social topography using the same tools.
Residences, Housing and Networks: Tracing Architects’ Settlement Dynamics and Mobility in Early Modern Rome
Giorgia Pietropaolo
abstractGiorgia Pietropaolo
This paper examines residential mobility among architects and other skilled building professionals in early modern Rome, from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. These practitioners represent a particularly revealing socio-professional group: unlike most urban residents, they were not only affected by urban change but also actively contributed to shaping it. Rome constitutes an exceptional case for such an investigation. The city’s unique concentration of architectural activity attracted and employed numerous practitioners, most of them foreigners, working for the papacy, religious orders, city magistracies, and noble families, all competing for prestige through building patronage. At the same time, a vast and heterogeneous body of surviving documentation allows for a detailed reconstruction of residential patterns. Drawing on data relating to over 100 identified professionals, this paper, as part of a broader research project, presents initial findings and observations derived from mapping their residences across time and space. It explores different dimensions of residential dynamics, including intra-urban mobility and frequency of moves, the influence of geographical provenance, and patterns of property ownership, tenancy, and patronal donation. Without seeking to establish direct causal links, and while acknowledging the importance of individual and particular biographical episodes that may influence residential choices, the analysis relies on recurring spatial and documentary evidence, which are being systematically integrated into a relational GIS environment to more efficiently connect individual historical data to their corresponding spatial entities. This structure makes it possible to interrogate and visualise the data according to chronological, geographical, property-related, and other parameters, while also allowing the research questions and the database itself to evolve in response to emerging patterns, correlations, and spatial relationships. This approach offers new insights into the close relationship between residential mobility, migration, patronage, and professional networks in early modern Rome.
Residential Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Kraków: Patterns, Strategies, and Social Topography
Ewa Kaźmierczyk
abstractEwa Kaźmierczyk
The paper examines patterns of residential mobility in 18th-century Kraków, particularly during the period 1790-1795. Kraków serves as a compelling case study: a former royal capital in the polycentric Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that experienced demographic and economic decline after the court's relocation to Warsaw at the beginning of the 17th century. Despite its diminished status, the city maintained significant urban functions and a complex social structure.
Drawing on a GIS database integrating tax records, burgher admission registers, property ownership records, and late-century censuses, this study traces residential mobility across different social groups. Using GIS methodology to map residential changes and analyze spatial patterns, we reconstruct the movement of inhabitants within the urban space. While tax sources primarily document middle and upper classes throughout the century, the introduction of censuses at the end of the period enables broader demographic analysis, including lower social strata.
The paper analyzes patterns of intra-urban mobility combining available sources and considering multiple factors: new migrants, social topography, residential status (owners/tenants), occupation, wealth status (based on taxes paid), and family size. The study addresses key questions: Did occupational or wealth status influence residential strategies and mobility patterns? How did property ownership versus tenancy shape the frequency and direction of residential moves? By examining these questions, the paper reveals the dynamics of residential change and contributes to our understanding of urban life in a significant early modern East-Central European city.
Residential mobility of immigrants in 18th-century Warsaw and the formation of the city's social topography
Marta Agnieszka Kuc-Czerep
abstractMarta Agnieszka Kuc-Czerep
18th-century Warsaw, the capital and residence of the kings, was the fastest-growing city in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The city’s demographic potential was based primarily on the influx of people from different regions of the Crown and Lithuania, as well as external immigrants, particularly from Saxony, Brandenburg-Prussia and Austria. The presence of migrants, including both Catholics and Protestants, as well as Jews and Armenians, significantly influenced the shape of the city’s social landscape and affected the development of Warsaw’s real estate market.
The aim of the paper will be to analyse the residential mobility of immigrants within the Warsaw metropolitan area. Special attention will be paid to the issue of their access to buying their own property and to the rental market. An attempt will be made to answer the question of how these housing options influenced the social advancement opportunities of immigrants, and to what extent belonging to a particular social class determined the frequency of changing one’s place of residence. This will enable an assessment of the impact of immigrants’ spatial mobility on the socio-professional profile of individual city districts.
As a basis for the analysis, tax records and city censuses will be used, especially those from 1716, 1743, 1754, 1776, 1784, and 1792. Many data concerning migration to Warsaw can be found in the books of citizens of Old and New Warsaw from 1701-1794. A particularly valuable type of source is the record of interrogations by the prosecutors of the Grand Marshal of the Crown from 1787-1794. They are a kind of biography of persons suspected of various types of crimes. They deserve attention because they concern the functioning of people from lower social classes (domestic servants, laborers), who are harder to find in archival documentation. Based on the database and GIS systems, a spatial analysis will be prepared, including visualization of the scale of spatial mobility of immigrants. On this basis, it will be possible to present the dynamics of these processes and identify patterns of residential mobility among immigrants within the city.
Session 7 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 1 CSIC
Migrants’ access to short- and medium-term housing in Italian cities (14th-15th centuries)
Cécile Troadec
abstractCécile Troadec
Does the high level of residential mobility within medieval cities at the end of the Middle Ages stem from difficulties in accessing stable housing, or is it instead a sign of tenants' ability to choose their neighborhood and accommodation? While access to stable and decent housing may have been easier in the years following the plague, what was the situation a century later?
This paper examines migrants' access to short- and medium-term housing in several Italian cities (14th-15th centuries). It will explore their housing situation as tenants, their ability to find accommodation, to negotiate rent or to move from one dwelling to another within the same city, as well as the difficulties they might have faced (unsanitary housing, problems paying rent, eviction). Variations in rent levels and changes in the duration of rental contracts over the period under study (between the Black Death and the early 16th century) are important factors to consider in understanding how the situation of tenants evolved in Italian cities, particularly migrants who left their hometowns after 1348. The paper will also seek to highlight the intermediaries who may have facilitated housing access for foreigners arriving in the city.
From a spatial perspective, the study will also consider the location of dwellings occupied by foreigners within the urban space. In a context of urban growth and pressure on the property market, is it still possible to choose one’s place of residence? We will examine the constraints that may have limited access to housing in certain urban neighborhoods.
CITY OF MIGRANTS. GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY, HOUSING, AND REAL ESTATE MARKET IN LATE MEDIEVAL VALENCIA
Antoni Furio, Juan Vicente Garcia Marsilla
abstractAntoni Furio, Juan Vicente Garcia Marsilla
Our proposal focuses on the city of Valencia, the capital of the kingdom that bears its name within the wider framework of the Crown of Aragon. In the late Middle Ages, Valencia was a major manufacturing and commercial centre, an important financial hub, and a strategic Mediterranean port. Valencia was—throughout most of its history and even today—a city of immigrants, whose constant influx enabled the population to grow from approximately 15,000 inhabitants in the first half of the thirteenth century to more than 75,000 in the second half of the fifteenth century, making it the most populous city on the Iberian Peninsula.
We begin with the colonisation that followed the Christian conquest of the thirteenth century, when thousands of new settlers from Catalonia, Aragon, and more distant regions established themselves in the city. They occupied the houses confiscated from the Muslim inhabitants, who were dispossessed and expelled. A second moment was the comprehensive remodelling of the urban fabric, which involved the demolition of Muslim houses and neighbourhoods and their transformation into poblas, newly created settlements with homogeneous plots arranged longitudinally and perpendicular to the streets to accommodate the incoming population. The housing stock was therefore adapted to the needs of the small family units typical of immigrants arriving from the Christian north.
However, the migration process did not end there. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Valencia’s demographic growth continued to depend primarily on the steady arrival of individuals from nearby rural areas as well as from more distant regions such as Catalonia, Aragon, and Castile. Moreover, colonies of merchants and skilled craftsmen from across Europe established themselves in the city. This continuous flow of newcomers sustained a dynamic real estate market. Valencian notarial records contain numerous short-term rental contracts, and even cases of subletting, sometimes of a single room or a loft space within another person’s home, characteristic of periods when the housing market was under significant pressure.
Based primarily on the large number of contracts preserved in Valencian notarial registers, our presentation examines the housing strategies adopted by migrant households, the architectural evolution of buildings to accommodate the needs of their owners or tenants, and the changing cost of housing in the late Middle Ages.
Female domestic servants and their mobility in the cities of the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Radoslaw Poniat
abstractRadoslaw Poniat
The aim of this presentation is to analyse the mobility of female domestic servants living in three large cities of the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – Krakow, Warsaw and Vilnius. Although all of these cities were located in regions dominated by the serfdom system, which formally imposed significant restrictions on the mobility of the main population groups, female servants proved to be a category with a high degree of spatial and social mobility. Although the vast majority of them came from the countryside and belonged to the peasant class, they were able to migrate to cities relatively effortlessly, often with the help of networks of relatives and friends who had already taken a similar path. Once in the city, servants changed jobs quite easily, sometimes abandoning their profession permanently or temporarily, moving on to other types of job or getting married. The paper will not only allow us to examine the scale of the phenomena under analysis, but also to search for socio-cultural patterns conditioning migration processes and observe their impact on the life cycle of individual servants. All these problems will be described using quantitative and qualitative sources in the analysis. These will mainly include censuses, court hearings and petitions to charitable institutions operating in the cities under study.
Session 7 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 CSIC
Residential mobility and resistance to the rental system. Secret moves in Paris during the French Revolution (1790s)
Laurent Cuvelier
abstractLaurent Cuvelier
Moving house is often the preferred solution in cases of unpaid rent, as Louis-Sébastien Mercier notes with irony and sentimentality: ‘households that do not pay their rent and move their poor furniture from one garret to another every three months’. Beyond the memoirist's comments, little is known about these multiple, more or less furtive moves. However, police sources provide details of this tactic, sometimes temporary, to escape the ‘rental order’. This urban history of ‘freeloading’ moves would complement our knowledge of the extent and nature of intra-urban residential mobility. Although police archives mainly contain cases of failed moves, their abundance offers a privileged gateway to identifying patterns of residential mobility and measuring their impact on social mobility and the urban inscription of inequalities. Using documents from police commissioners in Parisian districts during the French Revolution (1789-1799), we will study tenants' strategies for challenging or rebalancing unequal relationships with their landlords or property owners. This case study also allows us to examine the role of neighbourhoods in a Parisian metropolis increasingly marked by urban anonymity. Indeed, these furtive moves were opportunities to revive community solidarity or to engage in denunciation during a period of political and social unrest.
Tiered tenancy and landlord hierarchies
Preston Perluss
abstractPreston Perluss
In pre-industrial France, a very common rental practice as regards urban residences involved « main tenancy ». Olivier Zeller has noted that in most cases of absentee landlords, this specific type of rental agreement most likely existed . Main tenants would accordingly sublet parts of their building to others, these latter being the “sous locataires” or sub tenants. Obviously other conceivable patterns might arise : a landlord could rent parts of his or her dwelling to tenants, and some of these tenants might sublet parts of their dwelling space. But this latter contingency would seem to be less widespread than the case in which an absentee landlord rented out the totality of a property to a single individual.
As a typical example of the main landlord renting out space we have a notarized sublet on May 9 1780 granted by Marie Geneviève Rollet, widow of Jean Marie, used clothes dealer, residing rue Dauphine and main tenant of a building on the basis of a lease signed by Jean La Ville, bourgeois de Paris (and first master smith). The widow Rollet sublet a shop in the house and two rooms with fireplaces on the second story at the back of the building to Michel Marinot cook and Mme Marie Jobert, widow, maitresse lingère, living together rue de la Chaussée D’antin, paroisse Sant Eustache. The annual rent was set at 600 l.t. per year. However, the lease was for only 2 years and nine months and the final nine months’ rent was set at 400 l.t. The usual conditions required keeping sufficient goods on the premises as a guarantee for unpaid rent and the risk of expulsion should rents fall in arrears. The only unusual feature of the lease is the short length, less than 3 years. We can surmise that the widow Rollet dwelt in the house and to cover her overhead let out one shop and several rooms.
My presentation seeks to provide a number of microhistorical cases of subtenancy, drawing upon my research in the Paris notarial archives. The pattern of subtenancy was quite complex, and we can observe a large typology of rental strategies. We can glimpse aspects of tenant mobility through short term rentals but also notice multiple rentals in various places by the same individuals!
The limits of "billighed": Housing disputes and informal pawning in eighteenth-century Copenhagen
Benjamin Brandt Christiansen
abstractBenjamin Brandt Christiansen
In eighteenth-century Copenhagen, a rapidly growing capital city, the housing market was characterised by tenancy and subtenancy of small rooms. In this urban environment, what sorts of arrangements did houseowners, tenants and subtenants create to resolve conflicts when money was scarce? One common agreement was for houseowners to take some of their tenants’ household items in pawn until the tenants could pay rent. Complicating matters, however, tenants frequently sublet their rooms. Accordingly, debts and pawned items could be passed on to several individuals. These conflicts could thus be closely connected to wider urban networks of credit and second-hand trade.
In this paper, drawing on legal, economic and theological frameworks, I examine complex notions of justice and fairness at play in concrete cases from eighteenth-century archival sources. Through resolution protocols and original testimonies in the archives of the Magistrate of Copenhagen, I investigate houseowner-tenant conflict resolution with the perspective of common notions regarding equitable ("billig") conduct in an early modern Lutheran legal culture.
Session 8 - Capitals of Capital: Credit Networks and Financial Markets in Europe (13th-18th Centuries)
This session explores the emergence of Europe's first financial capitals between the 13th and 18th centuries, with a particular focus on the late medieval origins of credit networks, urban finance, and public debt. Emphasizing cities such as Florence, Lübeck, Kraków, Tallinn, and Stockholm, it examines how merchant-bankers and political authorities developed innovative financial instruments and institutions to meet the growing demands of trade, governance, and warfare. The session encourages contributions that highlight the role of cities as nodes of financial innovation and examine how these early systems shaped the long-term integration of private capital and state finance across the European continent.
Coordinators: Antoni Furio, Pere VerdÉs-Pijuan
show/hide introduction
Coordinators: Antoni Furio, Pere VerdÉs-Pijuan
show/hide introduction
Session 8 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Capital and the City: Medieval Rome and the Making of Europe’s Financial Networks
Donatella Strangio
abstractDonatella Strangio
This paper invites to investigate the emergence and evolution of Europe’s first financial capitals between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, with particular attention to the medieval origins of international credit networks, urban financial institutions, and systems of public finance. Within this framework, medieval Rome stands out as a compelling case study: as a major political and religious centre, the city witnessed the development of complex mechanisms of economic management linked to the papal Curia, local bankers, and the transnational financial circuits connecting the Urbs to Europe’s major markets. By examining credit practices, public debt, and the early forms of urban fiscal administration, the work aims to shed light on how municipal financial institutions shaped the relationship between private capital and state formation, outlining a model of economic and political interdependence rooted in the Middle Ages and anticipating the dynamics of modern finance.
Bruges, Crossroad of Mediterranean Capitals: The Milanese Borromei Bank and the Catalan Banker Berenguer Fortuny
María Viu Fandos, Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli
abstractMaría Viu Fandos, Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli
This paper offers a comparative and interconnected study of two major financial actors in fifteenth-century Europe: the Italian Borromei Bank—one of the most structured transnational banking firms of the period—and the Catalan banker, Berenguer Fortuny, whose financial activity evolved in close connection with that of the Borromei. Both were simultaneously active in Bruges from 1436 onwards, maintaining key financial connections with London and Barcelona. By cross-examining the preserved Borromei ledgers of Bruges and London (1436-39) alongside Fortuny’s only surviving journal dating from 1436 to 1440, this research seeks to reconstruct a shared financial and social ecosystem that linked Mediterranean and Northern European capital markets through complex international networks based on trust and a common business culture, despite linguistic and organizational differences.
Our analysis focuses on capital transfers and exchange operations established from Bruges, revealing the mechanisms through which both Italian and Catalan bankers managed credit flows across jurisdictions and linguistic frontiers. While the Borromei operated through a sophisticated international organization with clearly defined branches (in Milan, London, Bruges and Barcelona) and procedures, Fortuny’s more personal and flexible structure relied on his contacts with the Borromei Bank. In particular, the Borromei were instrumental in connecting Fortuny with the marketplace of London, where the Catalan presence was very limited. The joint study highlights both convergence and complementarity between large-scale institutional banking and smaller, personal enterprises, demonstrating how their cooperation sustained and integrated European financial markets.
A linguistic and technical reading of the account books reveals the cultural and professional transfers underlying late medieval finance, including the use of diverse financial instruments, the rhythms of bills of exchange, and the linguistic intercomprehension between Catalan and Italian, as well as interactions with local Flemish actors whose names were recorded in Catalanized or Italianized forms. This approach positions the Borromei and Fortuny as a unique case study on Europe’s first financial capitals, showing how transnational credit networks operated as laboratories for technical innovation, social mobility, and intercultural communication.
Early modern Prague as one of the centers of transregional credit and trade relations
Marie Buňatová
abstractMarie Buňatová
The aim of this paper is to present Prague as one of the important centers of financial, credit, and commercial operations in early modern Central Europe. The paper focuses on the last third of the 16th century, when Prague became the seat of Emperor Rudolf II Habsburg (1583-1611), and the subsequent reign of Emperor Matthias (1611-1617) shortly before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The paper is based on new, previously unpublished research by the author, which draws on primary archival sources of Czech, Italian, Austrian, and German Archives.
The strong political position of Prague as the seat of Emperor Rudolf II was reflected in both demographic and economic spheres. At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, Prague became a destination for large numbers of merchants and financiers from abroad. These were mainly immigrants from northern Italy (Lombardy, Valchiavenna, Veneto), Savoy, the Netherlands, Germany, and France, who strengthened Prague's position in international trade and finance. Among these immigrants were a number of entrepreneurs who conducted their credit transactions and business activities on an international scale, and their clientele included the monarch and state (court) authorities, courtiers, and other nobles.
Using several selected financiers as examples, the nature and scope of their credit operations and client networks, as well as the customer-supplier relationships that developed between northern Italy, Prague, and Vienna at that time, will be presented.
Experimenting with Chance: Lottery Finance in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp
Jeroen Puttevils
abstractJeroen Puttevils
This paper examines lottery markets as a distinctive form of financial innovation in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Between 1441 and 1700, more than a quarter of all lotteries organized in the Low Countries (119 of 450) took place in Antwerp, establishing the Scheldt port as the principal marketplace for lottery organizers and participants. Lotteries served as flexible credit instruments for governments, churches, confraternities, guilds, and entrepreneurs, primarily financing construction projects and debt repayment.
The paper focuses on the merchant-entrepreneurs who acted as intermediaries between public authorities and capital markets, offering to organize lotteries on behalf of governments. Particularly prevalent in the 1550s and 1560s, these arrangements reveal a sophisticated intersection of private finance and public fiscal needs. Through analysis of lottery contracts, licenses, correspondence, and accounts, the paper addresses several key questions: Who were these lottery organizers, and what commercial networks did they draw upon? How did they secure government licenses and negotiate profit-sharing arrangements? How did they finance substantial upfront costs, including prize purchases and advertising campaigns? What returns did both governments and organizers derive from these ventures?
The paper demonstrates that Italian merchant-bankers based in Antwerp played a prominent role in this sector during the mid-sixteenth century. These merchants leveraged their access to capital, international commercial networks, and expertise in financial instruments to transform lottery organization into a profitable business model. By examining lottery organization as a form of financial intermediation, this study illuminates how merchant-entrepreneurs adapted traditional commercial activities to meet the fiscal demands of urban and state authorities, contributing to the broader development of credit markets and public finance mechanisms in early modern Europe. The Antwerp case demonstrates how financial innovation emerged at the intersection of popular participation, private entrepreneurship, and governmental fiscal needs.
Session 8 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Accounting Uniformity and Political Integration: Gold Minting in the Crown of Aragon (Valencia, Perpignan, Mallorca, Barcelona, Iglesias)
Jordi Quiles Ruiz
abstractJordi Quiles Ruiz
The homogenization of accounting practices among the mints of the Crown of Aragon—particularly those of Valencia, Perpignan, Mallorca, Barcelona, and Iglesias—played a decisive role in the political and cultural consolidation of the monarchy during the later Middle Ages. While these mints operated in distinct social and territorial contexts within a single political entity, the adoption of shared documentary procedures concerning the receipt of metal (gold mainly), the fineness of coinage (incoming and outcoming), and the volume of gold issued established a common framework of reference that transcended local particularisms.
The gold market, more than the circulation of billon or silver, demanded rigorous coordination due to its political and symbolic value as a guarantor of princely authority and as a marker of sovereignty. The uniformization of records and account books enabled the crown to exert control over geographically dispersed mints, to monitor the flows of precious metals, and to impose consistent standards of weight, purity, and iconography. These written practices thus operated as instruments of government: they produced not only reliable data but also the cultural conditions necessary for a shared conception of political order.
By fostering comparability across Valencia, Perpignan, Mallorca, Barcelona, and Iglesias, the circulation of standardized accounting models generated a network of information that underpinned the integration of territories with heterogeneous traditions into a single monetary and political sphere. The convergence of mint documentation reveals how the construction of a gold market was inseparable from the crown’s project of centralization: the stability and credibility of coinage depended on the ability to institutionalize uniform procedures.
The unification of mint accounting in the Crown of Aragon, therefore, should be understood as a mechanism of political integration. It provided the crown with the tools to articulate a coherent metallic and monetary policy and, at the same time, cultivated a cultural identity rooted in shared practices of documentation and valuation. The management of gold through standardized records thus emerges as a key factor in both the formation of a unified monetary space and the consolidation of royal authority across the crown’s Mediterranean dominions.
Empire of debt: short-term credit networks at the origins of Spanish imperialism (ca. 1475-1525)
Federico Gálvez Gambero
abstractFederico Gálvez Gambero
Since the late 15th century, Castile undertook a process of military expansion beyond its borders, marked by conquest campaigns that entailed high human and material costs. Among these, the wars in Italy stand out, combining these expansionist ambitions and the traditional Mediterranean projection of the Crown of Aragon. The need to wage war outside the Iberian Peninsula for the first time posed unprecedented logistical and financial challenges, which required the development of complex credit networks for the international transfer of capital on a scale previously unknown within Castile. Initially, these networks drew upon the experience accumulated by the Crown of Aragon during the campaigns of Alfonso the Magnanimous in the mid-15th century. However, they soon expanded, becoming essential structures not only for financing warfare but also for supporting other initiatives, such as dynastic alliances or territorial expansion in the Low Countries and the Empire.
This study is based on the records of the general treasury of Castile in order to reconstruct the series of bills of exchange negotiated by the royal treasury during this period. The research examines both the amounts transferred and the main centers of issuance and destination, as well as the most prominent financial operators. In addition, qualitative information is incorporated to reconstruct some of the networks used to further swap these funds. Notable among these are the banks of Grimaldo, Lomelín, and Zenabre in Rome, and the Farahone bank in Palermo. Documentation from the general treasury of the Crown of Aragon is also used to place these operations within the broader context of the overall cost of these campaigns. In doing so, the study traces the evolution of financial strategies adopted by the royal treasury during a critical phase of its international expansion up to the mid-1520s.
Ultimately, this research demonstrates that these financial networks far exceeded their technical function. They constituted a system of incentives for a wide range of agents who intensified their “demand for empire”—that is, their desire to be integrated into the imperial project. These networks were thus not merely a consequence of such expansion but became one of its fundamental driving forces. In this way, they actively contributed to the consolidation of an imperialism that was a necessary condition for the construction of the Hispanic Monarchy as a global power.
Trade fairs: connecting Castilian cities and international markets in the early 16th century.
David Carvajal, Diego Moledo
abstractDavid Carvajal, Diego Moledo
Credit needs grew rapidly in Castile in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The increase in the number of sales and loans in urban markets, between businessmen from different cities, including foreign centres, made it necessary for local and non-local agents to have access to a regular supply of credit. To address this situation, most creditors and debtors in the cities of northern Castile used fairs as a meeting point. The regularity of these institutions and the connection between them made the increase in capital flows between centres possible. The main objective of this article is to understand the role of fairs as a financial hub for the major centres from the angle of the most common operation: short-term credit contracts -connected with consumption credit-; and to understand the role of markets in fostering the speed of money circulation. In a second stage, the paper will provide a general overview of the transformation of major trade fairs into international financial hubs.
THE PRICE OF BILLS OF EXCHANGE IN SEVILLE, 1514-1613
Manuel González-Mariscal, Manuel Díaz Ordóñez
abstractManuel González-Mariscal, Manuel Díaz Ordóñez
The objective of this paper is to calculate a statistical series describing the evolution of bill of exchange rates in Seville between 1514 and 1613. To this end, documentation from the Notarial Records Archive of Seville was used, specifically protested bills of exchange. In some of these documents, a market broker appears, attesting to the price at which the bill was quoted between Seville and various European fairs or cities. The significance of the calculated series lies in the fact that it provides a very good approximation of the evolution of the interest rate, a key variable in explaining, among other issues, the causes of the “price revolution” (Hamilton, 1934) or the decline of the Spanish economy in the late 16th century. The main phases described by the series are: 1516–1533, during which the interest rate rose from 2 to 4 percent; 1533–1556, during which it fell from 4 to 1 percent, coinciding with the arrival of large shipments of silver from the Americas; 1556–1597, during which the interest rate rose from 1 to nearly 9 percent as a result of the three suspensions of payment suffered by the Spanish Monarchy, particularly in the wake of the 1575 default; and, finally, 1597–1613, during which the interest rate fell from 9 to 5 percent due to the start of massive issuances of vellón coins.
Notarized Loans in 18th Century Milan: a Credit Market Equilibrium? A Social Network Approach
Giuseppe de Luca, Maria Carmela Schisani, Giancarlo Ragozini
abstractGiuseppe de Luca, Maria Carmela Schisani, Giancarlo Ragozini
This paper investigates the private credit market intermediated by notaries in Milan in mid eighteenth century. The research is based on a dataset of loan contracts drawn up by the city’s leading notaries in a period in which the city was undergoing a remarkable economic modernization. New ventures both in manufacturing and infrastructure required lively flows of capitals whereas the massive redemption of public debt by mid 18th c provided a vast multitude of individuals and families with hot money.
Compared to institutionalized credit providers (private bankers and later Savings Banks), this ‘informal’ lending market proved capable of financing innovative ventures with non exclusively land-backed collateralized loans. Thanks to the dominance of a great deal of reputational information, notaries were able to make the private credit market avoid rationing.
Social Network Analysis evidence demonstrates that a pooling equilibrium was averted in this market and a separating equilibrium was reached. Such a market was conducive to the rise of a modern financial-deepened society: a large share of high-middle-size capitals were employed for financing the most innovative ventures, new partnerships, and the creation of infrastructures, paving the way to economic modernization, and a vast part of minor loans were used for meeting everyday needs, i.e. new consumption, asset management, debt rescheduling,
Session 8 - Slot III
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Changes in Taxation of the Cities in Kingdom of Poland in Late Middle Ages (1386-1506) and Their Impact on Municipal Finances
Michał Schmidt
abstractMichał Schmidt
The period of the early Jagiellonian rulers in the Kingdom of Poland was a time of dynamic economic and demographic growth in towns. Large cities such as Cracow and Lviv strengthened their position as centers of international trade and craft production. Medium and small towns also took part in commerce, and the number of these towns was steadily increasing what contributed to the densification of the urban network in Poland. As a result, towns became places of capital accumulation, which successive rulers sought to exploit. One of the tools at their disposal was taxation, whose system underwent significant changes in the 14th and 15th centuries.
A good example of this is the szos, an extraordinary property tax paid by towns. From the late 14th to the early 16th century, it evolved from a relatively small levy collected irregularly only from royal towns into a tax covering all towns in the Kingdom, collected every two to three years and of a much higher value. At the same time, the decision to pass the tax—initially belonging solely to the king—was gradually taken over by the parliament.
Changes within the tax system were intertwined with political and social transformations in the Kingdom of Poland, triggered by both internal and external factors. Among the most significant impulses driving tax reforms were the state’s financial needs associated with ongoing wars. A turning point in this regard was the Thirteen Years’ War against the Teutonic Order (1454-1466).
Preserved municipal accounting records indicate that the beginning of the war coincided with the start of a period of increased urban expenditures, primarily related to burdens imposed by the state. These included both reformed older levies, such as the aforementioned szos, and entirely new dues, such as a tax on the production and sale of alcohol. The changes introduced during the war became a permanent part of the tax system afterwards.
The issue of municipal taxes in late-medieval Poland has been the subject of research, but such studies are few in number and outdated in many respects. It is therefore reasonable to conduct further research. The article will discuss the state’s taxation policy toward towns in the Kingdom of Poland from the late 14th to the early 16th century. It will present the most important changes in this area as well as the reasons behind them. It will also examine the impact of tax reforms on municipal finances and on the level of burdens borne by townspeople.
Municipal mediation and the making of credit: Urban governance in the late medieval Upper Rhine (15th century)
Hippolyte Souvay
abstractHippolyte Souvay
The late Middle Ages (1300-1500) witnessed a period of political consolidation for small and mid-sized towns on the Upper Rhine. Though smaller than major imperial centers like Cologne or Nuremberg, towns that would later constitute the Old Confederacy such as Basel, Bern, Solothurn, Fribourg, Zurich, emerged as regional hubs along key commercial axes. These communities expanded zones of influence through land purchases or pledges, sometimes following military successes. Their heterogeneous legal statuses (imperial, free, seigneurial) and varying proximity to royal authority (königsnah, -fern, -offen) shaped distinct trajectories of governance and fiscal capacity.
From the late 14th to mid-15th century, these towns developed durable chancelleries and administrative structures to meet growing demands for written governance. The proliferation and preservation of records, recently termed “écritures grises” by French historians, reflects an expanding municipal documentary culture. Of particular interest are missivenbücher, appearing in the early fifteenth century in Basel, Bern, Solothurn, Fribourg, and Zurich. These registers, part of broader “réseaux d’écriture”, preserve copies of outgoing correspondence, enabling municipal clerks to reconstruct and convey the council’s collective action.
This unpublished corpus sheds light on everyday practice and reveals how smaller towns shaped credit markets through two mechanisms. First, councils occasionally contracted substantial loans, engaging in public borrowing that foreshadows later systems of municipal debt. Second, authorities intervened for their burghers in local credit disputes; petitioning other cities and lay or ecclesiastical powers for repayment, adjudication, or negotiated settlement. In both cases, cities extended financial relations beyond their borders via epistolary networks of credit and negotiation, integrating into wider social and political networks.
Viewed through the lens of Capitals of Capital, these practices show that even modest towns acted as hubs in emerging transregional credit networks and as nascent financial institutions. Their chancelleries, merchant actors, and interventions linked local disputes to broader fiscal imperatives, contributing to the medieval foundations of financial capitalism. This proposal invites comparative and diachronic inquiry into how such towns participated in the circulation of capital and the early development of public finance across late‑medieval Europe.
Households of Credit: Mapping Barcelona’s Municipal Debt at the End of the Fifteenth Century
Laura Miquel Milian
abstractLaura Miquel Milian
For the first time since 1379, in the summer of 1496, a counting of Catalonia’s households was undertaken. According to it, Barcelona had by then around 5,800 households, whose members lived within the five districts into which the city was divided. The information provided about them is almost always the same: the name of the head of the household, their occupation, and/or their social condition. This account has recently been the subject of a new edition and detailed study by Lluís Sales i Favà, who has also included a series of maps of Barcelona locating each household within a specific and well-defined block of houses.
This paper aims to use Sales’ work in order to cross-reference it with the list of 866 annuities (censals) that were paid by the Barcelona city council a year later, in 1497. After a general profiling of the creditors—since the great majority of them were citizens and inhabitants of Barcelona itself—the main goal of this paper will be to allocate as many annuities as possible to specific households. Thanks to this, it will be possible to assess what percentage of households took part in Barcelona’s municipal debt market and to locate with remarkable precision the interest payments made by the city on a map. This will make it possible to see which quarters and areas concentrated more or less of the city’s debt and, therefore, where exactly the main financial resources of Barcelona were situated.
The Long Shadow of Municipal Debt. Formation, Evolution and Crisis of the Annuity System in Early Modern Girona (Fifteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)
Sebastià Villalón
abstractSebastià Villalón
This paper examines the formation, evolution and gradual decline of Girona's municipal debt between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing primarily on an exceptional source: a capbreu of censals compiled during the 1760s. Rather than constituting a simple inventory of liabilities, this register makes it possible to reconstruct the origins, administration and progressive reduction of the debt accumulated by the city over several centuries. The analysis focuses on the chronology and purposes of municipal borrowing, the impact of seventeenth-century debt settlements and eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms, and the social composition of Girona's creditors. Particular attention is paid to the role of ecclesiastical institutions, which held a dominant position within the city's credit network. The study shows how municipal debt was closely connected to warfare, provisioning and extraordinary expenditure, while also revealing the gradual transformation of public credit under increasing royal supervision.
Session 9 - Urban consumption and urban networks: Italy and the Southern Low Countries (13th-16th centuries)
This proposal examines urban networks in the Italian Peninsula and the southern Low Countries (13th-16th centuries), focusing on the flow of commodities and circulation of objects linked to the evolution of urban consumption. A comparative approach highlights the connections between these networks and their integration into other systems.
Coordinators: Marc Boone, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Ilaria Taddei
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Coordinators: Marc Boone, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Ilaria Taddei
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Session 9 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Wool, Cloth, and the Selling-Bench: Producers, Distributors, and the Control of Retail between Central–Northern Italy and the Southern Low Countries (13th–16th Centuries)
Marco Giacchetto
abstractMarco Giacchetto
This paper offers a comparative reassessment of the relationships between the wool-producing cities of central and northern Italy – especially Florence and other Tuscan and Po Valley centres – and those of the Southern Low Countries from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The wool industry serves as a privileged lens onto urban consumption, the circulation of goods and skills, and the functioning of urban networks: the analysis considers together the movement of raw materials and finished cloth – the triangular flow linking English wool, Flemish manufacture and Italian markets, and the growing export of Tuscan and Lombard cloths northward – and the transfer of technical expertise through the mobility of artisans and the selective adaptation of "foreign" models. Against this framework, the highly specialised Flemish draperie, long renowned for high-quality international production, is set beside an Italian industry that between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries shifted from consumer of northern cloth to competitor in the upper market segments. The analytical core, however, lies elsewhere: not in who produced cloth – the classic question of the Verlagssystem literature – but in who could access its retail sale, where economic interests concentrated and relations between producers and distributors turned to conflict or collaboration. After an overview of each area, it examines the social and institutional position of the cloth entrepreneur and seller. In the Southern Low Countries the drapier emerges as a legally defined, fundamentally artisanal figure who only exceptionally becomes a full merchant, and who is himself the first to invoke the institutional separation of production and commerce as a defence. In central-northern Italy three outcomes appear – the prevalence of the lanaiolo in Tuscany, of the drappiere in the Lombard-Veneto area, and of transit commerce at Bologna – so that the geography of conflict matches that of reconversion possibilities. A concluding lexicographic analysis, drawing on Edler's Glossary and the OVI corpus, shows that drappo denotes silk far more than wool once the material is specified, that its craft derivatives (drappiere, drapperia) pull toward wool, and that drapier, drappiere and lanaiolo are not equivalent – cautioning against the flattening use of the English "clothier". It thereby grounds a systematic comparison of two regions long studied in parallel but rarely within a shared framework.
Bruges and the Mediterranean (14th-15th Centuries)
Angela Orlandi
abstractAngela Orlandi
This contribution aims to reconstruct, through the documentation belonging to the Tuscan
merchant Francesco Datini, the role of Bruges within the system of exchanges between the North
Sea and the western Mediterranean during the decades straddling the 14th and 15th centuries.
In particular, the investigation seeks to identify the forms and connections linking the Flemish city
to the various ports of the western Mediterranean. It will focus especially on the ports of Barcelona,
Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca, which were obligatory stopovers for most vessels bound for the
North Sea. All of this unfolds within a context in which the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the
North Sea appear criss-crossed by ships moving from one coast to another, transporting goods,
money, and people who - through their continual movements - created zones of contiguity,
proximity, and exchange.
Threads of Exchange: The Italian Silk Fabrics Trade and the Southern Low Countries (14th–16th Centuries)
Franco Franceschi
abstractFranco Franceschi
Since the fourteenth century, beginning with the silk industries of Lucca, Bologna, and Venice—cities connected through a distinctive productive and commercial network managed by Lucchese merchant-entrepreneurs—and later with the wide range of textiles manufactured in Florence, Genoa, and Milan, Italian cities came to dominate an ever-expanding segment of the luxury-goods trade.
A key market in this system was Flanders, and more broadly the southern Low Countries, territories that passed under the rule of the Dukes of Burgundy and later the Habsburgs.
The paper I propose aims to examine the relations between this region and the Italian cities producing silk cloth from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century from three complementary perspectives:
- The structure and evolution of the silk fabrics market in the southern Low Countries, focusing on the relationship between local demand and the varieties of textiles produced and exported by Italian merchant-entrepreneurs;
- The commercial interactions generated by the large-scale silk fabrics trade between the two areas, with special attention to trade routes and the nature of exchanges. In this context, Bruges played a strategic role as a major hub for Italian silk in north-western Europe and, conversely, as a supply market for Italian businessmen seeking English wools, Flemish cloth, and products from the Germanic area.
- The direct and indirect contribution of Italian merchants and entrepreneurs to the emergence of a local silk-weaving industry in the southern Low Countries—particularly in Bruges from the late fifteenth century and in Antwerp during the early sixteenth century.
The aim is to gain a deeper understanding—through different yet interconnected lines of inquiry—of the role that the circulation of silk goods played in reshaping the trading networks between two regions long bound by commercial ties.
Changes in Trade and Consumption: Urban Industries in Flanders and their Mediterranean Markets
Peter Stabel
abstractPeter Stabel
uring the late middle ages the exports to the Mediterranean markets of the main industry in the Low Countries cities, urban cloth manufacture, dwindles. By 1400 only some manufacturing centres hung on to exporting medium quality cloth, not in the least the urban centres on the Leie River. But also this market segment declined. It seemed that for a very long time Low Countries urban products were no longer attractive for Italian consumers and that except for some limited number of luxury items (some panel paintings and, of course, tapestries). In the 14th century, however, some of the major cities in the Low Countries successfully changed their industrial infrastructure, focusing no longer exclusively on cloth (that remained an important export commodity towards Central and Eastern Europe), but also on luxury industries (but these did not constitute necessarily, of course, a source for massive employment and high export volumes) and above all fashion industries. The existing trade and information links provided by Italian merchants in the Low Countries apparently allowed a renewed export of this time finished commodities (hats, caps, gloves, etc.). The process started during the 15th century, and this time, Low Countries traders themselves catered for their exports on th Italian Peninsula, a sign that the one-sided trade arrangements had come to a halt. A century later, Low Countries merchants were very much present on the Italian market.
Session 9 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Les objets métalliques de luxe entre Milan et les Anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux : commerce ou politique (XVe-XVIe siècles) ?
Beatrice G.m. Del Bo
abstractBeatrice G.m. Del Bo
La bibliographie sur le travail des métaux en Lombardie et sur la production de certains ateliers spécialisés dans les objets de luxe (L. Frangioni, Milano fine Trecento. Il carteggio milanese dell’Archivio Datini di Prato, Firenze, 1998; Commercio in Lombardia, a cura di G. Tamburelli, 3 voll., Milano, 1986; Par exemple, les productions de l'atelier Missaglia sont les plus connues, mais elles ne sont pas les seules) constitue la base fondamentale de mon enquête, visant à déterminer si et quels produits de luxe fabriqués à Milan, notamment des armes et des armures, étaient destinés à l'exportation vers les villes du Sud des Pays-Bas. Tout d’abord, l'objectif est de reconstituer les types, les destinations et les acheteurs de ces marchandises, en s'appuyant sur des sources écrites et matérielles (objets conservés dans des collections muséales; iconographie). Mais, plus généralement, l'intention est de répondre à certaines questions : existe-t-il des réseaux commerciaux spécifiques pour ces produits ? Y a-t-il des marchands spécialisés ? La production et la commercialisation d'objets de luxe changent-elles les règles du marché ? Quelle est l'influence des liens politiques locaux et internationaux ? Quelle est l'incidence des cadeaux entre les princes ?
On analysera donc les relations entre hommes d'affaires actifs dans certaines villes italiennes et européennes - à commencer par Francesco di Marco Datini -, mais aussi le rôle des liens politiques entre Italie, Espagne et Pays-Bas, entre le XVe et le début du XVIe siècle, pour évaluer une nouvelle fois l'impact de la politique sur la manufacture et sur le commerce.
From the Low Countries to Italy, and Back: Tracing Return Migration in the Fifteenth Century
Bart Lambert, William Torbeyns
abstractBart Lambert, William Torbeyns
Migration is often assumed to be primarily aimed at permanent resettlement and integration, especially when it involves long-distance movement. Yet contemporary research has shown that a significant proportion of migrants eventually return to their place of origin. Some may have sought temporary refuge from economic or political crises at home and chose to return once conditions improved. Others may have left with the intention of gaining experience or resources abroad, which they later reinvested back home.
This pattern is not limited to the modern era—it also holds true for the late Middle Ages (13th-15th centuries). This paper challenges linear narratives of mobility and highlights the complex, cyclical nature of migration in the late medieval period by examining the dynamics of return migration between the Low Countries—particularly Flanders and Brabant—and Italian cities—especially Florence—in the fifteenth century. It draws on individual cases of migrants who left Flemish and Brabantine cities, established lives on the Italian peninsula for several years, and eventually returned to continue their lives in the Low Countries.
Based on extensive archival research conducted in both regions of origin and migrants’ destinations, involving guild registers, confraternity records and city accounts, the paper reconstructs the motivations behind these migration trajectories. It considers structural push and pull factors but also explores the role of social networks and individual and household-level decisions that shaped these movements.
From masterpieces to everyday consumption: networks and circulation of works of art between the Southern Low Countries and Italy in the late Middle Ages
Jean-Baptiste Delzant
abstractJean-Baptiste Delzant
The circulation of masterpieces of art history between the Italian Peninsula and the Southern Low Countries left a strong mark on the historiography of the Quattrocento. It is common to mention the taste of the court of Naples for the works of Jan Van Eyck, or the triptych of the Adoration of the Shepherds commissioned by Tommaso Portinari from Hugo Van der Goes in the early 1470s. While it is clear that the development of branches of large Italian companies in the Low Countries explains some of these commissions, new studies of medieval consumption invite us to reopen this issue by focusing on the flow of goods exported from the Netherlands to the Peninsula, broadening the range of products considered (painted panels, tapestries, but also gold and silverware, ceramics and illuminated books) and drawing attention to much more commonplace production. We can thus discern networks differentiated according to the quality of the products concerned, connected to other networks operating around other exchanges and deployed according to chronologies that need to be refined. Beyond a few key works, a new structure for the circulation and consumption of artistic productions is emerging.
The circulation of Flemish paintings in Italian commercial circuits
Maximiliaan Maximiliaan Martens, Maria Clelia Galassi
abstractMaximiliaan Maximiliaan Martens, Maria Clelia Galassi
The case of Flemish painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
provides a particularly illuminating lens through which to explore the
circulation of objects and the functioning of urban networks in the
southern Low Countries and Italy. The unprecedented artistic production
of cities such as Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp cannot be
understood apart from their dense mercantile infrastructures and their
integration within transregional systems of exchange. Painters such as
Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes,
Joos Van Cleve, and later Pieter Bruegel the Elder operated within
circuits that linked Flanders to Italy, above alll thanks to the
presence of the Nationes of Italian merchants, first in Bruges and then
in Antwerp.
Flemish works—devotional panels, altarpieces, and portraits —were
themselves commodities circulating through the same networks that
conveyed luxury textiles, pigments, and other high-value goods.
On a first level, the production and dissemination of paintings reveal
the integration of artistic labour and material exchange within urban
economies that specialized in luxury manufacture. On a second level,
tracing the chronological evolution of trade routes and markets helps
explain the shift in artistic centres—from Bruges in the fifteenth
century to Antwerp in the sixteenth—as a reflection of changing urban
hierarchies and commercial orientations. Finally, the international
diffusion of Netherlandish paintings, many of which reached Italian
collections, demonstrates how these artistic objects mediated
cross-cultural exchanges, connecting northern and southern networks in a
dynamic system of mutual influence.
By situating Flemish painting within this framework, the comparative
study of Italian and southern Netherlandish urban networks gains a
tangible dimension: artworks emerge not only as aesthetic achievements
but also as material witnesses to the economic, social, and cultural
flows that underpinned the early modern world.
Corridors, Hubs, Crossroads: A Network Urban Perspective on Art and Luxury Exchange between Italy and the Low Countries (1580–1620).
Isabella Di Lenardo
abstractIsabella Di Lenardo
This contribution presents a large-scale reconstruction of the commercial network of artworks and luxury goods in early modern Europe, mainly between the Low Countries and the “South” Europe based on a newly compiled dataset comprising over 8,000 historical figures, more than 500 urban locations and type of trading done. The data draws from original archival research and curated selections from established online repositories. Chronologically, the study focuses on the period between 1580 and 1620; a critical turning point marked by the decline of Antwerp and the rise of Amsterdam, the predominance of Venice, the expansion of trans-European trade, and the abrupt disruption of global circulation with the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Within this framework, the paper investigates the spatial logic and socio-professional structure of the global art trade. Methodologically, the research moves beyond monographic traditions to propose a systemic understanding of how artworks and ideas circulated across hundreds of interconnected cities and actors. This is made possible through a mixed quantitative and qualitative methods that combines archival transcription, historical prosopography, geolocation, and longitudinal network analysis. Such a computational framework enables the identification of historical patterns and relational dynamics that remain invisible within smaller scales of inquiry. The study maps mobility and connection intensity between nodes, both cities and individuals, highlighting maritime routes, continental corridors, and key centers of redistribution. It proposes a revised typology of urban functions within early modern exchange networks, complementing the classic center–periphery model with nuanced categories such as global/port hubs (e.g., Venice, Amsterdam), continental crossroads (e.g., Lyon, Cologne), secondary trading towns (e.g., Malines, Innsbruck), and family hubs (e.g., Frankfurt, Nürnberg) classified according to their network centrality and role. Likewise, historical figures are grouped by emerging functional profiles derived from their relational patterns in the network: long-distance merchants, local traders, resident agents, and specialized art intermediaries. Special attention is given to the role of merchant families (from Flanders, Italy, Germany, withs nodes in France and Spain) who integrated collecting into commercial strategy, and to the rise of “stock collections” as curated inventories for sale, comparison, and prestige
Session 10 - Jewish Networks in Medieval Europe: Urban Interactions and Judeo-Christian Relations in the Development of the City
This session explores the central role of Jewish communities in shaping medieval Europe's urban networks, highlighting their interactions with Christians in fields such as commerce, finance, culture, and urbanism, and offering a comparative and transregional perspective on Judeo-Christian urban coexistence.
Coordinators: Philip Banks, Jordi Fernández-Cuadrench, Robert Baró i Cabrera
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Coordinators: Philip Banks, Jordi Fernández-Cuadrench, Robert Baró i Cabrera
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Session 10 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 2 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
A Jewish Trade Connection between Barcelona and Al-Andalus in the 11th Century
Thomas Freudenhammer
abstractThomas Freudenhammer
In 1054/55, Count Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona sent a group of Jews to Narbonne on galleys he had requested from the Emir of Tortosa. The aim of the mission was to pick up Almodis, the wife of the Count of Toulouse. Ramon Berenguer had fallen in love with her during a previous visit to Narbonne and persuaded her to flee. Shortly after her arrival in Barcelona, Almodis married Ramon Berenguer. Being already married, the count was excommunicated by the Pope, but was later able to achieve reconciliation with the Church.
The only person to record this episode is the contemporary geographer Abū ‘Ubaid Al-Bakrī. The Andalusi author could only have learnt about these events in the foreign Christian world from the Jews of Tortosa, who in turn had been informed by the Jews of Barcelona. This chain of transmission across the Christian-Muslim cultural border suggests close ties between the Jewish communities of Barcelona and Tortosa, which probably also served trade purposes. As the wrecks of four Andalusi merchant ships off the coast of Provence show, Al-Andalus was already trading along the Catalan and Provençal coasts at the turn of the 10th century.
Two original documents from Barcelona provide insight into the dealings of a Jewish resident of that city. In 1021, a merchant named Benevenisti accepted a large load of barley on credit from Ermengardis, the daughter of the late Count Borrell. Despite a generous extension of the deadline, he was unable to settle his debt and eventually lost the property he had pledged as collateral. Given the large quantity, which exceeded personal consumption, Benevenisti most likely had intended to resell the grain. Why did the deal fail? Barley was certainly in high demand at the local market of Barcelona and Benevenisti would not have been left sitting on his goods there. However, he could equally have planned to export the grain to Tortosa using the Andalusi galleys that sailed from this city. In such a case, a shipwreck might have deprived him of his goods and the corresponding payment.
Our sources do not reveal whether the Jewish merchant Benevenisti from Barcelona actually shipped grain to Tortosa. However, the close relations between the Jewish communities of both cities make such trade plausible. Furthermore, the assumption of bilateral trade is supported by the massive influx of Andalusi dinars into Barcelona, which served as local currency from the 980s onwards under the name “gold mancuses”.
Jewish and converso networks in the trade and craft of coral in Medieval Barcelona.
Anna Rich-Abad
abstractAnna Rich-Abad
In the second half of the 14th century the work of coral became central to the economic life of the Jewish quarter of Barcelona alongside with the weaving of silk into veils. The manufacture of coral was dedicated to export after a minimal process of transformation, mainly to the north of Europe, Barbary, and the Levant, and to the production of beads and paternosters for mass consumption. Through this trade, Jews made an important contribution to the economic life of the city of Barcelona. Looking into the rich notarial documentation of the city of Barcelona, the present paper examines the period 1348-1440 as a time of precarious economic balance after the Black Death, the anti-Jewish riots and mass conversions of 1391 and as the start of a severe economic crisis in Barcelona. It focuses on the patterns of adoption of these trades by the Jews of Barcelona, relating them to the context of the decline of Jewish credit towards Christians and of overall changing credit practices for both Jews and Christians. The paper uses network analysis and genealogies to evaluate the continuation and disruptions of this trade at this transitional point and how family groups and social networks of individuals involved in the commerce and manufacture of coral were affected by the forced change from Jewish to Converso society.
INTERACTION IN SHARED JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN SPACES IN MEDIEVAL BARCELONA
Philip Banks
abstractPhilip Banks
Recent studies of medieval Barcelona’s Jewish quarter or Call have focused on a wide range of subjects, including its physical shape and limits, Jewish property ownership, its social and political organisation, and commercial and craft-related aspects. This paper seeks to place the Jewish quarter in its broader urban context by examining different spaces in which Jews might (or might not) have entered everyday contact with the Christian inhabitants of Barcelona. Focusing on the period between the twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries, it aims to use a range of sources, largely of a documentary nature, some of which have only recently been published or become accessible, but also to draw on the implications of the city’s plan and topography.
The topics considered include such aspects as Jewish property holdings outside the Call proper but still within the late Roman city walls, as well as others in the city’s far more extensive suburban areas (e.g. the former Horta de Queralt and the Trilla jueva). In these areas, Jewish individuals and institutions were involved in the urbanisation of what had hitherto been horticultural plots, in much the same way as their Christian counterparts were. Particular attention is devoted to several aspects of urban infrastructure, especially the baths (Barcelona being one of the few Christian cities that had two bath complexes, one situated alongside the Call itself); a further feature to be studied is the similarly located (outside but adjacent to the Call) bakery oven of the Call, the modus operandi of which, previously almost unknown, is now amply documented; furthermore, aspects of commercial activity, including the main market, where Jews are recorded as holding stalls, the fish market and the distribution of fish, the preparation and sale of meat, as well as Jewish involvement in the alfòndecs or funduqs, as a reflection of their involvement in long-distance trade, are also considered.
The limited amount of source material will be complemented by examples drawn from other urban centres in Catalonia and elsewhere in the Christian realms of the Iberian Peninsula. Although few definite conclusions can be drawn, this more eclectic approach intends to add to the growing body of evidence that suggests a greater degree of interaction and interdependence between the Jewish and Christian communities, particularly prior to the later thirteenth century, than has often been considered to have been the case.
Session 11 - Inter-Urban Women's Networks in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Gendered Connections, Legal Frameworks, and Institutional Influence
This session examines inter-urban networks in pre-modern Europe, with a focus on the connections forged by and for women across urban centres. We aim to explore both the networks that actively linked women's communities-especially religious ones-across cities and regions, and the broader institutional frameworks (such as legal traditions).
Coordinators: Michaela Antonín Malaníková, Anna Molnar
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Coordinators: Michaela Antonín Malaníková, Anna Molnar
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Session 11 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 1 CSIC
Nuns in the Middle Ages and their economic matters. The Case of Margareth von der Beke.
Beata Możejko
abstractBeata Możejko
In my paper, I will refer to several female monastic congregations from the Gdańsk area that were active in the late Middle Ages. I will focus in particular on two monasteries: Żukowo (Norbertines) and Żarnowiec (Cistercians).
The nuns working in both places often came from Gdańsk. I will also be interested in their economic background and activities, as well as the difficulties they encountered.
My research will also focus on the Brigidine convent in Gdańsk.
Female patronage in urban development in Abruzzo between the 15th and 16th centuries
Raffaele Giannantonio
abstractRaffaele Giannantonio
Beyond women artists and those employed on construction sites in operational roles alongside men and the very rare "female architects," a fundamental aspect of women's role in the 15th and 16th centuries concerned matronage. Matronage was, in fact, a strategic instrument in politics and in the consolidation of power through the construction or transformation of palaces, sacred buildings, and monasteries. In particular, in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the role of noblewomen in architectural matronage changed profoundly. While in the Middle Ages they were primarily dedicated to founding convents, between the 15th and 16th centuries, some female figures belonging to the great European dynasties began to exert an influence on the construction of palaces, villas, gardens, and representative buildings, with a constant focus on the governance of the city. This essay focuses on the architectural matronage of three of the most significant female figures in Abruzzo between the 15th and 16th centuries: Covella da Celano, Vittoria Colonna, and Margaret of Austria. These three noblewomen active in Abruzzo in those years performed their roles as patrons in a way that affirmed an intellectual autonomy and design ability that transcended the purely architectural aspect. Through her relationship with the religiosity of Giovanni da Capestrano and the Frati Osservanti, Covella influenced her own territory and, at the same time, by working on the castle of Celano, defined monumental features that were new to the typological context. Margaret of Austria left unmistakable traces of her presence throughout the “Farnese States.” Great names in architecture, such as Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, designed works for her that allowed the area to embrace research of national scope, while Pico Fonticulano's design for the new palace gave new meaning to the medieval fabric of Aquila. Vittoria Colonna created the regulatory framework that allowed Pescocostanzo to maintain consistent urban development for centuries. Her impact also extended to social development through her support for the education of young Pesco residents, who were recommended to Michelangelo and sent to Rome to perfect their skills in the arts and crafts.
Session 11 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 1 CSIC
Women in Late Medieval Cities: The Case of Bohemia and Moravia
Matěj Kaftan
abstractMatěj Kaftan
This paper deals with the status of women in the late medieval period. The lives of urban communities in medieval Bohemia and Moravia were influenced by two families of urban law. The 15th century brought great change, The Bohemian Reformation, as well as the centralisation of urban law in Bohemia and the strengthening of the role of towns owned by the aristocracy. These changes determined the position of women within families, craft guilds, and society. This paper explains how urban legal traditions affected women's lives and describing regional variations in Bohemia and Moravia.
Urban Mobility in Late Medieval and Early Modern Towns between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary
Judit Majorossy
abstractJudit Majorossy
Moving People between East and West: The Towns in the Medieval Hungarian Kingdom and the Eastern Territories of the Holy Roman Empire
My general research interest lies in the overlapping social groups in late medieval towns and in the role of family and kinship relations, both within and beyond the political borders of the Holy Roman Empire and the Hungarian Kingdom. In my current project, I aim to find out more about female members as brokers, and the role of patchwork families in Friedrich III’s and Maximilian I’s urban and intellectual environment, particularly in relation to regional and trans-regional economic and social networks (mainly between southern German, Austrian, Western and Upper Hungarian urban networks), as well as university circles around the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In addition to such economic and social ties, I take into account the growing role of university education among the 'average' burghers, as well as the role that lay (elite) religious fraternities might have played in these forms of interaction.
In my paper, in the above context, I plan to examine the kinship networks of some influential urban figures, among others, such as the Pemfflinger family in Regensburg, Vienna and Buda and later also in Transylvania; the Funck family in Memmingen, Schwäbisch Hall, Wiener Neustadt, Schemnitz and Kremnitz; the Haller family in Nuremberg, Buda, and other royal centres in Hungary (as well as in Transylvania); the Thurzo family and their economic allies in important Hungarian mining towns: the Pieschen family or the Hillebrand family (from Styria) in Vienna, Pressburg and Schemnitz; the partners of the Fuggers in Vienna, such as the Kisling family; or the Königsfelder family (from Brünn) in Pressburg and Vienna, just to mention of few of those under the magnifier. Beyond their economic mobility in the wider region their connection to court circles are also interesting to shade light on the mechanism of their success in the second half of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. From the perspective of the regional urban (economic) network, Vienna functioned as a wider regional hub, and the way in which an important religious brotherhood (the Corpus Christi at the Cathedral Church of Saint Stephen’s) could have functioned as an informal “community” of networking will also be under scrutiny.
Women of the Sea and Urban Networks: Fisherwomen in Late Medieval Barcelona
Aïda Sánchez
abstractAïda Sánchez
In late medieval Barcelona, women of fisherman comunity played a crucial yet often overlooked role in the city’s urban and maritime economy. Beyond their visible labor in catching, cleaning, and selling fish, they forged networks of solidarity and cooperation that sustained both their livelihoods and their communities. These women operated within the bustling environment of the port and surrounding markets, managing sales collectively, sharing resources, and navigating the uncertainties of a trade dependent on the rhythms of the sea.
Their activities reveal a complex intersection between gender and economy. While municipal ordinances and guild regulations sought to control women’s work and mobility, fisherwomen found spaces of negotiation within these constraints. Through informal agreements, small loans, and reciprocal obligations, they built micro-economies that functioned alongside—and sometimes in defiance of—official structures. Such practices exemplify what may be described as a “moral economy of the sea,” grounded in trust, kinship, and female collaboration.
These women’s networks were not confined to Barcelona alone. The city’s maritime connections extended across the Catalan coast and into the western Mediterranean, creating inter-urban circuits of exchange in which fisherwomen participated directly or indirectly. Their work linked local urban life with broader regional economies, demonstrating women’s active contribution to transregional connectivity.
The fisherwomen of medieval Barcelona thus emerge as key figures in understanding urban and gendered networks in the premodern Mediterranean world. Their economic activities, legal negotiations, and communal bonds illustrate how women could transform the constraints of urban regulation into opportunities for agency and solidarity. The networks they wove—both human and material—sustained not only their own survival but the very fabric of the medieval city.
Session 12 - Porous walls. Political networks and travelling ideas among cities in Europe, 1200-1800
This session wants to discover how porous urban walls were when it came to political cooperation and the transfer of political ideas among towns (1200-1800). We invite speakers to trace the political networks between urban (and rural) communities and to consider the inspiration for political action citizens sought in other towns and communities.
Coordinators: Marta Gravela, Jelle Haemers, Christian Liddy
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Coordinators: Marta Gravela, Jelle Haemers, Christian Liddy
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Session 12 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 2 CSIC
Travelling Customs: Shared Conceptions of Governance, Accountability, and Belonging in the High Medieval Guilds of the North Sea World
Jeroen Deploige, Jeff Rider
abstractJeroen Deploige, Jeff Rider
Recent archaeological research into the use of ballast stones in the North Sea region has provided strong evidence for the intense contacts that must have existed between Flanders, the English East Coast, and Scandinavia during the High Middle Ages (c. 1100–1300). Written sources for these contacts, however, remain comparatively scarce. In this contribution, we examine three sets of medieval guild customs: those of the Flemish merchants of Saint-Omer (c. 1100), the Danish St Knud’s guild in Malmö (1256), and the northern English guild of Berwick-upon-Tweed (1248–1283/84). Although no literal textual correspondences can be identified between these three collections of customs, it is striking that several clauses display strong similarities, suggesting the existence of shared practices in the North Sea area, while other clauses point instead to highly local traditions.
We hypothesize that, just as ballast stones circulated among the regions engaged in North Sea trade, certain rules of conduct likewise spread orally among merchants and may have found their way into guild regulations. These rules cannot be equated with town charters or laws, which were often drafted around the same time, yet they nonetheless reveal how such relatively private fraternities—groups that did not necessarily represent the broader community of citizens—developed an arsenal of values and conceptions centred not only on solidarity and security, but also on governance, accountability, and belonging. In this sense, they testify to the importance of widely circulating ideas that also influenced local processes of political emancipation.
A room of one’s own? Jews and the Towns of Medieval England
Natasha Jenman, Dean Irwin
abstractNatasha Jenman, Dean Irwin
The establishment of the medieval Anglo-Jewish community by the end of the twelfth century, posed significant challenges for English towns. While recent research has emphasised the presence of immigrant communities within English towns, the Jews were religiously and legally unique. At a time when English towns were undergoing a period of ‘urban emancipation’ during which towns gained ‘the right to organize their own affairs free from routine interference’ (Liddy, 2017), the presence of Jews had the potential to negatively impact upon urban autonomy. There was always the possibility that the Crown might seek to stretch it’s authority over Jews in a local context, to usurp local privileges which had been hard won. As such, towns developed a number of strategies to deal with the Jews. Expulsion is the most visible reaction against the Jews by towns, as can be seen at urban communities across the country from the 1230s down to 1275. This was a relatively rare reaction.
On the whole Jews lived alongside their Christian neighbours and, as we see in charters, legal cases, and chronicle accounts, co-operation was a highly effective strategy. In working together to administer local business and justice, medieval towns were able to curtail the possibilities for royal interference. Mechanisms were introduced to embed trust and ensure collaboration across the urban community: Christians and Jews. This paper will explore the strategies of different English towns to the presence of the Jews, and map the relationships between individuals and communities. Through a close reading of the manuscript sources, it will be possible to see how these relationships manifested themselves, while the use of social network analysis allows us to track those relationships through time and space. Ultimately, it will be argued that the presence of Jews was an important factor in the development of urban identity. Equally, measures which were introduced to ensure inter-religious co-operation were so effective, that by the fourteenth century they were embedded into everyday life. This is most obviously seen in the Articles of the Jewry (1194), which regulated the recording of Jewish business activities, which were so effective that they were replicated in the Statute of Acton Burnell (1283) in a Christian context. Ultimately, this paper will argue that, in instances of ‘town vs Crown’, thirteenth century English towns presented a united front against royal interference.
Officers under Investigation: Public Accountability and Popular Expectations in Late Medieval Flanders and Brabant.
Markus Breugelmans
abstractMarkus Breugelmans
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an ambitious administrative innovation took shape in the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant. Amidst the rise of accountability measures and initiatives elsewhere in late medieval Europe, the Flemish counts and Brabantine dukes began to subject their officers to so-called ‘enquêtes’, or investigations. Although commonly associated with the top-down growth of centralized bureaucracy, these ‘enquêtes’ were also enforced from the bottom up by the cities of these highly developed regions, serving as tools of counter-power, participation and popular control. In practice, auditors were sent out to towns and villages to question the inhabitants about the (mis)conduct of the local authorities. These visitations resulted in extensive reports filled with complaints and testimonies from subjects regarding the often corrupt and abusive behaviour of those in office.
Because these sources, which surprisingly have received little attention to date, document the personal grievances of the population, they enable us to deepen our historiographical understanding of late medieval popular politics by shifting the focus to the really everyday, practical experiences of people with those in power. More specifically, these enquiries offer a window into the political expectations that subjects held towards their rulers. The complaints reveal, for instance, how ordinary men, but also women, expected local authorities to behave and which norms officers were expected to uphold. The historiographical value of these sources also lies in their broad geographical and chronological range. Conducted in both towns and villages during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Flemish and Brabantine ‘enquêtes’ allow us to look beyond city walls and to compare political expectations from below across urban and rural regions. This research thus aims to explore how different communities had clear expectations about what good governance was supposed to be, and how they collectively compelled their rulers to take those expectations into account. The ‘enquêtes’ were, after all, used to investigate and evaluate the local representatives of the count or duke and, if necessary, even to sanction them, demonstrating how the complaints of villagers and city dwellers, and the expectations underlying them, impacted and shaped late medieval politics.
Session 12 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 2 CSIC
“Populus adversus rectores”. The spread of popular reforms in the small towns of Western Piedmont (15th century)
Davide Morra
abstractDavide Morra
This paper examines popular protests against municipal councils, a phenomenon that appears to have been widespread in the small towns of western Piedmont during the fifteenth century. Two cases, Barge and Carmagnola, are considered in order to highlight the presence of a recurring narrative underpinning this type of political contestation. The paper then turns to the broader regional context and to the connections between the aforementioned towns and other Piedmontese centres, seeking clues to the circulation of models and the reasons behind it. Although further research is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn, the evidence gathered here highlights the importance of the interlocal networks of certain families, whose members acted as mediators in the circulation and negotiation of political ideas between local and regional contexts.
Urban Networks and Political Landscape of Poland-Lithuania during the 15th -16th centuries
Yuriy Zazuliak, Olga Kozubska
abstractYuriy Zazuliak, Olga Kozubska
The paper discusses unstable forms and networks of the political solidarity and communication between the towns of Poland-Lithuania in the period of transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern times. It intends to demonstrate situational and short-term character of such networks and to emphasize the lack of the political institutionalization of such political inter-city cooperation. Seeking to highlight this specific feature of the political communication, the paper concentrates on the political conflict from the mid-15th between the city of Lviv, the main urban center in the eastern Ruthenian (Ukrainian) parts of the Polish Kingdom, known for its key role in the eastern trade, and the magnate family of Odrowąż, the royal governors of the Ruthenian province. Both parties in the conflict laid claims to the jurisdictional rights over the foreign merchants. The remarkable feature of this confrontation was the network of political support mobilized by the citizens of Lviv. The authorities of two other major cities of the Kingdom, Poznań and Gdańsk, intervened by the king on behalf of Lviv, claiming that the mentioned jurisdictional rights always belonged to Lviv. The common political activities to counter abuses of the Odrowąż family, also extended across estates and social groups. In 1464 Liv joined the confederation, that is the temporary political union, organized by the local nobility with the aim of defending their rights. It must be noted that this extensive ties of solidarity with the city of Lviv, which united both townsmen and noblemen, coincided chronologically with the first major anti-urban legislation, known as the Nieszawa statute (1454). The statute was enacted by the Polish nobles and became one of the legal cornerstones of the political hegemony of the nobility in the Polish Kingdom. It not only extended the collective political privileges of the nobility, but also aimed, among others, at restricting economic and legal rights of the towns.
Before the Embassy: Cities, Dynasties and the Making of Sir Henry Wotton’s Geopolitical Worldview, 1589–1603
Robert Aleksander Maryks, Cezary Rosiński
abstractRobert Aleksander Maryks, Cezary Rosiński
This paper reconstructs the geopolitical world of Sir Henry Wotton, first accredited English ambassador to Venice, from his pre-embassy letters (1589–1603). Rather than reading Wotton backward from the Interdict Crisis of 1606–7, it asks what kind of Europe his letters describe and what the structure of that correspondence can and cannot reveal about the role of cities in early modern political communication. Fifty-one coded letters, from Logan Pearsall Smith's edition and supplementary archives, were encoded in a relational data model separating place references from references to political entities. Three networks result: a geographical projection of 111 places in 355 letter–place relations; a political projection of 52 entities in 111 letter–entity relations; and a bipartite layer of 163 nodes and 761 edges. Each is examined in full and as a skeleton of relations attested in at least two letters, with edge weights tested against degree-preserving randomizations.
Three findings follow. First, urban nodes did not displace dynastic or territorial formations; they served as interfaces through which such formations became observable. Vienna carries a concentrated imperial-dynastic profile, Rome a coherent institutional and confessional one, and Venice the broadest, most heterogeneous profile in the corpus. Second, the network is audience-shaped rather than cumulative: twenty-nine of the fifty-one letters were addressed to Edward la Zouche, and their removal eliminates 42 percent of repeatable geographical relations, 76 percent of political relations, and 64 percent of cross-layer relations, shifting the core from a Vienna–Empire configuration toward Heidelberg–Basel–England. Third, aggregate network statistics are largely artifacts of the data model: a letter to the earl of Essex (December 1594) mentions twenty-three places, generating roughly 14.6 percent of all edges in the full geographical network.
These results reframe how urban history should use epistolary network data. Co-occurrence in a letter evidences shared presence within a writer's field of attention, not institutional cooperation or information flow. Read with that constraint, Wotton's letters document a layered geopolitical literacy in which cities served as observation posts onto composite sovereignties. The paper closes with the letter of 23 May 1603, from Venice to London, as the documented threshold between the mobile observer and the resident diplomat.
City in Exile: Åbo Town in Stockholm, 1713–1721
Sari Nauman, Olof Blomqvist
abstractSari Nauman, Olof Blomqvist
The Great Northern War (1700–1721) resulted in large-scale displacement of people within the Swedish Empire as an estimated 20,000–30,000 refugees fled from the Baltic provinces and Finland to escape advancing Russian forces. Most settled in towns along Sweden’s east coast, including Stockholm, Härnösand, and Uppsala, which served as major hubs of refugee relief. Previous research has shown that many of the refugees also emanated from towns, particularly from the coastal regions of Finland. It has been estimated that in the case of Nykarleby, Jakobstad, and Brahestad more than 80 % of the population relocated to Sweden. To some degree, then, this refugee migration was an urban affair.
One of the towns whose inhabitants migrated to Sweden during the war was Åbo, the main administrative and ecclesiastic centre of southern Finland. In contrast to some of the other towns in the region, only about 35 % of its inhabitants fled, whereas the majority either remained in the town throughout the Russian occupation or temporarily relocated to its close vicinities. Yet, among those who fled were the town’s key institutions: the town council, the cathedral chapter, the university, and the civil servants of the Royal Court of Appeal—all of whom relocated to Stockholm. There, they attempted to continue their administrative and judicial functions. In the face of displacement and wartime disruption, separated from most of their constituents, they still laboured to keep up business as usual.
This paper explores how an early modern town operated in exile. Drawing on correspondence to, from, and about Åbo’s displaced authorities—the magistrates, the cathedral chapter, the academy, and the court of appeal—we examine jurisdictional conflicts and institutional overlaps with Stockholm’s local governance. How did the two cities, operating in the same geographical space, negotiate their power? We also investigate how Åbo’s institutions sought to assert and exercise authority remotely, addressing practical challenges such as communication, physical meetings, and archival preservation. Through this case study, we shed light on the complexities of urban governance in exile and the resilience of institutional structures under duress.
Session 13 - Fiscal Source-Based Insights on Short, Medium, and Long-Term Inequality in Urban and Semi-Urban Settlements (Western Europe, 13th-19th centuries)
This session aims to explore economic inequality in urban and semi-urban Western Europe (13 th -19 th centuries) using fiscal sources. It pretends to foster comparative insights into short, medium, and long-term trends in wealth, taxation, stratification, and network configurations, emphasizing methodological innovation.
Coordinators: David Carvajal, Laura Miquel Milian, Ramon Ramon-Muñoz, Andreu Segui Beltran
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Coordinators: David Carvajal, Laura Miquel Milian, Ramon Ramon-Muñoz, Andreu Segui Beltran
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Session 13 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
From Bourbon Reforms to Liberal States: Wealth Inequality in Aragon and Catalonia, c.1700–1900.
Adrián Palacios-Mateo, Josep Mas-Ferrer
abstractAdrián Palacios-Mateo, Josep Mas-Ferrer
This paper examines the long-term dynamics of wealth inequality in the current provincial capitals of Aragon (Huesca, Teruel and Zaragoza) and Catalonia (Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona) through the lens of direct taxation sources, from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Urban history has highlighted the central role of towns as spaces of production, consumption, and social stratification, yet the reconstruction of economic inequality at the local level remains limited. By systematically analysing fiscal registers from several towns and over two centuries, our contribution situates these towns within broader European debates, offering a continuous and comparative perspective on how inequality was shaped by economic, demographic, and political change.
Despite their limitations, direct taxes provide invaluable evidence on the distribution of property and wealth within towns. Indeed, the early eighteenth century was a decisive juncture for the consolidation of fiscal regimes in the Iberian Peninsula, following the Bourbon reforms and the reshaping of municipal institutions, while in the mid-19th century, a major tax reform took place, which marked the beginning of the contemporary Spanish tax system. Also, the selection of provincial capitals as our case studies is closely tied to these transformations: with the territorial division of 1833 and the creation of provinces, these towns acquired a distinctive political and administrative role, reinforcing their position as key areas where fiscal practices, social hierarchies, and urban governance intersected.
Moreover, the chronological span allows us to capture both structural continuities and moments of rupture, including political reforms but also wars and political turmoils. In doing so, the study contributes to three major debates. First, it advances the discussion on the potential of fiscal sources as a tool for reconstructing patterns of wealth distribution and social stratification over the long term. Second, it provides robust empirical data on the evolution of inequality in a set of towns that remain mainly understudied. Third, by situating Aragon and Catalonia within wider European discussions, it adds a valuable southern European perspective to global debates on inequality in the two centuries before the First World War.
Disruptive Shocks and the Dynamics of Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Catalonia: The Town of Cervera, 1700–1841
Pere Verdés-Pijuan, Ramon Ramón-Muñoz
abstractPere Verdés-Pijuan, Ramon Ramón-Muñoz
This paper investigates how disruptive shocks influenced economic inequality in preindustrial Catalonia, focusing on their duration, intensity, and mechanisms of impact. It analyses the town of Cervera between 1700 and 1841 to determine whether wars, political changes, demographic crises, or market disruptions produced temporary disturbances or lasting redistributive effects. The study seeks to clarify how external and internal shocks interacted with structural trends of population and economic growth to shape local inequality.
Cervera, located in western Catalonia, offers an exceptional case thanks to its detailed archival records and distinctive role as the only Catalan city authorized to host a university from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Its population grew from around 3,000 to nearly 5,000, reflecting regional expansion while maintaining a scale suitable for close empirical analysis.
Using fiscal sources such as tax registers and household-level data, the research estimates Gini coefficients and other indicators of income and wealth inequality for fifteen benchmark years. These data enable systematic comparisons across time, neighbourhoods, and nearby villages now part of Cervera, as well as within social groups. This level of detail allows a fine-grained view of inequality dynamics rarely attainable for Catalonia in this period.
The study provides new evidence for the broader European debate on preindustrial inequality, often described as rising until the early nineteenth century but uneven across regions and classes. Cervera’s experience illustrates how local contexts could diverge from continental trends depending on the nature and frequency of shocks and on institutional resilience.
Preliminary results suggest that recurrent disturbances—military conflicts, political reforms, and social or institutional changes—did not merely cause short-term fluctuations but also reinforced structural disparities. By combining quantitative fiscal data with historical interpretation, the research shows that shocks and long-term transformations were deeply intertwined.
Overall, the case of Cervera demonstrates how communities in early modern Catalonia adapted to economic and political turbulence and how these adjustments contributed to persistent patterns of inequality. The findings enhance our understanding of the mechanisms through which disruption and continuity shaped wealth distribution in preindustrial Europe.
Agrarian Specialization and Economic Inequality in Early Modern Mallorca 1566–1666
Gabriel Jover Avellà
abstractGabriel Jover Avellà
In agrarian, organic economies, the distribution of land ownership, institutional power and environmental conditions play a dominant role in shaping specialization models. However, it is difficult to know what the driving forces are in each historical process.
Between 1566 and 1666, the island of Mallorca specialized in producing olive oil for international markets. In the mid-sixteenth century, villages with different agro-systems — cereal-growing plains, wine-growing and olive-growing — had similar levels of property inequality. By the end of this specialization process, however, the villages had diverged drastically in terms of economic inequality, as measured by Gini coefficients. Our objective is to study the factors that caused significant differences in the evolution of inequality, as measured by Gini coefficients.
To explore this, we examine four villages: Binissalem, characterized by vineyards; Santa Margalida, primarily devoted to cereal cultivation; and Esporles and Lloseta, which specialized in olive groves. Our analysis draws on a combination of sources, including the Estims, which assess real estate such as lands, houses, and mills; the Catastro, which records both movable property (loans, censuses, livestock, tools) and immovable property (lands, houses, mills, olive or wine presses) of village inhabitants in 1565-66, 1581/85 and 1665-68; records of debts, including perpetual and emphyteutic censuses on immovable property; and Feudal Domain Registers, which document feudal rights over immovable property.
By integrating these sources, we aim to trace the interplay between agrarian specialization, property structures, and the trajectories of inequality in early modern Mallorca.
The social and spatial distribution of taxpayers: the guilds of Palma in the eighteenth century
Ana María Coll Coll
abstractAna María Coll Coll
Our proposal is based on the reassessment and valorisation of documentation related to the distribution of direct taxation. Despite its discontinuities and limitations, the fiscal records produced through the distribution of the talla—the term used in Mallorca for the sole direct contribution—and the utensilios tax constitute a privileged source for deepening our understanding of the urban fabric in the eighteenth century.
This study focuses on the guilds of the city of Palma, a group particularly affected by these fiscal burdens. The examination of these primary sources allows us to analyse the spatial distribution of the guilds and to assess the economic and social weight of each within the urban structure, a setting marked by deep social and fiscal inequalities.
In parallel, we explore the mechanisms of tax allocation and the guilds’ struggle for greater tax fairness. The combined analysis of fiscal data and the broader social context make it possible to evaluate the presence—or absence—of fiscal justice, contrasting the participation of this collective with that of other taxpayers.
Alongside social and institutional conflict, we also examine the criteria applied in the distribution of tax burdens and the tensions emerging among the various guild bodies, as well as the strategies employed by these trades to make their grievances visible to local and state authorities and to advocate for a fairer fiscal system. Altogether, this perspective situates the city as a space of political and social negotiation, where disputes over economic power and fiscal justice become visible.
We put forward a geo-historical reading of the city, conceived as the material stage on which social and fiscal inequalities unfold. The comparison between fiscal and socioeconomic maps enables us to reconstruct the mechanisms of tax distribution and the relationships between economic power, social hierarchy, and urban space, thus offering a historical interpretation of the configuration of urban inequality. In this way, the intersection of both maps defines a genuine geography of urban inequality, where dynamics of conflict, negotiation, and the representation of power converge.
Session 13 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
PRESIÓN FISCAL, DISTRIBUCIÓN DE POBLACIÓN, DEVALUACIÓN MONETARIA E INFLACIÓN: LOS JINETES DE LA DESIGUALDAD EN GALICIA ENTRE 1632 Y 1638
Pablo Rueda Rodríguez-Vila
abstractPablo Rueda Rodríguez-Vila
Uno de los temas clásicos de la Historia Económica castellana se debate en torno a los efectos extremadamente negativos de la llamada crisis del siglo XVII en los reinos de Castilla y la importancia agravada de dicho ciclo negativo por las decisiones de política monetaria y fiscal, más concretamente en la sobre-emisión de moneda de escaso valor intrínseco y la elevada presión fiscal sobre la población.
En esta investigación se propone emplear el Reino de Galicia como laboratorio para explicar los efectos económicos de la emisión monetaria durante la década de los 30 del siglo XVII, conjugando la variable demográfica y los saldos de los diferentes rubros fiscales a niveles de datos granulares. Empleando las fuentes fiscales de toda una nueva batería de recursos que aumentaron la presión sobre la población, en especial el servicio de millones por ser el principal ingreso tributario de la Monarquía durante este período, podemos estimar la carga fiscal per cápita así como determinar su impacto regional y establecer comparaciones con otras latitudes. Por último, nos interesa reflexionar sobre el hecho de que quizás una política monetaria controvertida pudo servir no solo como instrumento para generar recursos extraordinarios sino también como elemento democratizador de la acción fiscal y fomentador de las lógicas capitalistas.
La década de los años 30 en la Castilla del siglo XVII se caracterizó por una gran expansión fiscal con la introducción de nuevos gravámenes o el aumento de los existentes, cargando sobre la población castellana los costes de las guerras de la Monarquía Hispánica. El censo de la sal, un recuento de la población castellana con fines fiscales elaborado en 1631 con el objeto de sustituir los servicios de millones por una gabela sobre la sal, pese a ser un proyecto fracasado nos proporciona abundante información sobre la distribución de la población en el territorio gallego en el primer tercio del siglo XVII.
La combinación de las fuentes demográficas (el censo de la sal de 1631) con las fuentes fiscales (los servicios de los 24 y 2,5 millones de 1632) nos permite profundizar en el estudio de la aportación de la población urbana y rústica a las arcas reales en la década de los años 30 del siglo XVII. Las ciudades gallegas, caracterizadas por un tamaño mediano-pequeño en comparación con otras localidades castellanas, participaron de forma notablemente inferior a la Hacienda castellana en comparación con los vecinos del resto del territori
Generating Inequality, Controlling Inequality. Landlords, Sharecroppers and Agricultural Revenues in Fifteenth Century Florentine Fiscal Sources
Davide Cristoferi
abstractDavide Cristoferi
This paper uses new primary source research and two original case studies from the 1427 Catasto of Florence to examine economic disparities between urban and rural areas in late medieval Tuscany. The paper aims to demonstrate how century-old land consolidation processes, the development of a particular type of sharecropping contract known as mezzadria, and the new cadastral fiscal system introduced between 1427 and 1429 contributed to the creation of a pattern of high economic inequality. Previous literature has confirmed on several occasions that this inequality was particularly pronounced with regard to wealth and landed property, both between the city and the countryside and within rural communities (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 1985; Alfani and Ammannati, 2017; van Zanden and Felice, 2022). However, when considering access to land — that is, access to revenues (and food) from landed property through leases, as well as access to credit and oxen — the pattern of economic inequality becomes more nuanced. Sharecropping, the main lease system used by Florentine landlords in the surrounding countryside, increased wealth inequality through its exploitative features, while mitigating its effect on income distribution and access to food. This lease contract typically allocated half of the revenues (along with other benefits) from unequally distributed urban landed property to landless peasants, in exchange for their intensive labour. In return, peasants' labour provided landlords with marketable produce such as cereals and wine, while increasing the value of landed estates by working them and developing polyculture and hydraulic-agrarian arrangements. This shows that even in very unequal rural areas, the reality was more nuanced, demonstrating how a very unequal society functions through formal and informal channels of distribution and access to wealth and income. In this respect, the study will address the methodological challenges and opportunities of using Florentine fiscal sources to reconstruct historical inequality. It will highlight the role played by the Catasto in influencing our reconstruction of inequality, and demonstrate how urban landlords influenced wealth extraction and the generation and control of different levels of inequality.
Measuring and governing inequality: Economic disparity and political fiscal management in Venetian Bergamo (15th-18th centuries)
Rachele Scuro, Matteo Di Tullio
abstractRachele Scuro, Matteo Di Tullio
The Venetian State provides a compelling case study of institutional continuity across the transformations of early modern Europe. When Venice established its Mainland State across northern Italy from the 15th century until 1797, the region was characterised by extensive commerce, agriculture, and a robust network of proto-industrial sites. This paper investigates economic inequalities within this framework, focusing on Bergamo, one of the State’s largest urban centres. Furthermore, this research contributes to the project "Taxation, public expenditure, and economic inequality in preindustrial Venetian Lombardy (1400-1800)" (Universities of Pavia and Milano-Bicocca), allowing comparison of the Bergamo case study with the wider Venetian Lombardy and the Venetian State.
The analysis will employ a two-tiered approach to measure inequality from a dual perspective. Firstly, the crucial issue of inequality’s evolution in Bergamo between the 15th and 18th century will be measured using the well-established methodological framework of the Gini index. We shall utilise a dataset derived from the local estimi (property tax records), which were periodically revised and employed as a coefficient for calculating fiscal imposition. Comprehensive records of the estimi are available for the period under study, and the objective is to identify how these imbalances fluctuated based on the socio-economic development of the city’s quarters over time. This involves examining the impact of migration and the reallocation of the wealthiest or emerging groups, such as how inequality was affected by the settlement of affluent newcomers in the city's peri-urban areas over time.
Secondly, we will focus on a less analysed dimension of inequality: the access to the decision-making process. The Serenissima’s fiscal system granted significant autonomy to local rulers regarding fiscal management. As public levy and expenditure can generate economic imbalances, their governing mechanism was inherently dependent on local political choices. If these governing processes were monopolised by the wealthiest segment of the population, we shall ascertain how this came to favour the upper social strata. Hence, the management of local fiscal policy and other compensatory instruments designed to mitigate disparity (e.g., recourse to the commons, or the commune’s annual accounts available systematically since the 16th century) will be examined in conjunction with the findings of the first approach.
Session 14 - Good Governance and Urban Conflict in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cities in Europe and Beyond (13th-17th Centuries)
This session proposes a critical examination of principles of good governance in the world of city politics, juxtaposed with the practices that fostered and managed conflict within urban environments. It aims to bring together specialists from different fields for an integrated and globally informed discussion of good governance and urban conflict across cities in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (13th-17th centuries).
Coordinators: Angel Casals, Darko Darovec, Minne De Boodt, David Napolitano
COST Session; CA22149 CHANGECODE
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Coordinators: Angel Casals, Darko Darovec, Minne De Boodt, David Napolitano
COST Session; CA22149 CHANGECODE
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Session 14 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Guilds and Defence in Early Modern Barcelona: Between Public Service and Conflict
Víctor Jurado
abstractVíctor Jurado
This contribution will analyse the defence of the community through the example of Barcelona as a space of public service and conflict in the practical application of defence by its residents. We will examine the early decision-making bodies of the municipal government (the Consell de Cent) and how this framework of political decision-making interacted with the guild structure upon which the militia and defence were built.
To conduct this analysis, in addition to providing certain examples and precedents from Barcelona's early modern history, the discussion will focus on a very specific chronology: the sieges of Barcelona during the War of the Spanish Succession. These moments of extreme military demand, drama (as the city could be lost), and the necessity to mobilize the city's own human resources, prove crucial for understanding this relationship between the citizens and the common good and communal defence. This is where the behaviors and relationships common throughout Habsburg-era Barcelona (with all their inherent fluctuations) come most clearly into focus.
Therefore, for the proposed chronology (1705, 1706, and 1713-1714), the aim is to analyse spaces of deliberation and response, the defence of the common good and the city itself (often understood as the “homeland”), the guilds as social and resource structures for managing emergency situations like a siege, the political responses generated to conflicts of coexistence between these guilds (with the idea of justice and the common, or general, good as the municipality's mental framework), and finally, the violent changes of government within the city (as they apply to community defence and customary tradition in this regard).
To this end, the sources used will be primarily two-fold. On one hand, those of the municipal government (using deliberations, public edicts, and correspondence as key sources). On the other, the private records of the guilds, with the objective of uncovering their internal deliberative processes regarding aspects of community defence and arriving at an understanding of how the collective civic spirit (which involved risking their lives if necessary for the communal defence) prevailed over the social structure of early modern Barcelona.
The Privileges of Insaculació granted by Joan of Aragon (1499-1501)
Anna González Pérez
abstractAnna González Pérez
This presentation intends to analyze the actions of Joan of Aragon in the various municipalities of Catalonia following the granting of the privileges of insaculació.
A brief historiographical review will be undertaken regarding the study of insaculació and the decisive intervention of Ferdinand II in expanding this system of selecting municipal offices and positions by lot. Subsequently, the actions of viceroy Joan of Aragon (1499-1501) will be analyzed based on the concession of various Privileges of insaculació during his scant two years in office. The examination of these Privileges will enable us to observe the different reasons that led to the implementation of this electoral system and the similarities or differences in the configuration of social groups in Catalan cities, as well as, ultimately, to understand the restructuring process that occurred at the beginning of the modern period in the relations between the cities and the monarchy and the various social groups.
Good governance and conflicts for the capital of the Kingdom. Ciudad de los Reyes y Cuzco (16th - 17th century)
Valentina Emiliani, Manfredi Merluzzi
abstractValentina Emiliani, Manfredi Merluzzi
Within a political and territorial context characterized by significant governmental instability and considerable distance from the center of government of the Spanish Monarchy, during the 16th century there were several divergent views on the form of government applicable in the recently conquered Reinos del Perú. Several authors contributed to the dispute over good governance, and one of the issues relevant to the control of the territory proved to be the designation of the capital, which gave rise to competition between the ancient capital of the Inca empire, Tawantinsuyu (Cuzco), and the new capital of the Kingdom of Peru, Ciudad de los Reyes (Lima).
The proposal highlights and compares the different strategies that the urban elites of the two cities adopted to assert themselves over the Spanish Monarchy during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the considerations of several influential ministers of the king and rulers, including: Francisco de Toledo, viceroy of Perú (1569-1581); Juan de Matienzo (1560-1579), oidor of Charcas and author of El gobierno del Perú (1567); Pedro Gasca, president of the Audiencia of Peru and peacemaker of the kingdom (1546-1549); Polo de Ondegardo y Zárate, corregidor of Cusco (1544-1575); Huaman Poma de Ayala (1534-1615); Solorzano Pereira, oidor of the Real Audiencia of Lima (1610-16126), and later fiscal of the Consejo de Hacienda and of the Consejo de Indias, autore De Indiarum iure et gubernatore (1629-1629) and Politica Indiana (1647). The study focuses on the representations given to the sovereign by the two different cities, portrayed as loyal to the sovereign and pillars of good government of the Kingdom during the period of consolidation of the Peruvian viceroyalty through administrative, iconographic, and narrative sources. Among these, the royal cedules, correspondence, contemporary chronicles, and visual sources will be examined. For several decades, the two cities competed for recognition as the capital of the Kingdom, while the difficult political and military context of civil wars and indigenous uprisings caused concern for the crown and its agents in the territory. The two cities constructed their own narratives and networks of relationships in order to obtain maximum recognition from the sovereign.
Session 14 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Urban Governance in the Low Countries, c. 1400-1600
Arie Van Steensel, Jesse Dijkshoorn
abstractArie Van Steensel, Jesse Dijkshoorn
In recent years, research on urban government in premodern Europe has provided new insights into its polycentric political context, showing various levels and forms of participation, contestation and conflict. Furthermore, studies on communal health and environmental management have broadened our understanding of the scope and responsibilities of urban authorities, revealing their role in areas beyond the regulation of economic activities, the maintenance of order and the provision of public services. Building on this body of research, this paper aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the continual collective management of urban affairs in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. Firstly, it proposes to using the term ‘governance’ to conceptualise the interactions between the actors involved in political decision-making and the implementation of policies. Secondly, it aims to incorporate the aspect of the effects of good or bad governance into the discussion by examining how political decision-making and urban policies affected the economic, social and environmental well-being of urbanites.
This paper will first sketch these two aims from a historiographical, theoretical and conceptual perspective, in order to explore how this new framework can help us to explain the relationship between urban governance, political participation and living conditions in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. The second part of the paper will adopt an empirical approach to demonstrate the involvement of various stakeholders – authorities, associations, citizens and inhabitants constituting the urban political economy – in the political decision-making process, focusing on the case of the IJssel town of Zwolle between 1400 and 1600. This analysis will be based on a careful examination of the town council’s minutes and petitions that were submitted to the authorities. This analysis will reveal not only the various actors involved, but also their political repertoires and economic arguments, which articulated a broader civic ideas about good governance, political participation, legitimacy and accountability.
Making Law, Shaping Society? Good Governance and Urban Professionals in Early Modern Amsterdam and Zwolle
Maurits Den Hollander
abstractMaurits Den Hollander
Recently, there has been increased attention among historians for the creation, contents, and impact of urban governance and customary law (Liddy 2017; Seong-Hak Kim 2021; Kuskowski 2022). As Liberman Cuenca (2025) notes, this large corpus of regulations, ordinances, and customs was ‘in constant flux, subject to certain documentary practices, and influenced by the vicissitudes of urban politics’.
My research (Den Hollander 2021, 2025) has indicated how the introduction of a new, innovative legal framework for dealing with the problem of insolvency both helped to strengthen the local credit market and to restore trust among citizens in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. To what extent is this case study typical for processes of good governance and lawmaking in late medieval and early modern cities in the Northern Netherlands, such as Amsterdam or Zwolle? Was urban legislation primarily shaped and written by those in power: the aristocratic regent elite; or the urban administrative officials (Manger & Den Hollander 2025) such as pensionaries and secretaries who supported them, and who attended all important policy-making meetings? Or, conversely, was urban lawmaking in cities in the Northern Netherlands primarily a bottom-up process, driven by the numerous petitions presented by both guilds and individual citizens (Prak 1996; Van Nierop 1997)? The archival analysis of practices of urban governance has the potential to provide us with new insights into both the mentalities and daily reality of early modern urban governance.
In this paper, I would like to closely examine two dimensions of urban customary law in early modern Amsterdam and Zwolle, to add to the aforementioned bodies of (inter)national research. On the one hand, I will analyse and compare a series of oaths of office, a valuable source of contemporary conceptions about what constitutes good governance. On the other hand, I will analyse registers of urban offices and the employment procedures they shed light on. How did contemporary urban professionals view the nature of their office? What forces in urban politics could shape and influence the contents and staffing of these offices? An improved understanding on appointment dynamics and conceptions of proper official conduct in these cities will allow to reflect on those actors who had an impact on processes of urban law-making, both as officials, and as those shaping their offices.
Negotiating Order: Urban Governance and Customary Conflict Resolution in the Coastal Towns of Albania Veneta (14th–16th Centuries)
Angelika Ergaver
abstractAngelika Ergaver
This paper examines the maintenance of civic order in the coastal towns of Venetian Albania—principally Kotor, Budva, and Bar—and their districts between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Situated along a shifting Venetian–Ottoman frontier, these communities were governed through overlapping municipal, imperial, and customary jurisdictions. Drawing on statutes, notarial registers, petitions, diplomatic correspondence, and published archival sources, the study considers relations between fortified towns and the rural communities upon which they depended economically and strategically. Disputes concerning land, property, jurisdiction, honour, and violence frequently crossed administrative boundaries and exposed the limitations of formal judicial authority. Municipal judgments and interventions by Venetian or Ottoman officials could establish ownership, jurisdiction, or criminal responsibility, but could not always extinguish obligations arising from injury, death, or material loss. The paper argues that statutory and customary law did not constitute opposing systems but formed part of a layered legal order. Customary arbitration, compensation, collective oaths, and ritual reconciliation could prevent escalation and restore social equilibrium. Venetian authorities recognised and supervised such practices when they supported public peace but restricted them when collective action threatened security or Venetian supremacy. Exile and exclusion provided additional means of protecting civic order when offenders remained beyond the reach of municipal justice. Governance along this frontier therefore depended upon an asymmetrical but flexible negotiation between institutional authority and local legal practice. Customary reconciliation was not an evidence of institutional weakness; it was one of the mechanisms through which civic order was produced across urban, rural, and political boundaries
Hanafi Law, Governance, and Conflict Resolution in Mughal Urban Spaces (ca. 1650–1700)
Naveen Kanalu
abstractNaveen Kanalu
The paper examines how Hanafi law, one of the four schools of Sunni Islam, shaped the urban legal landscape and governance in the northern Indian cities of Agra, Mathura, and Delhi on the Yamuna River plains in the Mughal Empire during the second half of the seventeenth century. Analyzing the legal opinions of Hanafi jurists in Arabic alongside Mughal administrative documents in Persian, I explore the graded nature of urban land use policies within and outside the walled cities that created a mosaic of differential property rights for Mughal subjects. Equally, it unearths the role of Muslim judges, administrative personnel, censors, and police, who oversaw the protection of legal entitlements and resolved tensions between subjects belonging to diverse caste communities. The urban social landscape was also regulated to strike a balance between private interests and public welfare as well as the maintenance of law and order.
Probing the interaction between state, communities, and individuals, I argue for a fresh assessment of Mughal imperial authority’s central role in enforcing Hanafi law within urban communities composed of subjects belonging to diverse religious backgrounds, Hindus, Muslims, etc. The idea of good governance in the Islamicate world resolved around the casuistic interpretation of legal opinions (fatwas) in the resolution of conflicts. Taking a few case studies from these three cities in the seventeenth century, the paper demonstrates how various officials regulated the tensions that arose in the urban spaces, be they, between merchants, soldiers, high-ranking officials or their agents. The recourse to justice at the judicial courts was only one among other means of settling disagreements. City officials like the police, who maintained order too intervened actively in disputes. Between agreement, imprisonment, and violence, diverse mechanisms existed to regulate urban behavior. Tracing the active engagement of city-dwellers with the urban nexus of imperial authorities, the paper reconstructs the contours of good governance in Mughal India.
In the Shadows of Good Governance: Violence against Religious Minorities in Later Medieval Cities
Patrick Lantschner
abstractPatrick Lantschner
The historiography of the past few decades has shown how much debates about good governance were at the heart of urban life and how actively city-dwellers were engaged in urban politics – whether through different types of urban institutions or corrective acts of violence. In this paper, I turn to a topic that sometimes lay in the shadows of such debates: the questions raised by the presence of religious minorities in later medieval cities, especially in those with sizeable minority populations. Across cities ruled by both Muslims and Christians, religious minorities were not only distinct religious communities, but they also enjoyed a special legal status that often provoked questions about their place within the urban body politic. These questions could lead to heated disagreements and sometimes to outright violence that resulted in the destruction of buildings and neighbourhoods, assassinations, and conversionary drives. Though often framed in terms of religious animosities towards minorities, such violent attacks were also often driven by concerns about the urban political order. Strife could arise from disagreements about the privileges and obligations of religious minorities within the urban body politic, but religious minorities also served as conduits for broader debates about the balance of power between different political players, such as rulers, urban elites, and religious professionals. I will illustrate this argument by reference to case studies drawn from fourteenth-century Barcelona and Cairo, where violence against Jews in the former and Coptic Christians in the latter raised troubling questions about those who lost out from urban good governance.
Session 14 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Citizenship in the Making: Governance, Conflict, and Jewish Urban Life in Early Modern Amsterdam
Julia Van Der Krieke
abstractJulia Van Der Krieke
In 1597, the Antwerp-born Portuguese merchant Manuel Rodrigues Vega applied for poorterschap—formal citizenship—in Amsterdam. His application, approved the following year, sparked a debate capturing the central concern of this paper: the legal position and lived experience of Amsterdam’s first Jewish community and their role in co-defining early modern citizenship. By treating the city as a lived and contested space rather than merely an administrative body, my study shows that urban order was continually tested and reshaped through everyday interactions. Neighbourhood disputes, interfaith relationships, illicit conversions, clandestine prayer houses, and moments of violence between Jews and non-Jews reveal how urban conflict became a productive arena in which power relations were negotiated.
The 1612 case of Amsterdam’s first synagogue—initially banned but later tolerated after a city official’s intervention—illustrates how informal networks could influence governance as powerfully as formal policy. Urban authorities managed religious and social diversity through mediation, leniency, and flexible pragmatism. Citizenship, accordingly, emerged not only in council chambers but also in marketplaces, households, and neighbourhood encounters. Rather than focusing solely on formal statutes, my work examines the informal practices through which citizenship was enacted: everyday negotiations, conflicts, and instances of tolerated transgression. I show that theories of governance and practices on the ground often diverged, and that conflict was not simply disruptive but formative. Insults, altercations, and court cases allowed Jews to assert respectability and seek protection from civic authority. Intimate relationships—marriages, affairs, pregnancies—further shaped civic standing, revealing what we might call forms of “sexual citizenship.”
The authorities’ responses to transgressions illuminate how they managed tension while continually renegotiating the boundaries of belonging. The inclusion of Jews was partial—they were barred from guilds, militias, and public office—but they were nonetheless woven into the city’s daily rhythms. Early modern citizenship was not simply conferred from above. It was co-created through petitions, commercial dealings, neighbourhood conflicts, intimate lives, and formal governance alike—a dynamic process continually made and remade by residents and authorities.
Governing Souls and Bodies: Justice, Moral Order, and Urban Power in 16th-Century Hungary
Blanka Szeghyova
abstractBlanka Szeghyova
This paper examines the ideological and visual foundations of early modern urban justice and their role in shaping practices of good governance in sixteenth-century Hungarian towns. Townhalls functioned as stages for civic moral pedagogy: decorated with biblical inscriptions, allegories of virtues, Last Judgment motifs, and scenes of exemplary judgments, they communicated ideals of justice as both a civic duty and a divine mandate. These artistic programs acted as “mirrors for magistrates,” integrating humanist and confessional ideals with long-standing medieval conceptions of crime as sin and punishment as part of the cosmic order. Such imagery helped legitimize a tightening of judicial authority and expanding strategies of social control.
Against this backdrop, the paper explores how Hungarian towns responded to emerging concerns about moral order. It analyses the shift from medieval toleration of practices such as prostitution toward increasingly moralized criminalization of sexual behaviour, where sexual offenses constituted a substantial portion of court cases and punishments became explicitly gendered. The second part focuses on urban municipal statutes which illustrate the expansion of municipal legislation into areas previously governed by ecclesiastical authority. These ordinances targeted everyday conduct like swearing, drunkenness, gambling, disorderly behaviour in inns, and unregulated celebrations, while also imposing restrictions on weddings, music, and festive culture. Such measures reveal a growing concern with religious observance, work discipline, and moral propriety.
The paper argues that these developments reflect a close convergence between Reformation ecclesiastical norms and municipal lawmaking. Protestant expectations regarding preaching, education, communal unity, and the punishment of sexual and moral offenses increasingly shaped urban statutes, giving rise to a distinctly urban form of civic piety. This fusion of secular governance with religious normative agendas produced a hybrid civic-confessional framework of discipline. By tracing this evolving culture of moral governance, the paper contributes to a broader understanding of how early modern European towns negotiated justice, constructed moral order, and exercised urban authority.
An Inversion of Good Governance: The Internal Politics of Wrocław according to the Chronicle of Peter Eschenloer, 1457-67
Stanislaw Banach
abstractStanislaw Banach
Throughout the fifteenth century, the most zealous and influential centre of Catholic resistance against the spread of the Hussite heresy in the Bohemian kingdom was the capital city of the northern region of Silesia, Wrocław (Breslau). Wrocław had been first integrated into the Bohemian crown under the reign of John I of Luxemburg in 1335, becoming the kingdom’s second largest city and a crucial political, economic, and ecclesiastical centre. Although the city’s elites had eagerly welcomed union with Bohemia in the fourteenth century, the Czech king’s sovereignty over the Wratislavians proved problematic under the rule of the Hussite king George of Poděbrady, who ascended to the throne in 1458 and whom the predominantly German-speaking and Catholic citizens of Wrocław steadfastly opposed.
Wrocław owed its position as an anti-Hussite stronghold largely thanks to the activities of impassioned preachers, some of them prominent parish priests like Nicholas Tempelfeld, who urged the public to never give in to Poděbrady and his allies. Such was the influence of Tempelfeld and other preachers that the town council feared negotiating with George of Poděbrady, the bishop’s recommendations for maintaining peace went unheeded, and even papal envoys who sought compromise between Hussites and Catholics in Bohemia found themselves under suspicion of being heretical agents. Furthermore, wide sections of the Wratislavian public were roused by preachers to threaten the town council with armed revolt should it seek reconciliation with George. Thus, these preachers were even called ‘Blutfresser’, or blood gluttons, by the pro-council scribe of Wrocław, Peter Eschenloer.
A biased yet incisive observer of Wrocław’s contemporary politics, Eschenloer produced a highly detailed chronicle covering the period of Wrocław’s conflict with George of Poděbrady, entitled Geschichte der Stadt Breslau. This proposed paper will analyse the vision of good governance presented by Eschenloer, considering (1) the discourses and reasoning he applied to legitimise council authority, (2) the proper role of guildsmen and commoners in urban governance, and (3) the limited sphere of influence that he thought should be afforded to clerical authorities. Additionally, the paper will consider (4) why this vision of good governance was so susceptible to subversion by urban preachers in the mid-fifteenth century and (5) what alternative visions of community and justice were offered by these clerics.
Origins of Democracy in Medieval Grassroots Associations? : A Comparative Study between Confraternities in France and She (社) in China
Zhao Lv
abstractZhao Lv
The democratic system in contemporary world is often attributed to the overthrow of absolutist monarchies or seen as a revival of ancient Greek traditions in early modern Europe. In Chinese historical narratives, democracy is commonly perceived as a Western import resulting from 19th-century global colonization. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that early modern grassroots associations in Europe embraced democratic principles before they became institutionalized as state regimes. This prompts the question: Could pre-modern grassroots associations in different societies have already cultivated rudimentary forms of democracy?
A comparative study between the confraternities of France and China's She (社) reveals that medieval grassroots associations, despite differing religious and cultural backgrounds, shared a preference for equality among members and a "democratic" framework. This is evident in the representative systems, annual elections for leaders and councilors, and the authority of general member meetings. These "democratic" mechanisms enabled grassroots associations to engage people in mutual assistance communities and mobilize non-governmental social resources. They functioned as unofficial instruments for collective crisis management, supplementing state deficiencies in social protection. Consequently, both Europe and China experienced forms of democracy before the modern era, driven by a grassroots-level aspiration to create solidarity in facing individual vulnerabilities from disasters and accidents.
Session 15 - Governing Water: Administrative Responses to Urban Water Management in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (1200-1800)
Water management was a key challenge for late medieval and early modern cities (1200-1800). This session explores how administrations faced the challenges of water through the installation of governmental bodies, the development of architectural and infrastructural projects, and the knowledge exchange on these issues among cities across the globe.
Coordinators: Jaap Evert Abrahamse, Nele De Raedt, Merlijn Hurx
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Coordinators: Jaap Evert Abrahamse, Nele De Raedt, Merlijn Hurx
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Session 15 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Water management and early townsin the Netherlands: the cases of Utrecht and Amsterdam (1100-1300)
Marcel Ijsselstijn
abstractMarcel Ijsselstijn
The Netherlands is known for its water-rich landscapes and cities. Its low-lying location at the mouth of several major European rivers not only provided a favourable economic breeding ground for the emergence of towns and cities. It also forced the population of this area to work together to control the dangers of the water. Interventions in water management, such as digging canals, constructing dykes or damming watercourses, not only had a local impact on the landscape but also affected a much larger area. What was a positive measure for one area could have negative consequences for another. The dynamics of the water-rich landscape have traditionally made consultation and cooperation at the supra-local level necessary in the Netherlands. This also applies to cities. Whereas cities mainly needed water to supply their inhabitants and craftsmen with (drinking) water and to keep their ports accessible, water was of vital importance to farmers in the surrounding countryside in order to drain their fields and meadows. In order to reconcile these interests, water management partnerships were established as early as the Middle Ages, which continue to function to this day. However, even before the historically known establishment of these water boards in the 13th century, there were already significant interventions in water management in which (premature) towns played a role. This paper will discuss two of these early examples: the construction of the Oudegracht in Utrecht in the 12th century, part of a large-scale operation in which the Kromme Rijn was dammed and a new shipping connection to Utrecht was dug, and the construction of the dam in the Amstel near Amsterdam around the middle of the 13th century. Both interventions have been decisive for the spatial development of the town and largely determine the appearance of the contemporary city centre. Unfortunately, very little historical data is available about what must have been mega-projects for their time. This paper will attempt to examine this sparse material in conjunction with what is known from archaeological and physical-geographical research. Both projects will be discussed from a broader historical-geographical perspective in order to answer the question of which parties were involved, what interests they represented and how much influence the emerging towns were able to exert in this regard.
Common Sense or Cleanliness: Water Management in Two Fenland Towns, 1300-1540
Louis Henry
abstractLouis Henry
In medieval England’s fenlands, flooding was a common issue, and the maintenance of drainage systems was of critical importance. In leet court records, a multitude of cases relating to the blocking of ditches, watercourses, and sewers can be found; in monastic cartularies, there are records of agreements regarding sewer repair and maintenance; and in the patent rolls, disputes and complaints over the same matter appear. This mass of documentation demonstrates not only how important the correct management of water was to the survival of fenland towns, but also how individuals at all levels of society were keenly aware of this fact. However, water management was not only a logistical matter. Water, whether flowing or stagnant, potable or contaminated, had socio-cultural meanings that informed how it was treated. The very same documents which showcase concerns over drainage systems also contain entries, by-laws, and complaints regarding the introduction of pollutants into water systems as well as the sanitary issues that incorrect management of water could cause.
This paper explores water management in two late medieval fenland towns: Peterborough and Ramsey. Utilising leet court records, alongside other documentary sources, this paper examines motivations behind water management, considering whether a desire to deal with practical issues such as flooding, or sanitary issues such as polluted waters, drove the people of these towns to manage water in the ways they did. In addition to methods and motivations, the question of who managed water and whom water was managed for shall be addressed, feeding into traditional lord-tenant and officeholding debates, whilst bringing in new perspectives such as ‘healthscaping’. Overall, these questions shall shed light on the administrative, legal, and economic developments that took place as a result of and a response to challenges of water management.
The economic and political challenges of water management in Embrun between the 14th and 15th centuries.
Noémie Lacroix
abstractNoémie Lacroix
Embrun is a small town in the Hautes-Alpes region, located on the banks of the Durance river and not far from the confluence of several mountain torrents. As in other Alpine communities at the end of the Middle Ages, managing natural resources, particularly water, was a major challenge in Embrun. It was necessary to ensure that there was enough water in the town for agricultural and industrial activities, but also to try to control the unstable and dangerous rivers that flowed down from the mountains. Historiography has examined water management in mountain communities and demonstrated that they built and maintained infrastructure to cross watercourses or to bring water where it was needed. Our paper focuses on water management in the town of Embrun in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Although the city's municipal archives do not reveal much about how water was managed by the city, some sources tell us about the existence of numerous canals around the city used for irrigating fields and powering mills and other water-powered tools (paroteria, tornalhis), as well as the presence of several bridges crossing the river. These infrastructures are often mentioned during reconstruction projects that the city has to organise and, above all, finance. The city authorities made every effort to ensure that the entire population of the city made their contribution, including the clergy and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages.
Water management was an important right for this town, which was subject to its archbishop and the Dauphin. It is therefore not surprising to find several copies of deeds (dating from the early 14th century) proving that the community had rights in this regard in the cartulary created at the end of the 15th century. The representatives of the community, known as factores, made decisions concerning the town's water infrastructure (thanks to their specific technical knowledge) and kept accounts of the related expenses. Furthermore, the sharing of water (or the costs associated with its delivery) was a political issue that went beyond the urban context, and the question of water also made it possible to map out the city's relations with the surrounding villages. While some villages, such as Saint-André and Saint-Sauveur, have united with the city to better share this resource, Embrun has had to take legal actions against other villages to defend its rights.
Water Management on Both Sides of the Pillars of Hercules: Municipal Legal Ordinances and Water Governance in Seville and Lima in the Sixteenth Century
Marco Silvestri
abstractMarco Silvestri
With the rise of the Catholic Monarchs, a “polisinodal” system of governance emerged on the Iberian Peninsula, complemented by a municipal framework. Within this dynamic, various municipal legal codes—ordenanzas municipales—gradually developed. An early example is the Ordenanzas de Sevilla of 1527, which consolidated a long yet fragmented legal tradition into a compilation of local regulations. These efforts reflect broader attempts to codify and legalize issues of the bien común within the context of policía, as explicitly stated in the preamble of the Sevillian ordinances. Alongside numerous provisions on municipal governance and guild regulations, the ordinances also addressed water management, notably in the Libro del Peso de los Alarifes. This concise compilation became a model for subsequent councils in Toledo, Córdoba, and many other cities. As a colonial empire built upon municipalities, these norms were also applied overseas. The first ordinances in the Viceroyalty of Peru were likely issued for Arequipa in 1549, followed closely by Lima in 1551. Both drew on Sevillian precedents, regulating buen gobierno as well as the use and distribution of potable and utility water.
This paper examines the transfer of these legal frameworks from Spain to the Viceroyalty of Peru, the transcultural negotiation processes involved, and their connection to contemporary architectural theory and broader regulatory texts—such as the Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias (1573)—which shaped urban planning and water management. Key questions include: How were local specificities accommodated, and to what extent did these compilations transmit standardized formulations? Did this process generate translation issues or innovations? Which actors contributed to shaping these ordinances, and how did they implement the concept of good governance? Can their impact be traced in the physical fabric of cities, and what institutions were established for water management? Finally, what notions of nature, hygiene, and environmental systems informed these measures, and how can the resulting concepts—materialized in legal corpora and urban interventions—be interpreted within an environmental history of architecture?
Water Management System of Augsburg: Administrative Rationality and the Differentiation of Water Supply
Yurim Jeong
abstractYurim Jeong
During the early modern period, European cities confronted the practical and political challenge of distributing water for both domestic and industrial purposes. Recognized by UNESCO for its Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), the Water Management System of Augsburg offers an exceptional case of how early modern urban administrations organized the governance of water resources. From the mid-sixteenth century, Augsburg developed a differentiated water supply that separated drinking water and process water.
This paper examines how the city’s administration institutionalized this separation and maintained it through evolving regulatory mechanisms and technical measures. Drawing on municipal ordinances, maintenance reports, and records of the Brunnenmeister (fountain masters), it analyses how civic authorities coordinated infrastructural design, inspection, and maintenance of infrastructure in order to ensure water quality, prevent conflicts over use, and balance sanitary and economic priorities. This study approaches Augsburg’s water heritage as not only a technical achievement but also an administrative accomplishment in civic water governance. Viewed in this light, the case of Augsburg reveals how early modern cities sought durable solutions for managing water resources through administrative and technical coordination.
Session 15 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Control of Public Water from Private Residences in the Early Modern Era
Pablo Gumiel Campos
abstractPablo Gumiel Campos
During the Early Modern period, significant hydraulic engineering projects were undertaken to supply both urban centres and private residences. However, the boundaries between the public and the private were not always clear-cut: these infrastructures often responded to carefully designed political strategies. Popes, kings, and dukes financed the construction (and reconstruction) of numerous aqueducts that fed public fountains in growing cities; yet, their flows were first diverted through their own palaces and villas. This manipulation of the public network not only ensured the supply for the elites but also granted them the ability to intervene in, and even interrupt, the communal water distribution.
This paper examines several paradigmatic examples of such practices, including the Alcázar of Seville, the Ducal Palace of Vila Viçosa, the Villa of Poggio Reale in Naples, and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Through these cases, it seeks to understand how this “domestic control” of hydraulic networks functioned as a strategy of power. The proposal contributes to the discussion of the session “Governing Water: Administrative Responses to Urban Water Management in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period”, by showing that urban water management during was articulated through complex interactions between the public and the domestic spheres, ultimately becoming an arena of significant political relevance.
Supplying a thirsty lagoon city between drought and acqua alta: eighteenth-century Venice
David Gentilcore
abstractDavid Gentilcore
From their very beginnings, Venetians had to deal with the question of water. A city borne ‘amidst salt water and surrounded by marshes’, to quote the chronicler Marin Sanuto, faced the existential challenge posed by the absence of fresh water. The solution was to develop a network of cisterns (‘wells’) for the capture, filtration, storage and supply of fresh water for all of its needs. The cistern design was unique to Venice, making use of locally-sourced materials: sand from the dunes, clay from the lagoon banks, bricks from the area around Treviso, stone from the Istrian peninsula. There were two to three public wells in every urban parish, eventually numbering 150 by the end of the 18th century. They came under the combined authority of the ‘Provveditori di Comun’, a sort of public works department, responsible for their material condition, and the ‘Provveditori alla Sanità’, the public health office, responsible for the quality and quantity of water they contained. In addition, there were some 5,000 private wells, generally much smaller, located in private houses, religious institutions and artisans’ workshops.
This was supplemented by barge loads of fresh water transported from the River Brenta, on the Venetian mainland, across the lagoon, and poured direct into the cisterns: several hundred in an average year. From the fourteenth century through to the early twentieth, this laborious task was undertaken by the city’s watermen, known as ‘acquaroli’, who transported the water in large flat-bottomed barges known as ‘burchi’.
But this still left the city having to contend with two environmental threats, both posed by water. One was the difficulty posed by the lack of it, during extended droughts, which emptied the wells of fresh water and threatened their structural integrity. Another, equally dangerous, was posed by too much water: the particular salt-water environment from which the city emerged and which sometimes threatened to submerge it during episodes of ‘acqua alta’.
Based on archival research carried out in the Venetian archives, my paper looks at how the city coped with these twin threats to its fresh water supply, focusing on the eighteenth century. Set against a broader picture of the piecemeal, pluralistic and unequal water access typical of early modern European cities, Venice was nonetheless able to keep pace with changing demands through careful management and significant infrastructual improvements.
Managing Water in Mamlūk Cairo: The Multi-Actor Water Systems of a Late Medieval Metropolis
Angela Isoldi
abstractAngela Isoldi
During the Mamlūk period (1250-1517), Cairo developed into the largest city of the Mediterranean. Its built space and population experienced substantial growth, peaking at nearly 250,000 inhabitants before the mid-fourteenth century outbreak of the Black Death. Yet, the natural environment posed a significant challenge, particularly regarding water management. Due to scarce rainfall, the growing metropolis relied heavily on the Nile and groundwater, a reliance that introduced significant difficulties. Groundwater was often brackish and required costly water-lifting devices. The Nile, Cairo’s main source of drinking water, was increasingly difficult to access due to its natural westward shift, increasing the distance from the city. Compounding these issues, the city’s discharges periodically polluted water sources.
Recent scholarship emphasised the lack of a dedicated governmental apparatus for water supply. However, the city’s sustained growth argues that urban water provision remained functional despite these institutional challenges. Analysis of chronicles and normative sources reveals a multi-actor system where different forms of supply coexisted and overlapped. These ranged from sultans’ court-oriented hydraulic projects to decentralised street-level services by water-carriers. Furthermore, documentary sources show that Islamic perpetual endowments (waqf/awqāf) played a crucial role, financing the construction and maintenance of both lucrative facilities (e.g., bathhouses) and charitable structures (e.g., drinking water dispensers).
This paper analyses how the actions of these multiple stakeholders shaped water provision, showing that these intersecting interventions triggered complex socio-economic dynamics and negotiations that organised the medieval metropolis. The analysis reveals a complex, poly-centric network of entities—many not exclusively water-related—that, by harnessing, trading, or offering water, profoundly shaped Cairo’s urban network and socio-economic life. This paper thus reflects not only on how Cairo adapted to its natural water disposition, but also on how water provision dialectically shaped the city’s structure and social order.
Session 15 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Building on water in the modern age between the rivers of the Venetian
mainland (Bacchiglione, Adige and Po)
Elena Svalduz, Giulia Becevello
abstractElena Svalduz, Giulia Becevello
Venice is the “queen” of the waters, not only in relation to its urban fabric, but also in the
mainland towards which it gradually directed its attention. Irrigation and land reclamation
works were strategic for the spread of the villa system in the countryside from the early
modern period onwards. Their realisation was only possible through «frantic activities to set
up pressure groups» (H. Burns) and constant dialogue with government bodies. Among them,
the most significant ones in water regimentation were the Provveditori sopra beni inculti. In
16th-century Veneto, the water was distributed unevenly, either in excess or in short supply.
Unlike the northern foothills, where it was brought wisely to ensure its availability, in the
“low” Veneto plain it was abundant. The documents of government officials show a constant
focus on water management, which was perceived as an effective tool for economic and social
control. Recent studies allow us to go beyond the high/low plain dichotomy to take a closer
look at specific areas.
This contribution aims to examine some specific environmental situations, considering the
relationship between water, architecture and government bodies especially in the area
between the Bacchiglione, Adige and Po rivers. Venice relied on a long-term knowledge to
coordinate and control water processes, faced even before the official establishment of the
Provveditori sopra beni inculti (1556). Starting from this crucial transition moment and in the
centuries that followed, it will be analysed their management of public goods, namely water.
Large villas were built in the lower Paduan plain: the choice of their location was closely
linked to the course of the waterways, which were regulated by hydraulic works. Villas were
built along the Battaglia Canal, such as Castello del Catajo and Villa Selvatico. Equally
significant is the location of Villa Garzoni in Pontecasale, designed «with so many
conveniences that water runs throughout the palace» (Vasari). Further south, the Po Delta is
still today one of the most important wetlands in Europe. Here, from the early decades of the
16th century and with a steady increase up to the great land reclamation, the manor houses
built by the Venetians became structures that characterised the landscape. The intervention of
the magistrates was essential for the management of the initiatives promoted in these two
areas.
Between Engineer and Civil Servant: Circulation of Technical Knowledge in 16th-Century Urban Water Management
Vincent Vanhamme, Emma Bekaert
abstractVincent Vanhamme, Emma Bekaert
In his 1976 publication Engineers and Engineering in the Renaissance, William Barcley Parsons goes to great lengths to identify the name of the inventor of the water lock. While the Venetian hydraulic engineer Bernardino Zendrini (1679-1747) claimed this honour was reserved for the brothers Dominico, who built a lock near Padua in 1481, Barcley Parsons dismisses this attribution as a ‘huge blunder’. In true whodunit style, he evaluates the likelihood of it being a more eminent candidate such as Leon Battista Alberti or Francesco di Giorgio. The author also states that, after the perfection of the lock doors by Leonardo da Vinci, the system was employed on the river Scheldt, to the benefit of the cities of Oudenaarde, Antwerp and Ghent.
While Barcley Parsons’ chapter makes for an entertaining thought experiment, more recent scholarship has shown the designing of locks, and hydraulic structures in general, to be anything but a one-man endeavour. Building on soft and unstable soils of northern Italy and the Low Countries was technically demanding, and interventions in water management were never without repercussions, sparking the need for additional hydraulic interventions. As a consequence, governments needed to carefully plan the construction of hydraulic structures. City councils observed solutions elsewhere and adapted the methods they learned locally, paying particular attention to structural details, as they often determined success or failure. This exchange of construction knowledge relied not only on written documentation but also on direct observation. Public servants, contractors, and engineers travelled to other cities to study hydraulic works as precedents for new commissions.
While such practices of learning through travel and imitation are well known in architectural history, they are rarely considered in relation to hydraulic engineering. As a result, the ways in which technical knowledge circulated between cities remain largely underexplored, leaving many hydraulic innovations overlooked. Focusing on sixteenth-century Ghent in the Low Countries and Padua in the Republic of Venice, two international trading hubs situated in vulnerable river deltas, this paper demonstrates how the construction site of waterworks served as a space of experimentation and knowledge-making. Drawing on the rich administrative archives of civic authorities, particular attention will be paid to the central role of civic authorities in steering technical decisions.
Managing Water in a Baltic Borderland: Hydrological Governance in Gdańsk, 1450–1800
Franciszek Skibinski
abstractFranciszek Skibinski
Owing to its strategic location at the mouth of the Vistula River—the main waterway of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth linking inland regions with the Baltic Sea—water was central to Gdańsk’s rise as a major commercial hub in Central and North-Eastern Europe. The city’s distinctive topography, encompassing floodplains of the Vistula Delta, the Vistula Spit, and a network of rivers and canals, created both economic opportunities and environmental challenges, making water management a persistent civic priority.
Gdańsk’s prosperity depended on the navigability of river and sea routes, rendering water both an asset and a source of vulnerability. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, municipal authorities faced the constant task of maintaining hydrological infrastructure, protecting the city from floods, and defending strategic waterways from external threats. This paper examines how the city addressed these challenges through measures such as dredging channels, constructing embankments and locks, and integrating hydraulic works into defensive fortifications. These undertakings required major financial commitments and specialized expertise, often supplied by engineers and planners from the Low Countries and other German- and French-speaking regions, as well as locals send there for training. The administrative framework for water management was notably complex, involving cooperation between the Wall Office, the city engineers, the administration of the Vistula Spit, all supervised by the mayors, council, and urban estates. Drawing on extensive archival sources—including narrative records, fiscal accounts, and technical drawings—the paper reconstructs how responsibilities were distributed and how local expertise interacted with transregional flows of knowledge.
By examining Gdańsk—a semi-autonomous port city situated in a geopolitically contested borderland—this study explores how late medieval and early modern urban communities developed resilient and adaptive systems of water governance. It reveals the complex interplay between local agency and transregional knowledge flows, as communities navigated the political, institutional, and technical challenges of managing water as both a resource and a risk. The analysis also sheds light on emerging forms of ecological awareness, where economic imperatives were negotiated against the environmental constraints of a fragile deltaic landscape.
Session 16 - Hospitals and cities in Western Europe (1300-1550)
The aim of the proposal is to analyse welfare reforms in urban contexts from a comparative and long-term perspective that considers the complex and slow evolution of hospital institutions and the healthcare, as well as health challenges they faced between the Late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern period.
Coordinators: María Álvarez Fernández, Stefano D'Ovidio, Salvatore Marino, Pol Bridgewater
show/hide introduction
Coordinators: María Álvarez Fernández, Stefano D'Ovidio, Salvatore Marino, Pol Bridgewater
show/hide introduction
Session 16 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Madness in the City: Gender, Community, and Institutionalization in Early Modern Ghent
Jonas Roelens
abstractJonas Roelens
This paper examines a series of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century petitions from Ghent (County of Flanders) in which ordinary citizens requested the institutionalization of relatives, neighbors, or acquaintances described as “mad” or “insane.” Addressed to civic rather than medical authorities, these letters reveal how mental disturbance was identified, narrated, and managed by everyday people before the rise of medicalized frameworks of mental health.
Drawing on so-called admission requests, the study explores how petitioners—often family members or neighbors—employed rhetorical strategies to convince city officials to take responsibility for disruptive individuals. They emphasized the chronic and worsening nature of behavior, expressed emotional strain and helplessness, and underscored threats to community order, morality, and safety. These narratives reveal the emotional, social, and economic burdens of care within early modern urban households and neighborhoods.
The petitions display clear gendered patterns. Men’s madness was frequently contextualized through external causes such as war trauma, poverty, or alcohol abuse, framing it as circumstantial rather than inherent. Women’s madness, by contrast, was typically described through its consequences: scandal, danger, or threats to public order. Female petitioners were thus portrayed less as victims and more as sources of disruption, reflecting contemporary gender norms and moral expectations.
Strikingly, physicians are absent from these processes. Neither petitioners nor authorities relied on medical expertise; instead, testimonies came from relatives, neighbors, priests, or colleagues. This civic, community-based framework highlights how definitions of madness were socially constructed and collectively negotiated rather than medically diagnosed.
By situating these petitions at the intersection of gender history, the history of emotions, and social history, the paper illuminates a transitional moment in the governance of mental illness. Responsibility for care shifted gradually from families to civic institutions, and narratives of madness were crafted through communal voices rather than professional discourse. These petitions provide rare insight into lived experiences of mental disturbance and communal responses, enriching our understanding of early modern urban society and the gendered dynamics of care and control.
The bad practices of working women in the hospitals of the Crown of Castile in the late Middle Ages: «Porque ella no es onesta en su vivir ni en sus palabras».
Andrea Fernández
abstractAndrea Fernández
Throughout the Middle Ages, numerous authors have emphasized the role of women as caregivers, both inside and outside their homes. Medieval legislation, for its part, ratified the importance of sheltering the most needy, as well as providing them with a bed and board to overcome their illness, alleviate their poverty, or continue their pilgrimage.
In this context, the objective of our paper is to analyze the most transgressive behaviors of women who worked in some urban hospitals in the Crown of Castile between the late 15th and early 16th centuries; women who, in any case, presented themselves as outsiders to gender roles and the tasks they were expected to perform in such establishments. To accomplish this objective, we consider it necessary to begin with the construction of the role of the "female caregiver" in the medieval West, which we will analyze using literary references such as Causae et Curae by Hildegard of Bingen and The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, among others. Once this model has been analyzed, we will present its otherness. To this end, we will select various judicial documents, mostly from the General Archive of Simancas (Valladolid). These judicial records allow us to learn about cases of women who were reported to the authorities for not performing their duties and for behaving dishonestly in hospitals, thereby disrupting the care that was supposed to be provided there.
Based on the documentation collected, the paper will focus on the following questions: What malpractices did these women engage in? What was the social profile of the denounced workers? What cultural discourses emanated from their behavior? How did they influence the development of hospital life? What consequences did their patients suffer? How did medieval authorities react to this? What punishments did they receive for it? All of these questions aim to contribute to our understanding of female hospitality in the Castilian Middle Ages. It is clear that the documentation from the period reveals that the presence of women in hospitals—as workers—was varied and complex. Among many other questions, it provides us with an insight into their behavioral universe, their criminal strategies, and the social networks they managed to create—outside the law—in these establishments.
“Electing pious women to supervise and rectify shortcomings” – Hospital Reforms in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg
Eva-Maria Cersovsky
abstractEva-Maria Cersovsky
In late medieval and early modern European cities, the formal supervision of urban hospitals was mostly entrusted to men. Yet women could nevertheless exercise considerable influence over the everyday functioning, oversight, and reform of charitable institutions. This paper examines such informal forms of female agency through the example of Strasbourg’s pox hospital. Founded in 1503 in response to a new health challenge, the hospital saw repeated conflicts and reforms regarding its finances, administration, and the care of the sick throughout the 16th century. Focusing on the activities of two prominent widows in the 1550s, the paper explores how women intervened in hospital administration, monitored the care of patients, identified shortcomings, and advocated institutional reforms despite holding no official position.
Drawing on council minutes, hospital records, visitation reports, and reform pamphlets, the paper argues that their interventions were neither isolated acts of charity nor merely tolerated forms of “meddling”. Rather, they formed part of an established, if unofficial, practice of hospital supervision. Analysing the women’s self-perception, I further highlight how they understood and legitimized their interventions through familial, charitable, and religious roles. Although the city council adopted many of the women’s recommendations during the reform of 1557, it rejected the proposal to formalize female supervision. The case thus reveals both the possibilities and the limits of women’s authority. The paper demonstrates that hospital reform involved actors whose authority and expertise crossed the boundaries of gender and formal office. Strasbourg consequently offers one example within a broader European spectrum of female participation in the supervision and transformation of charitable institutions that deserve to be studied in more depth.
The decline of women's work in Iberian hospitals in the 14th-16th centuries
Raúl Villagrasa-Elías
abstractRaúl Villagrasa-Elías
In recent years, the role of medieval and modern women from the elites has been re-evaluated through concepts such as agency. In the field of welfare, there is no doubt that many of them (queens, nobles, abbesses, wealthy peasant, etc.) promoted charitable institutions alongside their husbands, as widows or even as single women. Furthermore, it is well known that these women were able to implement substantial changes, becoming key figures in the phenomenon of hospital reforms in large and small cities. It is worth remembering and vindicating the figure of Queen María de Castilla (1401-1458), who took an interest in the institutions of the Iberian kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon during her lieutenancy while Alfonso the Magnanimous was in the Kingdom of Naples.
To complement this perspective, this proposal aims to reflect on women's work in urban and hospital settings: in administrative, healthcare and domestic spheres. The hypothesis is that urban hospital reform processes undertaken through state and local dynamics, with an increasingly institutionalized healthcare system, generally occupied by men, progressively relegated women to domestic tasks (care and cleaning).
Study materials (primary and secondary sources) from the Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Castile will be used to carry out a comparative, non-contrastive analysis of these hospital and social transformations in the 14th-16th centuries.
Session 16 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Hospital Architecture and Urban Landscape in Early Modern Spain
Antoni Conejo
abstractAntoni Conejo
The architectural and artistic patronage, and its influence on the city landscapes in Early Modern period is a topic that has already been studied, although not extensively. However, from late medieval age, some hospitals stunned for his splendid architectures and became monumental milestones of the urban landscape and symbol of the social policies of its governments. In the ancient Crown of Aragon, the most common architectural typology was a long single-storey hall built in stone and by means of a series of pointed diaphragm arches covered with a wooden gable-shaped roof. The success of this system was evident, especially during the 13-15th centuries, because their advantages were manifold:
-A rectangular and single-storey hall was both beautiful and functional.
-It was the best option to create a spatial unity between the hall for the sick and the altar, which could be fixed in the extreme of the nave.
-It allowed the creation of an open, tall, and inexpensive space that could be rapidly implemented.
-Structurally, it guaranteed the stability of the building and lightened the weight of the roof.
The Holy Cross hospital of Barcelona was built since 1401 till the beginning of 19th century. Here, beyond the diaphragm arches system, there’s and amazing courtyard around which the chambers were organized and distributed. Its appearance is very close to the classic monastic cloister, and its main value is the versatility. The calm and peaceful atmosphere was suitable for contemplation and rest, features that were also exploited with therapeutic and healing purposes. But it could also have many other functions, such as:
-Meeting point between patients and relatives or friends.
-A crossing, which connects the sacred and the secular parts of the precinct.
-Funerary uses, cultivation of plants and even liturgical or public celebrations.
-And finally, courtyards could be used to perform plays.
Other hospitals, as the General of Valencia (founded in 1512), and others from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, like those ones of Santiago de Compostela (1499), Toledo (1504), Granada (1511) and Sevilla, built a cruciform plan, according to the same structure designed for several hospitals in North Italy (Milan, Florence, Genoa, Brescia) and also in Great Britain (Savoy of London); function and prestige are again behind this original solution.
Queen Leonor and the establishment of the Hospital of Caldas: charity, devotion and artistic patronage in Premodern Portugal
Joana Pinho
abstractJoana Pinho
The hospital of Caldas was founded by Leonor of Avis in 1485 and has been regarded by some authors as the first thermal hospital in Europe, as it made use of local hot springs for the treatment of patients admitted there. To ensure the hospital’s financial and material sustainability, Queen Leonor endowed it with several sources of income and privilegies and also ordered the establishment of the nearby settlement of Caldas, later known as Caldas da Rainha. The village was intended to suport the hospital staff, while the surrounding lands were to be cultivated to produce essential foodstuffs for its daily functioning.
The creation of this hospital can be situated within the broader context of the charitable initiatives promoted by the queen, as well as by King João II, who founded the Royal Hospital of All Saints in Lisbon, consolidating healthcare and welfare reform in Portugal.
Alongside this charitable dimension, Queen Leonor also distinguished herself through an eclectic yet consistent patronage, supporting diverse cultural fields such as theatre, literature, printing, goldsmithing, illumination, painting, and architecture, thereby fostering the dissemination of new artistic currents.
Another notable aspect of the queen’s biography was her spirituality, particularly of Franciscan inspiration, which was interwoven with many aspects of her life, including her support for certain religious orders and houses, the commissioning of devotional and dramatic works, and the creation of a lay confraternity that combined social assistance with spiritual devotion.
In this paper, we aim to explore three dimensions that we consider highly relevant in the context of the establishment of the hospital of Caldas: charity, devotion, and artistic patronage. These represent the central pillars of Leonor of Avis’s life, and we seek to demonstrate that no other initiative she undertook embodied these three elements so fully and simultaneously as the establishment of the hospital of Caldas.
People and Things in Networks: Social and Material Circuits through the Florentine Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova (1340-1390).
Valentina Costantini, Serena Galasso
abstractValentina Costantini, Serena Galasso
This co-authored study arises from the intersection of two research projects—Art & Inequality in the Shadow of the Black Death (ERC/UKRI, 2022–2025) and Things that Matter: Mobility and Agency of Everyday Objects in Late Medieval Italy (MSCA, 2025–2027). It is based on the discovery, among the archival records of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, of the so-called libro delle masserizie, a register listing objects acquired by the institution between 1360 and 1390 and subsequently directed to the second-hand market. The evidence reveals the existence of a veritable bazaar, supplying men and women from a wide range of social backgrounds, as well as second-hand dealers, tailors, and other artisans from both the city of Florence and its surrounding countryside (contado).
A careful reconstruction of the hospital’s documentary practices from the 1340s to the end of the century sheds light on the experiments and adjustments undertaken in the later fourteenth century to improve the management of substantial flows of bequests in movable goods, while at the same time optimizing the procurement of items required for the care of patients and for hospital staff (starting from the so-caleed familia). We therefore examine the networks through which men and women, in various capacities, participated in the circulation of beds, textiles, garments, and other objects—objects that were donated and sold, but also purchased, modified, and put to use by the hospital in its everyday operations.
Through the close cross-referencing of accounting registers and preparatory records, the hospital emerges as an institution that progressively refined its organizational capacities and positioned itself as a key point of reference within late medieval Florentine society, across social strata and without gender distinction. While further research will extend this inquiry to other contexts in Italy and across Europe, this article offers an initial vantage point onto the complex world of people and things that revolved around the major Florentine hospital at a moment of profound transformation in Italian and European urban society.
Finally, the ongoing reorganization of the hospital’s archival holdings has fostered a productive collaboration with the State Archives of Florence, which by the end of 2026 will make an updated inventory available to scholars. This represents a tangible contribution to historical research, one to which we are very pleased to have contributed.
Session 16 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Hospital care for children and youths in late-medieval Portugal (1300–1521)
Ana Rita Rocha
abstractAna Rita Rocha
In 1321, Elizabeth of Aragon, Queen of Portugal, together with the Bishop of Guarda, founded in the town of Santarém the Hospital of the Innocents, created to receive and raise abandoned children. It is the best-known and most thoroughly documented Portuguese hospital specialising in child care during the Middle Ages. However, it was not the only institution of its kind. Other hospitals and welfare mechanisms existed, established by royal, municipal, and ecclesiastical authorities, as well as by private initiative, all aimed at assisting poor and/or unprotected children and youths.
This paper aims to survey and analyse the various forms of child and youth assistance in late medieval Portugal, focusing on institutional provision from a comparative perspective. Based on legislation, hospital statutes, wills, and documents issued by royal and municipal chanceries, it addresses two central research questions: how did medieval Portuguese society confront the problems of child poverty and abandonment? And what forms of care, education, and apprenticeship were offered by hospitals to orphans and abandoned and/or poor children?
The first part of the paper situates the topic within its broader context. It outlines the state of the art and provides an overview of child and youth assistance in medieval Portugal. Particular attention is given to pious legacies for abandoned and orphaned children, to the creation of royal and municipal offices responsible for their guardianship, and to support mechanisms such as scholarships for poor students. It is also essential to consider the changes introduced by the late medieval welfare reform.
The second part focuses on hospital care for children and youths in the final centuries of the medieval period in Portugal. It begins with a survey of institutions specialised in the reception of minors documented for this period, presenting the available data. It then examines the Hospital of the Innocents in Santarém as a case study, considering its foundation, operation, care practices, education, and apprenticeship provided to its residents, in comparison with similar European institutions.
By combining a detailed national study with a comparative European perspective, this paper sheds light on how medieval Portuguese society cared for its most vulnerable members and situates the Portuguese experience within the wider historiographical debate on hospitals as places of care for abandoned children.
Growing up in the Hospital: Care, Labor, and Gendered Paths of Abandoned Children in Late Medieval Palermo
Daniela Santoro
abstractDaniela Santoro
In the late medieval Mediterranean, child abandonment constituted a systemic, structural crisis driven by socio-economic volatility, demographic insecurity, and rigid imperatives surrounding family honor and illegitimacy. While extensive scholarship has reconstructed foundling care networks in central and northern Italian city-states (such as Florence and Siena) and major southern hubs like Naples, the historical framework for late medieval Sicily remains remarkably underdeveloped—a deficit largely caused by the severe fragmentation and loss of Palermo’s institutional archives. Addressing this historiographical gap, this study investigates the administrative policies and daily operational practices governing abandoned children—categorized in contemporary legal discourse as expositi, proiecti, and gittatelli—in late fifteenth-century Palermo. Specifically, it analyzes the collaborative governance framework established between the municipal administration (the universitas) and the city’s main healthcare complex, the Ospedale Grande e Nuovo (Santo Spirito). The empirical core of the analysis relies on a cross-reading of two primary regulatory and administrative anchors: the institutional capitoli of 26 February 1480 and an unpublished archival document dated 17 November 1487. Together, these sources document a structural transition: the shift of infant care from fragmented, private charity into a centralized, highly regulated public policy. While the 1480 capitoli established gender-differentiated developmental trajectories for boys and girls, the 1487 petition for an exemption (supplica di deroga) illuminates institutional flexibility and administrative negotiations surrounding the fate of young women. Situated within a broader Mediterranean comparative landscape, these Palermitan records demonstrate that the Ospedale Grande functioned far beyond a passive refuge for the destitute. By managing long-term outcomes through structured labor placements, trade apprenticeships for boys, and dowry allocations for girls, the hospital served as a dynamic engine for workforce entry, social reintegration, and urban stability in Aragonese Sicily.
A Marginal Story: The Spedale degli Abbandonati in Early Modern Florence
Serena Sonaglioni
abstractSerena Sonaglioni
In 1542, Cosimo I de’ Medici reformed hospital management in the Florentine dominion, placing all institutions—except those under ecclesiastical or military control—under a lay magistracy, the Magistrato del Bigallo, which oversaw more than two hundred hospitals.
At the same time, Cosimo I founded a new establishment, largely neglected by historiography, dedicated to the care of abandoned children between three and ten years of age, of both sexes. Care for the sick poor was already provided by Santa Maria Nuova, Bonifazio, and San Paolo; the Spedale degli Innocenti cared for foundlings; the Spedale degli Incurabili received patients suffering from syphilis or other incurable diseases; and many smaller sites welcomed pilgrims. Yet no institution existed for poor orphans beyond infancy.
Their care thus became the responsibility of the Capitani del Bigallo, the newly created magistracy. Boys were sent as apprentices only after learning to read and write; girls were employed mainly in domestic work. In both cases, education followed the principles of Catholic doctrine and strict moral discipline.
Those who violated the rules faced severe punishment—imprisonment, corporal discipline, or both. These practices reveal how care and surveillance were inseparable, reflecting a model in which charity and control coexisted. Nevertheless, frequent acts of disobedience show how the children’s desire for self-assertion resisted institutional control. Escape or transgression became ways to affirm agency, generating daily tensions where assistance and autonomy, integration and marginality, protection and punishment constantly overlapped.
Like the Innocenti, the Spedale degli Abbandonati became a key institution for abandoned childhood in early modern Florence. Its importance is confirmed by the by the active interestof two Grand Duchesses. Eleonora of Toledo, in her 1563 will, ordered two hundred scudi to be assigned annually for the support of abandoned girls. In 1649, Vittoria della Rovere, wife of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, likewise instructed the Magistrato del Bigallo to admit a thirteen-year-old girl, personally covering her expenses.
The story of the Spedale degli Abbandonati thus reveals not only the mechanisms of early modern welfare, but also the moral and social tensions that shaped the experience of childhood and charity in Medicean Florence.
Session 17 - North and South. Strategies for old age in urban contexts during the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
This session aims to deepen our understanding of retirement and ageing strategies in medieval and early modern Europe. By comparing urban contexts across North and South, we aim to explore how local legal, cultural, social, and demographic factors shaped care for the elderly in different European cities.
Coordinators: Mireia Comas Via, Jaco Zuijderduijn, Jaume Marcé Sánchez
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Coordinators: Mireia Comas Via, Jaco Zuijderduijn, Jaume Marcé Sánchez
show/hide introduction
Session 17 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Anticipating Aging in the Medieval City: Health Preservation and Longevity Strategies in the Crown of Aragon
Luz Ballart Ruiz
abstractLuz Ballart Ruiz
This proposal examines agency and strategies for anticipating retirement and aging in the medieval urban context, focusing on the dissemination of the earliest known medical text devoted to preserving health and delaying senescence: De retardatione accidentium senectutis.
As in contemporary societies, medieval individuals sought to extend life expectancy and improve the conditions of old age. In the early thirteenth century, several factors converged—transformations in theological thought, the transmission of Arabic medical knowledge through the translations, and a culturally receptive intellectual environment—culminating in the appearance of De retardatione. Circulating widely across Europe, the text was transmitted both anonymously and mainly under the names of Roger Bacon, Arnau de Vilanova, and Ramon Llull. Its purpose, shared by the later prolongatio vitae corpus, was to provide practical guidance on hygienic conduct and medicinal treatments intended to maintain health and prolong life.
The impact of De retardatione is evidenced by its wide manuscript tradition: thirty-eight copies are recorded in specialized catalogues, though some are now lost. Other related texts, such as Liber conservatio iuventutis, also achieved broad diffusion, with twenty-seven surviving manuscripts. The significance of this corpus was further underscored by the first printed edition of De retardatione in 1590, attributed to Roger Bacon.
In contrast, only two manuscripts are currently known to have been preserved in Iberian libraries, and traces of their presence in medieval collections are nearly imperceptible. This scarcity can be explained by the censorship and suppression these works faced during both the medieval and early modern periods.
The objective of this study is to demonstrate the dissemination of these texts—particularly within the Crown of Aragon—not through their physical transmission, but through the hygienic measures and medicinal preparations they prescribed, which were believed to possess anti-aging properties and are attested in other medical and documentary sources. This approach suggests that, in the medieval period, the circulation of new medical knowledge contributed to the development of practical strategies aimed at preserving youth and delaying the onset of old age.
Old Age in Polish Urban Centers in the Late Middle Ages. Institutional Care—Strategies and Models
Dorota Żurek, Edyta Pluta-Saladra
abstractDorota Żurek, Edyta Pluta-Saladra
The aim of this paper is to present strategies for caring for older women and men in Polish cities during the Late Middle Ages. The analysis draws on examples from selected cities of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland (e.g., Kraków, Gdańsk, Poznań), as well as from medium-sized and small towns typical of the period. The categories and types of care institutions, as well as the chronology of their establishment, will be analysed. The study will also consider the existence of institutions dedicated to specific sexes or professions (e.g., miners). An additional objective is to determine the number of hospitals in each centre, thereby indicating their availability to those in need.
The paper will further examine which entities were responsible for the establishment and organisation of urban care—municipal authorities, monastic communities, or parishes. Finally, the selected models will be compared with findings for Central Europe, in order to assess the extent to which the trends observed in the area under study were common across the region. The results will enable a broader discussion of the nature of institutional care in the Late Middle Ages.
Too Old to Ignore: Intergenerational Conflict and Civic Governance in Eighteenth-Century Copenhagen
Ulrik Langen
abstractUlrik Langen
This paper examines how urban authorities were utilised to settle disputes and resolve conflicts about old age and ageing in eighteenth-century Copenhagen. The paper is based on archive material related to local complaint practices administered by the Copenhagen City Council. Precise ages of the persons involved were rarely specified in the complaints or in the summary entries of municipal records. Nevertheless, there are several linguistic and contextual indications of the complainants' advanced age, as well as examples of complaint narratives specifically structured around either the complainant's or the defendant's old age. Many of these complaints contain information about the daily lives of older people and their relatives in the city.
Using several case study examples, the paper will demonstrate how old age was portrayed and conceptualised in intergenerational conflicts between family members. The complaints cover a wide range of age-related issues, including disputes over inheritance and extravagance, generational obligations, assistance and support, housing conditions and, not least, expectations of age-appropriate behaviour. At the same time, the cases show how the authorities dealt with practical, financial and emotional conflicts where old age constituted the primary concern. Another important aspect pertains to the evolution of the City Council's comprehension – and the legal stipulations about its obligations – regarding the safeguarding of the city's elderly population.
Session 18 - Consent and Sexual Violence in Late Medieval European Cities
This session explores sexual violence and consent in late medieval Europe through an interdisciplinary lens. Connecting legal, social and literary history, it invites comparative studies across regions and source types to reassess how urban communities understood, regulated, and represented sexuality.
Coordinators: Cecile De Morree, Chanelle Delameillieure
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Coordinators: Cecile De Morree, Chanelle Delameillieure
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Session 18 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Corruption of Sodom. Contextualizing Sexual Violence against Children in the Crown of Aragon (13th-16th Centuries)
José Tébar Gómez
abstractJosé Tébar Gómez
Late Medieval judicial records preserve a wide range of experiences, among which cases of sexual violence feature prominently. In contrast, documented cases of sodomy are less common, at least until the late Middle Ages, when growing moral and public concern led to increased repression of such acts, which were perceived as capable of bringing divine wrath upon the entire community. This paper presents the initial results of an analysis of more than twenty cases of sodomy involving sexual violence, affecting individuals across different religions, genders, and ages.
These cases occurred primarily in major urban centers. The corpus is drawn mainly from the great capitals of the Crown of Aragon, Valencia and Barcelona, and is supplemented by records from medium-sized cities such as Lleida and Tortosa, where relevant judicial documentation has survived. The research draws on records from the Justicia Criminal of Valencia (Archive of the Kingdom of Valencia); the Cancelleria Reial (Archive of the Crown of Aragon); the courts of the Veguer of Barcelona, Lleida, and Tortosa (held in their respective municipal archives); and documents from the Procuració Reial of Mallorca (Ar-chive of the Kingdom of Mallorca). While more sporadic and laconic, local chronicles and diaries provide additional context by documenting events of this nature.
This study addresses several key questions. It analyzes the specifics of each case to understand how sexual violence impacted both perpetrators and victims, and how judicial responses were shaped by the gender, religion, and age of the individuals involved. Through this analysis, the paper aims to present a richer and more complex picture of sodomy in the Crown of Aragon than has been previously described. It seeks to contribute to the under-studied Late Medieval period, which has received considerably less scholarly attention than the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries, and to contrast courtroom practice with the normative discourse of contemporary legislation on the unnatural sin.
‘Notorious, Violent and Monstrous': (Re)constructing the Criminal-Rapist in Late Medieval Bruges
Lieze Bertier
abstractLieze Bertier
While historians have devoted considerable attention to the experiences of victims of sexual assault in premodern Europe, far less is known about how perpetrators were perceived and represented. Focusing on Bruges, a major commercial centre in the County of Flanders, this article examines a series of rape convictions recorded by the city magistrates around 1500, a period marked by a notable increase in prosecutions. Through an analysis of eighteen judicial verdicts, it explores how urban communities defined rape and which offenders became the targets of criminal justice. The study demonstrates that prosecution was closely tied to broader concerns about assault, reputation and social order. Convicted rapists were consistently portrayed as notorious, violent and monstrous individuals whose actions threatened urban stability. Far from being understood primarily as a sexual offence, rape was framed as an act of excessive force that violated accepted norms of masculine behaviour. By (re)constructing the image of the criminal-rapist in late medieval Bruges, this article argues that severe punishment reflected not only the crime itself but also contemporary perceptions of deviance, transgression and acceptable conduct.
Sexual Violence and Consent in late medieval French and Dutch Urban Song Culture
Cecile de Morree
abstractCecile de Morree
In the late medieval Southern Low Countries, French and Dutch flowed freely in its literature and culture as well as in daily urban life. At the turn of the 15th century, the printing press particularly contributed to the rapid and international exchange of texts and ideas across linguistic borders. This paper examines the theme of sexual violence and consent in two major urban songbooks, printed in Paris and Antwerp (c. 1530-1545), and seeks to interpret the different representations of women and women’s rights in these books against the background of French and Dutch legislations. Based on a comparative literary analysis, the paper will particularly demonstrate how assaulted young women in Dutch songs consequently stand up for themselves, by holding their attacker responsible and by demanding financial compensation for the harm done, as in agreement with contemporary local law. In French songs, however, women demonstrate less agency and appear to be more restricted by patriarchal norms. Nevertheless, both the Dutch and French songs that thematize rape make use of the same recognizable narratives and are rooted in the same literary tradition. This paper, therefore, will contend that the Dutch songs were purposely created to re-work these well-known narratives into more positive stories, in order to make women in the Low Countries more conscious of their legal position and their rights. In this way, the songs sought to foster women’s agency and resilience, and to shift the blame and shame from victim to perpetrator.
Testimonial Injustice and Sexual Abuse in Cities in Early Modern Holland
Manon Van Der Heijden
abstractManon Van Der Heijden
The Dutch cities in the early modern period were known for the relative freedom and independence of women. Although women were formally subordinate to their parents or husbands, in practice they had more power and autonomy. Various judicial, ecclesiastical, and notarial sources show that many women from the lower and middle classes led public lives: they ran small businesses on their own, were often out in the streets, and were visible in many public spaces. From the 16th century onward, the Reformation also granted women more freedom through the possibility of divorce.
The question that has never been asked before is: did this relatively strong position also mean that women were better able to defend themselves against sexual violence? This paper examines how consent was discussed in cases of sexual violence, based on verdicts, interrogations, and testimonies found in the judicial archives of various Dutch cities. The cases are analyzed using Miranda Fricker’s concept of “testimonial injustice.” Testimonial injustice occurs when a victim’s credibility is unfairly reduced because of prejudice about their social identity, such as gender.
In the early modern legal cases of sexual violence, the question arises whether judges gave less weight or trust to the testimony of women simply because they were women, rather than because of the credibility of their story.
Session 19 - Cross disciplinary approaches to domestic cultures in premodern cities in Europe and beyond, 13th-17th centuries
This session examines premodern urban domestic cultures through interdisciplinary methods, integrating archaeology, historical texts, material culture, iconography, and social history. By combining diverse sources, it reveals the complexities of domestic life and its cultural dynamics in cities across Europe and beyond.
Coordinators: Julie De Groot, Daniel Lord Smail, Juan Vicente García Marsilla
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Coordinators: Julie De Groot, Daniel Lord Smail, Juan Vicente García Marsilla
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Session 19 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
THE OCCUPATION OF DOMESTIC SPACE: objects attributable to certain individuals and their distribution throughout the house (Valencia, 15th century)
Jaime Tortosa
abstractJaime Tortosa
In this paper, we analyze the objects that can be attributed to specific individuals that lived within the households of the city of Valencia and its surroundings between the late 14th century and throughout the 15th century. Specifically, we work with a sample of 852 inventories of goods, which describe the material culture of individuals of the time and were created to ensure the proper management or transmission of their possessions.
We will highlight certain objects that were attributed to men and women according to their gender. In addition, we will examine goods that belonged to children, such as toys, cradles and nappies. We will also identify the spaces occupied by servants and slaves, since these individuals also were part of some households.
From this, we will be able to study the spatial distribution of these individuals within the house, as well as the internal hierarchies, depending on who occupied the most privileged spaces. Furthermore, we will try to determine whether certain objects tended to appear in the same locations. This will allow us to identify spaces associated with particular individuals and to see whether gendered spaces existed or not.
This analysis will provide a better understanding of how people lived together within domestic units and will offer a deeper insight into family models of the time.
Prayer benches and preickstoeltjes. The use of seating furniture for domestic devotion in the 15th and 16th century Southern Low Countries.
Jessica Van Zadelhof, Lien Vandenberghe
abstractJessica Van Zadelhof, Lien Vandenberghe
In the 15th- and 16th-century Southern Low Countries, prayer was an everyday routine. Men and women were instructed to pray at home at various times throughout the day. Under the influence of the Devotio Moderna, the home became an important place for private piety, with material artefacts such as rosaries, books of hours, and images playing a significant role. While the material culture of domestic devotion has been investigated in relation to these small objects, the role of furniture in daily prayer has largely been overlooked in historical and art historical research. This is surprising, given that many religious paintings depict benches and small prayer stools in domestic interiors. These paintings imply that specific types of seating furniture were used for prayer. In this study, we verify the reliability of these images by juxtaposing them with probate inventories from Antwerp and Bruges. By analyzing the spatial context of seating furniture in both the inventories and the paintings, we aim to determine whether specific furniture was indeed used for prayer. Did the paintings merely advocate an ideal of domestic prayer, or did they mirror reality to a certain extent? Which of the depicted chairs were used for prayer, and how did other objects in the domestic space relate to these pieces of furniture? Is it possible to reveal the devotional use of furniture by examining its spatial surroundings?
A Parisian bakery and its bakers : a micro-historical study
of one building on the Rue Dauphine
Preston Perluss
abstractPreston Perluss
My paper concerns the social, economic and architectural history of a specific Parisian building. Although I limit my discussion to the “genealogy” of one dwelling, my long term project involves the systematic study of 34 adjacent (or nearly such) buildings located either on rue Dauphine, rue de Nevers or the Quai des Grands Augustins. My research extends the methodology introduced by Daniel Roch (Le Peuple de Paris, 1981) and developed by Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun (La Naissance de l’intime, 1988) and in the continuation to which I have written two studies (Preston Perluss, «La reconstitution sociale des quartiers parisiens d’après les biens des gens de mainmorte» in Gauvard, Claude, et Jean-Louis Robert, éditeurs. Être Parisien. Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2004,. « An example of a Pre-industrial shopping street : the rue Dauphine on the Paris Left Bank
(1620-1790) », Shopping and Housing, n°thématique de Citta e Storia, 2, juillet-December 2007).
Using a several distinct sources (e.g. estimates and architectural plans from the Revolutionary expropriation of church properties; monastic archives; probate inventories, leases and other notarial archives) I propose to describe the history of specific dwelling that was built in 1608 and whose rental history can be traced with a good degree of accuracy from 1631 to 1812 (and could be certainly extended until 1925).
My discussion will center more on the building’s history during its occupancy by two families of bakers, in particular the very long tenancy of Guillaume César Rousseau who dwelt therein for forty years. The ground-floor functioned as a bakery for at least 90 years.
Session 19 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
At home, in the shop, in the study. Book production in the early modern Venetian Mainland
Enrico Valseriati, Anna Gialdini
abstractEnrico Valseriati, Anna Gialdini
Early modern books are, first and foremost, material objects, each of them the result of a unique process. As such, they are best investigated within the context of the places and spaces in which they were produced and consumed: workshops, studies, and libraries in both private and public environments. Often however, we know frustratingly little about how and by whom these were set up and organised.
By combining a range of documentary sources with material evidence, this paper aims at casting light on book production in the cities of the early modern Venetian Mainland; namely, it will focus on one of the lesser known professions in the book trade, i.e. bookbinders: how families took part in daily work; the topography and boundaries of their domestic and professional spaces and lives; the role of women in binderies; and finally, how they interacted with patrons and booksellers.
Fiscal sources, for instance, do not provide just quantitative data on a family’s income, but also information on gender and class. They can shape the contours of family compositions, place households within the urban fabric, and reveal fundamental details about the everyday lives and material practices of these individuals: how apprentices were trained and whether or not daughters received an education, for instance, or how family fortunes fluctuated over time. Notarial records are also essential sources that paint rich domestic lives: in the same inventory, one can find well-used binding tools alongside household linens, freshly made paper alongside a spit roast - thus suggesting a permeability of domestic and professional spaces. Binders are a liminal and ‘invisible’ profession in the Italian booktrade: their presence in sources is often opaque and they did not necessarily welcome patrons into their professional spaces; at the same time, bookbinding practices mean professional spaces can expand by means of specific soundscapes: bookblocks were commonly beaten with a hammer to flatten them and prepare them for sewing, a noise that could be heard in the surrounding neighbourhood. Finally, just like materiality appears in sources, it can itself be used as a source to provide insight into cultural practices: not only do inventories and purchase lists mirror the components we still find in books, but in rare, yet significant cases, Italian bookbinders signed their work.
Exploring The Material Culture of Butchers: House, Workshop, and Market in Late Medieval Valencia (14th–16th centuries).
Manuel Jaén Lozano
abstractManuel Jaén Lozano
This paper studies the material culture of butchers in late medieval Valencia (14th–16th centuries). To this end, nearly fifty post mortem inventories, wills, and auction records, among other sources, have been located, which document their real estate holdings and the furnishings, tools and objects present in their homes and workshops (butcheries). The study of everyday objects also enables the analysis of change and continuity in history, whether from the perspective of consumption, production, trade or the relationship between object and person. The aim is to analyse how work and domestic spaces were articulated and to what extent these reflected strategies of representation, social mobility and household economy within urban society. Moreover, aspects such as preservation or materials could function as indicators of wealth, revealing economic differentiation within the same professional group, which cannot be neatly classified as middling sorts.
Butchery was an essential and regulated trade, requiring specific infrastructures and spaces: yards, storage rooms, tools, tables and counters. The inventories, however, may also show that these were spaces of sociability and intersections between the private and the public: workers, apprentices, servants, customers and family members coexisted there. Such concerns were already of interest in the period, as illustrated by treatises and pictorial representations. These notarial documents further provide an opportunity to explore phenomena such as the second-hand market, a widespread practice that offered consumers a degree of choice which otherwise seems unattainable. These auctions attracted the deceased’s peers, family or fellow tradesmen, allowing extension of the life of objects and improving living standards in an economically viable way.
The study will also pay attention to gender dynamics and the participation of women in the economy of the trade. Although notarial sources tend to obscure their labour, the presence of widows’ or wives’ inventories invites a reconsideration of their role, as later centuries more clearly document. That is, this paper seeks to integrate the Valencian case into broader European debates on the materiality of work and the culture of consumption. Analysing butchers’ houses and workshops—as spaces of production, commerce and representation—will shed light on connections between urban economy, professional identity and everyday life in one of the major Mediterranean cities.
Nothing Wasted: Metal and Packaging in the Circular World of Premodern Craftsmen
Verena Weller, Julia Bruch
abstractVerena Weller, Julia Bruch
In 1976, the remains of a scissor sheath were discovered in a fountain at Friedberg Castle near Lake Zurich. It was designed to be both visually and functional appealing: On the one hand, decorative lines and closely spaced, diamond-shaped stamps were pressed into the surface. On the other hand, the leather case served a dual practical purpose: it protected the wearer from the scissors’ sharp points while also preventing the scissors from rusting when exposed to moisture. Furthermore, the characteristics of the iron tool and its leather covering also carried certain risks. The acidity of the leather could damage the metal, or the sharp edges of the scissors could harm the leather. For this reason, parchment was often placed in between.
All three materials were at different stages of their lifecycle. The leather fragments show no evidence of having been used for any other purpose, while the parchment often had a previous function and was only later repurposed as a protective barrier. Similarly, the metal may have been melted down and shaped into scissors, or it could have been recycled after its in this context, since we find no trace of it today.
This paper aims to demonstrate how premodern societies practiced highly sophisticated forms of resource conservation. Contrary to the common assumption that premodern economies were merely adaptive responses to material scarcity – and therefore «circular by necessity» – growing historical and anthropological evidence suggests that they functioned as complex, culturally embedded systems of knowledge, practice, and value. Circular use of materials was not simply reactive, but a proactive form of economic and social organization, grounded in creativity, foresight, and an intimate understanding of materials. In addition, materials, whether raw materials or recycled materials, are assigned their own significant value.
The study explores the reuse and recycling of everyday objects in craftsmen’s households, with a focus on metal tools and packaging materials. The first part examines historical metal recycling within the framework of the circular economy, emphasizing the melting and reprocessing of raw materials, finished and broken or worn out goods into new products. The second part analyzes historical practices of packaging reuse and recycling, including objects repurposed as packaging and packaging reused in trade and daily life. It examines the material, economic, and cultural factors that shaped these practices.
Windows in Dispute: Privacy, Visibility and Interethnic Relations in Early Modern Lviv
Jakub Wysmulek
abstractJakub Wysmulek
This paper examines how visibility and privacy were negotiated in the multiethnic urban environment of early modern Lviv through disputes over windows. Drawing on municipal court records from 1570–1620, it shows how windows—essential for light and air—became contested sites of legal conflict, social tension, and intergroup interaction. In a city formally divided into Catholic, Armenian, Ruthenian, and Jewish quarters but marked by spatial entanglement, residents repeatedly appealed to civic law to defend their right to visual privacy. These cases reveal a culturally specific understanding of privacy as control over visibility rather than interiority or withdrawal.
The analysis builds on Andrea Brighenti’s insight that visibility is not always reciprocal and that it entails control, authority, and social recognition. It also engages with Joachim Eibach’s concept of The Open House and situates Lviv’s experience within a wider European framework by comparing it with patterns observed in Bruges, London, and Munich. By tracing these everyday negotiations across ethnic and religious boundaries, the paper contributes to broader debates on urban sociability, privacy, and visibility in premodern Europe.
Session 20 - Medieval Performances of Urban Space in Europe based on Iures Urbices
The session promotes scholarly reflection on the dynamics between concepts and performances of urban spaces in medieval Europe. It focalizes the appearance of Urban Customary Laws in many places, whose content and synchronous circulation reflecting local norms and regulations, allude affinities amongst spatial performativity in urban settings.
Coordinators: Christoph Kilger, Myrto Veikou
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Coordinators: Christoph Kilger, Myrto Veikou
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Session 20 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Practice in Action: Small Change, Big Politics and the People in Between – Law, Monetary Policy, Measures and Practices when Encountered Hanseatic Prescence in Norwegian Towns, c. 1276–1537
Jon Anders Risvaag, Axel Christophersen
abstractJon Anders Risvaag, Axel Christophersen
This research combines a comparative urban analysis of the three Norwegian Hanseatic towns Bergen, Oslo and Tunsberg, alongside Trondheim with a practice-theoretical examination of late-medieval monetary practices. Expanding upon Risvaag’s analysis of coin circulation, the decline of minting post-c. 1349, Hanseatic supremacy, and the socio-topographic shift of coin discoveries from public and commercial areas to elite and ecclesiastical contexts, we reevaluate whether Norwegian towns were characterized as “towns without money” or as towns with diversified payment systems. We use written norms (urban law and law amendments, testaments, and price/craft regulations) and archaeological data (topography, hoards and individual discoveries), to analyze evolving standards, disputes about acceptable currency, and the simultaneous existence of coins, measured silver, in-kind payments, and credit. The theoretical framework is social practice theory (Shove’s triad of materials, competences, and meanings), which regards coin usage, conversion, and accounting as performative micro-practices that solidify into routines within a contested "hybrid standard regime," where royal norms, Hanseatic market power, and local habitus perpetually recalibrate each other. We methodologically integrate comparative urban analysis with practice-proximate indicators to deduce routinization beyond policy purpose. The findings provide a transportable framework for delineating monetary behaviors as socio-material foundations of urban organization. This technique allows future research to quantify practice clusters in North Sea cities, associate coin distributions with craft and market ecologies, and examine how tensions arising from standardization influence resilience and inequality in both pre-modern and contemporary urban economies.
Canons in town – on ecclesiastical spatial and judicial structures in Medieval Sweden
Göran Tagesson
abstractGöran Tagesson
The presence of cathedrals, bishops, and the clergy of cathedral chapters constitutes an important component in a selection of cities within Christendom, which played a decisive role for these cities during the Middle Ages. The various institutions of the Church functioned in different ways but exerted a clear ideological, legal, and cultural influence on the urban space. The relationship between these institutions and the secular town varied. The physical presence of the bishop and various institutions of the cathedral chapter held different meanings. In Scandinavia, where urbanization was relatively late, these relationships changed over the course of the Middle Ages, primarily through the establishment of a resident function.
Linköping is one of several cities in medieval Sweden with a cathedral, a bishop, and a canonical chapter. A previous study clearly showed that the urban space began to change from the mid-14th century onward, through the establishment of a number of residences for the chapter’s prelates and canons. These residences occupied large plots, built with stone houses, and had a spatial structure that appears to differ from the more secular urban plots. A similar pattern seems to be present in other Swedish medieval cathedral cities (Uppsala, Västerås, Turku [Åbo], Strängnäs, and Växjö, with Skara being an important exception).
The example of Linköping suggests that a very specific urban spatial structure was introduced in a particular historical context, which transformed the urban space entirely. This probably involved not only spatial organization but also the material culture of the residences and their households — a topic that requires further critical discussion and study in similar locations. These chapter residences were likely directly linked legally to their institutions, i.e., prebends and canonries. The establishment of a resident cathedral chapter meant that large parts of the urban space were allocated to and owned by ecclesiastical jurisdiction, with clear differences compared to other secular properties. This arrangement probably has parallels elsewhere in Europe, which merits closer study.
Urban Preferences in Early Modern Water Regulations: Inventorying Water Regulations in the Cities of the Rhine Delta
Cornelis Marinus (Marco) in 'T Veld
abstractCornelis Marinus (Marco) in 'T Veld
Water pollution has a long history. As early as 1527, a cloth dyer in Dordrecht was forbidden to discharge ‘his lye or other dyeing material’ into the harbour during rising and high tide due to harm caused to fish. With this order the Dordrecht city government protected fishermen and fishmongers but conversely ensured according that the linen industry and tanneries were unable to flourish in the city. Janna Coomans has argued that medieval urban authorities relied on the belief that ‘flowing water is clean’ – a belief that is also visible in the 1527-order in Dordrecht.
This paper will inventory water regulations in early modern cities in the Rhine Delta (e.g. Nijmegen, Dordrecht, Delft, Leiden, Amsterdam) to uncover the economic choices and preferences of urban governments. Where the rules in these cities regarding water quality rather similar? Did water quality concerns push these cities to hard choices? Which proto industries were affected or favoured by these measures? Such large-scale comparison of urban regulations (available either in print or in the archives) makes it possible to formulate a well-founded hypothesis about the interplay between early modern water governance and economic development.
Session 21 - The Memory of Cities: Scriptural Practices and Archives in Urban Spaces in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
From the 13th century onwards, writing spread widely in European cities, becoming essential in both public and private life. A documentary revolution emerged, marked by new types of documents for practical use. Urban spaces became centres of written expression, producing texts in all areas, reflecting the life, government and economy of the city.
Coordinators: Josepa Cortés-Escrivà, Gema Capilla-Aledón, Antoni Mas-Forners
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Coordinators: Josepa Cortés-Escrivà, Gema Capilla-Aledón, Antoni Mas-Forners
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Session 21 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The practices of writing and archiving memory in Medieval Coimbra:
in the Livro of Almoxarifado of 1395
Daniel Marques, Rui Neves
abstractDaniel Marques, Rui Neves
The Livro do Almoxarifado de Coimbra, written in 1395 by order of King João I, stands as one of the most important testimonies of royal administration in late medieval Portugal. Preserved in the National Archives (Torre do Tombo), this extensive codex records in detail the royal properties, revenues, and rights within the city of Coimbra, its surrounding countryside, and various localities of the Lower Mondego.
Produced in the aftermath of the dynastic crisis of 1383–1385 and the wars with Castile, the book reflects a renewed royal effort to recover and organize the Crown’s patrimony, much of which had been appropriated by lay and ecclesiastical lords. The compilation of this register aimed to identify and reaffirm royal authority over lands and revenues, ensuring both fiscal control and administrative order after a period of instability.
The almoxarifado was a key administrative and fiscal unit centred on a major city, managed by an almoxarife, a royal officer responsible for collecting revenues, leasing royal estates, and overseeing local expenditures. In Coimbra, this office covered an extensive and diverse region, underscoring the city’s strategic and economic relevance within the kingdom.
In our approach, we pretend to analyse the Livro do Almoxarifado de Coimbra from two complementary perspectives. The first it is codicological and concerns its material and textual features, examining the codex’s internal organization, script, and the methods used to structure information — aspects that illustrate how writing functioned as a bureaucratic and practical instrument of governance. The second focuses on the fiscal and territorial content of the record, identifying the types of property listed, the methods of evaluation and registration, and the officials involved in the process.
Through this dual approach, the paper aims to show how this document shaped and reflected the written culture of the medieval city. It demonstrates that the act of writing was not merely administrative but foundational to the construction of Coimbra’s urban and territorial identity. The Livro do Almoxarifado de Coimbra thus reveals the interplay between writing, power, and space, serving as a concrete example of how documentary practices underpinned the organization and memory of the medieval city.
Preserving the Memory of Barcelona: the City Archivist in the Late Middle Ages
Mireia Comas Via
abstractMireia Comas Via
This paper aims to explore the role of the city archive in late medieval Barcelona. It served not only as an instrument of power, legal security, and identity for a city expanding its political and economic influence across the Mediterranean, but also as a cornerstone of collective memory. Archival documentation from the mid-fourteenth century (1351–1369), preserved today in the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona (AHCB), demonstrates that dedicated spaces for the conservation of documents already existed within the Casa de la Ciutat. These records reveal the complexity of managing a growing corpus of privileges, contracts, and deliberations, as well as the technical challenges posed by the materiality of parchment and paper. Damage caused by humidity, pests, and physical wear required constant attention and preventive measures, ranging from structural solutions to everyday practices—such as keeping a cat in the archive to protect documents from rats. This paper will examine the strategies for organizing the archive, the role of the archivist, and the measures adopted to prevent deterioration. Regarding the archivists, we are also interested in understanding how they were selected for the position and how their training was carried out to acquire the necessary knowledge to become the city’s archivists. By analyzing these aspects, the paper would like to shed light on how documentary practices shaped urban governance and the construction of collective memory in medieval Barcelona.
When the Fire of Paper Ignited a Rebellion. A Peasant Uprising against Zaratin Landlords in Venetian Dalmatia in 1737 after the Fire of the Archive
Filip Novosel
abstractFilip Novosel
The provincial archive of the Venetian province of Dalmatia and Albania, the Archivio del Generalato, was founded in 1624 in the capital of the province, the city of Zadar. As part of broader administrative reforms within the Republic of Venice, this moment has been relatively well researched. However, the “life” of the archive itself during the Venetian rule in Dalmatia has been somewhat neglected, despite the many possibilities it offers for research.
Like many other archives in early modern Europe, the archive in Zadar faced numerous challenges, among which fire represented one of the most serious threats. Not the first in the archive’s history, a fire occurred in 1691, destroying, along with some provincial administrative records, documents concerning private land ownership. Indirectly, this tragedy had a profound impact on the population of the district of Zadar. Burdened with heavy taxes during times of famine, in 1736/1737 local peasants on the surrounding islands organized an uprising against their landlords, mostly members of the local urban secular and ecclesiastical elites. Interestingly, one of the main justifications for the peasants’ claims to the land was precisely their awareness of the lack of written evidence that had been lost in the fire 45 years earlier. Focusing on this particular uprising, the research will highlight the importance of an early modern archive not only for the literate minority but also for members of the lower social strata. Based on the analysis of archival sources kept in the Državni arhiv u Zadru and the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, this case study primarily seeks to answer what this specific institution represented for an early modern eastern Adriatic community, and to what extent awareness of the importance of its contents was present across different social groups.
Evidently serving the local population and not merely the high provincial administration, the Archivio del Generalato in Zadar reveals much about the complex social relations within one of the most prominent Dalmatian communes. Employing a microhistorical approach, this research further illuminates Venetian administrative practices in its overseas possessions during the final century of the Serenissima’s existence. Finally, the results presented here aim to encourage a reconsideration of the predominant narrative of generally low literacy, allegedly limited to urban elites, within the early modern eastern Adriatic context.
Complaint Culture, Written Self-Narratives, and Urban Experiences in 18th Century Copenhagen
Peter Wessel Hansen
abstractPeter Wessel Hansen
During the eighteenth century, the Copenhagen City Council received around 50.000 written complaints from people of all social backgrounds on a wide range of topics. The citizens' complaints were documented and archived in the City Council's archives at the City Hall, where the complainants and their opponents were summoned to meetings, often with the aim of reconciling the parties. On other occasions, the City Council ordered the citizens to conduct properly, while in frequent cases they imposed actual penalties such as fines.
The City Council was not a court of law. Citizens took their complaints to the City Council when they either did not want or could not afford to take their case to court. The complaint culture was rooted in an old tradition of mediation and arbitration. The City Council played an important role as an easily accessible authority where you could present your case quickly and without great expense. The complaints and the details of the conciliation or resolutions that the cases were settled with were archived and would often serve as a security for the complainants if problems persisted.
Many themes and issues linked to eighteenth-century urban experiences and living conditions frequently recurred in the complaints, covering a broad spectrum of concerns, ranging from neglect and breach of contract to misconduct, violence, and abuse. Therefore, complaining played a crucial role in the daily negotiation of the city's social dynamics and constituted a unique form of urban agency. Furthermore, as complaints require responses and actions on the part of the authorities, complaining can be viewed as a multi-voiced communicative process representing a distinctive genre of historical evidence. The culture of complaining was characterized by vital elements of life writing features as the complainants almost always provided information about their lives and problems as an integral part of the complaining narrative. This paper focuses on the distinctive scriptural practice of complaining and how the complainants presented themselves, their life conditions, and their experiences of urban living, interactions, and conflicts with other city dwellers and communities. I will discuss how testimonials and character references on norms and values were embedded in the written self-narratives of the complaints and how they played an active part in the complainants’ linguistic and scriptual strategies.
Writing Authority: Archival Production, Scriptural Practices, and Institutional Conflict in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris
Guang Yang
abstractGuang Yang
This paper examines the conflict between the Paris Hôtel de Ville and the Châtelet in the early eighteenth century as a revealing episode in the formation of urban written memory. This contest occurred in the wake of Jean Mabillon's diplomatics revolution, which established critical methodologies for authenticating documents. Mabillon's principles, while designed to ensure textual fidelity, were weaponized to enhance institutional legitimacy. Rather than treating their rivalry merely as a political dispute, the paper argues that both institutions engaged in deliberate practices of archival production, documentary selection, and scriptural construction in order to shape authoritative narratives of the city’s past. These competing histories—most notably Nicolas Delamare’s Traité de la Police (1705–1719) and the municipal response by Michel Félibien and Guy-Alexis Lobineau in the Histoire de la ville de Paris (1725)—functioned as powerful instruments for establishing jurisdictional legitimacy.
At the heart of this conflict was not only the interpretation of existing records but the manufacture of new written memory. Delamare grounded the Châtelet’s claims in a reordering of legal titles, selectively abridging or omitting earlier royal ordinances and municipal charters to support a hierarchical model of police power. In response, the Hôtel de Ville sponsored extensive archival work: the compilation of a large Recueil de chartes, new inventories of municipal registers, and the mobilization of recent archaeological discoveries such as the 1711 inscription dedicated to the nautes in Notre-Dame. These actions were meant to establish municipal authority in an antiquity whose documentary traces were carefully curated and publicly displayed.
By analyzing these scriptural practices, the paper shows how urban archives were not passive repositories but active sites of political authorship, where writing, collecting, and editing became tools for creating a durable civic memory. The 1730s municipal initiative to reorganize and centralize city archives—culminating in the 1735 general inventory—demonstrates how institutions sought to stabilize their authority through the control of records and the production of new textual order. In this sense, the “war of histories” in Paris illuminates a broader phenomenon in medieval and early modern Europe: the strategic use of documentary culture to define urban identity, institutional hierarchy, and the continuity of political life.
Session 22 - Beyond Centrality: Reassessing Urban Networks and Regional Hierarchies in Europe, 1300-1900
The session examines urban hierarchies of Europe, focusing on the distinctions and interactions between cities, towns, and boroughs/market towns between 1300 and 1900, addressing regional disparities and functional differences. We welcome all methodological approaches, but particularly those that go beyond the Central Place Theory.
Coordinators: Katalin Szende, Judit Majorossy, Beatrix F. Romhányi
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Coordinators: Katalin Szende, Judit Majorossy, Beatrix F. Romhányi
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Session 22 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
A golden reserve or a dead-end road? Market towns in the context of regional inequalities in the Kingdom of Hungary in the late Middle Ages
Katalin Szende
abstractKatalin Szende
Historical research on market towns or small towns, i.e. towns in the second and third tiers of the urban hierarchy, has led to wildly different assessments on their impact among the protagonists of social, economic, and urban history in twentieth-century Hungary. Some scholars considered the proliferation of market towns in the late Middle Ages as a sign of stagnation and inertia from where no road led to reaching higher ranks of urbanisation. Others argued that these towns were special reserves for social mobility and economic resilience. Both views were supported by data on the economic output of these towns: underdeveloped craft production on the one hand and specialized, market-oriented agrarian produce on the other.
Recent research on regional differences in the Kingdom of Hungary around 1500, which quantifies and aggregates data from 33 development indicators of about 5000 parishes in the country, allows us to apply a different approach to market towns. First, the circle of those parishes can be defined whose development score reaches a level above the villages; second, the relative contribution of (1) administrative, (2) social and ecclesiastical, (3) cultural and educational as well as (4) economic indicators to the overall score, the so-called development profile, can be defined. Displaying these localities and their profiles on the map of the country highlighted significant regional disparities: in some areas, such as the northeastern part of the kingdom, market towns appeared to have served as dynamic reserves for urbanisation, whereas in the southwestern regions, they often remained stagnant.
This paper will take these differences as its starting point and inquires into the reasons behind them by examining the complex settlement hierarchies in these two selected regions, from primary towns to the bigger and smaller villages. By examining the interconnections between different levels of the settlement hierarchy, analysing spatial organisation, and identifying regional variations, it intends to seek for causal explanations behind the divergent trends in market town development.
Urban Network in the Southeast of the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th Century
Miha Kosi
abstractMiha Kosi
Town centres in the area of present-day Slovenia and neighboring countries began to emerge intensively in the 12th century, and this development reached its peak in the 13th century. It was a border territory of the Holy Roman Empire with exceptional strategic and trade-transport importance. Connections ran through it from Hungary to Italy and to the center of the Empire in the Northwest, and from Austria to Italy. Numerous influential imperial princes, both secular and ecclesiastical, developed their urban centers here in intense mutual competition (the Andechs-Meranians, Babenbergs, Spanheims, archbishop of Salzburg, patriarch of Aquileia, bishops of Bamberg and Freising). In the Late Middle Ages, most of the more important urban settlements in the region came into the possession of the territorial princes – the Habsburgs. By the end of the Middle Ages, an urban network had emerged that included more than 80 urban settlements of various categories.
We do not have any statistical sources available to understand the urban network in the 15th century (on the size of settlements, number of inhabitants etc.). We can only indirectly conclude about the hierarchical relationships between them. The main criteria are based on economic data on trade and crafts: on types of trade and trade connections (long-distance, medium-distance or local trade), on types of craft production and possible specialization (e.g. for foreign markets). The second set of indicators is data on trade and transport fees, trade/transport privileges and the organization of transport (tolls, staple privileges (Niederlage), compulsory road privileges (Strassenzwang), bridges, ports, transport professions). The importance of the urban center can also be inferred on the basis of migration flows (immigration of entrepreneurs, e.g. traders, specialized craftsmen, etc.). Last but not least, an important picture is provided by data on the central functions of the settlement (administrative, judicial, ecclesiastical, educational, etc.) and the development of the city in terms of autonomy and administrative structure and legal status. Based on the interweaving of the aforementioned criteria, we have formed four categories of urban settlements:
• important trading town
• town
• small town/major market-town
• market town
The methodology for forming and using the aforementioned criteria will be explained in the lecture itself.
Londoners and England: Towards a History of Londoners’ Relationships with the Country, c.1400-1640
Justin Colson
abstractJustin Colson
The relationship between Londoners and the rest of England has seemingly always been strained. From as early as the fifteenth century London’s dominant share of England’s international trade was a concern to many, and complaints at the city’s growth, seemingly at the expense of other places, grew louder in the sixteenth century. Yet, paradoxically there is a parallel truism that, in contrast to many European cities, London was not a city of urban dynasties: it was a city where capital was built, but from which it quickly fled. The archetypal medieval or early modern London success story was for an apprentice to arrive in the city from the countryside, make his fortune and establish his children in even more prosperous trades, only for them, or their children, to use this wealth to buy a rural estate to move into the ranks of the gentry. Even today, many consider it normal to live in London only for a time to build a career, leaving to more rural locations once you have children.
There are many ways we might seek to more closely examine the nature of the entanglements between Londoners and England in the late medieval period, when these trends were first observed. Aside from practicalities such as the hinterland of food and commercial supplies (e.g. Galloway & Murphy 1991), we can look to infer the experiences and attitudes of Londoners themselves through a range of sources, from origins of apprentices (e.g. Leunig, Minns & Wallis, 2011), through legal entanglements (e.g. Stevens, 2012), to the places and individuals remembered in wills. This paper surveys the potential to answer the question of how embedded late medieval Londoners truly were in their city through a survey of some extant and emerging large datasets: enrolled apprenticeships, Londoners’ cases in the central civil law courts, and especially the vast archive of enrolled wills which are being unlocked for distant reading via HTR and entity recognition. This approach promises to show the qualitative strength and embeddedness of Londoners’ entanglements with the countryside.
Self-Governance Networks: Magdeburg Law as a Driver of Urbanization in the Ukrainian Lands (14th–19th Centuries)
Myron Kapral
abstractMyron Kapral
This paper reconsiders the urbanization of the Ukrainian lands within the broader European context by shifting attention from economic centrality to legal and institutional frameworks. From the late medieval period, the diffusion of Magdeburg Law endowed towns with charters that secured municipal self-government, commercial regulation, and civic accountability. Rather than isolated privileges, these urban charters generated dense networks of self-governing towns across Ruthenia, Galicia, Volhynia, and Left-Bank Ukraine. They shaped not only local administration but also regional hierarchies, producing distinctive forms of civic modernization that persisted despite imperial centralization. Ukrainian towns, often overlooked in comparative urban historiography, emerge here as active nodes in a European-wide tradition of juridical autonomy and institutional resilience.
The argument is grounded in the UrbanGIS-UA project, which constructs the first historical GIS platform documenting over 1,000 Ukrainian towns from the 14th to the 20th centuries. By encoding more than twenty indicators per locality—legal status, educational presence, civic institutions, demographic composition—the platform allows typological clustering and diachronic analysis of urban functions. Preliminary results show strong correlations between municipal autonomy and higher literacy levels, denser institutional presence, and greater civic continuity, even in regions disrupted by war or imperial restructuring. In this perspective, Magdeburg Law functioned not merely as a legal transplant but as a network-forming mechanism that connected urban communities into patterns of mutual reinforcement and regional cohesion.
By reassessing the legacy of Magdeburg Law as a driver of Ukrainian urbanization, the paper contributes to the session’s aim of moving “beyond centrality.” It highlights how juridical regimes, cultural institutions, and social solidarities could shape urban hierarchies as powerfully as economic central place functions. Ukrainian evidence enriches comparative debates on European urban history, suggesting that modernization was not only a product of industrial growth but also the long-term outcome of civic autonomy, legal rationality, and institutional density. In tracing these networks of self-governance, the study situates Ukraine firmly within European traditions of urban modernity while providing a transferable framework for understanding urban networks in other regions.
Session 22 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Structural comparison of urban and parish networks in Poland up to the 16th century
Marek Słoń
abstractMarek Słoń
Towns and parishes formed the two most fundamental networks of central places in pre-industrial Poland. Despite the difference in their basic functions, legal character and supreme institution, they show far-reaching similarities and interdependencies. The process of their formation will be analysed, above all the demographic, spatial and economic prerequisites for the creation of new centres and the capacity of the network, the circle of founders, the policy of territorial state and the Church. The second aspect examined will be a comparative analysis of the central functions of the parishes and small towns. It will be focused on the frequency, length and participants of journeys between the place of residence and these centres. The role in the transfer of civilisation markers from the centre to the periphery is another point of interest. There will be taken into account the profound diversity in the structure and density of both networks in the Polish lands over successive periods. The analysis will be based on data collected and made available by the Institute of Historical Geography of the Church in Poland at the Catholic University of Lublin and within the framework of the Historical Atlas of Poland programme conducted at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Historical-geographical factors and their influence on the formation and development of the urban network in medieval and early modern Bohemia
Jana Vojtíšková
abstractJana Vojtíšková
The planneed study will focus on the town in the landscape with longue durée intentions and observed, in the context of political, economic, and cultural contexts in the broadest sense of the word, the key role of historical-geographical factors in the formation of the urban network in Bohemia and in the development of medieval and early modern Bohemian towns. Special attention will be paid in this context to the royal towns, using especially findings from research into the towns of Hradec Králové (Eastern Bohemia) and České Budějovice (South Bohemia). Using the example of these two towns, which have held the position of regional centres since the 13th century, we will observe how it is essential for medieval and early modern research to determine the unique local combination of the historical-geographical factors, which take on different importance in the case of individual towns, and to also monitor strategies to overcome their potential disadvantage, because it turned out that geographical conditions could have caused towns to fall behind, or, on the contrary, could have contributed to their long-term prosperity and created reserves for overcoming adverse periods (e.g. the effects of war or natural disasters, especially fires). This methodological approach will make it possible to look into the background of a number of historical processes, including the formation and transformation of the urban network, and to monitor indicators of urban functions. The advantage of the presented methodological approach – the town in the landscape, which uses the knowledge of a multitude of scientific fields, is the possibility of revealing processes that have so far remained hidden from historiography, while at the same time, it has the potential to prevent the fragmentation of research, because it develops urban research from a common platform – the historical landscape, which has been fundamentally affected by industrialisation and urbanisation in the case of Bohemia only since 19th century. The application of the aforementioned methodological approach is also basis for research in the field of comparative urban history.
Transition of centrality: The emergence and hierarchy of towns in northeastern Hungary (13th–14th century)
Drahoslav Magdoško
abstractDrahoslav Magdoško
In the thirteenth century, East-Central Europe experienced a substantial transformation of both social structures and the landscape, marked significantly by the emergence of communal towns. While some towns developed near earlier central places, others arose in areas where conditions had been fundamentally reconfigured. This paper focuses on the latter phenomenon in the northeastern regions of the Kingdom of Hungary (counties of Abov, Spiš, and Šariš, in present-day eastern Slovakia). It examines shifting patterns of centrality associated with the decline of older royal castles and the establishment of new castles and towns. In addition, it compares the developmental trajectories of these newly founded towns throughout the first century of their existence.
Prior to the mid-thirteenth century, this part of Hungary was a peripheral borderland administered by a small number of royal castles overseeing vast territories. The decisive turning point came after the Mongol invasion from 1241–1242. The subsequent period witnessed intensive resettlement of the mountainous frontier, the transfer of numerous estates to private proprietors, and modifications to the function—and, in some cases, also the location—of royal castles. Simultaneously, international economic ties intensified, elevating the strategic importance of the route crossing the region. The foundation of several towns along the route stimulated economic activity.
The first half of the paper will reconstruct the context of these urban foundations. Archaeological research over the recent decades has substantially altered former conceptions of pre-urban settlement, and, when combined with written sources, now allow for a more sophisticated interdisciplinary assessment of developments in in those times. Evidence indicates that towns there typically emerged outside older settlements and at a distance from previous centres of power. The second half of the paper will discuss the paths of towns such as Košice, Prešov, Veľký Šariš and others, whose hierarchical arrangement was shaped by factors as earlier settlement patterns, distance from royal castles, position within the road network, density of surrounding area with other newly founded communities, and others.
The main point of the paper thus concerns “centrality in motion” – the redefinition of spatial order in a period of profound systemic change, when multiple forces converged to produce new central places and configure the relationships among them.
Parallel networks of towns, interdependencies and rivalries in Transylvania and the Romanian principalities (15th–16th centuries)
Laurentiu Radvan
abstractLaurentiu Radvan
Within the medieval kingdom of Hungary, Transylvania was notable for the important economic, social, and legal contributions of the Saxons who had settled there from the 12th century. We owe them the development of a true network of towns, centred around three main hubs that shaped the urban landscape of the region: Hermannstadt/Sibiu, Kronstadt/Brașov, and Bistritz/Bistrița. At the same time, beyond the Carpathian Mountains, in the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, a different network of towns emerged in the 14th century, closely connected economically to the Saxon centres, as groups of people of German origin settled there (Râmnic, Câmpulung, Târgoviște, Baia, Suceava, Roman). In this paper, we aim to examine both the interdependence between the two networks' centres and the perspectives and interests of the princes of the two principalities concerning the connections between the two worlds. Initially, Saxon towns with deposit rights held a privileged status and enjoyed customs exemptions, but from the second half of the 15th century, princes from the south and east of the Carpathians began to attempt to restore balance by favouring their own towns. Their measures also had a political basis, against the backdrop of the increasing influence of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, they foreshadow a certain level of economic realignment not only within Romanian territory but also in Transylvania, considering the extensive changes that will occur in the 16th century, influenced by new geographical discoveries, the Reformation, and wars with the Ottomans.
Session 23 - Quayside and Custom House: Customs Accounts as a Source for Medieval and Early Modern Urban History
Customs accounts are amongst the most extensive surviving sources for many medieval and early modern towns, with huge potential to illuminate the 'social life of things' in the urban marketplace, urban networks, and the spaces of trade. This comparative session examines pre-modern customs records from all contexts and approaches.
Coordinators: Eliot Benbow, Justin Colson, María Grove-Gordillo, Werner Scheltjens
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Coordinators: Eliot Benbow, Justin Colson, María Grove-Gordillo, Werner Scheltjens
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Session 23 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Books to England: The London Custom Accounts as a source for a history of early book trade (1473-1520/1523)
Martina Hacke
abstractMartina Hacke
Books to England: The London Custom Accounts as a source for a history of early book trade (1473-1520/1523)
Any study of the history of book trade between the continent and England in the early days of printing must take into account the London Custom Accounts. Even though William Caxton (1422-1491) began printing near Westminster Abbey in 1476, it took more than 40 years for England to catch up in terms of printing technology. During this period, the island was dependent on importing books. Many of them made their way from the continent by ship via the port of London. There they were cleared through customs.
The customs invoices contain valuable information about the trade in books. They list the names of the dealers, whether they were foreigners, the quantity of books transported and their value, the packaging material, the transporting ship with the name of the captain and, last but not least, the customs duty to be paid.
A diachronic look at this source shows a consolidation of the trade in books, initially still with manuscripts, then with printed books (impressis). If one follows the activities of individual traders here, one gets an impressive picture of their trade. For example, between 1503 and 1520, the Cologne merchant Franz Birkmann († 1530) had over 40 baskets, as well as books in other packaging, transported to London by 15 different captains, with a value of over 170 pounds.
The aim of this contribution is to provide an overview of the informative value of customs invoices insofar as they relate to the book trade in the early days of printing (until 1520/1523). In addition, this informative value will be evaluated by comparing it with that of other sources on this topic. This is done using the example of the book trade between Paris and London, which was mainly kept going by various networks, especially French-English publishing associations. The evaluation of the customs registers can thus help to better understand the economic relationship between two important metropolises as a whole, but also the process of transferring ‘modern’ ideas, humanistic and later also reformatory, to England.
Customs Accounts as a Source for Studying the Art Trade: Barcelona in the Late Eighteenth Century
Anna Vallugera Fuster
abstractAnna Vallugera Fuster
Customs records are among the most extensive serial sources for the early modern port city, yet their value for the history of the art trade has rarely been explored in the Mediterranean. This paper approaches that question through late-eighteenth-century Barcelona, where the art arriving by sea was recorded through sanitary control and quarantine, and not only through fiscal customs. Its trace survives mainly in the Sanitat (Health) series of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona, a source that registers the origin, ship and route of each cargo but almost nothing about the works themselves. Drawing on fifteen certificates from 1791–1804, almost all from Rome, the paper analyses this hybrid customs archive and, by cross-referencing it with the records of the recipients, shows how an apparently mute source can become an instrument for reconstructing the routes, agents and networks of the art trade. The Barcelona case offers a Mediterranean counterpoint to studies on art trade through Northern European ports.
Determining trade volumes at the Leipzig fairs in the 17th century: a new approach using the Görlitz customs registers
Ulf Christian Ewert, Markus A. Denzel
abstractUlf Christian Ewert, Markus A. Denzel
Leipzig’s rise in the early modern period was largely based on the economic dynamics generated by its three fairs – the New Year’s Market, Easter Market and Michaelmas Market. In 16th and early 17th centuries they developed into the hub of trading with Eastern Europe. Goods from and to Western Europe, Southern Germany and beyond passed through the city. In the 17th century, the Thirty Year’s War and several plagues recurrently suspended trade for short periods of time, respectively, but in the aftermath the fairs always reassumed their key position within continental trade and grew even more in the long run. Total revenues of the city’s scale and stand fees are rough indicators of the commercial activity at the fairs. They were recorded in the municipal accounts, separately for each fair, and have been published by STRAUBE in 2015. As they do not provide any information on the quantity of goods, these data are of limited value, however. Thus, with the available Leipzig data trade volumes at the fairs cannot be properly determined, so far.
To close this gap, the Görlitz customs registers are used, with a particular focus on the crisis-ridden 17th century. Görlitz had the customs rights for goods transported on the Via Regia, the most important west-east overland trade route in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. Most of the goods being transacted at the Leipzig fairs that either came from or were bound to Silesia, Bohemia, Poland or further east thus passed the customs of Görlitz. The registers are nearly completely preserved from 1606 to 1830 and are currently being digitised in cooperation with the Historical Commission in Munich. Their daily entries declaring the type and quantity of goods and the names of customs payers give an accurate picture of the amount of goods transported on the Via Regia to or from Leipzig and allow to identify the merchants and carters involved in trade at the Leipzig fairs. The frequency of customs clearances and the amount of customs revenue corresponded very closely with the dates of the fairs. Both increased significantly immediately before and after each of the three fairs. There is also a strong correlation of customs revenues with the stand fees and weighing fees collected at the respective fair. Hence, the Görlitz customs registers allow to estimate a significant portion of the volumes traded at the Leipzig fairs. This is an important step towards precisely quantifying the development of the fairs in the 17th century.
The Architecture of Fiscal Oversight: Handelskommission and Customs Reform in Riga, 1763–1768
Pavel Demchenko
abstractPavel Demchenko
This paper examines the reorganisation of customs administration in Riga during the early reign of Catherine II through the relationship between fiscal governance, urban space, and negotiated authority. It focuses on the Riga Handelskommission, established in 1763 to investigate the city’s commercial decline and to reconcile Riga’s municipal privileges with the fiscal and commercial objectives of the Russian Empire. The paper reconstructs the customs organisation and observes negotiations among Riga Magistrate, the governor-general, central imperial authorities, and the different merchant communities trading in the city.
I argue that the customs reforms of 1765–1768 represented neither straightforward imperial centralisation nor a simple preservation of municipal autonomy. Rather, they constituted a compromise between Riga and the imperial administration reached under pressure from competing commercial demands. Russian merchants challenged the exclusive commercial rights and sought easier access to direct trade, while British merchants also contested aspects of the existing commercial order. Riga Magistrate, meanwhile, attempted to preserve its jurisdiction, urban privileges, and control over municipal revenues. The resulting settlement preserved important elements of Riga’s legal autonomy while substantially transforming the practical mechanisms through which customs administration could be supervised.
A central element of this compromise was the spatial reorganisation of customs governance. Before 1765, Riga’s customs system was both institutionally and spatially fragmented: different duties were collected by different officials at several locations across the city, while fiscal documents, treasuries, and administrative expertise remained dispersed among municipal and Crown institutions. The Commercial Statute of 1765 concentrated most customs chambers, treasuries, and records in the Lizenthaus under the supervision of the imperial Ober Inspektor. Municipal and Crown revenues remained legally distinct, but their physical co-location increased the visibility of fiscal practices and provided imperial officials with direct access to the documentation through which revenues could be calculated and audited. I conceptualise this arrangement as spatial accountability: the production of administrative control through proximity, concentration, and access to information rather than through the immediate abolition of existing jurisdictions.
Textile trade of Dutch cities in the 18th century based on Schenkenschans customs registers (1630-1810)
Lauri Heinonen
abstractLauri Heinonen
In my contribution to this session, I explore the customs registers of Schenkenschans (1630-1810), a former customs station and fortress on the Rhine at the border between the Netherlands and present-day Germany. The customs registers have been preserved between 1630-1810. They have been made available for digital analysis used at the University of Bamberg in the research project „The ‘invisible carriers’ on the Rhine, 1630-1810. Observing the early modern economy through the lens of freight transport practices” which is funded by the German Research Community (DFG) through a grant (Proj.Nr. 527636627) for the years 2023-2026.
This kind of data offers insights on the connections between urban centers and trade networks between towns and cities. This paper focuses on the textile trade through Schenkenschans in the eighteenth century with a focus on Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the most important cities in the border region like Arnhem.
The question of early modern Dutch textile trade has been covered in earlier literature (e.g. van den Heuvel 2014) who notes that a consumer market for textiles emerged in the Netherlands by the 1670s. Interestingly, de Vries and van der Woude (1997) argue in their seminal book on early modern Dutch economic history that the Dutch textile industry was on decline by the 18th century. However, the initial analysis of my data seems to indicate that the development of the Dutch textile industry could perhaps have been more complicated in the 18th century.
In this paper, I present the first results of the analysis of Schenkenschans data concerning the trade from and to Arnhem, Amsterdam, Duisburg, Köln, Emmerick, Wageningen, Roeroort and Rotterdam in 1737-1810. This selection covers ca. 50% of all passages at the customs station of Schenkenschans during this period. Based on these data, it can be shown that that the Rhine trade passing Schenkenschans can roughly be divided into three main blocks: (1) minerals and construction materials like soil, wood and iron, (2) textiles and, (3) other items such as consumables like salt and tobacco.
A methodological challenge with the data is that goods the shipmasters traded for burghers of tax-exempt cities were exempted from the customs. Thus, I will also address the effect this institution of the Rhine trade has on the interpretation of my results.
‘Masterful Women’: London widows, orphan patrimonies, and trade opportunity in the customs accounts.
Adele Sykes, Eliot Benbow
abstractAdele Sykes, Eliot Benbow
By the second half of the 15th Century, London had established a wardship procedure which, through the mandatory allocation of a third of a citizen’s moveable estate to his children,
made available significant sums of capital and credit to London merchants with which they could trade. Using a number of interlinked indigenous merchant families, this paper will
approach the customs accounts from both an economic and a social perspective. Using widows as a starting point, the paper aims to examine how women continued, or extended,
their husbands’ businesses: to make connections between wardships and active trading to better understand how citizens’ estates were being used after their deaths to internalise city wealth,
and to provide a unique insight into the social networks and aspirations behind trading transactions.
Session 23 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Olive oil consumption in London during the Late Middle Ages: its reflection in the London Customs Accounts (1380-1560)
María Grove-Gordillo
abstractMaría Grove-Gordillo
Olive oil was one of the leading export commodities from the Mediterranean area. England was one of the most important importers of this product due to its quality and applications in the wool and cloth industries since the Middle Ages. The transport methods and factors enabling its export to England evolved over centuries, becoming a primary product of Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish merchants between the 14th and 16th centuries. However, even though there are publications that underline the importance of this product, there is a scarcity of studies that consider the consumption patterns of this commodity in England.
In this paper, examining the edited Particular Customs Accounts of the port of London, we undertake a study of consumption of the olive oil for the period between 1380 and 1560, examining the time-patterns of its import through this period in the port of London -the biggest port of England in these years- who were the merchants importing this product, and, taking into consideration the possibilities and limitations of the source, we will explore the networks that produced this product, connecting the data obtained from the Customs Accounts with the diplomatic context, bibliography, and other sources such as other edited customs accounts from other English ports of the same period.
Economies of Play: Toys, Games and the Material Culture of Recreation in Late Medieval London
Eliot Benbow
abstractEliot Benbow
Economies of Play: Toys, Games and the Material Culture of Recreation in Late Medieval London
The London Customs Accounts can provide a wealth of information and insights into the material culture of everyday life in the 14th-16th centuries. One fascinating element of this is the substantial numbers of games, toys and other recreational items that were imported into London from the Low Countries and the Hanseatic League. Combined with London’s wealth of surviving archaeology these different sources can be directly compared to highlight the substantial evidence of toys, sports, games that were being traded and the sorts of activities that were being facilitated by these imports. Toys, rattles, figurines and other playthings survive in substantial numbers in the collections of the London Museum and many of these were found along the Thames riverfront, often not far from where they were unloaded when being imported. Here is an area where the documentary evidence of the London Customs Accounts and the richness of London’s medieval archaeology can combine in interesting and surprising ways.
This paper will outline the genres of recreational objects available across London society that have rarely been studied or given significant thought by scholars of the period. It will highlight the groups of London and Low Countries merchants who were involved in their making and selling. Studying the trade of such goods reveals some surprising developments. One example might be 1460s import bans of dice, tennis balls and playing cards which was actively enforced by London’s customs administration, yielding fascinating instances of such goods being impounded. Just as today, play was serious business. These genres of objects can also be placed into a broader consumer culture of everyday goods in the later Middle Ages where London acted as a vibrant producer, importer and distributor of the materiality of daily life. The breadth and scale of London’s growing goods market can be reflected in the increasing quantities and diversity of cheap things that flowed through the capital into the homes of Londoners, and increasingly, homes across England. Toys and games form a an underexplored example of these broader trends.
Eliot Benbow
Institute of Historical Research
1.8 million voyages and their importance to the town of Elsinore, the Danish state and the historical research: The case of the Sound Tolls
Jørgen Mikkelsen
abstractJørgen Mikkelsen
In 1429, the Danish king introduced a new duty at a recently built castle in the town of Elsinore at the narrowest part of the fairway between the Danish provinces Zealand and Scania. From 1497 onward we have ledgers with registration of each ship passing Elsinore, and from 1557 to the end of the customs collection in 1857, there are nearly no lacuna in the series of account books. In total, there are more than 700 volumes mentioning about 1.8 million voyages. Already in the 1540s about 1,200 ships were registered each year, and in the 1850s this number had increased to c. 15,000.
The account books are considered as one of the most important sources to European economic history in the early modern period, as The Sound carried a good deal of the traffic between Eastern and Western Europe and the books give a fine impression of changes in the trade patterns, even if we may take smuggling into account when interpreting the data. In contrast, we may assume that nearly all dutiable ships are registered, as the crew of Danish warships kept on eye on the traffic through the narrow passage.
The enormous amount of money levied by the collectors was very important for the Danish state. Thus, it covered the expenses to construction of the new grand Kronborg castle in Elsinore in the 1570s. Around 1640 the yields from the Sound Tolls formed about a quarter of the total revenue of the state, and as late as in the 1850s this share was 13 %. However, only from 1771 the Sound Tolls revenues went directly to the Treasury. Until then, the king had the right to use these amounts without restrictions, and of course this gave him a large scope for action.
The Sound Tolls also left a strong mark on Elsinore, which in hundreds of years was one of the most cosmopolitan towns in Denmark. The collection of customs created different jobs and a demand for many services, for example ferrymen carrying captains between their anchored ships on the town, merchants selling ship equipment, provision dealers, innkeepers and prostitutes.
In my presentation, I’ll put forward all these aspects, especially the Sound Tolls’ importance to Elsinore. Besides, I’ll point out that the account books not only tell about transport of grain, timber and other bulky commodities, but also many other and more special objects. For instance, several entries from c. 1850 throw light upon the transportation to Copenhagen of some finds, made by a Danish scientist in Brazil.
The modernization of fiscality during the Thirty Years' War: The case of the Danish customs administration
Werner Scheltjens
abstractWerner Scheltjens
The proposed paper examines the modernization of fiscal administration in the Danish Sound, the narrow strait between the North and Baltic Seas, during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). The paper documents the results of an in-depth analysis of changes in customs registration practices. Drawing on systematic comparison of the documentary practices in customs account books of this period, the paper identifies significant transformations in the early 1630s in how information about ships passing through the Danish Sound was recorded and organized. Perhaps most significantly, the guiding principle for the internal organisation of the customs registers changed during these years: Single registrations of a ship's passage based on the master's domicile replaced commodity- and privilege-oriented registrations of one ship's passage in multiple lists. The paper interprets these changes in light of the fiscal pressures of prolonged warfare, the need to gain a better understanding of customs revenues, and the emergence of the fiscal-military state. By focusing on documentary practices rather than institutional structures, the paper develops a new perspective on the impact of wartime pressures on customs administration.
The Lleuda of Mediona: A tax on trade and the passage of merchandise in Barcelona — towards a quantitative study of sixteenth-century commerce
Lluís Sales Favà
abstractLluís Sales Favà
The so-called Lleuda of Mediona and Reial comprised a fiscal levy that taxed the trade, sale, and passage of a wide range of goods in the city of Barcelona during pre-industrial times. This paper presents an unprecedented collection preserved at the Archive of the Cathedral of Barcelona: nearly 200 account books dating from the late fifteenth century to around 1600 (with the series extending into the early eighteenth century). These are nominal accounts in which scribes meticulously recorded each commodity subject to taxation. Depending on the type of merchandise, the entries also note the weight, origin, price, and the names of both seller and buyer.
The series is particularly remarkable for the second half of the sixteenth century, for which data survive for almost the entire period. Given its scope and continuity, this collection represents an unparalleled resource within the European archival landscape for the study of trade.
The paper will also examine normative and contentious aspects related to the Lleuda, including the evolution of tax rates, collection methods, and fiscal disputes. It will argue that, despite the pronounced fragmentation of tax ownership, these levies constituted a coherent and well-ordered fiscal system. Consequently, a collaborative project dedicated to large-scale data collection based on this corpus could yield new insights into trade dynamics in sixteenth-century Barcelona and its region.
Session 25 - Urban networks and inland markets in the expansion of trade flows: the case of the Iberian Peninsula (14th-15th centuries)
This session aims to provide new insights into the economic articulation of large mercantile spaces in the later Middle Ages. It will focus on trade and financial flows in regions which appear at first glance to be far from major trade routes. We will use urban networks of smaller towns to map out lesser-studied tributaries to these routes.
Coordinators: Sandra De La Torre Gonzalo, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul
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Coordinators: Sandra De La Torre Gonzalo, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul
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Session 25 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
In and Out: Lisbon’s mercantile networks between inland trade and overseas markets, 1300–1500
Flávio Miranda
abstractFlávio Miranda
How did inland trade networks sustain Lisbon’s maritime prominence, and to what extent did inland markets shape the city’s mercantile organisation? This paper examines the articulation between Lisbon’s mercantile networks and the inland markets of the Portuguese kingdom between 1300 and 1500, situating the city within broader Iberian and European trading systems. While historiography has traditionally emphasised Lisbon’s maritime expansion and its role as an Atlantic entrepôt (Andrade & Miranda, 2017; Miranda & Faria, 2016), or its Mediterranean connections (Cardoso, 2023; Sequeira & Miranda, 2019; Guidi-Bruscoli, 2014), less attention has been paid to how its economic vitality depended on a dense web of inland exchanges and the circulation of commodities across medium-range territories.
Drawing upon fiscal records, customs accounts, and royal chancery sources, this study reconstructs the mechanisms through which goods such as wine, olive oil, dried fruits, and hides were channelled from the surrounding and the interior regions toward Lisbon’s port, while manufactured imports and textiles followed the reverse route into the hinterland. Methodologically, it combines quantitative analysis of fiscal data with qualitative evidence from mercantile documentation to map commercial circuits and identify key social actors. By focusing on the interface between local production and long-distance trade, the paper explores how middle-ranking centres in central Portugal – within the River Tagus ecosystem of rural production and small towns – mediated exchanges between inland and maritime economies.
In doing so, it reassesses the degree of economic integration within late medieval Portugal and its connection to wider Iberian, Atlantic, and Mediterranean markets. Ultimately, the paper argues that Lisbon’s ascent as a major trading hub cannot be understood without considering the bidirectional movement of commodities and investment that sustained its outward expansion.
Puigcerdà and the Pyrenean Networks of Languedoc Woad Trade in the First Half of the 14th Century
Judicaël Petrowiste, Margault Coste-Hequet
abstractJudicaël Petrowiste, Margault Coste-Hequet
In the first half of the 14th century, the dynamism of the cloth industry in the Catalan territories generated a strong demand for dyeing products, particularly woad – a plant-based dye used to produce textiles in a wide range of blue tones. The success of this dye fostered the development of trade networks supplying Catalan production centers with woad, whose cultivation was then booming in the neighbouring Languedoc region. A significant portion of this trade followed the well-known Mediterranean route, which has been relatively well documented thanks to research conducted two decades ago. However, substantial flows also passed through another route, less studied by historians, which followed the Ariège valley up to the mountain passes crossing the Pyrenees. The rich notarial records of the town of Puigcerdà, located at the outlet of this route, shed light on the vitality of this channel for importing Languedoc woad during the first half of the 14th century and offer insight into how it functioned. These records notably highlight the important role played by merchants from small towns in the county of Foix in building and maintaining a Pyrenean trade network aimed at connecting this major center of cloth production with the woad-producing areas of the Lauragais region.
Urban networks and inland markets in the expansion of trade flows: the case of the Kingdom of Aragon (14th-15th centuries)
Sandra de La Torre Gonzalo
abstractSandra de La Torre Gonzalo
This paper focuses on the north-east Iberian Peninsula, a vast region between the Cantabrian Sea and the Mediterranean, during the 14th- 15th centuries. This inland territory was connected to several great trade flows by the mass production of raw materials indispensable for industries developing in different European regions during this period (e.g. leather and wool from transhumant flocks, or saffron). It also saw tremendous innovation in the pooling and investment of capital via sophisticated financial techniques. Our aim is to place a spotlight on the middle-ranking population centres of the northeast Iberian interior. The organisation of markets and the movement of inter-regional goods began in local territories and in small centres, where labour forces became oriented to certain long or medium-distance trades. Moreover, some communities served as suppliers to larger-scale trades focused in larger communities, and major ports connected these flows further beyond. Thanks to the wide range of documentary sources available, it is possible to broaden our understanding of the structure of medium and short-range exchanges by land, and also the financial flows in these territories. By observing the penetration of markets in the different areas, we hope that papers in this session will shed light on the true scale of inland trade networks within the greater Ebro valley region, and how these fed into larger scale European, Atlantic, and trans-Mediterranean networks.
Comercio y flujos comerciales en la Castilla de finales del siglo XV: fuentes documentales en el Archivo General de Simancas
Francisco Javier Crespo Muñoz
abstractFrancisco Javier Crespo Muñoz
Estudio de las fondos y agrupaciones documentales del Archivo General de Simancas como fuente esencial para conocer el comercio y los flujos comerciales de la Corona de Castilla a fines del siglo XV: ferias y mercados, redes urbanas y conexiones entre ciudades castellanas y, de éstas, con otros núcleos (Medina del Campo, Burgos, Génova, Granada, etc.).
En este sentido, es preciso considerar como fundamental la documentación de carácter fiscal, esencialmente la sección Escribanía Mayor de Rentas (su división homónimo relativa a rentas, sobre todo) o Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas; se trata de agrupaciones documentales clave como fuente para medir la incidencia que la fiscalidad y la hacienda castellanas tuvieron en los flujos comerciales, en el reino de Castilla, durante el siglo XV (en especial, durante la segunda mitad de la centuria). No obstante, deberemos remitirnos a otra documentación: dentro de la citada escribanía, rastrear las mercedes y privilegios de ferias o mercados; en la sección Registro General del Sello, todas aquellas noticias que nos reflejen la situación del comercio con genoveses o granadinos, así como la vida mercantil de las ciudades castellanas; etc.
Se llevará a cabo una localización de las series documentales más significativas, por su contenido, para estudiar el Comercio y los flujos en los territorios castellanos tardomedievales y, de éstos, con otros núcleos urbanos de contacto. Además, se realizará un análisis de los tipos documentales que escrituran el desarrollo de las figuras fiscales relacionadas con los flujos mercantiles, la dilucidación de pleitos comerciales, la navegación y sus cuitas, la concesión de privilegios sobre el comercio, etc. De este modo se podrá medir el impacto documental de las actividades comerciales.
Session 26 - The "Other Cities" of the Crown of Aragon: Taxation, Trade, and Market Integration in the Fifteenth-Century Mezzogiorno
Through a comparison of case studies focused on cities in the Mezzogiorno, this session seeks to enrich the historiographical framework regarding the relationships between urban economies and élites, Mediterranean trade interconnections, the negotiation of fiscal power, and opportunities emerging from warfare during the second half of the 15th century.
Coordinators: Esther Tello Hernández, Luciana Petracca
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Coordinators: Esther Tello Hernández, Luciana Petracca
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Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Between kingdom and commerce. Fiscal and customs policies in Taranto during the XV century: a first inquiry
Simone Callegaro
abstractSimone Callegaro
This paper offers an initial exploration of the case of the city of Taranto in the second half of the 15th century. Once the seat of the eponymous principality founded in 1088, Taranto was incorporated into the royal domain in November 1463, following the death of its last prince, Giovanni Antonio Orsini del Balzo, during the War of Succession to the Neapolitan throne. A supporter of the faction opposing the heir, Ferrante, the prince’s death allowed the young king to acquire a vast feudal holding, including Taranto itself.
At this juncture, the city’s universitas was integrated into the administrative framework of the Kingdom and began an intense negotiation with the crown through its collegiate institutions, which generally represented the urban elites. Aware of its strategic and economic relevance, the city leveraged the favorable political context — marked by the monarchy’s open support for urban communities as a counterweight to the baronage — to obtain significant privileges, particularly in fiscal and commercial matters.
First of all, this contribution aims to shed light on the management of both direct and indirect taxation by local institutions during Taranto’s transition from a feudal to a royal city. Furthermore, It will be examined the city’s role within broader Mediterranean trade networks and its evolving relationship with the Aragonese crown of Naples.
Merchant Elites and Urban Fiscality in Catalan Sardinia (1450–1490)
Laura Peris Bolta
abstractLaura Peris Bolta
Merchant Elites and Urban Fiscality in Catalan Sardinia (1450–1490)
This paper explores how merchant elites and urban administrations shaped the fiscal and commercial life of Catalan Sardinia between 1450 and 1490—a period spanning the final years of Alfonso the Magnanimous, the reign of John II, and the early rule of Ferdinand the Catholic. These decades marked a phase of adjustment and consolidation, as royal fiscal institutions and local economies adapted to the fluctuations of the regional and Mediterranean markets.
The study focuses on the interaction between royal officers (mainly the Procuració Reial of Sardinia, the Mestre Racional, and the virrei) and the principal urban centres of the kingdom—Cagliari, Alghero, Sassari, Bosa, Vila d’Esglèsies and Oristano. Drawing on a broad set of fiscal and administrative sources—including the books of the Court of the Procuració Reial, taxation registers, and royal accounts— the paper uses fiscal pressure as a lens to explore how local markets were integrated into wider Mediterranean circuits, identifying who farmed the royal revenues, the role played by merchants in this system, and whether they sought to monopolise tax farming as they did in other parts of the Crown of Aragon. Particular attention is given to customs duties, port tolls, and indirect taxes, which reveal the close interdependence between fiscal policy and maritime trade.
The analysis situates Sardinia’s main towns and patrimonial institutions within the wider economic geography of the western Crown of Aragon, showing how they functioned as complementary nodes within the island’s fiscal and commercial network. Their revenues derived from trade, agriculture, and local production, and were increasingly tied to the flows of goods and capital circulating between the Iberian Peninsula and the central Mediterranean. This perspective highlights the integration of Sardinian urban economies into broader Catalan commercial systems without obscuring their local specificities and degrees of autonomy.
By comparing these different contexts, the paper argues that Sardinia was not a marginal periphery, but a dynamic component of the fiscal and commercial system of the Catalan monarchy. The collaboration or even the conflict between royal agents and merchant elites demonstrates how taxation could serve both as an instrument of royal control and as a catalyst for local and regional enterprise.
Fiscal Power and Urban Agency: The universitas of Palermo in the Late Fifteenth Century
Elisa Turrisi
abstractElisa Turrisi
This paper examines how the universitas of Palermo managed its fiscal burden through indirect taxation and the payment of apportionment taxes during the second half of the fifteenth century. The analysis draws on the registers of the Palermitan secrezia and the records of the Tribunal del Real Patrimonio. It aims to reconstruct the revenue generated by the Crown’s gabelle and to highlight their impact on urban taxation and the city’s economy.
At the same time, the study focuses on the gabelle administered directly by the universitas. It addresses the challenges posed by fragmentary municipal records, which do not always allow precise calculation of customs revenues. These sources, however, provide valuable insights into how income was managed and the role of city officials in overseeing tax farming.
This dual approach allows us to examine consumption patterns, trade, bargaining power, and the fiscal capacity of Palermo during the reigns of John II and Ferdinand the Catholic, compared with the Alfonsine period. Furthermore, it highlights Palermo’s role as a central financial hub within the Kingdom of Sicily and the broader fiscal mechanisms of the Crown of Aragon. This was particularly significant at a time when Barcelona and the Principality of Catalonia were heavily indebted, while Valencia emerged as the main financial center of the Crown of Aragon.
The Palermitan gabelle are considered not only as fiscal instruments but also as a unique perspective on the interaction between the city and the monarchy. They funded the political and military enterprises of the Crown of Aragon during the Catalan Civil War (1462–1472), the Otranto War (1480–1481), and the Granada War (1482–1492), while also sustaining the universitas and promoting social integration. Particular attention is given to the expenditures of city officials for maintaining urban administration and infrastructure, to the upkeep of public spaces, and to the revenues acquired by the urban patriciate and foreign merchants—especially Catalans and Valencians—allowing them to diversify their business activities and strengthen their presence in the local economy.
This perspective positions Palermo not merely as the capital of a satellite viceroyalty, but as a central and active node in the financial and political equilibrium of the Crown of Aragon.
Session 27 - Transference of urban models in the Iberian World: Castile and America (1400-1600)
This session aims to discuss urban models and urban experiences across the Atlantic in the Iberian world, focusing on the multidirectional transference and exchanges that took place between Castilian and American regions in a decolonial perspective. The session is open to medievalists, modernists and scholars from any discipline working on Castilian and American cities.
Coordinators: David Igual-Luis, María Ángeles Martín Romera
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Coordinators: David Igual-Luis, María Ángeles Martín Romera
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Session 27 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
From the Americas to Castile and the Crown of Aragon:
Towards a Glocal History of Premodern Citizenship.
Carolina Obradors Suazo
abstractCarolina Obradors Suazo
This paper aims at engaging with a glocal history of premodern citizenship. It explores medieval forms of citizenship in Iberia to assess their influence in the later shaping of belonging and categorisation in the Americas. Recovering first the inspiring work of Tamar Herzog, who analysed the transfer of citizenship models from Castile to the New World, the paper then draws on other forms of Iberian citizenship, digging into medieval precedents beyond Castile. In doing so, the paper discusses whether this transfer rested on broader legal cultures. More specifically, the paper examines the main features of citizenship in Late Medieval Barcelona, analysing the extent to which it mirrors, for a previous chronology, the formal processes through which informal practices of citizenship were recognised, as Herzog acknowledged in her work. Ultimately, this will mostly be a historiographical dialogue that aims at bringing the Crown of Aragon into the discussion to situate Mediterranean forms and experiences of citizenship into the later Atlantic venture.
Caciquismo and oligarchy in Castilian cities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Affinities and continuities (15th and 16th centuries)
Maria Asenjo-González
abstractMaria Asenjo-González
The forms of integration and government in the urban societies of the New World required the application of models of affinity towards the indigenous societies that populated the islands of the Caribbean and the territories of the continent. The Castilian urban model organized the populations into councils, providing accommodation options for the conquerors, but during the first half of the 16th century, the indigenous hierarchies seemed ready to identify themselves as chiefs and natural lords of their clans and related groups. In an attempt to identify with structures already known in the urban environment of the peninsula, tribal chiefs, as lords of indigenous peoples, presented themselves as caciques in the memorials addressed to the Indians Council and claimed a status equivalent to that of “natural lord,” which were the social hierarchies that ruled and remained active in the urban environment of the Iberian Peninsula, also knew as “boni homines.”
This paper seeks to delve deeper into these networks of contacts and identification, which provided them with recognition of authority with their own powers over their loyal followers and responsibility for submission and dialogue with the monarchy under a well-known Castilian socio-political model. It allows us to understand the role played by indigenous hierarchies, in tune with the hierarchies of the kingdom and alongside the men of the urban oligarchies. This analysis will also provide a better understanding of the ways in which directives issued by governments with different powers were integrated and assimilated by their subjects in the American territories.
RELIGIOUS WOMEN IN THE CITIES OF CASTILE AND THE NEW WORLD (15TH-17TH CENTURIES): TRANSFERS, COMPLEXITIES AND DIVERGENCES
Silvia María Pérez González, Luis Cabeza Delgado
abstractSilvia María Pérez González, Luis Cabeza Delgado
There is no doubt that religious women were an eminently urban phenomenon, as their way of life could only be found in the cities. From the 12th to the 15th century, the West experienced the rise of groups of women who adopted marginal forms of religiosity, in other words, outside the formal ecclesiastical institutions represented by convents. This was a movement of women who channelled their life trajectories through pious practices and works of mercy and apostolate. These women could be celibate, married or widowed, and even mothers in some cases.
Since the end of the last century, religious women have been of interest to medieval historiography and gender studies. Their various forms of religious expression have been analysed and the leading role played by these women in the different mechanisms that articulated urban societies, beyond their traditional domestic and reproductive roles, has been highlighted. The organisation of colonial society attempted to partially replicate Castilian urban models, so that early on, religious women played a role in responding to the needs of evangelisation, and by the end of the 16th century, they were already present in the main urban areas of the territory incorporated under the Crown of Castile.
Our aim is to study the similarities between Castile and America in the analysis of these groups, specifically the accessibility of their traces in documentary sources, and whether the same level of development and complexity existed in America as in the cities of the Iberian Peninsula. In this sense, Castile witnessed different manifestations of the phenomenon, which resulted in a wide variety of denominations, constituting an unequivocal sign of the extent and complexity of the phenomenon.
Another highly interesting topic is the pressure that was exerted on these female groups since the time of Cardinal Cisneros. This group of women underwent a progressive process of control by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which began to see them as dangerous and as elements outside of structure, law and order. Therefore, the best solution was to subject them to regulation, which led to various adaptations by these groups in order to alleviate the aforementioned pressure. One such adaptation was their transformation into convents, with many monastic communities having their origins in groups of mulieres religiosae. We aim to analyse whether the same occurred in the American territories and whether, in the face of pressure, there were
The Juicio de Residencia in a Transnational Perspective: The Case of Cristóbal de
Lebrón between the Canary Islands and Hispaniola
Víctor González Melgar
abstractVíctor González Melgar
During the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, Castile relied on the
juicio de residencia, employed as an instrument for the evaluation of public office and the
supervision of governance, to maintain control over its newly conquered colonies. The
extra-peninsular application of the residencia, driven by colonial expansion, acquired a global
and transimperial nature, consolidating a triangular network of communications grounded in
accountability. This study examines this phenomenon through the case of Cristóbal de
Lebrón, in which the juicio de residencia functioned both as a transatlantic urban connector
and as a key determinant of his career trajectory. In 1511, he was dispatched as teniente to
Alonso de Lugo in Tenerife (Canary Islands) to resume the residencia of the Adelantado
before being replaced and subsequently subjected to a residencia by Cristóbal de Valcárcel in
1514. A year later, he was assigned to Hispaniola as judge de residencia of Marcos de
Aguilar. In 1521, he became oidor of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, beginning with the
order to conduct Rodrigo de Figueroa’s residencia and concluding with his own juicio de
residencia by Gaspar de Espinosa in 1527. His career thus exemplifies the transnational
nature of the juicio de residencia, offering insight into the development of this governing
device within an urban network linking the Canary Islands, the Americas, and Spain.
Early Modern Port Systems and Dynamics in the Portuguese Atlantic Islands During the Iberian Union (1580–1640): How Imperial Models Adapted to Geomorphological Realities
Ana Catarina Garcia
abstractAna Catarina Garcia
The port systems of the Portuguese Atlantic islands, Angra do Heroísmo (Azores), Funchal (Madeira), and Ribeira Grande (Cape Verde), served as insular laboratories for imperial strategies, where port functioning needs interacted with geographic constraints. During the Iberian Union (1580–1640), these islands were pivotal nodes in the Portuguese maritime networks, yet their development was profoundly influenced by local geographical, environmental, and conditions. The volcanic origins of Macaronesian archipelagos, characterized by steep orography, abrupt coastlines, and deep bathymetry, imposed significant challenges to port functioning. The Macaronesian islands offered limited natural harbors, shallow coastal areas, and exposure to strong winds and currents, which complicated navigation, anchorage, and the construction of artificial structures.
This study examines how the Portuguese Empire adapted its port models to natural constraints, focusing on the selection of port locations, the transformation of coastal landscapes, and the creation of functional harbours. Archaeological, cartographic, and historical evidence reveals that ports like Angra and Funchal relied on natural bays and small coves, often protected by volcanic formations, to establish safe anchorage and facilitate trade and defense. In Angra, the Monte Brasil promontory provided a strategic shelter, while in Funchal, the absence of natural barriers required innovative solutions, such as the use of pebble beaches for landing and the construction of small quays on rocky islets. These adaptations were not merely reactive but reflected a deliberate balance between imperial objectives, such as securing trade routes and defending territories, and the need to overcome geomorphological limitations. The ports of the Atlantic islands played a dual role: they were essential stopovers for transatlantic navigation, offering supplies, repairs, and protection, yet they also faced constant threats from storms, piracy, and the technological limitations of the period. The comparative analysis of these case studies demonstrates that while imperial frameworks provided a standardized blueprint for port development, natural and local conditions dictated the spatial and functional organization of each port, leading to hybrid systems that were both reflective of and distinct from mainland models.
Session 28 - Ports, maritime communities, and urban life in Europe (15th-19th centuries)
This session looks at the interplay between ports, maritime communities and urban life in European cities from the early modern period until today.
Coordinators: Brendan Von Briesen, Pablo Sánchez Pascual, Kalliopi Vasilaki
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Coordinators: Brendan Von Briesen, Pablo Sánchez Pascual, Kalliopi Vasilaki
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Session 28 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Port Typologies of the Industrial and Maritime Revolutions: Infrastructure, installations, and labour configurations
Brendan Von Briesen
abstractBrendan Von Briesen
This paper proposes a common framework for understanding the relationship between industrial, maritime, and port revolutions, with an eye to the changing relationships between ports and maritime workers, communities, and cities. Ports are one of the major features of coastal urban areas: the ports built the cities as much as the cities built the ports. For thousands of years, ports served as the locus for important economic, social, political, and cultural connections with distant forelands far upriver or across the seas and oceans, and fostered exchanges with their hinterlands. Over the last two hundred years, the relationship between major cities and their ports has changed in striking ways. In many cases, inner-harbours dedicated for centuries to fishing and shipping are now filled with leisure craft; with container ports located on the outskirts. In other cases, the modern-day ports are located more or less where the old infrastructures were laid millennia prior. Here, we create a typology and general chronology for the many technological changes required by the three Port Revolutions. I show how they responded to the demands of Maritime Revolutions in shipping, in turn created by the increased shipping needs of three Industrial Revolutions. While this causes chronological lags between these processes and their impacts across geographies, it allows for a general framework for comparing port developments over time, with an eye to contributing to the efforts to create a global history of ports and shipping.
Sailing North: The Castilian Initiative in Fishing and Trade with Ireland and its Impact on Ports and Inland Markets (15th-16th Centuries)
Javier Añibarro
abstractJavier Añibarro
This paper analyzes the Castilian fishing and commercial enterprise in Irish waters during the 15th and early 16th centuries. It explores the complex trade dynamics, from the initial catch to the sale in the markets of northern Castile. The study delves into the logistical challenges faced by Castilian merchants and fishermen, including their often-conflictual relations with local Irish authorities in the ports of destination. A key element was the crucial role of salt in preserving the fish during the long return voyage to Cantabrian ports.
Furthermore, the paper examines the sophisticated commercial infrastructure developed by the Cantabrian coast inhabitants. This included not only specialized fish shops in their home ports but also a network of strategically located warehouses in the interior of Castile. This infrastructure allowed them to control the supply and distribution chain, dominating the market. Consequently, the high price of fish upon reaching the inland markets made it a luxury product, largely unaffordable for the populations of villages near the towns, highlighting the product's status and the sharp social inequalities in its consumption.
The urban development of the port-city of Piraeus in the long 19th century.
Katerina Galani
abstractKaterina Galani
In the early 1830’s, in the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence and the nascence of the Greek state, the necessity for demographic recovery and economic revival was closely tied to urbanisation and the founding of new cities across the country. Neighbouring the newly nominated capital of Athens, Piraeus was strategically built from the ground up with the intention to serve as the national and international port of the Greek Kingdom. Within just a few decades, the port city had evolved into an international maritime centre and the forerunner of industrialisation in Greece. Today, Piraeus remains a global hub—home to the largest merchant fleet in the world, the leading container port in the Mediterranean, and the fourth largest in Europe.
In recent years, the study of ports has gained renewed attention, driven largely by historians of globalisation. However, the perception of ports as mere contact zones, as liminal places between the sea and the land, between markets and civilisations leaves little room to explore the port city per se: the transformation of ports to adapt to the growth of the maritime sector (trade and shipping) and, vice versa, their transformative effect on the proper city, on its urbanization, industrialization and socio-economic infrastructure.
In this light the paper explores the urban expansion of the port city throughout the long 19th century in relation to its economic function. What kind of a port was Piraeus, and how did this shape its demography and cityscape? The analysis focuses on the development of the port district, i.e. of the port services and infrastructure, to accommodate the city’s ever-increasing role as an international maritime hub. Furthermore, it examines the intermodal transport system that connected Piraeus’ hinterland with the domestic and international markets to diffuse agricultural and industrial produce. The findings are presented in PiraeusDigiMap, a web-based GIS urban map that traces the city’s dynamic evolution between 1834 and 1914. Through selected temporal layers, the map visually captures the remarkable transformation of the port and its surrounding economic and residential zones.
Bodies at Work: Labour and Port Construction in Early Modern Genoa
Davide Ferri
abstractDavide Ferri
Between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, the governing bodies of the Republic of Genoa commissioned a cycle of monumental canvases, probably destined for the Ducal Palace, depicting the construction of the Darsena, piers, and other major harbour infrastructures. These works constitute an extraordinary but largely overlooked case of how visual culture made labour — including that of enslaved and coerced workers — visible within spaces of political representation.
My paper investigates the agency of these images in shaping the Republic’s self-understanding as a maritime power. Far from offering neutral records, the canvases actively constructed a vision of collective effort, technological mastery, and economic foresight, transforming the contingent realities of construction into an emblem of civic strength. They show port labour in action, manipulating and idealising it; their monumental format displaced scenes of toil into a representational sphere where they served the rhetorical needs of the patriciate.
Through analysis of compositional strategies, iconographic choices, and spatial context, I will examine how these canvases appropriated the energy of labouring bodies to celebrate the Republic’s infrastructural and territorial ambitions. In this sense, they belong to a broader early modern visual discourse in which depictions of building sites and port construction did not merely document but actively produced meanings around power, order, and progress.
This case study highlights the capacity of visual representation to mediate between the material practices of construction and the ideological narratives of government. It also underscores how visual culture rendered both visible and invisible the forms of labour — including enslaved labour — that were fundamental to the functioning of the early modern Mediterranean world.
Session 28 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
'British Sicily' 1816-1861?
Alex Cooper
abstractAlex Cooper
Sicily, situated in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, has been a stepping stone between continents for commerce throughout history. In particular, during the ‘British Decade’ 1806-1816, the island’s ports were home to British merchants and bankers who were drawn to the island as an alternative trading centre during the French Wars. The transformation of the port cities and their economies, especially Palermo and Messina, under British control marked a golden age in the island’s history.
This paper examines the British community in Sicilian urban centres during the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and their social interaction across dense networks. The firms of Abraham Gibbs, John Woodhouse, Benjamin Ingham and William Peirce changed the scale of business as well as its geographical reach. The British business communities were concentrated in the port towns in compact physical areas: in Palermo around Piazza Marina, in Messina at the Palazzata and in Marsala along the Boero promenade. Despite their distinct nationality, their clustering in specific areas in the urban centres and their typically British clubs and pastimes, the British community was open to Sicilian and foreign business ventures as well as to integration in a cosmopolitan urban context.
This paper poses the following questions: how did the British merchant community in Sicily influence the economic and institutional development of these towns and was it truly uniquely British or has historiography been more generous with the British in interpreting the fortunes of the business elite in Palermo and Messina before Unification.
Although this study largely attributes British businessmen with transforming the port cities and their hinterlands through commerce and finance, it demonstrates that they were flanked by Sicilians and other foreigners, especially the Swiss. The British may have acted as business pioneers, but the cosmopolitan business elite of the urban centres was quick to emulate and compete with them.
However, one peculiarity distinguished the British in Sicily 1816-1861. Although Britain withdrew its armed forces in 1816, its commercial and political interests remained, and they were inextricably bound. Two incidents highlight the profound importance of Sicily for the British government. The first, which has been largely ignored in the historiography, was the 1840 Sulphur War. The second was Garibaldi’s landing in Marsala in 1860.
British Merchant Networks Involved in Port Traffic Between Bilbao and London During the Long 18th Century
Pablo Sánchez Pascual
abstractPablo Sánchez Pascual
Maritime trade played a fundamental role in the economic integration of Atlantic European port cities into the modern global economy. Directly interconnected, the London emporium and the town of Bilbao capitalised on trade between the UK and northern Spain. The main objective of this proposal is to learn about the British merchant networks that played a leading role in trade between the British and Biscayan capitals between 1700 and 1810. To this end, a comparative methodology will be followed, linking the abundant information from both British archives (TNA-Kew, London Metropolitan Archives) and Spanish (Histórico Foral de Vizcaya, Histórico Provincial de Vizcaya, Real Chancillería de Valladolid, Histórico de la Nobleza).
European commercial and financial networks converged in both cities, albeit on different scales. R. Davis, P. Gauci, X. Lamikiz, Mas Machuca and J. Astigarraga have worked specifically in these areas, although it is necessary to contextualise them within Atlantic trade on the basis of works by G. Saupin, C. Antunes, A. Polonia and Crespo Solana, among others.
It is crucial to determine the position of both ports in their immediate surroundings and their relationship with the cities of the hinterland and the global economy as a whole, the impact of the numerous wars of the period, and how other geographical areas were linked to them.
Merchants and their networks contributed decisively to the expansion of urban commercial activity. The sphere of port cities and merchant families is specific and is studied within the theory of social trajectories to analyse a society in transition and families in transformation, such as the British families who, through London, developed their activity in 18th-century Bilbao. It is important to know about their heritage and businesses, how they dealt with crisis situations, the degree of conflict with Biscayan merchants, their values and way of life, and, eventually, the participation of women in business. It is essential to understand how these British merchants used their relational capital and how they influenced political and military power as a commercial pressure group or in obtaining legislation adapted to their commercial needs. How did British merchants interact with the other agents who made trade possible? Notarial protocols and consular, judicial, epistolary and statistical documentation are key sources for gaining a better understanding of the role of British merchants in 18th-century Bilbao.
Urban Property and Residential Behavior in a Commercial and Administrative City: A Coruña in the Eighteenth Century
Daniel Mena
abstractDaniel Mena
This study analyzes urban property ownership and the residential behavior of elites in La Coruña, an important Atlantic port in the northwestern Iberian Peninsula, between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the Catastro del Marqués de la Ensenada (1752), it identifies the composition of the social elite, whose profile was fundamentally bureaucratic-administrative and, to a lesser extent, seigneurial and mercantile. Approximately 56% of members of the Coruña elite owned at least one house, a proportion that reached 75–78% among hidalgos and regidores, but barely 40% among the high-ranking officials of the Real Audiencia, whose relationship with the city was essentially transitory.
A Coruña, located on a peninsula, was divided between the Upper City—covering an area of nine hectares and situated on a promontory—where the city’s hidalgo families and administrative officials resided, and the Pescadería district, which occupied much of the Coruña isthmus and comprised an urbanized space of about 25 hectares, where many artisan and merchant families lived. In addition, the extramural area located outside the peninsula—that is, the arrabal—must also be taken into account. An analysis of the population registers (padrones de vecinos) of 1746 and 1810 shows that the residential behavior of the elite underwent no major changes.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the city experienced intense demographic growth (from 7,457 inhabitants in 1752 to 13,575 in 1787 and nearly 27,000 by 1847) as a result of the opening of the Maritime Post Service (1764) and the expansion of American trade. However, the supply of housing increased only very slowly due to the peninsula’s morphology and the presence of city walls. For this reason, housing became a scarce, costly, and contentious resource.
Indeed, the combination of demographic growth, the physical limitation of buildable space, and the expansion of Atlantic commerce turned Coruña real estate into a highly profitable asset, as evidenced by speculative practices traceable through notarial records and mortgage registries. At the same time, the housing shortage also triggered conflicts over evictions, as shown by judicial proceedings. Thus, members of the administration who depended on renting accommodation in the city had to face disputes with property owners.
Resilience Prospects of Istanbul Eminönü Commercial Area
Seda Kula, Jale Beşkonaklı
abstractSeda Kula, Jale Beşkonaklı
Istanbul situated only 20 kms from the active North Anatolian Fault, is the financial capital of Republic of Turkey and home to 18 million people. As for intramural Istanbul occupying a seismically dangerous ground, it stands out as the seat of a multi-layered historical heritage, and accommodates not only historical monumental architecture, but also a large historical market zone.
Situated in very touristic Eminönü area, old Istanbul’s commercial centre is a combination of an intricate network of streets and intertwined structures holding bazaars, trade inns and office buildings dating from 17th century onwards, with their unique architecture, components, traditions and cultural significance. These tired and beautiful historical “hans”, due to their continual use and reuse throughout centuries, are also holders of different layers of building materials and precious witnesses to centuries' old evolution of building practices and technologies. Yet their architectural traits are insufficiently documented.
On the other hand, hardly any one of Eminönü hans is out-of-use and they literally comprise the heart of Turkish money and commodity market, not to mention their extreme value as real estate property and candidates for recycling. As of the end of the 20th century, urban transformation efforts, especially new functions based on tourism, have gradually been changing the cultural characteristics of the district. Next to these heavy commercial and touristic loads they bear, these historical but worn-out structures also confront constant seismic danger.
In this study, architectural components, materials and most importantly building techniques will be analysed for a selection of buildings representative of the Eminönü commercial area. One objective in this paper would be to discuss and establish the impacts of heavy touristic and commercial use and interference on these buildings and their long-term outcome. Secondly this study opts to contribute to an appropriate architectural documentation model so that historical evolution of this zone as well as the building practices in this urban centre can be evaluated and documented for further reference and re-constructs. In this context, on-site observations and field work would be assessed in parallel with historical research on this selection of Eminönü hans under threats of natural disasters, mass tourism and urban transformation, in order to plan sustainable futures for these places of memory and identity.
Session 29 - Feeding European Cities: Governance, Gender and Sustainability, from 15th century to present
The session aim to understand, from a gender and comparative perspective, how were organized urban food markets to maintain the sustainability of cities in a broad chronology, from the municipal control that governed from the late Middle Ages to the system of free market capitalism and its evolution towards the global economic system.
Coordinators: Emmanuelle Charpentier, Rosa-Maria Gil, Mercè Renom Pulit
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Coordinators: Emmanuelle Charpentier, Rosa-Maria Gil, Mercè Renom Pulit
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Session 29 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
On their plate? Urban households and their access to food via property rights to land (Antwerp, 15th-16th century)
Cécile Bruyet
abstractCécile Bruyet
More often than not, historians studied the food supply of premodern towns at the aggregate level, questioning food flows and supply regions of entire towns and cities (Campbell et al., 1993; Higounet, 1985) This has led to a static conceptualisation of urban food provisioning from a bird eye’s view, missing therefore the fundamental aspect that not everyone would or could eat the same food in premodern urban societies – something cultural historians have thoroughly demonstrated over the years (Montanari, 2012; Laurioux, 2013). In economic history as well, inequalities in the access to food are sometimes emphasized, in particular with regard to famines or food crises (Collet, 2017; Dijkman, 2021). A fundamental, but poorly understood driver of inequalities in the food system, are the manifold forms of self-provisioning, which are related to the access to food via the control over landed property. Self-provisioning is well known when it comes to small and medium towns, but to which extent was it part of the foodscape of urban dwellers in larger cities? And more particularly, of which urban dwellers?
This paper aims to unravel the importance of self-provisioning in late medieval urban food systems, questioning which households in larger cities could provision themselves with food from their own land. It investigates how socio-economic, gender and life-cycle induced inequalities in one’s access to land intertwined with processes of self-provisioning, allowing or constraining households to have their own food on their plate.
Antwerp in the15th and 16th centuries offers a unique test-case, as the city grew from a medium-sized town to the commercial gateway of the North Sea and Atlantic trade, generating rapid processes of urbanisation and demographic growth. I investigate two forms of land entitlements through which households could have self-provision themselves: urban agriculture and payments in kind from landed property. The chosen case-study further allows to analyse how processes of urban growth , which impacted the sustainability of premodern cities’ food system, intervened in the access to self-provisioning for different types of households. Finally, the paper questions the interaction of these ‘alternative’, land-based food flows, with the ‘regular’ food market, as they may not have passed the market square as a space, but they nonetheless depended on market dynamics, including the land and credit markets, and households' habits and preferences.
Food supply in pre-liberal Portuguese cities: Viseu as a study case.
Liliana Castilho
abstractLiliana Castilho
Feeding has played a central role in urban policies across Portuguese cities throughout the Modern Age. Assuring food-provisions to the population was both the fulfillment of peace and public health keeping and thus, one of the key roles of the local political power´s.
Viseu, a medium-sized town, is no exception. During the period between the 16th and 18th centuries, control over transactions of the main alimentary goods required by the population (as bread, wine, meat, fish, and olive oil) was mediated by the municipal authority, by means of a three stage equation: on one hand the obligation upon the city`s surroundings and its farmers to provide food for the city; on the other through the fixation of prices for which they could be sold; and finally via the issuing of the vending licenses of those same goods, sorting the agents and the places where the transactions could take place, thus closing the circle and de facto controlling every sphere of food-provisioning to the city.
While municipal powers and the application of their legislative body were, naturally, a male-dominated domain, the sale and production of food was a mixed territory, with visible specializations by gender, as in the case of sardine sellers, bakers, or lupin sellers, occupations practiced exclusively by women or butchers and muleteers, occupations practiced exclusively by men. The sale of honey, cheese, vegetables, and fruit was practiced by both genders, and likewise, licenses for food establishments, such as inns, were granted to both men and women.
Afar from the municipality’s control, but equally important for the city population, food production for self-consumption had its place in the dwellings backyards. These were usually confined spaces, that wouldn’t certainly allow for the production of wheat or similar, but enabled raising of small animals and the growing of vegetables and fruits as a complement to inner city inhabitants feeding. This agricultural practice of self-production was carried out by both men and women within the family structure.
The production of food within the city’s walls wasn’t at disregard with a city urban character – in opposition to the rurality of surrounding areas – but, rather part of its own genesis and identity, and accompanied the day-to-day life and uses of city’s inhabitants contributing to the betterment of their life standard, up until the urban paradigm shifts of the nineteenth century.
Was there a shortage of wood in the early modern period? Evidence from Turin (Northern Italy, 17th–18th century)
Matteo Di Tullio, Matteo Stroppiana
abstractMatteo Di Tullio, Matteo Stroppiana
Wood was a pivotal natural resource in pre-industrial societies. During the early modern period, wood consumption increased significantly due to demographic pressure, manufacturing needs, domestic uses (e.g. heating and cooking) and the consequences of climate change (the Little Ice Age). This would lead to a shortage of wood, which was particularly problematic for urban settlements and the most dynamic economies. However, scholars do not agree on the specifics of the European wood crisis, including its actual manifestation and intensity.
Our paper aims to contribute to this debate by focusing on Turin, the capital of the Sabaudian State. Located in northern Italy, Turin experienced sustained demographic growth after the Plague of 1630–1631 and it was the first beneficiary of the mercantilist policies pursued by the dukes. This resulted in the expansion of manufacturing activities, construction and energy consumption. In other words, early modern Turin is the perfect case study with which to examine the presumed shortages of wood in the early modern period and evaluate their consequences for the urban food system and the local and regional economy.
Thanks to the analysis of almost unstudied primary sources preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Turin (specifically, the section “Woods, hunting and fishing” in the Sezioni Riunite and the section “Hunting and woods” in the Sezione Corte) and the records of other urban institutions (such as the Turin City Archive and the Ospizio della carità Archive), the goal of this paper is to reconstruct the dynamics of wood supply, pricing and consumption, as well as the mechanisms established to prevent private hoarding and subsequent wood crises. To fully understand these mechanisms, we will examine the relationships between the capital city and the surrounding countryside and mountains, where most of the wood supply originated. Furthermore, by examining a period spanning several decades, we can evaluate the impact of the various policies promoted by the successive sovereigns on the Savoy throne, including those of "Madama Reale", Maria Giovanna Battista of Savoy-Nemours, who was regent from 1675 to 1684.
Meat Supply, Market, and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Valencia. A Cross-Sectional Perspective
Andrés Borrás Benavente
abstractAndrés Borrás Benavente
Throughout the Early Modern period, European cities (particularly those in the Mediterranean) developed complex systems of intervention in the market for food and basic goods. While the importance of “pósitos” or “alhóndigas” in regulating grain and bread is well known, market control extended far beyond cereals. It also applied to many other products through municipal regulations, officials such as the “almotacén/mostassaf”, and the leasing of monopolies under the system of “obligados”. In Spain, this framework of supply control was firmly established, and one of the clearest examples can be found in Valencia. Since the Christian conquest, the city had maintained a sophisticated provisioning system that functioned without major disruption until the implementation of the “Nueva Planta”. From 1707 onwards, however, the traditional foral system of supply was replaced by a new, Castilian-style model.
From that point, the provisioning of several essential goods (such as wine, snow, and meat) came under the system of obligados. The focus of this paper is precisely one of these markets: meat. As José Ubaldo Bernardos Sanz has demonstrated for Madrid, a city was fed by «more than bread», with meat being one of the central pillars of the Mediterranean diet. For this reason, the control of the meat supply became a major concern for the authorities of Valencia, who leased to commercial companies the monopoly over wholesale purchasing and tax collection through four distinct branches: mutton and goat, pork, tallow, and “cabritería” (beef, kid, and lamb). The abundant documentation generated by the administration of these businesses provides a valuable perspective on the workings of an Ancién Regime city. This paper will therefore examine the institutional framework of the meat supply in eighteenth-century Valencia (1700–1820); the identities of the “obligados”; the role of the commercial companies that supported them; the conflicts, disputes, corruption and struggles for power surrounding these monopolies; and finally, the retail distribution system, paying particular attention to the dynamics of the butchers’ stalls, where not only the master butcher but also his wife sold jointly, forming a collaborative partnership akin to the “Arbeitspaar” model.
Ruling the Market: Women, Power and Food Circulation in Eighteenth-Century Marseille
Romain Facchini
abstractRomain Facchini
Feeding Europe’s cities under the Ancien Régime relied on fragile balances among institutions, market practices and the agency of daily food distributors. In eighteenth-century Marseille, a Mediterranean and World port, women were essential to that balance. Fishmongers, fruit sellers and petty traders mediated between rural producers, maritime imports and urban consumers, shaping urban provisioning through daily practices, market control and frequent conflicts with civic authorities.
This paper examines Marseille’s food supply via women’s economic roles and the governance of local markets. Female traders ensured circulation of highly perishable goods—fish, fruit and vegetables—by occupying streets, squares and infrastructures such as the poissonnerie. These spaces were essential yet contested: arenas where women claimed visibility and access while municipal authorities attempted to regulate prices, quality and hygiene. Debates about enlarging the fish market on sanitary grounds show how urban space was central to provisioning politics and how material constraints shaped everyday negotiations of power and legitimacy.
Women also organised trade zones through informal management, governing markets without official mandate; practices neither codified nor expressly forbidden. Judicial and police records reveal activities beyond formal regulation: clandestine resale, manipulation of access to producers, fraudulent sales and arrangements with muleteers. Credit and informal agreements were vital to ensuring supply, indicating that sustainability depended as much on these unofficial mechanisms as on civic ordinances.
Market women, accused of monopolising goods or disturbing order, appear in sources as unruly, yet their clashes with producers, consumers and authorities reveal them as agents of negotiation and social pressure. By resisting, bargaining or provoking, they influenced prices and availability, reshaping the balance between scarcity and abundance.
The Marseille case contributes to broader historiographical debates, illustrating how women’s presence in Mediterranean public spaces differed from Northern Europe, where other supply models prevailed. By combining gender history with the spatial turn, this study shows that women’s practices, through compliance and resistance, reshaped urban governance and sustained the city’s daily feeding and long-term viability. It invites study of ports, markets and the interplay of formal and informal rules to study.
Session 29 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Hidden in Plain Sight: Women's Labor and Legal Exclusion in Mallorca's Bread Guilds (15th-18th centuries)
Miguel Gabriel Garí Pallicer
abstractMiguel Gabriel Garí Pallicer
Bread production history has traditionally been linked to female work, yet the institutional recognition and economic control of this activity reveals a complex process of marginalization. This paper analyses the evolution of women's participation in bread production in Palma de Mallorca between the 15th and 18th centuries, examining the gap between female labour reality and institutional exclusion.
The research traces the transformation from initial recognition to systematic marginalization. When the bakers' guild was established in 1415, the official name explicitly included women: "Col•legi de flequers i flequeres, forners i forneres" (guild of male and female bakers). This nominal recognition disappeared by the late 15th century, with the guild's name simplified to exclude any female reference.
The institutional marginalization intensified throughout the 16th century with specific regulations prohibiting women from guild membership and direct oven management. However, this legal exclusion contradicted economic reality: women continued performing essential tasks including dough preparation, bread shaping, and sales—activities crucial for business sustainability and customer relationships.
Using guild regulations, inventories, wills, property records, and legal documentation, this study reveals the persistent gap between formal exclusion and practical necessity. Widows like Mariana Penya successfully managed ovens, with her establishment becoming known by her name rather than her husband's. The guild's attempts to impose additional taxes on widows and monopolize traditional female activities like pastry production demonstrate on-going tensions between institutional control and economic reality.
The situation transformed in the 18th century when some women successfully challenged guild restrictions. In 1759, despite guild opposition, the legal recognition of women as legitimate oven owners and bread producers arrived, acknowledging what had been economically and socially evident since the 15th century.
This case study illuminates how urban food governance intersected with gender relations, revealing that sustainable bread provisioning systems required female expertise despite institutional attempts at exclusion. The Palma experience demonstrates how economic necessity ultimately challenged legal marginalization, contributing to understanding the complex relationship between formal regulations and actual food production practices in pre-industrial cities.
Bread, Protest, and Space: Women and the Urban Politics of Provisioning in Venice
Maartje Van Gelder
abstractMaartje Van Gelder
The politics of bread shaped the premodern city through provisioning policies devised by urban authorities, vast granaries occupying strategic sites, and crowd protests over high prices, poor quality, or the absence of bread. This paper examines how food protests in early modern Venice and other cities influenced urban policies and targeted urban granaries. From the mid-twentieth century onward, social historians challenged the view that protesting crowds were irrational mobs, revealing the complexity of such protests . This “history from below” approach corrected traditional political history, showing how, before obtaining the right to vote, subjects used protests to negotiate with rulers. In short, ordinary people shaped politics and thus the city itself.
Yet this correction has been partial. Food protests—the most frequent and widespread form of collective contestation between 1500 and 1800—have remained largely outside this revision. So too have women, their primary actors. Food protests multiplied from the late sixteenth century as the climatic instability of the Little Ice Age caused harvest failures and famine. Women, more often than men, took the lead in these protests, prompting historians to interpret them as extensions of domestic roles, driven by scarcity rather than politics.
I argue instead that women’s food protests were political interventions that shaped urban policies and provisioning institutions. In Venice and elsewhere, this responsibility was embodied by the urban granaries: buildings that stored and distributed grain, symbolizing both the power and obligations of civic government. Women’s mobilizations at these sites should be understood as acts of negotiation, contesting authority precisely where public power and food supply converged.
This paper adopts a gendered and spatial perspective, situating Venice in comparative dialogue with other early modern cities. It explores how environmental conditions shaped women’s lives and how food crises in the late sixteenth century transformed Venetian provisioning and its relationship to the hinterland. Finally, the paper traces how the granaries' political and symbolic centrality eroded in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as municipal provisioning gave way to a new economic system. Their demolition not only reshaped the urban landscape but also contributed to a collective forgetting of granaries as spaces of political action.
A Staple Food in the Making: Early Modern Food Policies and Evolution of Comparative Urban Wheat Consumption
Aysen Tanyeri Abur, Nil Tekgül
abstractAysen Tanyeri Abur, Nil Tekgül
Throughout history, fear of food shortages and food protests led societies to develop complex food provisioning strategies to ensure stable and sufficient food supplies especially to urban areas with concentrated populations. Such strategies included administrative and economic measures to produce and/or distribute food (primarily grain) and innovations to facilitate storage and transportation. Food provisioning systems in turn created various social, economic, and environmental outcomes that have persisted over time.
In this paper we explore different food provisioning strategies in three cities with diverse food systems to understand if and how such policies shaped wheat consumption modes over time and contributed to establishing wheat as a staple food. In our comparative analysis we aim to explore the historical origins of the differences in today’s food systems particularly in terms of institutions and gender outcomes. We focus on Ankara, Genoa, and Naples, during the 16th-18th centuries- three cities with distinct histories and geographical settings and different social, political, and economic structures. Ankara- an urbanized, renowned manufacturer and exporter of mohair cloth, with surrounding agricultural land producing wheat. Genoa- an urban center with no agricultural hinterland and a net importer of grain, but open to the world through trade and settlements, and Naples, a large city with an aristocracy alongside a poor population supported by a thriving agricultural sector in the countryside. We start by sketching the elements of the food systems in the three cities to place the food provisioning strategies in context and study the governance, financing, and adaptation of the strategies over time in each location, and their impact on how wheat was acquired, prepared, and consumed.
We find distinct differences in strategies for food provisioning with a combination of state regulated and market-based strategies, depending on the cultural, political, and institutional setting, the structure and technology of agricultural production, and the extent of engagement in the trade of staple foods. The strategies created unique institutional structures and livelihood mechanisms that created gendered patterns of participation that are distinct at each location. We conclude that the outcomes of the food provisioning policies influenced the evolution of the consumption of wheat and its place in the diets today as a staple food.
Relations between the Countryside and Barcelona through Food Supply from Large Estates in the Lower Llobregat Valley
Maria Luz Retuerta Jiménez
abstractMaria Luz Retuerta Jiménez
This paper analyses the relations between Barcelona and the lower Llobregat valley through food supply and the management of large agrarian estates between the sixteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Based on the study of the Quadra del Palau, Torre Blanca, Can Falguera and Ca l’Erasme, with lands in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Sant Joan Despí, Sant Just Desvern and Santa Creu d’Olorda, and using notarial documentation, it examines how Barcelona’s elites invested in land, water, rents and crops in order to obtain food, economic benefits, social prestige and the capacity to intervene in the urban market.
The research reconstructs the forms of management and rural labour that sustained this economy, including sharecropping, leases and other forms of agricultural contracting, wage labour, and family labour, with particular attention to the often-invisible contribution of women and other members of the household.
It also shows how the control of irrigation, the expansion of orchards, market gardens and specialised vineyards transformed the agrarian landscape and strengthened the connection between countryside and city. Overall, the paper argues that the lower Llobregat valley was not only a space of food production for Barcelona, but also an area of investment, conflict, social differentiation and accumulation of power by urban elites.
Finally, the paper analyses how these structures anticipated later transformations, especially with the arrival of the Canal de la Infanta in 1819, which marked a turning point in the relationship between the territory and the city and favoured a more intensive and market-oriented agriculture.
Thus, the study offers a perspective on the economic, social and political interdependencies that shaped Barcelona’s metropolitan space from the early modern period to the threshold of contemporaneity.
Governing the Garden: The Relationship Between the City of Girona and Its Horticultural Territory (17th–19th Centuries)
Enric Saguer
abstractEnric Saguer
Before the expansion of railway and road transport networks, urban centers, even the smallest ones, tended to develop zones of horticultural production in their immediate surroundings, which supplied fresh produce to the city’s markets. The forms of control exercised over these spaces varied according to the agronomic, hydraulic, and socio-political characteristics of each peri-urban environment. This study examines the case of Girona, a modest urban center located about 100 km north of Barcelona, which presents two distinctive features in the governance of its horticultural territory. The first concerns an irrigation canal whose primary function was to provide mechanical power to the city’s mills, yet it also served to irrigate an extensive area of gardens stretching along much of its six-kilometre course. This canal, of medieval origin, was purchased by the municipality in 1620. Unlike other Mediterranean hydraulic systems, the case of Girona lacked any institutional body to regulate irrigation turns or mediate between competing uses of water. No irrigation community was ever established, and the batlle de la sèquia (canal warden), a post created in 1433, was limited to maintaining the physical infrastructure. The second distinctive feature was the administrative fragmentation of the horticultural territory, which—beyond the city itself—extended into two neighbouring municipalities. This fragmentation constrained Girona’s ability to assert control over its horticultural hinterland. Conflicts frequently arose over access to the city’s market stalls and over the resistance of outlying gardeners to incorporation into the urban gardeners’ guild. By analysing the case of Girona, this paper seeks to highlight the complexity of the relationships between small pre-industrial cities and their immediate horticultural territories—spaces on which they depended for the supply of essential foodstuffs until the advent of modern transport networks.
Session 29 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Shaping Food Inspection and Market Control in Early Modern Augsburg
Brendan Röder
abstractBrendan Röder
The proposed paper examines early modern practices of food inspection as an integral part of how municipal food markets were organized. Who could inspect food, when, and how was not a given but raised crucial political questions such as the relationship between guilds and governments and issues of expertise and gendered authority. Moreover, if organized too strictly, quality control and food safety could also clash with the imperative of supplying sufficient and affordable food for a growing urban population.
The paper evolves from an ongoing second-book project and focuses on meat and fish in the southern German city of Augsburg. It draws not only on normative market ordinances but also on an unexplored corpus of hundreds of judicial cases concerning food-market infringements from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried out in front of a specific office responsible for the meat and fish trades. These documents, close to daily urban practice, show that while the authorities claimed market control as their own remit, butchers, fishmongers, and regular citizens played a decisive role in food control. Even formal inspection remained contested, with experienced butchers asserting better knowledge and authority than government-appointed official inspectors. Contrary to the established historiographical view on German cities, women could also—if rarely—serve as food inspectors, and they were even more involved in practices of selling, buying, and litigating over food matters.
The material relates both to livestock inspection carried out at the gates or on marketplaces and to the inspection of dead meat and fish, ranging from locally caught fish to oxen and salted fish traded through long-distance networks. The paper will also address some of the major transformations of this early modern system. With the incorporation of the self-governing city of Augsburg into the Bavarian territorial state at the turn of the nineteenth century, policies privileging local guild butchers and other food trades were officially abandoned by decree, even though they proved longer-lasting in practice. At the same time, veterinarians increasingly claimed authority in food inspection, explicitly positioning themselves as superior to traditional guild-based inspection practices. The southern German case thus provides perspective on the panel’s focus on the broader shift from pre-liberal municipal regulation to other forms of food supply and control.
Markets, shops and streets. Approach to control and dynamics of the retail market in Barcelona (1750–1835).
Clàudia Mateo Lozano
abstractClàudia Mateo Lozano
Reclaiming E.P. Thompson's theory and the moral economy of the multitude inherited from pre-industrial societies will clash with the new centrist liberal tendencies, and this conflict will become evident when applying the state decrees. The binomial relationship between municipality and society will be altered when the state comes into play. Herein lies the basis of the research: to demonstrate the constant maintenance of municipal control over the liberalising waves and the latest steps of the guilds. Focusing on the case of Barcelona and the study of the pre-industrial retail food market, the municipal dominance inherited from medieval and modern policies is evident. The operation and control of retail sales in Barcelona are proposed to be studied through two institutions: the municipal council and the Gremi de tenders revenedors. From the city's town hall, the functioning of the market system and the products are overseen. Research into periodic regulations can help trace the everyday life of these spaces. The authorities' regulation of market hours, weights and measures, and prices for the food market guaranteed access for the population. These regulations demonstrate the municipal council's power over access to sales, for both vendors and consumers. The Gremi de tenders revenedors likewise demonstrates this fact paradigmatically: the development of a network of control, imposition and surveillance over its members and other traders are nothing more than the final actions the guild will be able to undertake before its prohibition.
Ultimately, the objective is to define the dichotomy between the two leading retail institutions – the Town Council and the Gremi de tenders revenedors – in their control and maintenance of their own monopoly, which is also in dispute, as their power increasingly wanes.
Gender, Water & Work. Environment-making in early modern Amsterdam.
Bob Pierik
abstractBob Pierik
This paper proposes to analyse the role of women and men in the chain of provision of water in the urban Low Countries. Feeding the city as well as quenching its thirst were highly gendered labour activities that connected to a complex interplay between social-cultural norms, institutional frameworks and environmental factors. Water provisioning can be understood as gendered environmental act through which historical agents acted as part of the urban metabolism. Activities such as selling water, transporting water and fetching water can as such be seen as acts of environment-making. Water was crucial for food preparation, processing and production and bringing a water paper into this panel on food and gender can help us joins two topics in urban history that often remain separate. And they are worthwhile to consider together because exactly in the logic of commercialized forms of housework and gendered social-cultural expectations around provisioning, they share similarities. Water also goes through complex political-institutional changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there were also differences. A similarity was that health and sanitation was increasingly a reason for public authorities to step in and regulate water and food access. A difference was that food markets followed a trend of liberalization, while water’s trajectory of commodification was more diverse and complex. Of course, this broad sketch of developments has local and geographic variations and will benefit from more research on specific urban case studies. To investigate acts of water in the long eighteenth century, I turn to legal depositions from Amsterdam and apply a snapshot-based methodology to extract labour activity that relates to water from these sources. Through water or gendered acts of hydro-labour, early modern Amsterdammers were deeply engaged with their direct living environment, taking care of it and engaged in a type of environment-making together with their neighbours.
Gendered Foodscapes: Women, Markets, and Urban Food Practices in Girona from Francoism to the Present
Nadia Fava, Anna Roca Torrent
abstractNadia Fava, Anna Roca Torrent
This paper analyses the long-term food transition in Girona, from the Francoist period to the present, through a gendered reading of urban food practices. Although women under Francoism are frequently depicted as socially subordinate, their position within the food system complicates this assumption. We argue that women historically acted as central agents in the organisation of the urban foodscape, particularly within municipal food markets—among the first public infrastructures explicitly shaped around women’s presence and routines. These spaces afforded them economic and social agency, mediating the interface between domestic and public spheres. By contrast, from the 1960 the introduction of new retail formats enabled women to enter the workforce but simultaneously diminished their agency within the food chain.
In Spain the expansion of self-service shops and supermarkets in the 1960s—retail formats dominated by male managerial structures—reconfigured this agency by recasting women primarily as modern consumers. Coupled with the diffusion of the domestic refrigerator and automobility, these formats provided convenience, product abundance, and anonymity, while simultaneously eroding the dense social and cultural relations embedded in traditional market-based food practices. By the 1980s, however, women reasserted forms of collective agency through activist movements and community food initiatives, including cooperatives, reshaping both the symbolic and material infrastructures of the emerging imaginary city. Within this trajectory, the “right to the city” can be reconceptualised as a right to a food city, where access to food is decoupled from exclusively private retail logics and re-rooted in diverse, community-oriented systems. This reframing foregrounds how evolving food practices articulate demands for a more liveable city.
Drawing on industrial and commercial registries, newspapers, and municipal archives, the study situates everyday practices—purchasing, cooking, consumption—within broader socio-economic and political transformations. A feminist analytical framework guides the examination of how gendered norms, divisions of labour, and institutional arrangements have historically mediated women’s roles in the urban food system. This perspective illuminates the co-constitution of household, market, and city in producing Girona’s contemporary foodscape.
Session 30 - Dealing with Disaster in Early Modern Cities (15th-19th centuries)
Throughout the history, cities have been managing several catastrophes, such as famines, plagues, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This session aims to explore in a comparative perspective the material and spiritual practices developed to coping with them.
Coordinators: Alfredo Chamorro Esteban, Milena Viceconte
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Coordinators: Alfredo Chamorro Esteban, Milena Viceconte
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Session 30 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
De Bayra à Vera (Almeria) : séismes, reconstructions et naissance d’une ville moderne (XIVᵉ–XVIᵉ siècles)
Matthias Biro Sarrias
abstractMatthias Biro Sarrias
La médina de Bayra, située sur le territoire de l’actuelle ville de Vera (province d’Almería, Andalousie, Espagne), est une cité andalouse occupée entre les XIᵉ et XVIᵉ siècles. Elle se dresse sur un promontoire rocheux dominant la plaine du fleuve Almanzora, une position qui la rend particulièrement vulnérable aux fréquents tremblements de terre ayant affecté la région tout au long du Moyen Âge (notamment documentés aux XIVᵉ, XVᵉ et XVIᵉ siècles).
Les fouilles archéologiques menées entre 2021 et 2025 ont permis de documenter comment, à la suite de chaque épisode sismique, les communautés locales, avec le soutien du pouvoir nasride, procèdent à des reconstructions successives, tant de la ville que de ses défenses. Toutefois, en 1518, à peine trente ans après la reddition de Bayra aux troupes castillanes (1488), un dernier séisme dévaste la médina. L’ampleur de ce tremblement de terre, ou peut-être la disparition récente de la frontière nasride-castillane, conduit finalement ses habitants à abandonner le site pour fonder, dans la plaine, l’actuelle ville de Vera.
Notre étude se concentre sur cette chaîne d’événements, à la fois sismiques et humains, qui aboutissent à l’abandon de Bayra et à la fondation d’une nouvelle ville. Plusieurs questions guident notre recherche : quels sont les marqueurs archéologiques laissés par les séismes et comment les identifier en contexte de fouille ? Certaines phases constructives observées à Bayra peuvent-elles être interprétées comme des réponses directes à des catastrophes sismiques ? Qu’est-ce qui poussa les habitants à quitter le promontoire rocheux pour fonder Vera en 1518, et non auparavant ? L’abandon de Bayra fut-il immédiat ou résulte-t-il d’un déplacement progressif des populations ?
Ce travail vise à apporter des éléments de réponse à ces interrogations à travers l’analyse de l’architecture de Bayra, tant domestique que défensive, fondée sur des études du bâti, ainsi que sur des analyses géographiques et stratigraphiques réalisées dans le cadre des fouilles dirigées par le groupe PRINMA de l’Université de Grenade.
Fractured Cities, Living Memories: Architecture, Ritual, and the Seismic Shaping of Premodern Northern Italy
Saida Bondini
abstractSaida Bondini
This paper examines how recurrent seismic events and environmental transformations reshaped the urban and memorial landscapes of northern Italy during the early modern period. Focusing on major earthquakes, susch as the 1511 Friuli–Slovenia tremors, it explores how disasters transformed both the material and social fabric of the region, leaving traces that remain visible today in its architecture, rituals, and collective memory.
On the one hand, material responses to these events ranged from the introduction of new building techniques to the development of innovative preventive strategies that brought about long-lasting changes in local construction practices. On the other hand, these architectural adaptations were paralleled by religious and visual responses, including the establishment of new devotional rituals and the veneration of surviving images and artworks. Such practices functioned not only as expressions of resilience but also as means of reclaiming devastated urban spaces and constructing powerful counter-narratives to catastrophe. The paper argues that these material and ritual responses became enduring sites of remembrance, inscribing both destruction and reconstruction into the region's cultural landscapes and collective identity.
Adopting a longue durée perspective, the paper connects early modern disasters with more recent disastrous events in northern Italy. These seemingly distant episodes reveal recurring patterns of destruction, evolving reconstruction strategies, and continuous processes of re-semantizing spaces, monuments, and artworks. By tracing these continuities and transformations, the paper demonstrates how the region's history of disasters has shaped not only its built environment but also its cultural identity and collective memory across the centuries.
Negotiating Public Response in Times of Disaster: Communication and Mediation in Valencia and Izmir, 1739-1748
Burak Fici
abstractBurak Fici
This paper examines how publicness and civic responsibility were articulated, mediated, and received in two Mediterranean empires through the eighteenth-century port cities of Valencia and İzmir, particularly after two major earthquakes near Valencia (Montesa) in 1748 and near İzmir (Foça) in 1739. It rethinks the meanings of the Habermasian public sphere by exploring Mediterranean variations of publicness and asking who acted as communicators and mediators of civic ideas in the aftermath of urban crises. Habermas’s notion of rational-critical discourse within bourgeois society was barely tested beyond Northwestern Europe. This paper contributes to these debates by examining how civic and public participation were negotiated in two Mediterranean imperial contexts, the Spanish and the Ottoman, often portrayed as peripheral, monarchical, and religiously dominated regions in the eighteenth century.
Both Valencia and İzmir, vibrant commercial hubs with multilayered populations, complex centre–periphery relations, religious institutions, and civic actors, offer insight into how public authority and social order were collectively defined and contested. The earthquakes function as historical ruptures that expose mechanisms of governance and blur the boundaries between public and private space. They provoke collective responses, reshape civic participation, and reveal the states’ efforts to restore legitimacy and moral order. While both empires operated within strong monarchical and confessional frameworks, the port cities developed distinct modes of civic negotiation through networks of communication and community leadership. However, while the Ottoman terminology reveals the absence of explicit equivalents for publicness in governance and moral discourse, the Spanish case shows how the notion carried distinct moral connotations that make rethinking what was considered public equally necessary.
The paper uses comparative discourse analysis of state communication between imperial centres and peripheries to trace how civic ideas and policies were articulated by governments, transmitted through intermediaries, and reshaped within urban contexts. It further examines how authority and mediation functioned within local networks and how public messages were received and reinterpreted by civic actors. In doing so, the study aims to broaden the historiography by showing how publicness was constructed through crisis as both a social and cultural phenomenon.
Between God’s wrath and earthly ruins: spiritual and material responses to the 1748 Montesa earthquakes
Marta Casanovas I Beneyto
abstractMarta Casanovas I Beneyto
The 1748 Montesa earthquakes struck the Kingdom of València with an estimated intensity of VIII-IX (Mercalli), devastating the town and castle of Montesa and affecting numerous other settlements. This communication analyzes how this seismic disaster was managed, interpreted, and memorialized by contemporaries, placing it within the broader framework of early modern European urban catastrophe response.
Drawing on a rich corpus of printed chronicles —including the spiritually-infused account of bibliographer Vicent Ximeno, the technical and critical report by military engineer Esteban Félix Carrasco, and anonymous relations published by Joseph Texidó— this study reveals a dual coping mechanism. On one hand, a pragmatic, material response was enacted, focused on damage assessment, critiques of vulnerable architecture, and the organization of relief for survivors, illustrating nascent risk management practices.
Concurrently, a profound spiritual interpretation dominated the public discourse. The earthquakes were widely perceived as a divine punishment for collective sin, a manifestation of God's fury. This belief triggered a ritual commitment between civil and ecclesiastical authorities, who orchestrated public rogations, processions with sacred images, and the veneration of miraculously recovered Eucharistic elements. These practices were not merely symbolic; they were deemed essential for placating divine wrath, providing emotional solace to the populace, and restoring social stability.
By comparing these diverse textual responses, this paper argues that the resilience of Valencian society was forged through the simultaneous application of practical disaster management and deeply rooted spiritual coping strategies. It demonstrates how the memory of the catastrophe was constructed and transmitted through texts that negotiated between emerging empirical observation and enduring providentialist worldviews. The Montesa case thus offers a valuable lens for comparative study, highlighting the complex interplay between material and spiritual logics in shaping early modern communities' resilience in the face of disaster.
Rebuilding after Catastrophe: Modernity and Memory from the Great Fire of London (1666) to the Lisbon Earthquake (1755)
Madalena Costa Lima, Madalena Costa Lima
abstractMadalena Costa Lima, Madalena Costa Lima
The Great Fire of London in 1666 and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 rank among the most devastating events to strike European cities in the early modern period, with immense impact on the history of urban reconstruction and on their built heritage. Despite the markedly different political and cultural contexts of the two capitals and their respective kingdoms, both faced the urgent challenge of rebuilding in the aftermath of catastrophe. This paper examines how London and Lisbon approached this task, comparing their strategies and the principles that guided them, with particular attention to attitudes towards religious architecture and its remains after the catastrophes. Focusing primarily on Lisbon, it examines the decisions and debates that accompanied the reconstruction – from questions of demolition and reuse to the articulation of preventive and regulatory principles. It considers how these events prompted comprehensive programes of rebuilding that not only reshaped the cities layouts but also reflected distinct approaches to planning and governance. In dialogue with the London case, the paper also explores the emergence of heritage awareness within the Portuguese Enlightenment framework.
Session 30 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 1 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
“The Swans of the Tagus Fell Silent”. The Impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake on Urban Animal Life
Carla Vieira, Joana Lages Gonçalves, Nina Vieira
abstractCarla Vieira, Joana Lages Gonçalves, Nina Vieira
“The swans of the Tagus fell silent” is the expression that Moreira Mendonça, author of História Universal dos Terramotos (1758), chose to evoke poetically the devastating impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. It symbolises the consternation and the inversion of the natural order brought about by one of the most widely reported disasters of early modern Europe. Amid the abundant historiography on the disaster’s theological, architectural, social and philosophical dimensions, little attention has been paid to its effects on urban animals and interspecies relations within the city. How did this catastrophe, and the response it provoked, reshape how animals were perceived, controlled, and integrated into the daily life of Lisbon?
This paper reinterprets the 1755 Earthquake through the combined perspectives of animal history and urban resilience. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources—including accounts and records on the earthquake, official damage reports, and plans for the city’s reconstruction—it seeks to uncover how animals figured in both the experience of the catastrophe and the efforts to rebuild the city. The cataclysm momentarily blurred the boundaries between human and nonhuman: animals and people competed for food and shelter, their corpses alike posed a threat to public health, and contemporary observers frequently described human desperation in terms of “animalisation”.
At the same time, the Pombaline reconstruction represented a process of reasserting both material and symbolic boundaries. The rational and geometric design of the rebuilt Lisbon embodied not only a desire to restore order but also an effort to rehumanise urban life by regulating and spatially segregating animals once more. Animals were employed as a workforce for the city's reconstruction, also contributing to rebuilding the spaces that confined them from human lives. Rehumanising the city thus entailed a re-domestication of its ecological relations — an attempt to restore not only buildings and streets but also the species hierarchies.
The paper builds on the ANIMALx – Animals of Lisbon project, which investigates the presence and role of nonhuman animals in the city’s history. By examining the 1755 Earthquake within this longue durée perspective, the paper contributes to this panel’s comparative reflection on how early modern cities confronted disaster, highlighting the intertwined material, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of urban resilience.
Para mitigar al fiero Elemento de la Agua. Liturgical mechanisms in the face of Logroño 1775 floods
Álvaro López Gadea
abstractÁlvaro López Gadea
1775 was a difficult year for the small Spanish city of Logroño. After an unusually dry spring, a radical turn of events brought a sudden swelling of the Ebro river, the largest ever recorded, with copious material damages and bringing the city to a halt during the Corpus octave. The popular piety of the town council, clergy, and populace, articulated through multiple processions, rogations and other acts was so crucial to overcome the crisis that was intended to be remembered yearly through a perpetual vow, now forever lost. The June flood transformed momentarily the city and promoted the activation of a liturgical mechanism that used the whole city as its stage: all member of the Council and every religious institution took part into conjuring the river back to normal.
Everything began months prior, when “pro pluvia” rogations were commissioned to implore the celestial powers and beg for rains. This ancient Christian propitiatory ritual was a common occurrence in Spain in times of drought. Soon after, during the frenzy of the city’s most important days —Corpus Christi and the Patronal festivities—, the Ebro began to swell and flood in a way never seen before. The situation was so bad that on 21st June the Council and the churches organised not one but two processions to parade Saints, Virgins and Patrons from their temples to the bridge to pray, preach and make all supplications possible.
After the water receded, the traumatic event had left such an imprint that it a perpetual vow was stablished that every 21st June a civic-religious procession was to be held, with the participation of all Convents, Parishes, and Congregations of Logroño as thanksgiving for the divine intervention in stopping the flood, presided each year by a different church, as it was the city’s custom. However, this practice fell into oblivion and it is now lost in memory, only present in archival documents. Even its material memory is lost, as all but one commemorative plaques of the flood have been destroyed.
This contribution attempts to reconstruct the landscape of a city in crisis that was forced to put in motion all human and heavenly forces to be spared of destruction. To unravel the complex liturgical topography of a small city that was activated during trying times. It will help us to comprehend how the whole city was forced to act as one in a strange collaboration between civic and religious powers, usually in conflict for the use of urban space, which would soon resume.
The Cardinal Virtues: Papal Rome in the face of Asiatic Cholera, 1835-1837
Salvatore Valenti
abstractSalvatore Valenti
Epidemics are densely political affairs. Limitations to personal freedom, disruption of international trade routes, economic stall, mechanisms of social control, riots, and complex arrangements for public health all come within. Few epidemics have given rise to a wealth of literature such as nineteenth-century Asiatic cholera. Historians have interrogated cholera’s files asking them questions about social relations and class struggle, power, epidemiology, urban renewal, both separately and in various combination. The spiritual, cultural dimension of Asiatic cholera epidemics is less investigated. Nevertheless, devotional practices and moral norms were as important as measures to remove possible sources of infection as the former contributed to protect society from a catastrophe as dangerous as the epidemics itself: the collapse of social order.
The proposed paper aims to explore the case of cholera epidemics in nineteenth-century Rome during the papal rule. The objective of this study is to investigate the public measures implemented in the centre of the Catholic Church to ward off cholera, and to what extent public measures, prescriptions, instructions for people, and religious processions contributed to maintaining social cohesion by emphasising and instilling in the population the Christian virtues in particular temperance and fortitude. The aforementioned values were shared by other Italian communities. Devotional practices aimed at requesting the intercession of the Virgin and saints to bring an end to epidemics were not unique to nineteenth-century Rome. However, the question remains: what was the peculiar blend of medicine, public health and religion in Papal Rome? Was it distinct in its coherence with Catholic principles? By focusing on three outbreaks (1837; 1854-55; 1866-67) the paper will explore the continuities and changes in the anti-cholera practices in order to assess what was learnt by experience, and epidemiological observation.
Lettere da Napoli sull'epidemia del 1656-58: il caso del nunzio
Silvana D'alessio Ricerca
abstractSilvana D'alessio Ricerca
Le lettere scritte durante l’epidemia da un testimone in particolare, il nunzio pontificio, sono un patrimonio di grande rilievo per molti motivi; trascurate fin qui, esse costituiscono una delle principali fonti sull'evento (su queste mi sono soffermata in alcuni miei recenti contributi). Spinola informa delle difficoltà nell’inviare lettere durante l'epidemia, ma anche delle lentezze del viceré e dei diversi fattori che contribuirono a moltiplicare in modo esponenziale i casi, quasi come se vi fosse una totale noncuranza rispetto alla popolazione. La sua testimonianza mostra il totale fallimento della 'gestione'; anzi, si può senz'altro parlare di una gestione degli effetti e non dell'epidemia in sé, almeno per i primi mesi: molto presto si dovette affrontare il problema dei numerosi ammalati, defunti, negli ospedali e per strada. Le lettere consentono di comprendere anche la sensibilità, la posizione e la formazione di chi scrive, fornendo elementi imprescindibili per la valutazione della stessa testimonianza rispetto al tragico evento.
Sentinel Attentions: Sensitive Infrastructures and the Embodied Sensing of Disaster in Nineteenth-Century Switzerland
Estefania Mompean Botias
abstractEstefania Mompean Botias
This paper examines early modern infrastructures of sensing that mediated the perception of disaster before the advent of digital monitoring. The 1880 Swiss Earthquake Commission collected thousands of felt reports—accounts of tremors, strange animal behavior, and environmental anomalies—revealing an understanding of crisis as embodied perception. Similarly, Wettersäulen (weather columns) installed in European cities functioned as civic devices of collective awareness, transforming meteorological data into shared spatial experience.
These historical examples prefigure what I call sentinel attentions: distributed ecologies of response grounded in trust, repetition, and memory, where sensing itself becomes infrastructural. Infrastructures here operate at the level of the skin, ear, and atmosphere—mediating the relational thresholds between humans, environments, and institutions.
By reading these devices as sensitive infrastructures, the paper proposes a historical lens to rethink contemporary early-warning systems as socio-technical and more-than-human networks of attunement. Sensing disaster, then, is not merely detecting events but sustaining a field of co-attunement where vulnerability, perception, and collective care converge.
Session 30 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
The Great Fire and its management: the consequences of a catastrophe on the example of a Bohemian city during the Thirty Years' War
Tomáš Sterneck
abstractTomáš Sterneck
The paper will use the example of the great fire that engulfed the leading South Bohemian royal city of České Budějovice (Budweis) in 1641, to which more than half of the then inner-city buildings fell victim, to examine ways of dealing with the crisis situation. Key themes will be the investigation of the causes of the disaster coupled with efforts to punish the guilty, the subsequent reconstruction of the city (accompanied by regulatory measures by the city council in relation to new developments) and the associated efforts to prevent further fires, i.e. measures informed by experience with the destructive element. Also, given that alongside private townhouses, the central ecclesiastical building in the urban organism, the parish church of St Nicholas, was also burnt down, the topic offers a number of suggestions for unravelling the mentality of people coping with a catastrophe that was viewed by contemporaries through the prism of the 'crisis period' of the culminating Thirty Years' War.
Lisbon 1755: Material and Spiritual Practices in the Management and Memory of Disaster
Edite Alberto, Joana Balsa de Pinho
abstractEdite Alberto, Joana Balsa de Pinho
Lisbon’s strategic position within Atlantic, Mediterranean, and European circuits endowed the city with a central role in early modern commercial and cultural networks, while simultaneously exposing it to recurrent seismic and epidemiological risks. Considering also the fact that it is an area of high seismic risk, the Portuguese capital has always been prone to disasters. The earthquake of 1 November 1755, followed by a tsunami and a prolonged fire, constituted one of the most destructive catastrophes in Lisbon’s history, annihilating much of the urban core and prompting an unprecedented programme of emergency management and reconstruction under the direction of Secretary of State Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo.
This paper examines how Lisbon, like other early modern cities confronted with natural and health disasters, developed a combination of material, institutional, and spiritual strategies to cope with catastrophe. Immediate interventions included urban regulation, containment of destruction, disease prevention, provisioning of food, and reorganization of civic space, while simultaneously fostering charitable, medical, and devotional practices. Particular attention is given to the underexplored Memória de extraordinarios sucessos (1758) by Benedictine friar Tomás de Aquino, preserved in the Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa. Writing three years after the disaster, the author reflects on the fragility of material records and emphasizes the importance of truthful testimony in preserving memory. His account documents the transformation of the Monastery of São Bento da Saúde into a royal hospital and the collaboration of monks, court officials, and noblewomen in caring for the wounded, highlighting the interplay between spiritual devotion, practical care, and social cohesion.
By situating Lisbon’s response within the comparative framework of early modern urban disaster management, this paper explores how material and spiritual practices were mobilized to mitigate immediate harm, shape post-disaster reconstruction, and inscribe collective memory. The case of Lisbon demonstrates the ways in which city networks, administrative authority, and religious institutions intersected to mediate disaster, providing insights relevant to broader studies of urban resilience, communal solidarity, and memory formation across European cities between the 15th and 19th centuries.
Between river and sea: Padua and water management between the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Emma Filipponi
abstractEmma Filipponi
The territory of the city of Padua, in Italy, is located between the drainage basin of the Alps and the Adriatic Sea. Due to the fragility caused by the simultaneous presence of two rivers, the Brenta and the Bacchiglione, the city and its territory have always been the subject of special attention by governments, especially in relation to its geographical proximity to the Venice lagoon and the Po river delta, and the high risk of flooding. The medieval Da Carrara signoria, which ruled Padua between 1318 and 1405, created one of the first bodies dedicated to the management of urban and extra-urban waters, the Magistratura degli Ingrossatori. Under the control of the Serenissima Republic of Venice between 1405 and 1797, the economic and cultural development of the city coincided with the creation of new institutions, such as the office of the Savj ed esecutori alle acque, who worked on the management of the entire river and lagoon system of the Republic. With the fall of the Serenissima in 1797 and the transfer of the territory under the jurisdiction of Bonaparte's French Empire, the water infrastructure management system underwent a period of great evolution. Thanks to new scientific discoveries and available technologies, the French government created a new water control system, based on the figure of the engineer des Ponts et Chaussées, the centralisation of decisions and cultural transfers between the two countries. Organised into specific bodies established on the model on those already tested in France, including that of Ingegneri di acque e strade, technicians and engineers visited, studied and analysed the territory and its relationship with water, proposing management projects and support infrastructure. This institutional framework remained clearly visible even after 1814, when, following the fall of Bonaparte, Veneto came under the control of the Habsburg Empire, who reinforced existing bodies such as the Magistrato Centrale alle acque in Venezia. Taking into account the actions carried out during the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and through the analysis of figures such as Gaspard de Prony, Giuseppe Jappelli and Pietro Paleocapa, this paper aims to analyse the development of administrative bodies for water management in the period between the fall of the Serenissima and the early decades of the 19th century, focusing in particular on their organisation and on the knowledge transferred, learned and employed in infrastructure design.
“The Air on Fire”: Burning Petroleum and Istanbul in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
K. Mehmet Kentel
abstractK. Mehmet Kentel
Early modern Istanbul was prone to frequent and catastrophic fires. The predominantly wooden construction of the Ottoman capital, coupled with the perceived "fatalistic nature" of its inhabitants and rulers, as observed by contemporary commentators and even some modern scholars, were identified as key contributing factors. Indeed, the regularity of such fires appears to have transcended the boundaries of historical analysis, becoming instead a subject of urban myth, eccentricity, and the city's seemingly unchanging material reality.
Actual archival records, however, show that the Istanbul’s fire burnt different fuels across centuries. The wooden built environment was constructed with different types of wood, sourced from various regions. Additionally, the fuels utilized in the city shifted over time and space, including firewood, charcoal, coal, coal gas, and petroleum. By examining government records, insurance archives, and narrative and visual records, this paper reveals the effects of the increased use of petroleum on the burning of Istanbul.
As also noted by Daniel Immerwahr on the urban fires in the nineteenth-century America, “hot capitalism worked as an accelerant, intensifying fires particularly where commodification reached furthest.” Similarly, Istanbul’s fire regime was shaped through unregulated urban growth and energy concentration, influx of people and new commodities, and new materials the added to the inflammability of urban centers. Rather than an unchanging reality of the city’s premodern history, fire was an integral part of a transforming city, itself being modernized in process, becoming brighter and more deadly. Dealing with the disaster thus also meant dealing with these new forces and materials that transformed the city’s texture.
Session 31 - The City Writes Back. Urban spaces and Political Communication in the Spanish Monarchy (15th-18th Centuries)
This session explores how cities of the Hispanic Monarchy (15th-18th c.) used correspondence to project authority, build alliances, and participate in governance. Urban letter collections reveal cities as active agents within political, institutional, and transatlantic networks.
Coordinators: José Araneda Riquelme, Mathias Ledroit, Diego Sola García
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Coordinators: José Araneda Riquelme, Mathias Ledroit, Diego Sola García
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Session 31 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Communication between the cities of three Mediterranean kingdoms: Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples (16th-17th centuries).
Ida Mauro
abstractIda Mauro
The recovery of city letters, often preserved in very partial and incomplete forms, from various urban centers of the ancient kingdoms of Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples, provides an image of the multidirectional and particularly lively political activity of small and large urban centers in these three territories.
This paper will present a mapping of the recovered sources and an analysis of the content of the letters, paying particular attention to the reconstruction of each city's network of interlocutors, the analysis of communication between the "capital city" and the provinces, the presence of stable agents active outside each kingdom, and the comparison of the different modes of urban communication prevailing between one kingdom and another. Within the limits imposed by the surviving documentation, we will attempt to conduct this comparison over the same chronological ranges, corresponding to the crisis periods of the 16th and 17th centuries.
We will also examine how the letters suggest the presence of long-standing communication between small and large cities and, therefore, a long-standing political vitality within an urban context that has often escaped the attention of early modern Italian political and institutional historiography.
Finally, we will analyze the presence of these urban networks within the consolidation of the Spanish monarchy's system of governance in the Mediterranean region, which relied on constant multi-scale communication with its various "urban republics".
Center and Periphery in Dialogue: Ecclesiastical office allocation and interest representation in 17th century Barcelona
Naomi Beutler
abstractNaomi Beutler
The interaction between the ecclesiastical centre and the periphery is a key area for understanding early modern church and power structures. The 17th-century granting of church offices in Barcelona by the Apostolic Datary in Rome illustrates that the relationship between the Roman Curia and a peripheral yet significant city in Catholic Europe was not one of unilateral dependence. Rather, it was a dynamic interrelationship beneficial to both sides and essential for their stability.
The relevance of these interactions is particularly evident during the Reapers’ War (1640–1659), which deeply affected Catalonia and tested the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The granting of offices was not merely administrative but formed a dense network of correspondence: in supplications, breves and provisions between Rome and Barcelona, through which claims were made, loyalties demanded, and needs negotiated. Power was exercised both by the Datary and by clerics, cathedral chapters, urban elites, and high-ranking clergy asserting their interests under the guise of administrative procedures.
For Rome, the allocation of offices made its authority visible and effective in peripheral areas. Beyond spiritual concerns, it was economic and political: the sale, lease, or provision of benefices generated substantial income, securing Vatican finances. Targeted appointments, negotiated through correspondence, also stabilized centre–periphery relations, with loyal procurators in Barcelona enforcing Rome’s interests.
Barcelona, in turn, relied on these allocations to secure local clergy, institutions, prestige, and social advancement. Numerous actors participated: minor clerics petitioning Rome, kings exercising presentation rights, and city councillors seeking support and funds. Correspondence on office granting thus formed a multi-layered communication network in which different social groups articulated needs and exercised power through requests, negotiation, and allocation.
Analysis of this correspondence shows that centre and periphery were not hierarchically opposed, but engaged in complex exchanges based on mutual need. The early modern ‘global governance’ of the Holy See should therefore be understood as a dynamic interrelationship rather than unilateral control. The study is based on provisions from the Apostolic Datary and local collators, as well as letters between influential religious and secular actors, urban elites, and minor clerics.
Letters from Naples during the Epidemic of 1656–58
Silvana D'alessio Ricerca
abstractSilvana D'alessio Ricerca
La corrispondenza di Giulio Spinola da Napoli durante l’epidemia di peste del 1656-58
Le lettere scritte durante l’epidemia da un testimone in particolare, Giulio Spinola, sono un patrimonio di grande rilievo per molti motivi; trascurate fin qui, esse sono fondamentali per ricostruire dinamiche e condotte di chi poi materialmente si occupò di gestire gli effetti dell’epidemia. Il punto è proprio questo: l’epidemia non fu gestita (furono gestiti i suoi effetti).
Molto presto si dovette affrontare il problema dei numerosi ammalati, defunti, negli ospedali e per strada. Spinola si sofferma sulle difficoltà nell’inviare lettere, sulle lentezze del viceré e consente di conoscere i diversi fattori che contribuirono a moltiplicare in modo esponenziale i casi, quasi come se vi fosse una totale noncuranza rispetto alla popolazione. Le lettere consentono di comprendere anche la sensibilità, la posizione e la formazione di chi scrive, fornendo elementi imprescindibili per la valutazione della stessa testimonianza rispetto al tragico evento.
Session 31 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Writing to rule. The case of Antwerp in the early 17th century
Alberto Mariano Rodriguez Martinez
abstractAlberto Mariano Rodriguez Martinez
“Ella come da per sé […] quasi a modo di città libera e di republica si regge e si governa”. With these words, Lodovico Guicciardini referred to the polity of the city of Antwerp in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, published there in 1567. Although the work itself was dedicated to the Spanish monarch, those pages dealing with this rich commercial emporium were addressed to its municipal government. This was not a simple gesture of courtesy, as it responded to a reality in which political power was shared, negotiated and disputed among different actors. Through the case of Antwerp, this paper deals with the importance that the Habsburgs attached to their epistolary communication with the cities of the Spanish Netherlands, whose political agency they were well aware of. In order to do so, emphasis will be placed on certain moments of political and social upheaval in the city between the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when sending letters to the municipal authorities was one of the key resources available to sovereigns and royal agents to preserve calm and ensure the loyalty of the population.
In accordance with their own needs and interests, other external powers kept in touch with Antwerp’s leaders. To demonstrate the multi-level nature of this Antwerp’s municipal correspondence, I will also analyse letters sent to its city council by external powers.
Based on some examples and documental sources, it will be possible to see the key importance of political communication and letters exchange with local authorities to rule the territory and foster (dis)obedience.
Cities in revolting context: narratives, writings and communication during the
peruvian Gonzalo Pizarro’s revolt
Manfredi Merluzzi, Marco Verra
abstractManfredi Merluzzi, Marco Verra
During the the Gonzalo Pizarro rebellion (1544–1548), the cities cplayed a significant political role in defining the political and military balance within the recently conquered territory of the Peruvian viceroyalty. Urban centers, in fact, reacted to the promulgation of the New Laws (November 1542) in a non-uniform manner: the response was not limited to violent resistance or outright rebellion, as much of historiography has simplistically suggested; rather, it was heterogeneous. Some cities appointed agents to send to the sovereign, while all convened to discuss a shared political course. Gonzalo Pizarro was appointed procurator of the kingdom, while Hernando Pizarro was sent to court as procurator. Each cabildo sought to communicate with the Council of the Indies and with the sovereign to defend its own privileges and to justify its positions and requests within a complex legal context. The cabildos and urban elites attempted to rely on their relational networks to communicate among themselves and with their motherland.
The cities played an active role both in the dynamics of warfare and in those of pacification. This contribution, through a textual analysis, aims to explore the narrative dynamics and the various representations found in the chronicles and administrative documentation produced by the different protagonists and by the cabildos. The study will analyze the works of the principal chroniclers, including:
Diego Fernández, Primera y segunda parte de la Historia del Perú (1571);
Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, Quinquenarios o Historia de las guerras civiles del Perú (1544–1548) y de otros sucesos de las Indias;
Juan Cristóbal de Calvete , Rebélion de Pizarro en el Perú y vida de don Pedro Gasca (1567). As well as broader works, such as Antonio de Herrera, Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar Océano (1601–1615); López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias (1552); Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias; Agustín de Zárate, Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú (...) (1555); Cieza de León, La Guerra de Quito;
Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Relación de la conquista del Perú (1570).
And the documentation contained in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, in the Archivo General
de la Nación in Lima, as well as the letters exchanged between Pizarro and his captains and those of
the royal emissary Pedro de la Gasca found in the Pizarro-Gasca collection (Huntington Library).
The Chilean cities in the debate on the perpetuity of the encomienda system
Matthias Gloël
abstractMatthias Gloël
The Encomienda system was a key element, especially in the early decades to organize de colonial rule in Spanish America, between the dominant part and the dominated part of the society. While the encomenderos benefitted from indigenous labor, as a counterpart they were supposed to ensure the religious, this is catholic, instruction of these new vassals of the crown.
Since encomiendas were usually granted for two, or sometimes three lives by inheritance, soon a debate on perpetuity came up. The encomenderos pledged for two things above anything else: the perpetuity, this is to inherit the encomienda for all future generations of one’s lineage and to be granted jurisdiction over the Indians that belonged to one encomienda. If this was to be conceded, the encomenderos would virtually become equals to the Spanish nobility which enjoined precisely those two fundamental privileges within their own states.
Since the crown should itself dubitative on the subject, the encomenderos carried out the debate and arguments through the cabildos, the municipal institutions that governed the cities and towns in early modern Spain and America. So, it was the cities that were sending out opinions and on behalf of this powerful social group. This does not turn out surprising, since in the first decades of Spanish domination in America, it was usually those men who held the seats and posts within the municipal administration.
The debate has been perceived and analyzed fundamentally as a Peruvian and, in a lesser degree, Mexican issue, since most of the documentation was originated in those two territories and also the studies on the have subject focused basically on the two viceregal centers. The Pizarro uprising, which had much to do with the encomienda system and its possible abolition, only made this tendency to focus on Peru even stronger.
Nevertheless, Chilean cities as well participated in the debate on perpetuity, especially at one of the high points and the beginning of the 1560’s. After the arrival of the Pedro de Valdivia expedition and conquest of part of the Chilean territory during the 1540’s, the encomienda system had also been introduced to the Chilean indigenous people. In this sense, we will analyze how they participated, with what legal and rhetoric arguments they argued and how much their claims fit into a wider debate and conquistador elite demands on the one hand and if they are elements to be found that can evidence Chilean particularities.
Session 32 - Urban Histories in Motion. Cartographic, Artistic, and Historiographical Representations of the City within Early Modern Intellectual Networks
This session aims to explore how cities were represented in Early Modern times through
cartographic, artistic, literary, and historiographical forms, and how these representations were often embedded in the network of traveling intellectuals. By situating these knotted dynamics within a global framework, we aim to trace the motion of people, ideas, and urban imaginaries across the Mediterranean and beyond, also looking at transatlantic and transpacific circulations.
Coordinators: Fernando Loffredo, Ida Mauro, Tanja Michalsky
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cartographic, artistic, literary, and historiographical forms, and how these representations were often embedded in the network of traveling intellectuals. By situating these knotted dynamics within a global framework, we aim to trace the motion of people, ideas, and urban imaginaries across the Mediterranean and beyond, also looking at transatlantic and transpacific circulations.
Coordinators: Fernando Loffredo, Ida Mauro, Tanja Michalsky
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Session 32 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 305 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Mapping the Valley of Mexico After Conquest: A Spatial History of the “Map of Tenochtitlan,” c.1530
Caterina Pizzigoni, Gergely Baics
abstractCaterina Pizzigoni, Gergely Baics
The “Map of Tenochtitlan” (c.1530s) is one of the earliest and most famous cartographic representations of Mexico City shortly after the conquest. It is unique in several ways. First, its author(s) were most likely of Nahua origin, educated at the Franciscan monastery of Tlatelolco. The map therefore integrates Indigenous and Western cartographic traditions. Second, it is not a map of Mexico City-Tenochtitlan per se but of the city and its surrounding region. Before the conquest, the Valley of Mexico was among the world’s most densely populated areas. In 1550, the small Spanish population, mostly in the city, was engulfed by a vast Nahua world all around it. Third, the map details not only the region’s built environment and topography, but also its human and natural ecosystems. Its vision is in fact Indigenous, corresponding to the pre-conquest Mesoamerican urban tradition that treated city and countryside as integrated human and natural ecosystems. Fourth, the map narrates everyday life, depicting interactions between the human and natural environments and between Spanish and Indigenous people. Overall, it provides a veritable spatial catalogue of the built, natural, and human environments of one of Spanish America’s most important regions, and from an Indigenous perspective, from which derives its regionally-scaled and ecological vision and its familiarity with the territory.
The “Map of Tenochtitlan” has attracted considerable scholarship, mainly focusing on its artistic production and representation. We approach it from a spatial history perspective, and explore it as a rich cartographic resource with significant locational specificity and accuracy. Our GIS workflow involves geo-referencing the entire map, a challenging process given its multiple and inconsistent scales. This process, however, provides new insights about the mapmakers’ underlying vision, orientation, and priorities in depicting the Valley of Mexico. Second, we digitize and thereby create a spatial history archive of the map’s rich locational information about the region’s built environment, ecologies, and daily life. This opens up the possibility to reflect on the complex human and natural ecosystems of the Valley that had survived and continued to thrive after the conquest. Our workflow is laborious and pushes the limits of h-GIS. We plan on sharing our substantive and methodological findings in a digital format, at this early stage probably a story map.
Pirro Ligorio and the Cities of Campania: Cartography, Erudition, and the Circulation of Antiquarian Knowledge
Marina Guarente
abstractMarina Guarente
This paper examines how the antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (1513-1583) depicted the ancient cities of Campania, with a focus on the relationship between his textual erudition and cartographic practice. By examining both his Enciclopedia and his cartographic works, particularly the Map of the Kingdom of Naples (1557), the study shows how Ligorio effectively transformed southern Italy into a laboratory for historical reconstruction. In this context, ancient urban spaces were reimagined through the circulation of texts, images, and artefacts.
Ligorio’s Enciclopedia reveals his sustained attention to cities as repositories of collective memory. Through a combination of philological analysis and archaeological observation, he endeavoured to reconstruct the urban landscape of antiquity. He treated monuments and inscriptions as fragments of a living past. His approach relied on a dynamic interplay between Textkritik and Realkritik, combining literary, epigraphic, and material sources to produce knowledge of an ever-changing ancient world.
The Map of the Kingdom visually enacts the fusion of literary and cartographical elements, serving as a cartographic palimpsest where erudite memory, spatial imagination, and historical speculation converge.
Specific cases, such as Ligorio’s reconstructions of the cult of Fortuna Barbata at Paestum and the Tempio dei Dioscuri in Naples, demonstrate how visual, textual, and numismatic evidence were employed to create new interpretations of ancient cities. These reconstructions frequently involved processes of reinterpretation and even manipulation of sources, thereby revealing the creative dimension of early modern antiquarianism as a form of cultural translation.
Ultimately, the paper argues that Ligorio’s work on Campania outlines a form of urban knowledge in which studying cities becomes an intellectual journey and a representational act. While many of Ligorio’s insights stemmed from first-hand observation of the sites, many others derived from contemporary antiquarian sources. He engaged in a productive, albeit often indirect, scholarly dialogue with these sources. By examining the Enciclopedia and the Map of Naples together, this study illustrates how Ligorio’s antiquarian vision influenced early modern perceptions of the city as a connected, living archive, a space where erudition, imagination, and geography intersected to redefine the concept of the urbs antiqua in the 16th century.
Invoking Classical Antiquity as a Strategy of Establishing Order and Managing Religious Variety in Urban Milieu
Olga Kozubska
abstractOlga Kozubska
The paper is dealing with the historiographical representation of the town of Lviv/Lemberg (Ukraine) in the 17th century as antique Rome and the use of public space for self-representations of the local urban elite in the Renaissance tradition of uomini famosi. The aim is to analyze how references to antiquity were used by the elite to justify their political aspirations and to maintain the social order in the town.
Ancient Romans, the Roman Republic and the merits of elective government belonged to the civic ideals, adopted and expressed by urban intellectual elites. Senatus Populusque Leopoliensi (SPQL) was often used by the town council on different formal occasions, following the SPQR and signifying the ‘republican’ aspirations of the local ruling elite. Proponents of the "antiquization" of the town’s history and social order were primarily the town councilors, many of whom received their education in Bologna, Padua or Rome. Thus, it is not surprising to find a panegyric to the members of urban government titeled Viri illustres civitatis Leopoliensis (1658) apparently following De viris illustribus by Petrarch. Nevertheless, in contrast to Petrarch, the author from Lviv focused mainly on his contemporaries or immediate predecessors, rather than on historical personalities. The text from 1658 also revealed its ideological connection to the gallery of famous citizens carved on the tower of the town-hall.
The major historiographical work on Lviv, which demonstrates how antiquity being invoked in a public urban context, was Leopolis Triplex (1671) written by a town councilor and burgomaster Bartolomej Zimorowicz. He creates an imaginary space of Lviv, where his town resembles antique Rome in numerous topographical details, and declared a goal to transform his mother town from Ruthenian into Roman (patriam […] e Russica Romanam pro virili mea facerem). The text was not free from the author’s soaring self-esteem: he assigned himself the role of the Livy of Rus’ (Livius Roxanus) obviously comparing his work to Livy's History of Rome.
What purpose this appeal to Classical antiquity served in a town with no Roman roots whatsoever and with ethnically and religiously heterogeneous population (Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish communities)? How ideas of Classical Roman republicanism were instrumentalized by the urban elite, what kind of social and political order was gradually shaped in the town? These are the main questions of the presentation.
Contesting the image of Vilnius. Polish engraver, Lithuanian patron and Hogenberg’s print
Adam Perzynski
abstractAdam Perzynski
The image of Vilnius appeared in Urbium Praecipuarum Totius Mundi (Cologne 1581), the monumental collection of city views by Georg Braun illustrated by Frans Hogenberg. This print became the canonical representation of the Lithuanian capital, accepted for centuries without attempts to verify its accuracy or compare it with reality. Hogenberg’s vision remained authoritative long after it ceased to reflect the city’s evolving appearance. Its reception exemplifies the broader tendency to overlook that cities are dynamic entities, constantly reshaped by wars, disasters, and architectural change.
Around 1600, an alternative depiction of Vilnius emerged, attributed to Tomasz Makowski, one of the first engravers of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. His version, however, never equaled the fame or distribution of Hogenberg’s composition. This contrast raises questions: what distinguished these two visions, who promoted the alternative image, and why did it fail to gain wider recognition?
Hogenberg’s engraving presents the city from a bird’s-eye view. In its coloured impressions, brown tones dominate, emphasizing wooden architecture. The accompanying Latin text highlights the city’s modesty, portraying Vilnius as a provincial settlement rather than the flourishing capital of Lithuania.
Makowski’s engraving, in contrast, offers a panoramic view filled with churches, towers, and noble residences, giving Vilnius a monumental character. It may have been part of the first, now-lost edition of the Map of Lithuania commissioned by Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł. A later Amsterdam edition includes a description that appears to rebut Braun’s account, stressing the abundance of brick and stone buildings and mentioning wooden ones only on the outskirts. If both image and text originated under Radziwiłł’s patronage, they likely aimed to reshape European perceptions of the Grand Duchy’s capital.
The reception of Hogenberg’s image demonstrates how standardized visual models, rather than factual accuracy, shaped early modern urban iconography. Makowski’s engraving, conceived partly as propaganda, offered a more positive and ambitious vision but lacked wide circulation. The dominance of Braun and Hogenberg’s publication, repeatedly reprinted and reused by Dutch publishers, ensured its continued authority. Makowski’s work survived only in a few copies—evidence of how perceptions of Vilnius depended less on reality than on the endurance of established pictorial conventions.
A City Under Siege: Candia and the Plague in Georgios Klontzas’ Apocalypse Manuscript
Leah Marangos
abstractLeah Marangos
Spanning across folios 149v-150r, the map of Candia, the capital and main port city of the island of the Venetian colony of Crete, emphasizes the newly constructed fortification walls meant to defend the city from the Ottoman encroachment on Venetian territory. However, these walls were no match for the plague ravaging within the city, rendering them ineffective in protecting the citizens. In painful detail from a birds-eye-view, numerous coffins are depicted on the streets of the city as the personification of Death in the upper-right hand corner careens it. Made in Candia by Georgios Klontzas at the end of the sixteenth century, I argue that the map is the result of the merging of different genres, particularly cartographic.
In his manuscript, Klontzas stages the period after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) in recognizable cities and on islands, drawing from isolario (island books) and city views, which proliferated in the early modern Mediterranean and surely made their way into the collections of humanists on the island and therefore accessible to him. The depictions are accompanied by a written narrative arranged in chronological order. As the only image in the manuscript not accompanied by text, the map of Candia operates differently. In this talk, I investigate how it functions within the narrative of the book, but I also question how it can be divorced from the manuscript and its narrative and viewed as a singular image. The map behaves similarly to depictions of islands in isolario, where the reader does not necessarily need to start from the beginning, but can open to any part of the book to experience an imaginary journey. However, the incorporation of signs referring to the plague firmly places the image within a specific time period. In this instance, Klontzas, I argue, is relaying to his viewer the current events of his day as he experienced them. Furthermore, the emphasis on the fortification walls recalls the engineering maps produced for the Republic of Venice. Unlike these maps which portrays the city on approach from the sea, Klontzas depicts Candia from behind, as if standing on one of the mountains that surround the city. Residing in an entrepôt, Klontzas was able to absorb different types of imagery and piece them together to create this dynamic view of his native town under siege from an invisible threat.
Session 32 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 305 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Pontano's Depiction of Naples: From the Decumano to San Giovanni a Carbonara
Pina Palma
abstractPina Palma
In the opening scene of Giovanni Pontano’s Aegidius (1501) — the last one of the five dialogues the humanist wrote — two travelers, from Bergamo and Fondi respectively, reach Naples to visit the city and meet the humanist who served five kings of Aragon as a courtier, official, and diplomat and earned a greater fame as a scholar, poet, and prose writer.
As Pontano in person welcomes the strangers under the portico of the academy named after him, the conversation quickly shifts to his Augustinian friend Egidio da Viterbo.
The strangers who engage in a conversation about faith, providence, free will, and nature as order and limit of providence, foreground Pontano’s understanding of a humanistic dialogue that, in its transregional reach, guides the political ethical discourse. That the scene pivots around a specific topographic trajectory, from the Decumano to San Giovanni a Carbonara –from Pontano’s Academy to Egidio’s residence– shows Pontano’s naturalistic perspective, rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, against Egidio da Viterbo’s Augustinian and Platonic standpoint. Through the prism of Naples’s topography, in this paper I will show that Pontano’s dialogue traces political and ethical issues that are central to the advancement and unassailability of a governing dynasty. Also, that political success rests not on brute force, but on a ruler’s ability to balance the needs of communities and individuals with dynastic objectives.
Beyond Business: Barcelona as a Cultural Node in the 15th Century – Insights from Datini’s Network
María Morrás, Carmen Di Meo
abstractMaría Morrás, Carmen Di Meo
Part I. (Prof. Morrás): Barcelona has been a hub of cultural, commercial, religious and political activity since at least the thirteenth century. At various times and in various configurations, it was the de facto capital of the Crown of Aragon, which comprised Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and Mallorca at its peak. From the 14th century onwards, Barcelona also became the focus of tensions and negotiations. Due to the schismatic papal court in nearby Avignon and the accession of the Trastámara dynasty to the thrones of Aragon and Naples, it acted as a buffer and a bridge between the Crown of Castile, France, and the Italian commercial and cultural centres. Italian texts were bought, copied and translated in Barcelona, from French or Italian into Catalan and Spanish. This established the city as a centre for diplomatic and cultural negotiation.
Part II. (Dr. Di Meo): This paper’s second section examines a unique case from the family archives of Francesco di Marco Datini (c. 1335–1410), which are housed at the Archivio di Stato di Prato. It explores how transnational merchant communities perceived medieval Barcelona during the period 1394–1410. Datini’s network, one of the earliest European holding companies, produced an exceptional body of documents that sheds light on commercial and cultural exchanges. Adopting a cosmopolitan perspective, the analysis uses these Italian sources to focus on two themes: how merchants from different countries portrayed the city in their correspondence and the role of cartographic innovation. The case study centres on the commissioning of nautical charts (mappamondi) from Catalan craftsmen for European rulers by Baldassarre Ubriachi, also known as ‘degli Embriachi’, as documented in the archives. This reflects a significant development in scientific cartography during the late medieval period (Livi, 1911). This research combines socio-economic and cultural perspectives to illuminate urban perception and knowledge transfer in late medieval Europe.
Session 32 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 305 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Bolstering Madrid’s ‘Nobilitas’ in the Writings of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Jerónimo de Quintana
Jorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas
abstractJorge Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas
Madrid’s decidedly minor tradition of city encomia notwithstanding, two major seventeenth-century works on the Habsburg capital appeared in relatively short sequence. Authored by, respectively, Gil González Dávila and Jerónimo de Quintana, Teatro de las grandezas de la Villa de Madrid (1623) and A la muy antigua, noble y coronada villa de Madrid (1629) represent competing viewpoints. No significant works on Madrid had been published since Philip II selected in 1561 the mid-ranging but prosperous villa (town) as the permanent seat of his royal court. Dávila for one gave short thrift to the idea of the city as ‘noble’. Yet for Quintana it was essential to assert his hometown’s nobilitas. His strategic use of late medieval documents and his reliance on the works of the Madrid-born and phenomenally well-travelled Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) help grasp the range of textual sources he mobilised to cement the view that Madrid had a ‘native’ nobility of its own. Both Oviedo and Quintana were witnesses to a rapidly changing environment and allowed, unlike Dávila, local agendas to come to the forefront at various points within their narrative.
Close attention to Fernández de Oviedo’s and Quintana’s charting of Madrid’s 'noble' landscape provides insight into the efforts of the urban elite to assert their municipal prerogatives and to take full stock of their (individual and collective) physical presence in streets and squares but also in churches, monasteries and charitable foundations. The former, Oviedo, became acquainted with most of peninsular and insular Italy as a young man. Later in life, as the Crown’s cronista de Indias residing in Santo Domingo, he jotted down his recollections —refreshed by occasional trips back to the Iberian Peninsula— of Madrid and its aristocratic lineages. He wrote under Emperor Charles V, during Madrid’s spectacular rise in the lead-up to capitalhood. Quintana relied on close and prolonged contact with many of Madrid’s foremost noble families (particularly the Ramírez). He was the first to attempt a full account of Madrid’s genuine elite families, which for him meant excluding those whose documented settlement in the city dated after Philip II’s accession. Quintana, who had seen Madrid’s population drop steeply during the short-lived transfer of the royal court to Valladolid (1600-1606), must have realised the full extent of the court’s gravitational pull. Yet he still felt bound to assert the town’s inherent nobility.
HISTORIES OF CITIES IN THE 17TH CENTURY ABRUZZI
Giuseppe Mrozek Eliszezynski
abstractGiuseppe Mrozek Eliszezynski
During the 17th century, a group of intellectuals from the Abruzzi, the two northernmost provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, wrote and published historiographical works on various cities in the region. They were often in contact with each other, either in person or by letter, although at times their relationship became very conflictual; they were protagonists of important careers in the institutions of their cities or the Kingdom of Naples; most of them had a legal education and divided their lives between Abruzzi and other important cities: one can consider the example of Niccolò Toppi, a jurist, historian and scholar born in Chieti, who fled the city following the revolt of 1647-48 and then settled in Naples; or Lucio Camarra, also originally from Chieti, but who soon settled in Rome in the service of the Colonna family; or Mutio Pansa, originally from Penne, who was also very active on the routes to Rome and Naples.
This presentation aims to start from this network of 17th-century Abruzzese intellectuals, united by the writing of works focusing on the history of various cities in Abruzzo: the analysis of these works shows how the study of the past was clearly influenced not only by the personal experiences of the individual authors, but also by the political situation they witnessed and, often, in which they were protagonists. In other words, the past of the cities was interpreted, and sometimes distorted, on the basis of problems, issues and themes dictated by the present, by the political and social evolution of the territory.
For reasons of brevity and time, the focus will be on Chieti and Lanciano, the two main cities of Abruzzo Citra, whose rivalry has spanned the centuries. In addition to the aforementioned Niccolò Toppi and Lucio Camarra, the authors of interest will also include Girolamo Nicolino, who shared with the other two a legal education, a bureaucratic-administrative career and a passion for historical research. By comparing these three authors and their works, we will highlight how the history of Chieti and Lanciano, but also of many other smaller towns near the two main cities, was affected by the political situation of the time, as well as by the personal positions and interests of the individual authors.
Lisbon, Barcelona, and Naples: Representations of the Past and Connected Historiography during the Hispanic Crisis of 1640
Ivan Gracia
abstractIvan Gracia
The aim of this paper is to explore the representation of the past and its political use during the crisis suffered by the Hispanic Monarchy in 1640. The purpose is to develop a comparative and connected history of the historiography generated around three critical episodes: the revolt of Catalonia (1640), the uprising of Portugal (1640), and the insurrection of Naples (1647).
During the 1640s and 1650s, the so-called "wars of papers" or propaganda wars became intense wars of memory, where control over the representation of the past was fundamental to conquering the course of future events and legitimizing new political identities. Lisbon, Barcelona, and Naples became three epicenters of intellectual production in which urban elites carried out an intense renegotiation of the past, present, and future of their political community.
My main hypothesis is that, in the context of a global empire, the representation of the past promoted from these three cities was connected. The porosity of memories and the circulation of shared narrative models would have transcended borders, allowing the intellectual elites of Lisbon, Barcelona, and Naples to employ a similar repertoire of rhetorical resources to articulate their historical accounts.
This paper will analyze the impact of various cultural traditions on the formation of this memory in motion, namely:
- The Greco-Latin heritage and biblical culture as narrative frameworks for understanding the revolts.
- The influence of the American colonial experience on the European collective imagination.
- The imprint of preceding revolts, such as the Comunidades of Castile or the Alterations of Aragon, on the articulation of the new rebel memories.
By emphasizing the intellectual networks that allowed the circulation of these historical models, the proposal contributes to the debate on the relationship between memory and political identity and between globalization and local memory in the early modern period. Analyzing the historiography of the 1640 crisis is crucial to understanding how urban descriptions—textual and visual—acted as an active political discourse in civic life and in the shaping of historical imaginaries.
Session 32 - Slot IV
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 305 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Textual and Visual Forms of Urban Knowledge in the Venetian Lagoon
Andrea Romano Sposato
abstractAndrea Romano Sposato
The present paper examines the city of Venice in the early modern period as a case study, exploring the manner in which its identity is shaped by the continuous interplay between visual and textual representations. Furthermore, it analyses the dynamic relationship between land, water, and time as they are manifested in Venice. The study utilises a range of sources, including sixteenth-century maps, bird’s-eye views, and literary accounts of the lagoon, to explore the conceptualisation of the city as an unstable, shifting organism, the form of which is inseparable from the movement that shapes it. In Venice, the lagoon functions as a boundary, a unifying element, and a generative void. This spatial condition was consistently translated into images and narratives of oscillation, permeability, and cyclical temporality in early modern representations. By analysing cartographies of the lagoon in conjunction with contemporary diaries, historiographical texts, and descriptive writings, the paper traces how urban knowledge circulated through two registers: the measurable space of maps, which sought to stabilise the city’s form, and the literary voice, which instead suspended time and framed Venice as an experiential landscape that was ever-renewed. These sources reveal how motion – including tidal, conceptual and perceptual movements – became a structural principle for understanding the city. Furthermore, the paper argues that the early modern imaginary of Venice was constructed through relational forms of representation that negotiated absence and presence, full and void, land and water. The paper posits that Venice offers a privileged case for examining “imagined cartographies” and “cities along waterbodies” within a connected Mediterranean history. Its representations do not merely document a location, but rather articulate a political and symbolic order in which necessity (ananke) anchors the city to its environment while shaping its narrative identity. The present study contributes to the understanding of how early modern cities were mapped, described, and imagined as fluid spaces defined by both physical and conceptual motion by situating cartographic and textual portrayals within a broader framework.
Literary cartography of a sacred space: urban representation and collective identity in Giscafré's Triunfo del santo misterio (1634)
Marta Casanovas I Beneyto
abstractMarta Casanovas I Beneyto
This communication analyzes Pedro Giscafré’s Triunfo del santo misterio de la Vera Cruz de la villa de Cervera (1634) as a sophisticated exercise in literary cartography that transforms the urban space of Baroque Cervera into a sacred landscape of collective identity. Moving beyond its chronicle and devotional dimensions, this study examines how Giscafré's text maps the city through narrative, organizing its streets, squares, and buildings into a symbolic geography centered around the stolen and recovered relic.
The detailed descriptions of the 1620 and 1633 festivities —reconstructed from Giscafré's account and recent local studies— serve not merely as records of events, but as tools for spatial and social ordering. This presentation explores how processional routes, temporary architectures, and the movement of people through the city are meticulously documented to create a mental map of Cervera as a unified spiritual community.
Elements within the work —including the incorporated sermon by Jaume Puig— are analyzed not for their theological content but as components of this spatial narrative, reinforcing the symbolic connections between specific urban locations and the community's shared identity and history.
By situating the text within its historical context, this communication contends that Giscafré’s Triunfo represents a deliberate literary construction of urban space, where the physical city becomes legible as a text of memory, resilience, and collective belonging. This case study illustrates how early modern textual productions served as powerful instruments for shaping both the imagined and experienced reality of the city.
“Tosca’s Valentia edetanorum: Urban Identity across Mediterranean Intellectual Networks”
Cèsar Martínez Camarena
abstractCèsar Martínez Camarena
In the context of the intense flows of knowledge that characterized early modern Europe, the Valentia edetanorum vulgo del Cid map, completed in 1704 by the Oratorian Vicente Tomás Tosca, constitutes a paradigmatic example of how the city could be imagined, measured, and represented through new scientific logics. Its creation coincides with a key moment for Valencia, a city connected to Mediterranean and European intellectual networks that fostered the circulation of mathematical, philosophical, and geographical ideas. In this sense, both the map and its author cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as the result of a dialogue among novatores circles and, consequently, of a process of knowledge mobility that transformed the ways of observing, describing, and—above all—ordering urban space.
This paper examines how, in contrast to earlier representations—such as Mancelli’s idealized plan (1608) or Anton van den Wyngaerde’s panoramic view (1563)—Tosca’s proposal introduces an objective visuality based on geometric principles that shifts the city from the symbolic sphere into a scientific framework. This shift entails a profound cultural reconfiguration: the city ceases to be merely a celebratory image and becomes a measurable object. The absence of human figures in his map reinforces this change, presenting the urban fabric as a rational structure shaped by mathematical language.
Within a broader process of “imagined cartographies” that brought together texts, images, and technical knowledge, this contribution seeks to emphasize how this visual product must be understood in relation to the rich literary and historiographical production that developed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through the works of Marcos Antonio de Orellana, José Teixidor Trilles, and Vicente Boix, the city was conceived within a new interpretative framework, transforming urban representation into a political, scientific, and identity-forming tool.
Ultimately, Tosca’s map demonstrates how Mediterranean urban spaces were inscribed within global networks of thought, in which cartography functioned as a bridge between diverse communities and bodies of knowledge.
Session 32 - Slot V
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 303 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Unfolding Barcelona’s Early Modern Port: Rafaela Puig, Mediality and the Circulation of an Urban Formula
Quim Solias Huélamo
abstractQuim Solias Huélamo
This paper places the work of cartographer Rafaela Puig at the heart of a learned circle driven by the house of Pinós, which promoted of representations of Barcelona and other Catalan cities between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The central hypothesis is that maps, views, plans, and histories produced by this circle transformed Barcelona both symbolically and materially. I will analyze these ideas by studying the ideological realms quoted in Barcelona’s harbor view by Rafaela Puig in dialogue with other representations by the Pinós erudite circle.
Puig’s body of work, and particularly the view and plan of Barcelona’s harbor (preserved at the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid), makes possible to trace the participation of these objects in debates about the origin of the city and its urban reforms around the turn of the seventeenth century. On the one hand, the plan records phases of the harbor’s extension and expansion, situating the image within the municipal sequence of works (1590-1623). On the other, it references the mythic cycle of the Nine Barons of fame, thereby articulating both memory and urban project. This production also coincides with the activity of different branches of the Pinós across Catalonia and Aragon, which promoted urban representations complementary to Puig’s.
I propose a comparative analysis between Puig’s representation of Barcelona and those produced by other members of the Pinós erudite circle to identify Barcelona’s city narratives in debate. Following approaches on urban views, such as Tanja Michalsky’s, I combine visual and textual reading to explore discursive operations within the fabric of the civic imagination and assess their political impact. Ultimately, this study aims to show how these representations can be understood as products and producers of Barcelona’s model of the city, as they shaped and transformed both the architectural landscape and promoted debates about Barcelona’s history, origins and myths.
RIVER CITIES ON COSIMO DE MEDICI’S WAY THROUGH CATALONIA AND ARAGON
Maria Garganté Llanes
abstractMaria Garganté Llanes
Our communication proposal is based on the research project ‘17th-century Spain in the urban views of Florentine architect Pier Maria Baldi’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, which takes as its historical and chronological framework the journey that Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, undertook through Europe between 1668 and 1669.
After disembarking on the Catalan coast, he began a journey through the Iberian Peninsula, culminating in a visit to the tomb of St James in Compostela. The journey was documented in Lorenzo Magalotti's written chronicle and in black ink on paper by the architect Pier Maria Baldi, who produced the most complete collection of views of European cities and towns in the 17th century (more than two hundred views).
Within the framework of this conference, we will limit ourselves to analysing the views corresponding to the river cities he visited during his journey through the regions of Catalonia and Aragon. Our main objective will be to analyse the urban views (comparing them with earlier or contemporary examples) that are dominated by the presence of a river, such as the Segre in Lleida, the Cinca in Fraga and the Ebro in Zaragoza, and how this characteristic conditions access to and representation of these cities.
This simultaneous reading on two levels (the written chronicle and the drawn view) will allow us not only to identify some emblematic buildings that no longer exist today, but also those aspects that most caught the attention of the Prince and his companions. Likewise, the drawings also constitute a sample of the compositional techniques used by their author, who often self-portrays himself drawing at one end of the view, as a kind of signature.
Finally, it will be inevitable to propose a final reflection on the relevance of these views in contemporary times and even how the analysis of old views can help us rethink our relationship with the urban environment.
Catania, Manila, and the Ideal Baroque City Plan
Marian Berthoud
abstractMarian Berthoud
Spanish control and colonization in the Mediterranean and the Pacific during the seventeenth century had to contend with natural disasters that required imperial intervention, but with local solutions. This paper focuses on the effects of natural disasters on urban planning and architecture in the seventeenth century in southern Italy and the Philippines; responses to natural disasters in urban planning and building practices; and the evolution of architectural building practices and techniques.
In 1645, Manila’s Spanish district of Intramuros was destroyed by an earthquake. Seen as the entrepôt between New Spain and China, the need to rebuild was urgent. Manila was not completely adrift from the long arm of the empire, as the Viceroyalty of New Spain was a mere ocean away. Indeed, the Philippines were absorbed by the viceregal body of New Spain after Manila was established as the capital city in 1571. Priests, who had travelled from Spain to Mexico, and then from Mexico to the Philippines, were the unofficial carriers of architectural style in the Spanish Empire. Architecture and city planning had to contend with not only earthquakes but also fires and typhoons on an annual basis. Soon after establishing architectural forms, maps of the Philippines in official and unofficial capacities soon made their way to the court in Madrid, showing the disparity between that which was presented to the Spanish Crown, and what was used as a tool to convert the local populace.
In 1693, Sicily was the site of a terrible earthquake that led to tragic loss of life and destroyed medieval city centers. This paper considers a collection of maps and images of urban devastation in various centers in eastern Sicily created following the earthquake, documenting the alteration of the city form from medieval center to an idealized baroque plan. These maps and artistic renderings of destruction after the 1693 earthquake in Sicily show that rebuilding the city followed baroque urban planning not from nearby Naples, but instead from the imperial center of Madrid, during a period where map creation showed a patron or regent a glorified version of the evolving, renewed city.
Using archival evidence and cartography as its basis, this paper proposes a reconsideration of these maps and images and examines the potential idealization of city form that took place in theory but not in practice.
Visualizing Empire: Classical Architecture and Colonial Representation in the Mauritshuis
Albert Maximilian Fischer
abstractAlbert Maximilian Fischer
In a letter from 1642 sent from Dutch Brazil to the Dutch Republic, Count Johan Maurits of Nassau Siegen reported that the directors of the Dutch West India Company had begun to call his residence in The Hague the Sugar House. At that time he was governor general in Brazil, overseeing the Company’s colonial enterprise. The building, designed by Jacob van Campen and begun in 1633, stood prominently on the Plein next to the Binnenhof and was conceived to express his rank and global activities. From Brazil he followed the construction, sending instructions and materials, including tropical hardwoods for the staircase and sugar, whose trade financed the project and shaped its popular name.
The Mauritshuis exemplifies the reception of Italian architectural theory in the Netherlands, described by Ottenheym as a northern form of Italian classicism inspired by Palladio and Scamozzi. Van Campen created an interior iconographic program, reconstructed by Roscam Abbing, in which works by Albert Eckhout and Frans Post and a famous tapestry cycle complemented the classicist architecture. Brazilian landscapes in Dutch pictorial modes and ethnographic portraits translated the colonial periphery into metropolitan representation. Absent were the violence of uprisings and the enslavement of Africans. Instead the imagery projected a peaceful and prosperous colony under an enlightened governor, shaping Dutch visions of empire.
Within Dutch humanist circles the study of antiquity claimed a cultural lineage for the Republic. The imagined classical heritage provided symbolic legitimacy in Europe. The adoption of Italian architectural theory, offering access to ancient Rome through Renaissance treatises, intertwined with imperial aspiration. My dissertation examines how antiquity and the visualization of the New World converged in the Mauritshuis as a metropolitan site where classical order and colonial conquest met.
The conference City Networks in Europe and Beyond offers an ideal context for this research. I argue that both the architectural form of the Mauritshuis in the urban fabric of The Hague and its interior display of exotic images and materials, widely described by early modern visitors, materialized the idea of a just Dutch dominion in Brazil. Caspar Barlaeus’s illustrated account of Dutch Brazil echoed these strategies in text and image.
Session 33 - From Chroniclers to Citizen Scientists. The Long-durée of Lay Research in Urban History, 17th - 21st Centuries
Current debates on Citizen Science have sparked a new interest in the tradition of non-academic engagement in urban history. This session will develop a long-durée perspective on the many, and changing forms of lay research since the 17th century. It will address recurring questions about non-academic contributions to urban historiography.
Coordinators: Sebastian Haumann, Roey Sweet
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Coordinators: Sebastian Haumann, Roey Sweet
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Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Chroniclers as ‘citizen scientists’ in the Low Countries, 1500-1850.
Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann
abstractErika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann
Traditionally marginalized as amateurish and trivial, early modern local chronicles are increasingly recognized as useful windows onto the vernacular knowledge practices of literate citizens. This paper analyses a digitized corpus of 204 Dutch-language chronicles from the Low Countries (1500–1850), in order to identify the motivations and methodologies of these ‘citizen-scientists’. The paper demonstrates that chronicling was a ubiquitous local practice that was driven by a sense of civic duty among community stakeholders. While authors across the social spectrum often employed a ‘modesty topos’ regarding their literary and historical skills, they demonstrated significant confidence in their roles as reliable witnesses of their times. Many chroniclers were well aware of evolving historiographical practic-es in the world of print. They also adopted professional paratextual tools like indices, marginalia, and explicit source citations from printed historical works. Crises often functioned as a catalyst for record-keeping. The number of chronicles surged during periods of political rupture, such as the Dutch Revolt and the Age of Revolutions, when authors sought to ‘archive the present’ and provide an alternative to mainstream discourse. They relied not only on their own observations but also backed these up with copies of relevant written sources. Local chronicles were thus not archaic relics but sophisticated expressions of responsible citizenship. By documenting the intersection of su-pralocal crises and local impact, chroniclers constructed enduring archives intended to preserve communal identity and protect historical truth for future generations.
Competing Histories, Competing Powers: Lay Research, Urban Memory, and Institutional Conflict in Early 18th-Century Paris
Guang Yang
abstractGuang Yang
In early18th-century Paris, officers of the municipal council (Hôtel de Ville) and the Châtelet vigorously defended their competing jurisdictions through history-writing. The Châtelet’s newly empowered police provoked Commissaire Nicolas Delamare to publish the multi-volume Traité de la Police (1705–1719) as a polemical statement. Drawing on extensive archival and legal sources, Delamare distinguishes sharply between consular jurisdiction, “police particulière” and “police générale”. Under this scheme, the municipal leaders are confined to adjudicating river-trade disputes, while the Châtelet claims the general policing authority. Delamare selectively omits or abbreviates contrary documents (notably the 1672 royal ordinance). Contemporary observers noted that the Traité therefore served not merely as a treatise on urban policing but as a strategic weapon against the city’s claims.
Alarmed by Delamare’s influence, city leaders commissioned a counter-history. In 1725 Michel Félibien and Guy-Alexis Lobineau’s Histoire de la ville de Paris appeared as an authorized response, explicitly defending municipal prerogatives. It opens with Pierre Le Roy’s Dissertation sur l’origine de l’Hôtel de Ville, a rigorous rebuttal to Delamare. Le Roy marshals numerous unpublished charters, registers and early chronicles (collected in a “Recueil de chartes” from the Paris archives). According to the chapter, Le Roy then extends Paris’s origins back to antiquity, arguing that the city inherited the privileges of its ancient nautes (river merchants) from Roman times. Lobineau supplements this with an archaeological element: stone blocks bearing a Roman inscription, found in Notre-Dame in 1711, dedicated to the nautes. From these, he infers that the Parisian municipality was already in place under Emperor Tiberius. The placement of Le Roy’s polemical dissertation at the start of the Histoire was a deliberate strategy to foreground the municipalist thesis.
These rival histories underscore how local history-writing was instrumentalized in an institutional conflict. Both Delamare and the Félibien–Lobineau team exhibit “profound knowledge of ancient titles” and employ meticulous diplomatic and archival methods. The chapter highlights the exceptional richness of sources on both sides—overlooked royal edicts, unpublished registers, medieval charters and contemporary printed accounts. Both works amass an “arsenal of arguments” from this evidence. This case illustrates
Lay Monument Surveyor, or Chronicler of the Past?
Viktor Myskovszyk, Art Teacher in the Service of Monument Protection in 19th-Century Hungary
Gábor Papp
abstractGábor Papp
My presentation aims to show how lay people in Hungary participated in the research of urban history and architectural history in the mid-19th century. I will show the broader context in which it was natural for members of the lay bourgeoisie to actively participate in discovering the history of the city or founding institutions. The primary task of the Provisional (later National) Committee for Hungarian Monuments, an organization dealing with monuments established in 1872 based on the Austrian model, was to survey and describe the monuments of the past. The lay local patriots who participated in the cataloguing of monuments played a very important role not only in laying the foundations for scientific work on monuments, but also in turning towards the past and shaping the identity of the urban bourgeoisie.
Through the story of Viktor Myskovszky (1838-1909), an art teacher with a degree in architecture I would like to present the role of lay research and its changing role in urban history. For the call of the Committee he compiled and drew the buildings and objects of the cities of Košice, Bardejov, and other cities in present-day Slovakia. More than 700 of his drawings, their documentation, and the on-site sketches that served as the basis for the drawings can now be studied in the former archives of the Committee (Budapest). In my presentation, I will use three monuments (Kassa, Cathedral, St. Michael's Chapel, Bártfa, Town Hall) to illustrate his work and the process by which, from the 1880s onwards, his work came under criticism in line with the changing attitude towards historical monuments. He was criticized for his lack of professionalism: the lack of the accuracy of his measurements already reflected the approach and expectations of a new era.
Based on the examples presented in the lecture, I would like to point out, too, the extent to which the concept of the layman itself can be interpreted in terms of the process of professionalization. I am thinking of how the changing role of the intelligentsia in the second half of the 19th century influenced the relationship to the past. While in mid-19th century Hungary the intelligentsia participated in the exploration of the city's history and the activities of its institutions, by the end of the 19th century the actors of the professional, academic world had to a certain extent monopolized the discourse on the past. This process had important consequences for the scientific approach of the 20th century
Session 34 - Narrated cityscape: Personally recorded routes versus itinerary guidebooks and travel manuals
Among spatial representations such as vedute, texts, and maps, special attention is paid to those providing spatial information as an itinerary. We aim at comparison of an individual´s experience and topographical approach (private records vs. chorographies and guidebooks) provided in a form of a deep mapping, 3D models, and GIS-based mappings.
Coordinators: Eva Chodejovska, Keti Lelo
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Coordinators: Eva Chodejovska, Keti Lelo
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Session 34 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Promoting Campo de’ Fiori: Orazio Torriani and the representation of a square in early modern Rome
Alessia Comodini
abstractAlessia Comodini
Campo de' Fiori was one of the most important urban centres of modern Rome: it was home to a lively market, and was crossed by the main commercial and ceremonial streets. From the late 15th century onwards, it was surrounded by prestigious cardinal palaces.
On the short southern side of the square stood Palazzo Orsini, one of the most sought-after rental residences of the time. Around 1621, Duke Paolo Giordano II Orsini (1591-1656) offered to rent the property to Prince Cardinal Maurizio di Savoia (1593-1657), who had come to Rome to fulfil his curial duties. This context provides the backdrop for an unpublished description of Campo de' Fiori written by Orazio Torriani (1578-1657), an architect in the service of the Roman aristocratic family. Torriani’s text complements the already known descriptions of Campo de' Fiori, mostly included in travel diaries or official reports, with a project to transform Palazzo Orsini and extend it to its urban context. While travellers and chroniclers provide a concrete image of the square, Orazio Torriani develops a selective representation with a specific rhetorical intent: to ennoble the image of the site and, consequently, promote the prestige of the palace. The focus is on the elements most consistent with the client’s aspirations, with praise for the historical stratification of the area: of great interest to a patron and antiquarian such as Maurizio di Savoia. The language adopted by Torriani is deliberately evocative and contributes to outlining an idealised vision of the urban context; by referring to legends linked to the place, the author aims to arouse poetic fascination. In this way, the description of the urban space becomes a tool for promoting and constructing the image of Campo de’ Fiori, becoming an integral part of the real estate strategy adopted by the Orsini family to enhance the value of their palace for rental purposes.
Urban Landscapes of Early Modern Europe. The travelogue of Cesare Magalotti (1625)
Valentina Emiliani
abstractValentina Emiliani
On March 17, 1625, the Cardinal Nephew Francesco Barberini left Rome with an entourage of over one hundred people. They traveled through various Italian and French cities, including Rome, Civitavecchia, Livorno, Genoa, Savona, Marseille, Avignon, Vienne (Isère), Lyon and Fontainebleau, before arriving in Paris on May 21, 1625. The diplomatic goal of the Apostolic Legation was to promote a peace agreement between the French and Spanish crowns regarding the war in Valtellina, by requesting the suspension of military operations (Borromeo 1997; Giordano 2018). Historiography has devoted considerable attention to the study of the legation's diplomatic activity (Bazzoni 1893; Blet 1982; Lutz 1971; Barbiche and De Dainville-Barbiche 1985; Pieyre 2005, 2007). Between May and October 1625, the cardinal received 769 requests, including bulls and petitions. Meanwhile, the legation's chancellery produced an average of 150 documents per month: an evidence of the political and religious influence of the legation, for which Pope Urban VIII paid a total of 70,839 scudi (Pieyre 2005, 2007). However, historiography almost completely ignored cultural influence of the journey and the sources that recorded it. The paper aims to study the travelogue written by Cesare Magalotti during Cardinal Francesco Barberini's legation to France in 1625 as sources for Italian transnational dialogue with European cultures. Cesare Magalotti as historian of the Barberini entourage recorded social events, history of cities and their inhabitants. However, literature almost overlooked the source for the reconstruction of Urban history (Vázquez Manassero 2020). Indeed, Cesare Magalotti the diplomatic activity of the Apostolic Legation and describes the history of the cities, records the personal experience of the entourage and their encounter with other cultural habits. Thanks to the analysis of the source, the comparison with the diary of Cassiano Dal Pozzo and the use of GIS, I am going to show the first results of an ongoing research which aims to reconstruct of the journey and the specific sites visited in the cities. The travelogue will offer a special overview the known history of their origin and the anecdotes connected with their imaginary and culture. Moreover, it will be possible to reconstruct the places visited by the cardinal Francesco Barberini, and the ceremonial enters.
Session 34 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Rome in the 17th century: an anatomy of a foreigner's stay
Keti Lelo, Eva Chodějovská
abstractKeti Lelo, Eva Chodějovská
The Grand Tour in terms of the educational journey of (Central) European elites, popular in the 16th to mid-18th century, is a specific type of early modern mobility which involves cultural and social history, historical geography, art history, and related disciplines, and it has already been proven that it has great potential for explaining the phenomenon of cultural transfer. Italy, and especially Rome were major destinations.
We are investigating the background of the medium-term stays of young aristocrats in Rome. Beyond a tourists´ perspective. We intend to discover and visualize Czernin´s Rome: his everyday-life spaces, his own trajectories set by his origin in terms of social class, country of origin, religion, family ties, and relationships, etc. We aim to do that in the maximum of topographic detail. To achieve that we make use of chorographies, guidebooks, early maps (town plans), and selected ego documents, outstandingly rich in spatial testimony, and perform spatial analysis using GIS.
Distinguishing between the Grand Tour in terms of educational journey of young noblemen mainly from Central Europe to Southern and Western Europe, and a tour undertaken mostly by the British middle class to Italy, involving the period extendingg the year 1752 when the decree issued by the empress Maria Theresa possessed significant restrictions on such costly travel, which distracted young men from domestic educational institutions (Cerman).
Mapping of Lviv/Lemberg by Danish travelers: Just Juel, Georg Brandes, and Henry Hellssen
Iryna Papa
abstractIryna Papa
Unlike many other European travelers, the Danes did not visit Lviv frequently, nor did they often leave behind memories of the city. Due to its geographical remoteness and various historical factors, Lviv as a city was «invisible» and rarely appeared on the mental maps of Northern European travelers. They were more drawn to renowned cultural centers such as Paris, London, Rome, and Berlin, as well as to the Russian capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which were of significant diplomatic and economic interest to the Danish Kingdom.
Since Lviv/Lemberg was not located within the trade or political interests of the Nordic countries, it was regularly wars that brought this city onto the mental and political maps of the Scandinavians and made it «visible» in other words.
Danish involvement in the Great Northern War alongside Peter the Great did not yield notable success or territorial gains for the monarchy. However, this war did stimulate diplomatic relations and increased movement of Danes in Eastern Europe. An interesting example of this is the visit of a Danish envoy to Lviv/Lemberg in 1711, which provided travel impressions from a representative of the northern empire about the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – a region that rarely attracted Danish travelers.
The next significant visit by a Dane to Lviv took place in 1898, when the city was already part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Famous Danish literary critic and writer Georg Brandes perceived Lviv as part of the Polish state, referring to it as the «capital of Galicia» (Galiziens Hovedstad). He was mindful of the political context of the time, labeling Lviv and Galicia as «Austrian Poland» (østerrigsk Polen).
The perception of Lviv among the Danes began to evolve further at the onset of the 20th century, particularly with the outbreak of World War I. Despite Denmark's neutral stance in the conflict, newspapers were filled with reports not only about events on the European fronts but also about the occupation of Lviv in the fall of 1914. The concise headlines of Danish reporter Henry Hellssen (e.g., «Lemberg», «Lemberg under Russerne», etc.) depicted Lviv as a historic European city within the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had come under Russian occupation.
All three examples illustrate the little-known «Danish perception» of Lviv/Lemberg as a European city that had been «invisible» despite its rich history and belonging to different European states and empires.
Tracing the Mobility of Flemish Painters from the Het Schilder-Boeck with H-GIS
Karolina Prykowska, Oskar Rojewski
abstractKarolina Prykowska, Oskar Rojewski
This paper offers the view that Het Schilder-Boeck (1603–1604) by Karel van Mander—long treated as a static biographical source—becomes newly revealing when its data are transformed into spatial patterns through H-GIS. By combining Art History methodologies with a Historical-Geographical Information System, the study builds a coherent framework for defining the group of painters whose mobility shaped the spread of Flemish visual culture across Europe. Despite the known limitations of the treatise, van Mander’s biographies, supported by extensive bibliographical research and archival work in Brussels, Bruges, and Antwerp, allow the creation of a mobility map of painters who travelled for study, work, diplomacy, or patronage.
The research reconstructs each artist’s movements, professional networks, guild affiliations, commissions, and artworks. All information derived from the primary source and complementary bibliography is integrated into a dedicated H-GIS database with precise chronological and geographical coordinates. This approach enables the production of interactive spatio-temporal visualisations that reveal mobility patterns, clusters of destinations, and correlations between artistic development and intercultural encounters.
By integrating a reading of Het Schilder-Boeck with quantitative, prosopographical, and visual analysis, the paper explains how migration stimulated stylistic innovation, artistic exchange, and the transnational diffusion of Flemish techniques. The presentation will introduce the H-GIS database and demonstrate how this digital tool redefines the study of Early Modern artistic mobility.
Mapping Ceremonial Topographies: The Rûznâme of Sultan Mustafa III as an Itinerary Narration in Early Modern Istanbul
Fatma Sarıkaya Işık
abstractFatma Sarıkaya Işık
The rûznâme, or imperial daily journal, represents a distinctive Ottoman genre that blends itinerary and court chronicle, charting the spatial and temporal rhythms of rulership through the Sultan’s daily schedule. First attested in systematic form in 1730, these records survive only in a small number of fragile, often incomplete exemplars, usually preserved in single copies. Among them is the Rûznâme-i Sultân Mustafa Hân-ı Sâlis (TSMA, E. 12359, fols. 1b–40b), which covers the period from Mustafa III’s enthronement in 1757 until 1763. Like other rûznâmes, it emphasizes public and ceremonial life—processions, audiences, festivals, inspections—illustrating how the Ottoman sultan performed authority in space and time. The detailed mapping of his movements within palace precincts, across Istanbul, and into extra-urban settings turns the text into a literal itinerary of power in the mid-eighteenth century.
Ottoman architectural historiography of this period has long been shaped by paradigms of decline and European influence, but has increasingly been re-evaluated through studies by scholars such as Maurice Cerasi, Tülay Artan, and Ünver Rüstem, who highlight the stately and social dimensions of architecture, as well as a hybrid language that redefined imperial identity within global early modern exchanges. Against this backdrop, the rûznâme offers a different perspective, revealing how ceremonial space was shaped not only through monumental patronage but also through personal and repetitive routes performed by the Sultan himself.
This paper examines Mustafa III’s rûznâme as a window into the ceremonial topography of sovereignty in early modern Istanbul. By integrating the day-by-day record of the Sultan’s movements into categories of sacred, administrative, and recreational spaces, this study illustrates how daily itineraries highlight an urban geography shaped by mobility and presence—dimensions often marginalized in architectural historiography. Visualizing these itineraries through mapping and GIS allows us to reconstruct the Sultan’s “ceremonial city,” and invites us to rethink the relationship between ritual practice and the architectural canon in eighteenth-century Istanbul.
Session 35 - Sound and processional practices in Early Modern Mediterranean cities [Round Table]
This round table presents recent research into the role of sound in processional practice in several Mediterranean cities in the early modern period, with the purpose of providing a comparative perspective which allows us to assess differences and similarities. Case-studies from Spain, France, Italy, Croatia and Turkey will be discussed.
Coordinators: Tess Knighton, Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita
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Coordinators: Tess Knighton, Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita
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Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Between Discipline and Devotion: On Sonic Identity of Early Modern Ragusan Confraternities (1400-1700)
Tin Cugelj
abstractTin Cugelj
This paper shows how sound shaped the devotional and social life of confraternities in early modern Republic of Dubrovnik (Ragusa). Drawing on confraternal matriculas, episcopal visitations, and civic records, approached through the lens of auditory history, the paper asks how auditory practices such as bell-ringing, chant, organ music, and civic music structured collective belonging and embodied the Republic’s ideals of order and piety.
How did confraternities operate in a Republic where everything was tightly controlled? How did the confraternities organise collective participation while asserting spatial and institutional identity? In what ways did sung offices, organ accompaniment, or processional music mediate private devotion and public representation? Lastly, how did Dubrovnik’s tightly governed urban order shape what could be heard and by whom?
Rather than offering conclusive answers, this paper approaches the sonic identity of Ragusan confraternities as a framework for reconsidering how early modern cities constructed belonging, regulation, and piety through sound. By listening through administrative and prescriptive sources, it considers how confraternal sound practices contributed to Dubrovnik’s civic identity and situates them within broader Mediterranean patterns of ritual audibility and acoustic governance.
Sharing ceremonials? Praying for water in two Mediterranean cities (15th–18th Centuries). Processions, sounds and city networks
Francesc Orts-Ruiz
abstractFrancesc Orts-Ruiz
Barcelona and Valencia were, in many ways, two similar cities. Located on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula, both towns had very important ports and commercial institutions which connected them with other cities throughout Europe, especially with other harbors.
Both cities also had a rich network of guilds and confraternities, which participated not only in the commercial, but also in the social and religious life of the city, actively participating in the rituals and performances that filled the annual calendar.
Finally, because of their location, Barcelona and Valencia periodically suffered from water shortages, when rainfall was scarce (or non-existent), which, according to historical records, was one of the main problems facing civic administrations in the past.
One of the ways of combating calamities in Late Medieval and Early Modern cities was to ask God for mercy and help, and one of the consequences of this belief was the calling of rogation processions. Thus, in addition to the annual celebrations, both Barcelona and Valencia organized masses and processions with the aim of imploring God’s mercy, showing him penance and good Christian behaviour. These rituals were not held in fixed dates, but depended on the needs of the city and the importance of the emergency. As a way of solving a problem that affected the entire population, these events brought together not only the religious community, but every town's inhabitant.
The aim of this proposal is to analyse these ceremonies in both cities, studying the historical documentation to try to find similarities and differences. Reading and comparing the descriptions, announcements, organisation, itineraries, sounds and rituals will help us to better understand the importance given to these events, but also the idiosyncrasies of each city, which had its own traditions. Thus, although these localities had lots of things in common –shared religion and beliefs, administration, climate– both had and preserved local traditions and rituals, centred on devotion to certain saints, relics or places that were considered sacred and even miraculous. This affected and shaped the ritual of each city, and was almost certainly the origin of these differences.
Studying rituals using this comparative methodology will help us to find commonalities, but also better understand each city’s «way of being», its identity and the sense of belonging that made men and women become members of a community.
Session 36 - Liturgical Streets: Urban Processions and Religious Practices in Iberian Cities (15th-19th Centuries)
This session explores religious processions as urban liturgy and symbolic power in the cities, with a focus on cathedral rituals and feasting in Spain, transforming urban space. It invites case studies comparative perspectives, and interdisciplinary approaches on how processions shaped civic relations, festive calendars, and urban space.
Coordinators: Nil Rider Enrique, Carles Freixes Codina, Daniel Vilarrúbias Cuadras
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Coordinators: Nil Rider Enrique, Carles Freixes Codina, Daniel Vilarrúbias Cuadras
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Session 36 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The processions of the Five Wounds of Christ in early modern Barcelona
Xavier Narbón
abstractXavier Narbón
The five wounds that Jesus Christ suffered during his crucifixion -a wound of a nail driven into each hand and each foot, as well as the wound of a lance in his side- were the focus of a devotion that began in the twelfth century and was subsequently encouraged by the stigmatisations of St. Francis of Assisi (c.1181-1226) and the lay Dominican St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380). Franciscans and Dominicans were thus among the most fervent followers of this devotion, which became especially popular in the late medieval and early modern periods. The literal imitation of Christ’s suffering and the prayer of five wounds were also behind the penitential practices of the flagellants and the processions of the confraternities dedicated to the Five Wounds that appeared at the end of the fifteenth century.
The Barcelona city council, in agreement with the cathedral chapter, sometimes gave the order to begin the procession cycle of the Five Wounds of Christ, on the occasion of wars, plagues and droughts. These early modern processions departed from the cathedral for five days, each day heading to a chapel dedicated to a different Christ’s wound and returning again to the cathedral. The sacred topology thus created was integrated by the Hospital de la Santa Creu and four convents: Sant Francesc (Friars Minor), Santa Maria de Jerusalem (Poor Clares), Santa Caterina (Dominican friars) and Santa Maria de Montsió (Dominican nuns).
The study of this processional cycle presents various points of interest. First of all, their itineraries and destinations coincided in some cases with those of the royal entries (e.g., the main event, with the king swearing to uphold the city's constitutions, privileges, and customs, took place in Sant Francesc square). Secondly, the cycle was activated only in cases of extreme gravity and as a sequel to the plea already begun with another procession cycle, in this case dedicated to the Seven Joys of the Virgin, that preceded it and had a similar configuration (with seven chapels, each one for a different joy). Thirdly, the literal imitation of Christ’s suffering in the processions of the Five Wounds created sensory spaces especially interesting to be analyzed from the sensory history approach. And, lastly, the Five Wounds became a powerful symbol of Catholicism as a reaction to the dissolution of monasteries and religious orders in many territories converted to Protestantism during 1520s and 1530s. It is no coincidence that this processional cycle gained importance in Barcelona from those years onwards.
Promoting faith in modern Barcelona: the procession of the Holy Crusade Bull (16th-18th centuries)
Alfredo Chamorro Esteban
abstractAlfredo Chamorro Esteban
Among the range of processions that were commonly held in Catholic cities, the procession of the crusade bull is still largely unknown to historians today. Barcelona was the first city on the peninsula to receive the papal bull, having arrived by galley from Rome, a reason more than sufficient for the celebration of an annual procession, in which the main political and religious authorities of the city participated.
In this ceremony, the treasurer of the Crusade in Catalonia enjoyed great prominence, as he was the delegate of the president of the Crusade Council in the principality and, therefore, the highest representative of the institution. Thus, this procession, in which the crusade bull was carried under a canopy, not only promoted the papal grant to fight against Islam, but also represented an ideal occasion for the political and social promotion of the crusade bull treasurer in Barcelona.
In the present work, we will analyze the evolution of this procession throughout the modern centuries, focusing on aspects such as the usual route followed by the procession; the participants in it and the roles they played during the ceremony; the role of the treasurer in the organization and celebration of the procession; and the ceremonial adjustments and issues of precedence that may have arisen over the centuries.
«Per preparar lo modo de anar al Jubileu» Jubilee processions in 1826 Mataró.
Héctor López Silva
abstractHéctor López Silva
The aim of this paper is to analyse the different roles of religious confraternities during the organization of the Jubilee Procession carried out in the town of Mataró during the Jubilee ceremonies organized in 1826. As a result, we want to expose how these variety of confraternities prepared themselves to obtain the Jubilee of that year. That is why our focus will be on confraternities such as that of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blessed Souls of the Purgatory, Our Lady of Sorrows or the Saint Sacrament. We also aim to provide further research on the role played by the guilds and the civil authorities from Mataró.
To achieve this, our first step is to read all the documents generated by these confraternities, such as the variety of agreements to which the rulers of these confraternities had to arrive to perform the processions to achieve the Jubilee. Furthermore, we also aim to read the documents generated by local authorities, that also participated in this kind of celebrations. Finally, our focus of interest is also on guilds, to comprehend which role they played during the organization and celebration of the Jubilee procession.
“Y anaven ab dita professó los diablots”: new examinations on the history of processional devils in the city of Barcelona
Alvit Martínez I Civit, Clàudia Mateo Lozano
abstractAlvit Martínez I Civit, Clàudia Mateo Lozano
During the last decades of the Middle Ages, urban processions gained a central role in understanding religious, civic and political life in the Mediterranean cities of the Iberian Peninsula. Processions created spaces and moments that arranged the physical and mental world, and in which artistic expressions were predominant, up to the point of being thought of as performances of social representation. In this sense, the presence of representations or entremesos as a structural element of a procession took relevance in the civic matters. Moreover, the fact that some commercial guilds ended up being managers of certain representations, a well-known fact in the cities of the Catalan-speaking territories, must be taken into consideration as an added factor. That is the case, in the city of Barcelona, of the representation of processional devils and the local Gremi de Tenders Revenedors. Linked through Saint Michael the Archangel, patron of the guild and key figure of the representation of the devils as the divine justice counterpoint to the hubris call that they symbolised, tradition has it in the city of Barcelona that this entremès was managed under the direction of that guild from the late 15th century onwards.
Beyond the religious, catechetical or moralising content of said representation, this proposal focuses on seeing the social, organisational matters of the processional devils of the city of Barcelona throughout its history as an entremès. From its appearance in the context of the late Medieval religious processions, up to its eventual disappearance from the festive and processional line-up of the city, the goal of the proposal is to study who ordered the representation of the devils, who managed it de facto, who was it who actually played a dramatic role in it, and when and how all of it was done, regarding materials, numbers of actors and models of representation. The proposal presents, therefore, the main lines and hypotheses, as well as the first results of a research on the history of the processional devils in the city of Barcelona and their link to the Gremi de Tenders de Revenedors that is currently being developed under the auspice of the Associació Antic Gremi de Revenedors, and that looks to contribute to the history of the city’s popular culture with new contributions and perspectives on the local festive reality, as well as with an extended review of the archival documentation that has been historically referred to regarding this topic.
Session 37 - Urban networks put to the test of the "glocal": port cities and globalisation in the modern era, 16th-19th centuries
This panel aims to explore, through the concept of the 'glocal', the ways in which European port cities in the modern era become places where globalisation is experienced. How does it change the urban landscapes, the social practices and the material culture of the inhabitants? How maritime and port networks reconfigure urban life?
Coordinators: Gábor Czoch, Caroline Le Mao
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Coordinators: Gábor Czoch, Caroline Le Mao
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Session 37 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Quand Bordeaux de port régional devint un port de la globalisation
Michel Figeac
abstractMichel Figeac
La ville de Bordeaux à la fin du XVIIe siècle stagnait autour de 35 000 habitants. Portée par une croissance de 144%, elle atteignait en 1789, 110 000 habitants. Au XVIIe siècle, Bordeaux ne s'illustrait guère que dans le cabotage, elle n'avait pas de flotte puissante car Hollandais et Anglais venaient charger le vin et l'alcool. En un siècle, les grandes maisons d'armement s'étaient multipliées. La raison de cette mutation s'explique par le développement du trafic vers les Antilles et dans un second temps de la traite négrière. Les Bordelais avaient pris en main leur destin maritime et ils étaient entrés dans l'ère de l'économie globale. Nous en mesurerons les conséquences sur l'espace urbain.
On lit que la ville ne sut pas s'industrialiser mais ce changement de dimension entraîna néanmoins une transformation de l'espace urbain avec l'apparition de verreries, de faïenceries et surtout de sucreries car le sucre se déversait dans la ville avant d'être réexpédié vers le nord de l'Europe. On mesurera le commerce avec l'autre côté de l'Atlantique en ouvrant les chais et les lourdes portes des maisons de pierre car une nouvelle culture matérielle fit irruption faite de bois d'acajou pour le mobilier de port, de produits exotiques comme le thé, le tabac, le café et le chocolat. Ces produits stimulants furent à l'origine d'une nouvelle civilisation de l'objet. Et dans la boutique de la capitale de la Guyenne, on débitait des indiennes, des liqueurs fabriquées par Marie Brizard. On pense au Lisbonne décrit par Serge Gruzinski deux siècles plus tôt. La ville de bois et de torchis devint une ville de pierre, une vitrine de l'Atlantique.
Enslaved people in Lisbon during the XVII century in a “glocal” context
João Nunes
abstractJoão Nunes
In the early modern age, enslaved people were highly increasing in number in Portugal, due to the dynamics of the Portuguese Empire. As far as Lisbon is concerned, around 10% of the population, in the mid-16th century, consisted of individuals subjected to enslavement. Despite of the decrease in the influx of slaves to Lisbon during the 16th and 17th centuries, the number was significant due to circumstances related to self-reproduction. This study seeks to delve further into and discuss this topic through aspects related to the origins and the existence of enslaved people during the first quarter of the 17th century, manly focusing on the movement of the slaves in a global context and in the existence of some of these slaves.
The enslaved individuals were mostly born in Africa. Regarding African origins, the vast majority came from the western coast, especially from Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé, Congo, Mina (Ghana), and Guinea, territories in which Portuguese presence was felt. They were also part of transatlantic slave trade routes. People from Asia came mainly from India, Bengal being the main origin. The slave trade in India was primarily conducted through Goa, one of the most important Portuguese cities and a commercial post in the East. There were, however, also people from various territorial spaces, albeit to a lesser extent, and which correspond to the present-day territories of Indonesia, Myanmar, Iran, Malaysia, and China. Those born in Europe came from Portugal and they were descendants of slaves who already lived here. The majority arrived in Lisbon still as children, under the age of 12. Being taken away from their families at such a young age, they typically did not know their parents. Upon entering Portuguese custody, they assumed a new identity and existence, legitimized through baptism.
Glocalization and cosmopolitanism in an 18th-century Azorean town
Tiago Silva
abstractTiago Silva
This proposal outlines research in progress examining the urban and social landscape of Faial Island’s port town, Horta, in the 18th century, with special emphasis on sensory and material culture.
During the mid-17th century, Faial emerged as the main port of the Azores archipelago, integrated into the North Atlantic shipping routes and attracting foreign merchants to settle in Horta. These developments established continuous exchanges of people, goods, and knowledge, turning Horta into a center of global interactions.
This study aims to reconstruct Horta’s urban and social landscape in the 18th century through microhistorical analysis and sensory perspectives. The principal research questions include:
- What materials circulated within this community, and where did they originate?
- What were their local impacts, and how did they reflect global networks?
- In what ways did material culture manifest cosmopolitan and glocal tendencies in daily life?
The research employs interdisciplinary methodologies, including urban history, material culture analysis, and prosopography. Primary source materials include local administration records, custom records, and the analysis of urban-ism, buildings and artifacts.
By making a microhistory of material culture, it was possible to find traces from all around the globe, including an extensive presence of luxury goods, such as “exotic woods” and spices, and the emergence of artistic manifestations that mixed materials, techniques and aesthetics (such as the furniture made with Brazilian wood and African ivory, yet with Indian style decoration). A prosopography of foreigners and consular representations confirms the international presence, supporting its reputation as a cosmopolitan community. The research shows that the port was a social and institutional reality that structured life in town and beyond, influencing space and deeply involving the community in ways that are still being explored. Collectively, these findings provide a comprehensive view of a small society where global connections transformed the landscape and rapidly became part of daily life.
Conversely, the focus on local society and institutions reveals a typical Ancient Régime system, the disadvantages of being a national periphery, and a material culture still largely based in local resources.
This paper aims to contribute to the debate by highlighting the contrasts between the global influences and the persistence of local realities.
Session 37 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Theatres and urban sociability in a port city: Trieste 1814-1914
Giulia Brunello
abstractGiulia Brunello
Along the Nineteenth century and until the First World War, Trieste is the port of the Habsburg multi-national empire, and an emporium city embedded in commercial and cultural networks extending into a multi-national Mediterranean and Black Sea controlled by Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires. In this port city, different linguistic and religious communities coexist (primarily Italian, German and Slovenian) and inhabitants use different languages in different contexts. The trade and a significant urban growth make Trieste a crossroads for the movement of people, goods, knowledge and trends.
My proposal examines how theatre shapes urban sociability, moulds collective identities, and constructs transnational networks of labour, culture, and artistic exchange.
By adopting a socio-historical perspective, the presentation will highlight: the mobility of artists, theatre companies, impresarios, and backstage workers (stagehands, set designers, costume designers), together with the circulation of sets, costumes, and theatrical equipment; the place of Trieste within the career trajectories of Italian artists; the repertoires of Triestine theatres in a multilingual urban context; and finally the role of theatre in the construction of a cosmopolitan and multilinguistic civic identity.
Starting from a local context, the proposal aims to explore broader geographical and cultural spheres by situating Trieste within the Habsburg imperial and Upper Adriatic regions, an area in which, rather than taking the rise of nationalism for granted, it attends to the possibilities and alternatives opened up by a cosmopolitan multinationalism. This way, Trieste, for a long time a contested border city, can thus serve as a laboratory for reflecting on Europe itself, and an ideal site for the production of a “post-national” identity. Trieste can stand both as a centre and a periphery of a cultural phenomenon that transcends borders, in a new European space conceived not as the mere sum of differences, but as the practice of “a continuous negotiation that goes on despite the otherness and the difference” .
Is the Global Unlovable? Changing Sentimental Attachment to the Nascent Steamship Port City of Fiume
Veronika Eszik
abstractVeronika Eszik
Late Nineteenth Century Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) was a small but important international port city in a Habsburg borderland, which, following the Compromise concluded by the Hungarian and the Croatian part of the Hungarian Kingdom (1868) was administered directly from Budapest as a so-called corpus separatum in spite of the fact that it lay on Croatian soil. The only Hungarian seaport was a microcosm of city dwellers originating from various ethnicities, speaking different langauges and excercising different economic and cultural activities. Due to massive investments of the Hungarian state in five decades, this Mediterranean fishing town became the tenth European seaport by the volume of its trade. This rapid and radical transformation was indeed carried out by a national other.
This paper investigates changing attitudes towards an urban tissue under radical transformation. In spite of ongoing negotiations between local and global interests, the industrial steamship port seems to consume more and more from the cityscape. The result is an extended Central European neighborhood in an originally Mediterranean urban setting, and a spectacular divide between the modern port and the old town. In my paper, I go beyond these dualities to display microhistories of disappearing urban spaces in order to offer a closer look at the everyday urban experiences of Fiume’s growing global significance. The paper combines the methodology of spatial turn with that of the history of emotions, while also takes notice of the entanglement of national sentiments and sensibilities to urban change. It seeks to demonstrate that sceptical or even hostile attitudes towards urban modernity appear in every layer of the urban society and overwrite traditional social hierarchies.
Session 38 - Commodities, commerce, and urban network in the pre-modern world and the colonial expansion
This session examines the way in which urban networks enabled commercial and colonial expansion by Europeans before the nineteenth century. Focusing on a range of cities and geo-historical contexts, it is especially concerned with the development of commodity flows and systems and the people responsible for them.
Coordinators: Maarten Prak, Philip Withington
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Coordinators: Maarten Prak, Philip Withington
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Session 38 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The social foundations of mercantile networks in early modern England
Thomas Leng
abstractThomas Leng
The importance of merchant networks in connecting the cities of early modern Europe is widely recognised. Merchants supplied information that smoothed the flow of goods between regions, and diffused a collective commercial culture that supported cross-cultural interactions. These networks have often been represented as flexible, cosmopolitan and relatively egalitarian, epitomised by the figure of the commission agent and the etiquette of courtesy and friendship that helped generate trust between individuals distant from one another. But this culture did not spring spontaneously from the conditions of premodern commerce. Sixteenth century English merchants commonly managed their businesses as extended households, with apprentices acting as agents overseas bound by ties of patriarchal authority, resulting in deeply hierarchical networks though ones often characterised by inter-generational tensions. Apprentice-agents overseas often exhibited behaviour distinctly at odds with the standards that merchant householders were expected to abide by at home, characterised by sociability, youthful excess and a volatile combination of solidarity and rivalry. This paper considers how, as English merchant networks expanded and became more complex (especially in the Mediterranean), norms of commercial management had to be rethought, and different manners adopted.
Commodities, Merchant Practices and Geography – Mapping Trade in Early Modernity
Susanne Rau
abstractSusanne Rau
Economic exchange is an important component of globalisation processes. Exchange over long distances can generally take place through the movement of bodies or things in space or with the help of communication media. The former is physical or direct, while the latter is indirect. This proposal examines the emergence of global exchange processes from the perspective of individual travelling merchants, rather than from a systemic perspective. Some of these merchants have written about how natural or manufactured goods were produced, exchanged and trafficked across long distances. The finding from reading the sources is that these mercantile travel writers are either creating their city networks along the routes they travelled or mapping the (early modern) global market simply by constructing this connectivity through their narratives, pointing to towns and cities (and markets and bazaars therein) as places where goods are traded and transshipped.
In this paper, I will focus on one author and one trade book: Lewes Roberts (1596–1641), who travelled extensively during his apprenticeship as a wholesaler and later worked for the East India Company and some other companies. In 1638, he published a compendium for merchants entitled The Merchants Mappe of Commerce, which aimed to depict the entire world of trade at that time. It brought together geography (knowledge of countries, provinces and cities) with knowledge of merchant practices and goods available in specific cities and regions. The inclusion of maps, an index of the ‘most notable things’ (places and subjects) and a ‘table of longitude and latitude of all the principall cities’ (323 in total) underline the book’s claim to map commerce. Both the maps drawn and those generated by narration helped readers to understand and conceive of the world as a connected space, which was increasingly important as ‘global goods’ entered European markets through their ports.
This paper addresses the central theme of the conference by focusing on trading cities outside Europe (which are nevertheless connected by trade routes). It contributes to the panel’s interest in the development of commodity flows and the role of cities (as transshipment and transit points) by emphasising the perspective of contemporary actors / authors who were involved in the construction of urban networks and the ‘map’ of commerce.
Provisioning the Mission: Logistics, Goods and Commodities, and Eighteenth-Century German Protestant Expansion
Gabrielle Robilliard-Witt
abstractGabrielle Robilliard-Witt
A distinctive feature of early modern coloniality was the presence of religious missions. Often established in or near urban trading hubs, missions became important institutional actors in the movement of goods and knowledge between the “Old” and the “New” world, forging new city-connections and bringing towns and cities in both European and non-European hinterlands into global trading and communication networks. However, compared to major trading companies such as the English or Dutch East India Companies, smaller merchant houses and individual merchants, the commercial activities and impacts of mission and their entanglements with commercial trading and social networks have received far less attention. This paper examines the religious activities and networks of German Pietists and their impact on the flow of commodities, both commercial and for mission use, between European cities (Halle, London) and the Danish-German-Halle Mission in the Danish trading post of Tranquebar on the South-Indian Coast in the eighteenth century. In the early eighteenth century, Halle Pietists cooperated with the English Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge to move goods and people between Halle and the mission in Tranquebar through the East India Company based in London. This paper will explore the kinds of goods shipped between Halle, London and Tranquebar (in both directions), the networks into which missionaries tapped to make provisioning the mission possible, and the local (indigenous) commodity networks utilised by missionaries to ensure the success of the mission and its institutions. As such it will highlight the role of religious (here: Protestant) expansion, religious institutions and their actors on the kinds of networks and commodity flows within European-Colonial networks.
Tobacco, Sugar, and Wares: Bristol’s Colonial Commodity Systems in the Seventeenth Century
Richard Stone
abstractRichard Stone
Based on detailed statistical evidence from the surviving customs, this paper examines the impact of the emergence of transatlantic trade on Bristol’s commercial networks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking a Digital Humanities approach to the Bristol Port Books and Wharfage Books, new analysis reveals that the city’s overseas trade more than doubled in value as a result of the emergence of these new markets in the space of little more than two decades. The resultant flow of slave grown tobacco and sugar from the ‘ghost acres’ of the new world opened up significant new markets, and in turn stimulated the growth of manufacturing in both the city and its hinterland to meet the colonists needs. These findings are considered in the light of Kenneth Pomeranz’s work on the ‘Great Divergence’ and Erik Williams arguments that slavery caused the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Through the prohibition on growing tobacco in Bristol’s neighbouring county of Gloucestershire, and the Navigation and Staple Acts which bound the colonists to only buy and sell produce through England the paper also examines the relationship between human and environmental agency in shaping this new flow of commodities.
Network of cities, network of trade. Small southern Portuguese cities in European trade in the second half of the 16th century
Ana Ribeiro
abstractAna Ribeiro
Portugal has long been recognized as a central actor in early modern international trade, largely due to its control of maritime routes that linked disparate regions of the globe. The profound impact and disruption generated by Portuguese overseas expansion on existing commercial circuits have traditionally led both national and international historiographies to privilege maritime commerce. Consequently, inland trading routes connecting Portugal to broader European markets have received comparatively little scholarly attention.
This presentation seeks to illuminate the existence and relevance of a significant overland trade route connecting the two Iberian courts—Lisbon and Madrid—through the lens of two small yet strategically important cities in the southern Portuguese hinterland: Évora and Elvas. Elvas functioned as a principal frontier stronghold facing Castile, while Évora, during the sixteenth century, emerged as the kingdom’s second most important urban centre. Évora benefited from repeated royal residence, which precipitated the construction of substantial urban infrastructure, including aqueducts, fountains, and palatial complexes. Moreover, the city’s elevation to an archbishopric in 1540 and the foundation of the kingdom’s second-oldest university in 1559 further enhanced its political, religious, and cultural significance. These developments strongly suggest the existence of a substantial urban market, whose demand would have stimulated commercial flows along the road linking Évora to Lisbon and the Castilian frontier, integrating the region into broader trading circuits.
What types of goods circulated through these inland routes? What value did they contribute to regional and (inter)national commerce? Did a local merchant community actively mediate exchanges between these cities and wider European markets, and who were its members? On what degree did these agents reflect the insertion of Alentejo region within the overseas Portuguese trade?
Our analysis draws on merchant correspondence written between 1560 and 1605 by Portuguese traders whose letters form part of the Portuguese collection within the Simon Ruiz Archive in Medina del Campo. Approximately 200 letters originating from Elvas, Évora, and other parts of Alentejo provide insight into both formal and informal commercial practices, the organization of trading circuits, the roles played by played by local and international agents and the mechanisms of of cross-border exchange.
The sweet connection between the port cities of Antwerp and Rijeka. The Privileged Company and the sugar refinery of Rijeka in international commerce (1750-1775)
Maja Perić
abstractMaja Perić
This presentation will focus on the ties that Antwerp had with Rijeka in the eighteenth century. Both the southern provinces of the Low Countries and the region around Rijeka belonged to the territory of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. With the Adriapolitik, the Viennese court sought to invest more in improving the free seaports located in their Adriatic Sea territory. They found a solution by establishing the Privileged Company of Trieste and Fiume in 1750 and issuing a patent that gave the ports advantages regarding tolls and the import of luxury exotic goods. In this way, the Habsburgs attempted to position themselves strongly and independently related to other colonial powers that sought their economic interests in overseas territories. Sugar was an important and much sought-after product at the time due to its multifunctionality in both culinary and medical fields. Consequently, the patent also granted permission to establish a sugar refinery in Rijeka to promote the distribution of the product throughout the rest of the empire. To ensure the proper management of the refinery, Maria Theresa drew on the knowledge and expertise of wealthy investors from Antwerp, who, as true cosmopolitans, were eager to accumulate capital. In this way, the monarch also succeeded in connecting the various areas within her territory, which was in line with the reforms and the pursuit of a more profitable political economy under the influence of the Enlightenment ideas of the time. The analysed correspondence, accounts, decisions, etc., preserved in the archives of Antwerp, Vienna and Rijeka will provide a clearer picture in this presentation of how the trade network between the different regions functioned. Among other things, we will look at the most important actors in the story, the process of sugar production, daily life in the factory and any problems that arose. In the past, little attention has been paid to these early modern (economic) relations between two maritime regions in Europe that may have been physically distant from each other, but had much to learn from each other. Furthermore, the case study can also be viewed from the perspective of the Enlightenment, which focused on economic progress, reforms, globalisation, cosmopolitanism etc. Only recently has a new light been shed on the Enlightenment, which is now seen not merely as a philosophical phenomenon, but as something in which political economy from a historical context was of crucial importance.
Session 38 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 210 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
„I am writing from this port of Salé, to which God has brought the ship in peace”: Urban Sales Networks in a Global Context
Dagmar Freist
abstractDagmar Freist
Session 38
Main Session
Commodities, commerce, and urban network in the pre-modern world and the colonial expansion
Organizers
• Phil Withington
University of Sheffield
• Maarten Prak
Utrecht University
Keywords
commodities, missions, merchants, colonialism, networks
Proposal by
Prof. Dr. Dagmar Freist, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg
https://uol.de/dagmar-freist
Dagmar.freist@uni-oldenburg.de
Summary:
„I am writing from this port of Salé, to which God has brought the ship in peace”: Urban Sales Networks in a Global Context
This paper focuses on the urban sales network of the port city of Salé, Marocco, in the early 17th century, and its religious, ethnical, and national diversity as well as its global embeddedness: a Jewish minority, comprising long-established Arabic-speaking Jews and Spanish/Ladino-speaking Jewish migrants from the Iberian Peninsula, the Sephardim, coexisted with the Muslim majority, and with traders of different religious affiliations from Africa, America and Europe. The pragmatic, often fragile coexistence, which formed the backbone of these urban sales networks, the impact of supply and demand on the flow of goods in Salé, and its linkeage to global trading networks and its colonial settings, will be told and analysed on the basis of a Jewish letter book. It was written in the 1630s by an agent of a Jewish trader in Amsterdam, who had sent his partner to Salé in order to trade on his behalf.
From Salé, the author of the letter book wrote his letters to merchants and family members in the emerging northern European port cities of Amsterdam and Hamburg, and to members of the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean, especially in Brazil. The letters deal with business, family matters, war, religion, and the fragility of the lives of people who have to reorient themselves in unfamiliar, often hostile surroundings. Beyond these general observations, these letters provide a direct and highly exciting insight into the structure and organisation of the trade networks and contacts in Salé.
The letter book survived among the prize papers in the High Court of Admirality in London (The National Archives UK), and will be digitized, contextualized and eventually presented open access by the team of the prize papers project (2018-2037) at Oldenburg University in cooperation with The National Archive UK, and the German Historical Institute, London (www.prizepapers.de ).
Infrastructure of Commerce: Commodity Trade and the European Factories of the Coromandel Coast
Giorgio Riello
abstractGiorgio Riello
Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese Carreira da Índia first and from 1600 the East India companies organized their activities by building or taking over a series of trading ports throughout the Indian Ocean called ‘factories’. They were points for collecting, assembling and sometimes manufacturing commodities which were then distributed in vessels returning to Europe or plying intra-Asian trade. More than 200 such factories underpinned European trade in Asia and created an ‘infrastructure of trade’ that turned out to be remarkably long-lasting. This paper starts by providing a broad overview of the work completed by the ERC CAPASIA project and the creation of a census of on ‘factories of the Indian Ocean’. Second, it considers the specific space of the factories of the Coromandel Coast of India and a. examines how commodities were produced and procured by European traders; b. investigates the role of individuals, their intermediation, and the importance of information within the space of the factories; c. analyses failures and breakdowns in the system of procurement, and ultimately the closures of factories themselves. The overall argument presented in this paper is that factories acted as major hubs in the structuring of trade in Asia and between Asia, Europe and the Atlantic. While a great deal of research has been carried out on the trading companies, less is known about the factories themselves as infrastructures and institutions. Important to this paper (and the project as a whole) is the consideration of factories not as ‘little Europes’ but interfaces between European and Asian systems of production and trade.
Session 39 - Lodging practices and networks of work, migration, and sociability. Long term perspectives across European cities and beyond (1500-present)
Lodging has long shaped urban networks through mobility, labour migration, and social exchange. Yet its history remains fragmented. This session explores the long-term evolution of urban lodging, tracing its changing forms and roles in cities across Europe and beyond.
Coordinators: Hilde Greefs, Rosa Salzberg, Jasper Segerink
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Coordinators: Hilde Greefs, Rosa Salzberg, Jasper Segerink
show/hide introduction
Session 39 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Landscape of Lodging in Early Modern Venice
Rosa Salzberg
abstractRosa Salzberg
By the sixteenth century, Venice had developed one of the most vibrant and diverse hospitality sectors in Europe, catering to a great range of visitors and migrants to the city. Alongside a small cluster of government-sanctioned inns, a much broader network of more or less formal lodging houses spread across the city, especially located in strategic areas near the port zone and other sites of transport. This paper zooms in at one particular ‘lodging hotspot’ in the sixteenth century: in and around the parish of San Giovanni Novo, close to Venice’s main port zone. Examining evidence for lodging activities in this area, it considers who ran these houses, who frequented them, and how they functioned as nodes in networks of migration, work and sociability. It also seeks to illuminate the dynamics of (often) cross-cultural interaction that could play out in these houses, frequently hinging on delicate matters such as religious rituals, food, and clothing. Surveying the evidence from Venice, the city’s lodging sector emerges as a very early example of a phenomenon that would recur in other growing urban centres into the modern period. While the case of sixteenth-century Venice may not be as well-documented as later examples, it nonetheless suggests the emergence of patterns that would then be confirmed elsewhere. These include the importance of lodging houses in providing employment opportunities to working class city-dwellers, especially women and more settled migrants; the role of these accommodations in shaping the experiences and trajectories of many types of migrants and visitors to the city; and the struggles of the urban authorities to regulate this largely informal sector.
Coping with visitors in the capitals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lodging places in 17th-century Krakow and Vilnius
Piotr Guzowski, Radosław Poniat, Marzena Liedke, Monika Kozłowska-Szyc, Ewa Każmierczyk
abstractPiotr Guzowski, Radosław Poniat, Marzena Liedke, Monika Kozłowska-Szyc, Ewa Każmierczyk
The aim of this paper is to present accommodation options in two cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that served as capitals: Krakow in Poland and Vilnius in Lithuania. The paper is based on descriptions of the cities: each of the buildings located within the city walls and the potential accommodation options for guests arriving for the royal coronation of Władysław IV in Krakow and the king and his court in Vilnius in 1636. Royal officials not only recorded the number of rooms and the equipment of houses, such as kitchens and baths, but also calculated how many people could be accommodated and how many horses could be kept in city buildings. The sources provide insight into the accommodation possibilities not only during such exceptional moments as the coronation or the court's stay, but also give an opportunity to learn about the facilities used on a daily basis by merchants and migrants arriving in these cities.
Where the Newcomers Slept: Lodging and Migrant Household Geographies in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam
Marlies Couch, Jelle Van Lottum, Thunnis Van Oort, Judith Brouwer
abstractMarlies Couch, Jelle Van Lottum, Thunnis Van Oort, Judith Brouwer
This paper asks a simple question: where did maritime migrants live in Amsterdam? The overarching aim is to explore whether geographies associated with arrival and lodging remain visible as migrants formed households in the city. Contemporary observers and company records suggest that many new recruits used inns and lodging houses in the port districts, which acted as key nodes in wider migration networks. Yet not all groups used the same doors into the city. Using a preliminary dataset of 275 VOC personnel linked to Amsterdam marriage banns that record residential locations and household ties, the paper maps where these men lived during intended household formation and examines residential proximity between VOC personnel and their prospective brides. The results show that German-born men were relatively dispersed by the time they appeared in the marriage banns, whereas the predominantly Scandinavian other foreign-born group remained much more strongly concentrated in Amsterdam’s eastern maritime districts. Among Scandinavian grooms, particularly short distances between prospective spouses were concentrated among men marrying Scandinavian women. These findings suggest that spatial patterns associated with migrant arrival and lodging could persist, disperse, or be reshaped as migrants formed households in the city. The paper concludes by considering how an expanded linked dataset can further reconstruct these changing migrant geographies.
Taking in, living in. Lodging and co-residence arrangements in 1702 Brussels
Anne Winter, Heidi Deneweth, Wouter Ryckbosch
abstractAnne Winter, Heidi Deneweth, Wouter Ryckbosch
This paper uses the 1702 nominal household census of Brussels in present-day Belgium to examine living arrangements and household compositions and zoom in on the various forms of lodging in semi-public and private settings, from subletting rooms to taking in boarders. Drawing on a newly compiled database on the more than 12,000 households registered in the 1702 Brussels fiscal census, the paper investigates correlations between household size and composition, wealth and social status, dwelling type and location, and patterns of co-residence and lodging. By demonstrating the ubiquity and variety of lodging practices, the paper replaces the idea of (nuclear) family households as dominant living patterns by a much more varied townscape of flexible residential experiences, and argues how the presence of diverse living-in opportunities provided a crucial ‘arrival infrastructure’ to cushion and absorb the high levels of turnover and transience characteristic for early modern cities.
Inns as Mediators of Migration and Information: Urban Interests in Transient Communities in Ulm, 18th–Early 19th Century
Sarah Minor
abstractSarah Minor
Focusing on the Free Imperial City of Ulm, this paper examines how local inns became logistical and informational hubs within European migration networks. By tracing Ulm's involvement in continental recruitment schemes the paper explores how lodging practices reflected and shaped the city's position in transnational urban systems.
Since at least the recruitment of settlers for Hungary in 1723, the Ulm City Council and local innkeepers had negotiated with various European powers over their participation in migration politics. Situated on the Danube, Ulm functioned as a key infrastructural node connecting Central and Eastern Europe and repeatedly experienced mass migration movements that brought together agents, lodgers, and intermediaries in a Europe-wide network of mobility.
Innkeepers who hosted or cooperated with recruiters became embedded in the arrangements these agents made with foreign governments, offering their establishments as quarters for recruiters and emigrants alike. By tolerating recruiters in their houses or actively engaging in the migration trade, they became part of transregional networks of carters, shipmasters, and envoys. Their inns functioned as supra-regional information centres, frequented not only by migrants but also by locals seeking news about emigration opportunities. In this way, inns mediated both the movement of people and the circulation of information across borders.
The paper asks which Ulm innkeepers were involved in these processes, what specific tasks they performed and how this engagement shaped their social position within the city. It further examines how individual inns became known throughout the surrounding countryside as recruiting posts, shaping where prospective emigrants sought information and lodging, and traces the long-term transformation of Ulm's inns as recruiting posts across the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Drawing on city council minutes and administrative records from both Ulm and neighboring territories, the study reconstructs Ulm's inns as active participants in European migration politics, tracing the relationships between innkeepers, recruiters, and emigrants that structured these transient networks. By highlighting inns as mediators of migration and information, the paper reinterprets Ulm's urban interests within the wider context of early modern mobility and governance.
Session 39 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Lodging beyond the ‘urban island’? Tracing the rural-urban network of the lodging sector in the Bouches-du-Rhône Department during the late nineteenth century.
Jasper Segerink, Céline Regnard
abstractJasper Segerink, Céline Regnard
In recent years, there has been a surge in research on urban lodging houses and hotels. This strand has shown how a perspective on the lodging sector reveals a broad variety of mobile groups in complex rural-urban trajectories that surpasses myths of linear ‘rural exodus’ paths to the city. Yet crucially, the vast majority of studies focuses on the lodging sector in a single, often cosmopolitan, city, almost as an island, whereas its mobility flows precisely demonstrate how cities were implicated in broader networks of mobility. In order to fully explore such urban mobility networks, and to move beyond the ‘urban island’, this paper will shed light on the organisation of the lodging sector for an entire province, the Bouches-du-Rhône in the south of France, during the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on an extremely thorough departmental-wide police inspection of the sector, this paper asks: how the accommodation sector was dispersed over the region; how the metropolis (Marseille) related to its hinterland of smaller urban and rural centres; how the sector interacted with different modalities of transport, namely roads (pedestrians and carriages), canals and railroads; and how different types of mobile groups made use of the sector, with which economic and social agendas.
From Integration to Contention: The Case of the Malian Workers’ Foyer in Vitry-sur-Seine
Diego Inglez de Souza
abstractDiego Inglez de Souza
Far from being a marginal component of metropolitan growth, the workers' hostel that became known as the Malian foyer of Vitry-sur-Seine reveals how migrant lodging could evolve from an infrastructure of labour into a site where the contradictions of post-war planning, municipal communism and immigration were publicly negotiated. Built within the Zone à Urbaniser en Priorité (ZUP) created as part of the post-war reorganisation of metropolitan Paris, the hostel developed alongside the communist municipality's ambitious urban expansion, which included the Grand Ensemble n.º 4, later described as a "Red Brasília" on the outskirts of the capital. While these projects embodied the optimism of the Trente Glorieuses, they also rested on distinct planning rationales that would come into conflict at the turn of the 1980s.
Managed by the Association pour le Développement des Foyers (ADEF), the hostel was initially intended to accommodate young workers before becoming part of the regional network of migrant workers' accommodation. In December 1980, it became the centre of a national political controversy when Vitry's mayor, Paul Mercieca (1932-), attempted to prevent the transfer of 320 Malian workers from the municipality of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. Justified as a protest against the unequal distribution of immigrant populations across the communes of the Val-de-Marne, the episode exposed profound contradictions within French municipal communism between its universalist rhetoric and its increasingly localised responses to immigration. Media coverage rapidly transformed Vitry into one of the emblematic banlieues à problèmes of the period.
Following the history of this modest building from its construction to its recent replacement by a new social residence, the paper argues that migrant lodging functioned simultaneously as urban infrastructure and political arena. Situated at the intersection of metropolitan planning, labour mobility and local governance, the hostel reveals how temporary accommodation mediated changing relationships between migration, political power and urban belonging in contemporary France.
Continuity and change in Dublin’s lodging practices, 1901-1926 – labour migration, mobility and
gender
Ruth Mcmanus
abstractRuth Mcmanus
Research on urban lodging in Ireland to date has drawn on early 20th century sources to
demonstrate the economic and social importance of lodging in Dublin, including the complexity
and diversity of lodging arrangements within the city and its expanding suburbs. Until now, an
absence of later records has hampered efforts to understand the evolving dynamics of lodging
and to establish longer-term patterns and trends. New research opportunities will arise from
April 2026 as individual household returns from the 1926 census, the first taken in the newly-established Irish Free State following a 15-year gap, will be made available. This paper will draw on this newly available data to explore lodging patterns in the capital at a time of unprecedented political and social change. The analysis will consider both continuity and change in the period 1901 to 1926, with a particular emphasis on labour migration, mobility and gender.
Home away from home: Mapping native-place lodges in early twentieth-century Nanjing c.1920s-30s
Yichang Sun, Laura Vaughan, Sam Griffiths
abstractYichang Sun, Laura Vaughan, Sam Griffiths
Native-place lodges – known as huiguan or native-place guilds – were important infrastructures of migration and urban sociability in Chinese cities, providing temporary accommodation as well as spaces for meeting, worship, mutual aid and communal organisation. This paper examines how such institutions were embedded in Nanjing’s changing urban environment during the 1920s and 1930s, when the city became the national capital and underwent intensive spatial transformation. Combining Historical GIS with space syntax methods, it reconstructs lodge locations at street level from cartographic sources, directories, gazetteers and related studies, and examines their configurational profiles within the street network. Archival evidence on waterways, tramways, schools, religious sites and other amenities is then used to provide the wider social and infrastructural context. The findings reveal that native-place lodges expanded northwards and eastwards while retaining established clusters in the old southern city. Eastern-region affiliations remained dominant, but lodges associated with Anhui and Jiangsu – as two principal provinces within the eastern region – followed distinctive spatial trajectories. Smaller regional groups were often located on streets with greater city-scale accessibility, while some ethnic communities remained more closely embedded in established local environments. The paper argues that native-place lodges operated as a ‘home away from home’ through their dual role of anchoring migrants in distant hometown networks while embedding them within differentiated urban settings in the host city.
CORPORATE HOUSING FOR IMMIGRANTS IN SESTO SAN GIOVANNI IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Carlotta Maria Vaglieri
abstractCarlotta Maria Vaglieri
The article analyses two distinct types of urban spaces created by the companies of Sesto San Giovanni (Milan) for their migrant workers. On the one hand, it examines an informal city produced by the factories themselves, characterised by shacks and makeshift settlements—such as the Villaggio Libico—where migrants occupying the lowest positions within the labour hierarchy were housed. On the other hand, it considers a formal city that emerged from corporate housing welfare, represented by the workers’ dormitories examined here, as well as by the housing and workers’ villages built by companies. What emerges is that both the informal and the formal city were the outcome of corporate policies and, at the same time, functioned as instruments through which companies sought to control, segregate, and subordinate those sections of the working population composed of migrants.
Session 40 - Gateways to Work in Urban Spaces: Women's Strategies, Networks, Institutions, and Mobilities (18th-20th Century)
This session explores women's access to urban labor markets (18th-20th century), examining strategies, networks, and institutions. It addresses control policies, skill acquisition, career mobility, and urban transformations, highlighting comparative and transnational perspectives on women's impact on urban economies.
Coordinators: Céline Mutos-Xicola, Montserrat Duch, Manuela Martini, Cristina Borderías Mondéjar
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Coordinators: Céline Mutos-Xicola, Montserrat Duch, Manuela Martini, Cristina Borderías Mondéjar
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Session 40 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Trade guilds as access to work for women in eighteenth century English towns
Julie Chamberlain
abstractJulie Chamberlain
Women in towns in Warwickshire, England, in the eighteenth century who were widows of trade guild members took advantage of having access to crafts that would otherwise have been closed to them. Bereavement granted widows the right to become guild members and to work in trades which men had to earn through apprenticeship and buying their freedom. Very few guilds had rules which permitted wives to be taught by husbands, but informal learning took place in the workshop. This paper explores how, despite guilds being organisations of control and protectionism, their ordinances provided structures which gave widows access to work in businesses which they sometimes maintained for decades. Guild ordinances allowed a widow to continue to train her husband’s apprentices, playing a vital role in keeping the trade going. Some women’s work was in traditionally-male areas, such as blacksmithing, plumbing, saddlery and carpentry. They may have carried out tasks themselves but often ran the business and instructed journeymen. For many widows, work and guild membership was not short-term until a son could succeed them; some widows who had sons in the trade remained in business independently for more than 30 years, serving their towns and making a name for themselves. Female guild members had to follow the same rules as men, but also had the same benefits, including qualifying for legal help, such as when one woman’s right to work was challenged by another guild. Women could also gain support in a guild through female networks, and through family and faith connections. Some went on to create legacies. In one family, four generations of widows continued the business for nearly 150 years, with one commemorating her work on a civic building. Other women ensured the family name was sustained into the nineteenth century. Wills show women who identified strongly with their craft, and wanted to ensure it was passed on. Women could be treated markedly differently between guilds in nearby towns, however. In one Warwickshire town’s guilds in the eighteenth century women were allowed to be wardens, to have responsibility for guild money, organise feasts and participate in decision making and in another town they had a more passive role. This paper looks at how inheriting a husband’s guild membership allowed women to succeed in many types of trade, and also examines the differences between their participation in leadership in two towns and the possible reasons for this.
« Black » Women’s Work and Urban Networks in 18th-Century France: Navigating Subaltern Labor Markets
Lou Laval Matip
abstractLou Laval Matip
Many African women and women of African descent worked in Paris and in the French port cities in the 18th century. Domestic servants, wet nurses, maids, silk and lace laundresses, seamstresses, caretakers, linen workers, ravaudeuses (women who mended clothes), cooks, sex workers: like other women from the urban working classes, they held several jobs, lasting from a few months to a few years, alternating between domestic work, sex work, and productive work. In a pre-revolutionary France enriched by sugar production in the West Indies, these free and enslaved workers racialized as “black” made visible in urban spaces the dependence of metropolitan economies on colonial trade. Drawing on advertisements in the press, visual sources, censuses, notarial, judicial and police archives, I will examine the constraints and opportunities that shaped their participation in the urban economy.
The first focus of the presentation will be on the legal and economic mechanisms that limit the presence of African women and women of African descent to subordinate sectors of the urban economy. The presentation will address the role of such assignment in the production of social categories of gender and race in 18th-century France, paying particular attention to the fact that 80% of these women were enslaved.
The second focus of the contribution will be on the collective dimension of their agency. These workers lived together to compensate for low incomes, found shelter when they are unemployed in a new city, and protected each other when they conflicted with their owners. Based on a group portrait of these women, I will trace their relationships to document how the mobilization of interpersonal ties enables them to survive.
Gendered spaces of work in Venice (18th-19th century)
Anna Bellavitis
abstractAnna Bellavitis
The paper is based on a series of trials dating back to the early 1800s involving the haberdashery guild, in which women sold on the streets goods that were not necessarily contraband, but which they were not allowed to sell because sales were restricted to the interior of shops and could not take place outside. We are in a city, moreover, where the outdoor space is entirely occupied by people; there are no carriages or horses to hinder pedestrian traffic. The Republic of Venice has fallen in 1797, but new administrations have not yet abolished the guild system, and women are accused on the basis of a 1704 rule of the haberdashers' guild that justified the exclusion of women as master craftsmen and members - a novelty in a guild that had always been open to women and foreigners - on the grounds that, 'thanks to the freedom of their sex', they went to sell handkerchiefs, lace and ribbons on the streets and in houses, thus competing with the haberdashers (men who were masters in the guild). The accused women mostly come from the outskirts of the city, but the events often take place in the “upper districts” and the buyers come from all social classes. This outlines a contrast not only between inside and outside, but also between urban areas.
Labour market and women in 18th century Venice: shaping oneself and shaping the city
Louise Bonvalet
abstractLouise Bonvalet
The city of Venice is characterised by its unique anatomy, which hindered its geographical expansion throughout the Early Modern period, unlike other European cities. However, this has not prevented it from becoming densely populated and welcoming an ever-increasing number of workers. One of the sources available to us for studying women's labour during the 18th century are the censuses of the Provveditori sopra le Pompe, which indicate not only the inhabitants and their status, but also the type of housing, rent, composition of the family and occupation of the heads of households. Intended to raise a new tax, they were carried out in 1745, 1748 and 1750, revealing short-term changes in the female residential and commercial patterns.
Thanks to all these elements, part of women's labour can be studied. The sources of income of certain female heads of household show a wider variety of female occupation than other historical sources. Their involvement in providing accommodation for male and female workers arriving in the city demonstrates their skills in generating multiple sources of income, but also their ability to adapt to the Venetian labour market in an innovative way. Also, the composition of households also reveals the importance of solidarity ties, not only within the family, but also among women. Furthermore, rather than a dichotomy between male public space and female private space, we can observe a gendered spatial organisation, creating female areas in the city, linked to their activity.
This paper will therefore focus on how women not only adapted and integrated into the Venetian labour market in the mid-18th century, but also how their work shaped the structure and organisation of the city.
Women and Guilds in Eighteenth-Century Naples: The Case of the Silk Guild
Sara D'anna
abstractSara D'anna
In the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, guilds represented a key element in the economic and social organization of Italian and European cities, as well as a privileged gateway to the labour market. These institutions, with their systems of internal regulations, controlled access to professions, the quality of production, trade, and the sociability of their members; they were repositories of artisanal knowledge and technical skills, of privileges granted by rulers, and of a moral order founded on principles of solidarity – often apparent – and fraternity.
In Naples, as in other urban centres, the guild network was particularly complex and included various productive sectors that significantly contributed to shaping both the economy and the urban space. Despite the importance of guilds in the social and economic life of the Kingdom’s capital, historiography has overlooked an essential component for a full understanding of their practical and everyday functioning: women’s labour. While numerous studies have focused on the role of women within the guilds of northern Italy and central-northern Europe, the Neapolitan reality has been largely neglected.
Among the most prominent Neapolitan guilds was that of the Silk Guild, endowed with its own internal rules, an administrative body, a large membership, an internal tribunal, and a conservatory intended for the daughters of members who were impoverished, ill, or deceased. The statutes of this guild did not formally include women. However, this normative exclusion did not translate in their exclusion from guild dynamics and the urban market. The archival documentation makes it possible to examine their daily interactions with the enrolled members of the Silk Guild, the multiple spheres of action in which operated, their subsistence strategies, thus their full involvement in the local industry.
Based primarily on guild judicial sources, this study aims to make visible the “hidden” and informal participation of women, distinguishing between official exclusion and de facto inclusion. It highlights how customary practices could transcend normative barriers and how women became intricately integrated into the urban economy, actively contributing to the production of silk manufactures and their trade, in the acquisition of artisanal technical skills, and in the professional training of male and female apprentices.
Session 40 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Making a Living at the Auction: Female Bidders at the Amsterdam Wholesale Auction in the Eighteenth Century
Anne Wegener Sleeswijk
abstractAnne Wegener Sleeswijk
In the 18th century, auctions played a central role in the distribution of recently imported and damaged goods in the major trading centers of the United Provinces. Female shopkeepers, migrants and other traders who lacked easy access to a network of suppliers, or who could not openly engage in certain activities (due to guild monopolies or other forms of exclusion) regularly used broker auctions to purchase (part of) their supplies. They often collaborated, lived and worked in the same neighborhoods and frequently focused on the lower end of the market. This contribution charts the strategies at auction sales of female retailers in the trades of textiles and exotic beverages, two sectors in which women were particularly active. The archives of the Amsterdam broker auctions, notarial records and bankruptcy records (shop inventories) form the starting point for this research.
Gilding the Gutter. The lived experience of female street traders in growing British cities (1860-1950)
Lea Leboissetier
abstractLea Leboissetier
The most common and well-known representations of female itinerant traders in Britain can be found in the Cries of London. Popularised between the 17th and the 20th centuries, the genre of the Cries featured humble women selling a wide array of commodities such as groceries, flowers, love songs and – for the most humble – boxes of matches in a picturesque fashion. If they aimed to amuse and evoke nostalgia for petty occupations in a fast-growing metropolis rather than to be a faithful representation of mobile trading, this genre continues to shape how we perceive female street hawkers. However, these depictions offer a very limited view of women’s working lives, and often fail to historicise their experience on the street in a period of rapid urbanisation. How did women become and work as street traders? What were their routine, their networks and the skills they developed? What regulations did they have to follow in a period of growing urban challenges? This paper answer these questions by drawing on a combination of top-down and bottom-up historical material. Britain benefits from a unique corpus of working-class autobiographies and oral histories, that I complement with more conventional documents such as police records and testimonies published by female journalists who posed as undercover street traders. Taken together, these sources show that gender did play a role in the working lives of street traders, especially when it came to their entry into the occupation and their professional networks. Women were also policed differently than men, particularly in the case of juvenile traders. However, these documents also suggest that there was no typical or essential ‘female’ experience of mobile trading. Overall, they underline the diversity and resilience of street traders in a century of urban change and invite us to see female workers as complex economic agents embedded in their environment rather than as mere picturesque characters.
Old Boys Network? Female Agency in the International Antiques Trade through Antwerp-based Antiques Dealer Marie Van Herck, 1910-1914
Rick Faust
abstractRick Faust
Against the backdrop of profound industrialisation and modernisation, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by a bourgeois fascination with the past. Central to this fascination were antiques and historical objects, valued as tangible mediums through which the past could be studied, interpreted, and experienced. Both responding to and shaping this interest in history through objects, antiques dealers established themselves in major European cities and beyond, gradually creating an increasingly global network. In existing historiography, this professional sphere is consistently depicted as an exclusively male ‘old boys network’ of dealers, experts, and auction houses. Women, if mentioned at all, appear as marginal figures or passive consumers, rather than as professionals shaping markets and expertise. Yet how did women who did enter this male-dominated trade mobilise networks, expertise, and authority to secure a professional position within urban labour markets?
This paper addresses this question by focusing on the Antwerp-based antiques dealer and adviser Marie Van Herck (1857-1922). As the daughter of the antiques dealer Jan Frans Van Herck, Marie entered the trade at a young age, working alongside her brother Eugène in their father’s shop in the city centre of Antwerp. When Eugène established his own antiques business in the 1880s and their father passed away in 1903, Marie went on to manage the family enterprise independently and successfully as an unmarried woman until her death in 1922. A unique corpus of over 500 handwritten letters from Van Herck, preserved from the years 1910-1914 and addressed to both male and female clients, suppliers, and fellow dealers in Belgium and abroad, provides the basis for this study. Through a combination of social network analysis and close reading, this paper investigates how she navigated a male-dominated profession by mobilising family ties, commercial expertise, and transnational connections. Special attention will be given to the strategies she deployed in selling, advising, and building trust among clients, as well as to the ways in which she established authority and circulated knowledge in the marketplace.
Family burdens and labour strategies of poor women in an industrial city (Barcelona, mid-19th Century)
Tura Tusell Latorre
abstractTura Tusell Latorre
Historiography has highlighted the centrality of women’s work in pre-industrial economies and during industrialization (Humphries and Sarasúa 2012). Drawing on different sources, we now have important contributions that show how single, married, and widowed women had a significant connection to wage labour, despite traditional narratives that assigned women a marginal or supplementary role in the economy. The diversity of job opportunities in large cities facilitated women’s insertion into various sectors of employment, showing that caregiving responsibilities were not always an impediment to engaging in paid work.
For industrial Catalonia, we have evidence of high rates of female activity in textile-working families, even among married women (Borderías 2012). The stem family could facilitate married women’s employment, since other women in the household could take on domestic work (Borderías and Ferrer-Alòs 2015). In Barcelona, where 19th century economic development was characterized by an abundant female labour force (Borderías 2003), we know very little about the strategies employed by women with children to reconcile family care and wage labour. This paper aims precisely to shed light on this issue. It does so by focusing on married women and widows.
In the case of married women, various studies have shown that low male wages prevented many families from subsisting on the household head’s income alone (Borderías and López Guallar 2001; Borderías and Cussó 2023), forcing wives to participate in wage labour. As has been observed in other contexts, in such cases paid work could entail the externalization of housework and childcare (Shepard 2023). The situation could be more vulnerable for widows, since women’s earnings alone did not guarantee family sustenance. In these circumstances, subsistence work strategies emerged—such as working as a live-in domestic servant—which made caring for their children impossible.
My aim is to examine how these women reconciled family life and working life. I do so using a very rich qualitative source: the admission petitions to Barcelona’s main asylum, the Casa de Caridad. For 1852, there survives an admission register containing a detailed description of each family’s situation. This description lists the various members of the family unit and the income available to the household, and reveals the different resources available in the urban environment that shaped women’s labour strategies.
Enabling and gatekeeping urban work: Labour intermediation in the urban domestic sector in Sweden 1884–1935
Therese Christoffersson
abstractTherese Christoffersson
Around the turn of the twentieth century, people’s dependence on wage labour for their livelihood increased and many moved to cities. It could be difficult to find work, particularly when lacking a social network. As the urban labour market grew, a large number of private individuals and organizations began to mediate employment, either with profit in mind or for political purposes. Fees for registration, followed by additional charges for placement, were paid by both jobseekers and employers.
For-profit intermediation was the most common within the domestic sector in urban areas. They were not only mediating women, but were often themselves women, sometimes combining renting out rooms for newcomers in the cities with providing opportunities for work. These intermediaries therefore constituted an important infrastructure for rural-to-urban female mobility.
Profit- and ideology-driven employment intermediation was particularly common in the female-dominated sectors of the cities around 1900 in Sweden, and many women turned to intermediaries to find work in households, hotels and restaurants, or shops. The significance and potential impact of labour intermediation were considerable in contexts where the labour market was fragmented into many small and diverse workplaces, where levels of worker organization were low, and where employers in either a formal or traditional sense were absent.
Even though for-profit labour intermediaries where a wide spread system for finding work in urban areas prior to the establishment of public employment service in the 20th century Europe, especially for migrating women, little previous research have shown interest in either understanding the extent of their activities, the role they played for emerging urban labour markets or for geographical and social mobility, or the consequences they had for individual women’s livelihood and conditions of work and life.
Intermediaries made assessments of the women’s personalities, experiences, and preferences, pairing them with available positions and employers’ demands. Analysis of intermediaries’ notebooks shows that gender, heritage, age, class, and marital status were of great importance for how different women were understood by intermediaries as labouring subjects. This had significant consequences for the individuals’ women’s access to urban labour markets as well as the conditions and expectations they came to work under.
Session 40 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Rooting the Nursing History in Barcelona city: women, labour, gender and urban spaces
Alba Masramon Cruzate
abstractAlba Masramon Cruzate
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Barcelona underwent significant social and cultural transformations driven by urban expansion, the influx of new populations from other regions of Spain, and the growth of the service sector, among other factors. The emerging labour market was increasingly occupied by women employed as secretaries, typists, librarians, archivists, and nurses.
The City Council of Barcelona has been regarded as the most important municipal corporation in Spain and one of the largest employers of professionals and technicians. In this context, the municipal government became a key agent in the recruitment of technical and liberal professionals and a promoter of socially prestigious, stable, and career-oriented employment opportunities (Gil & Pujadas-Mora, 2024; Zarzoso, 2025). From the late nineteenth century onwards, the continuous increase in public health spending led to an unprecedented mobilisation of municipal resources. Beginning in 1918, with the introduction of the new Civil Servants’ Statute, for the first time, women were officially allowed to join the municipal workforce in all roles within the auxiliary category.
This paper aims to draw a socio-espatial profile of the nurses hired by the Barcelona City Council from 1918 to the outbreak of the civil war. To this end, we will identify their home addresses in order to see which parts of the city they lived, with whome they shared they household, and under what housing regime they resided (owned properties/rented dwellings). This information will be connected with their workplaces. Through these variable -deeply interwined with key issues in social history such as home conditions, family models, and working condititions- we will trace their labour trajectories, their day-to-day journeys between home and workplace, their family and professional dynamics
The sources for this study include the municipal staff registers from 1925, 1930, 1934, and 1942. These registers offer a snapshot of the City Council's workforce, organised by department and professional category, and provide information such as names, job titles, date of appointment, workplace, and date of birth. Of course, the 1930 Population Census will be an essential source for locating and for rooting the nursing history in the city of Barcelona.
Shifting tides? Female migrants and access to a dynamic labour market, Leiden 1850-1925
Ariadne Schmidt
abstractAriadne Schmidt
The opportunities for migrants on urban labour markets have always been strongly determined by the economic tide. The implementation of regulations for admission was linked to local interests. In periods of prosperity, both male and female migrants were welcomed to meet labour demand. In times of economic recession and unemployment, the legislation was applied more strictly. The arrival of female migrants was essential for the flourishing of the Leiden textile industry in the 17th century. Two centuries later, the situation had completely changed.
At the time of the promulgation of the first national immigration law in 1849 - issued with the aim of keeping out political troublemakers and people who could not provide for their own livelihood -, little was left of the prosperous textile city that Leiden had once been. Unemployment was high and the city attracted few people. Over the course of the 19th century, the economy revived due to the industrialization. Mechanization and concentration of production profoundly changed the textile industry; structural unemployment fell in the second half of the nineteenth century, though unemployment rates fluctuated. The demand for labor changed and other industries - metal, printing, canned goods - gained importance.
This paper examines if and to what extent immigration policies were used to regulate access for migrant women to the urban labour market. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the participation of female migrants in the uncertain and dynamic Leiden labour market in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Session 41 - Migrant labour and the urban construction industry: between opportunity and exploitation (18th-20th centuries)
The massive urban growth of the 18th-20th centuries was to a great extent realised by migrant construction workers, yet on whom little is known. Their histories are central to this panel, in which we question the circumstances and mechanisms that shaped migrant construction work, and paved the way for their upward and/or downward social mobility.
Coordinators: Matthijs Degraeve, Adrià Velasco
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Coordinators: Matthijs Degraeve, Adrià Velasco
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Session 41 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Who built Europe’s capital? Globalizing networks of migrant labour in Brussels (1957-1973)
Simon de Nys-Ketels, Robby Fivez, Marie-Julie Willaert
abstractSimon de Nys-Ketels, Robby Fivez, Marie-Julie Willaert
Together with the establishment of the EEC in 1957, the organization of the world exposition a year later marked the start of an unbridled ‘urbanisme sauvage’ in Brussels. An intense urban transformation project was launched to develop the city into Europe’s administrative and political capital. The process of ‘Brusselization’ has received ample attention, yet scholars have predominantly focused on building conglomerates, on conflicts of interests of planners, developers, contractors and politicians, or on the socio-economic fall-out for expropriated inhabitants.
Who actually built Europe’s capital remains unaddressed. We retrace the histories of construction workers behind Brusselization. Turning towards less conventional sources in urban and architectural history, we combine research in labour union archives with oral history to highlight how the construction of Europe’s capital closely relied on globalizing networks through which ‘cheap labour’ was imported from Europe’s fringes and beyond.
With Brusselization, new architectural and infrastructural typologies like high-rise buildings or metro tunnels emerged. While engineers or architects received ample credit for them, these changes were equally challenging for the workers involved, through the many novel and often unfamiliar building technologies. Migrant workers, generally labelled as ‘unskilled’, were often denied the use of expensive high-tech equipment, yet new techniques were often deployed with limited experience and in experimental, makeshift, and unsafe ways, using the same migrant workforce – like the experimental groundworks for high-rise buildings or metro tunnels for which former Italian, Moroccan and Turkish mine workers were employed. The ‘non-simultaneity’ on site thus also generated racialized effects and hierarchies of (in)dispensable labour. This was further reinforced by the worker’s unions, who predominantly represented the interests of autochthonous, officially schooled labourers, but who were also actively complicit as migrant labour recruitment agencies in commodifying and racializing migrant labour. On-site dynamics complicate these narratives, as workers recollect bullying, differentiated pay grades and glass ceilings, but also testify of comradery, family support, and upwards mobility, with many workers now operating small construction businesses in the city — once again the crucial hands for the renovation wave of our ecologically outdated patrimony.
Building (for) Barcelona: production relations, migration and opportunity in 19th-century Sarrià's construction sector
Adrià Velasco
abstractAdrià Velasco
The 19th century brought unprecedented growth to the city of Barcelona, mirroring other European capitals. This increase in the production of the built environment demanded a large workforce, and the construction sector underwent organizational and technical transformations that opened new opportunities for socio-labour mobility for its members. In this context, the former village of Sarrià, in the southwest, became an economic cluster for construction, by providing brick production and workforce to the neighbouring city. During the period of greatest construction demand —basically the second half of the 19th century, following the approval of the Eixample plan— combined with changes in property ownership, the liberalization of the real estate market, and the introduction of new materials and techniques, pathways to upward social mobility existed for those who could access the right combination of capital and competence or skill. On the other hand, however, business exploitation, a floating labour force, and the sector’s volatility very often resulted in downward mobility for many others. During the second half of the 19th century a construction industry emerged based on a few highly skilled but very specialized workers and a large quantity of extensive, unskilled, floating, and precarious labour, with no real opportunities for promotion, for whom construction was a temporary sector.
This paper aims to advance knowledge of the characteristics of Barcelona’s construction sector during the 19th century, focusing on the socio-labour mobility strategies of its members. The goal is to understand the circumstances and mechanisms at play in labour markets and the experiences of construction workers, often entangled with migration paths and family networks. To do so, the paper presents a case study focused on Sarrià’s construction businesses and its workers through the sources available for the period, mainly population censuses, tax registers and the press. With this data, it reconstructs the social composition of the construction sector (master builders, contractors, journeymen and labourers, and the changing relations between them) through the second half of the 19th century, specially focusing on both individual and familial trajectories and labour strategies.
Builders of the Modern Central European city – the Social Structure of Developers as Seen through Statistics
Josef Holecek
abstractJosef Holecek
Various not only Central European cities typically begin collecting statistical data in a targeted manner at times when their development begins to accelerate. One reason for this is the belief that such data can be used to correct their own development and improve the living conditions of their inhabitants. The following article attempts to use a comparative analysis of several cities to show how much can be learned about the social structure of builders from statistical data and what this information tells us about the nature of the development of a city. The findings are often surprising...
Who are the developers who buy new plots of land or change the historic centres of cities and build new apartment buildings there? The commonly accepted narrative assumes that this is a very small group of big businessmen (industrialists, etc.) who speculatively buy up plots of land, build buildings there, and then quickly sell them. The example of Prague, a historically significant but peripheral city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shows that this assumption is not true, even though it is repeated in literature. Based on a systematic analysis of data from the city statistical office between 1870 and 1915, it can be proven that, with very few exceptions, the city was built by middle-class construction entrepreneurs who always built one or at most two buildings. They subsequently retained ownership of these buildings and rented out individual apartments. The economic and civil records of the authorities provide information on who these individual developers were, and historical cadastral data can show what specific loans the investors were bound by.
Compared to other Central European capitals, Prague is developing at a slower pace. Is this because there are no large investors here who would build entire neighbourhoods? Or are there other reasons? A city is emerging that statistics reveal to be surprisingly more egalitarian than most metropolitan centres. If this is the case in Prague, how do other comparable cities in Central Europe behave? The presentation will include findings from ongoing research that compares Prague not only with Budapest and Vienna, but also with Krakow, Lviv, Swiss cities, and, above all, a number of German and Austrian cities. The aim is to vividly illustrate which society controlled the property in the centres of large cities and their developing surroundings at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Rethinking the link between labour migrations and building trades
Manuela Martini
abstractManuela Martini
Through a discussion of the other presentations in the panel I will reflect on the current state of the research and the pathways for further analysis of the intersection of building labour and migration in (urban) history
Session 42 - Urbanities of Belonging: Emigres from East Central Europe in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Cities
This session seeks to examine the ways in which emigres from East Central Europe found new homes in cities outside of the region and how they were linked through urban networks and emerging identities in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The geographical scope includes but is not limited to Europe.
Coordinators: Markian Prokopovych, Katalin Straner
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Coordinators: Markian Prokopovych, Katalin Straner
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Session 42 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Between pogroms, diamonds and networks. Jewish newcomers from Russian Poland and Galicia in Antwerp in the early 1900s
Hilde Greefs, Anne Winter
abstractHilde Greefs, Anne Winter
This paper investigates the migration background and settlement patterns of Eastern European immigrants originating from Russian Poland and Habsburg Galicia who arrived in the port city of Antwerp (Belgium) in 1910. It does so by analysing the individual details collected by the foreigners’ police on 481 such newcomers, of whom at least 77% were identifiable as Jewish. Their migration and residential histories connect to wider societal transformations in Europe’s run-up to World War I, such as the expansion of migration levels, the democratization of long-distance migration, the great Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, and the dynamics of ethnic neighbourhood formation in rapidly expanding and diversifying cities. By investigating both the commonalities and differences with other foreign newcomers in this period, the article aims to shed light on the characteristics of East-European Jewish immigration in a comparative perspective. The case study connects to a more recent trend in Jewish historiography that considers not only push factors in the region of origin, but also the facilitation of movement thanks to a dense railway and migration information infrastructure at the intermediate level. Antwerp's attractiveness as a diamond trading and processing centre encouraged Jewish migrants not only to emigrate through Antwerp to the Americas, but also to settle in the city.
Navigating administrative rejection and social integration: "foreign Polish workers" in Prussian cities before the First World War
Beate Althammer
abstractBeate Althammer
In the late nineteenth century, masses of working-class people moved from the territories of partitioned Poland westward in search of a better livelihood. While a substantial historiography exists on the Prussian Poles who moved within Prussia from the rural east to the industrial boomtowns in the Rhine-Ruhr area (the so-called Ruhr-Poles), much less is known about the "foreign Poles" arriving there from the Russian and Habsburg Empires. The differentiation between "Prussian" and "foreign Poles" is essential because, from 1890, the Prussian state government tried to prevent the permanent immigration and industrial employment of "foreign Poles", while this was out of the question regarding domestic Polish migrants holding Prussian citizenship. No law existed that formally restricted immigration and employment, yet local authorities had semi-confidential instructions to reject and, if necessary, expel "foreign Poles" who attempted to settle and find work off limits. From the perspective of local authorities, however, it was not always evident who should be regarded as a "foreign Pole", nor why these should be summarily banned. Negligence and diverging interpretations of the government instructions often led to situations where migrants had lived for years in a place before local authorities realized that their stay should not have been tolerated. When confronted with the threat of expulsion, migrants (and employers) tended to protest, which in turn prompted local authorities to reconsider the matter. This paper will focus on the negotiations that arose in 1905 about several hundred working-class families mostly from Suwalki Governorate in Russian Poland who had settled in the cities of Essen and Elberfeld (Düsseldorf district). Were these people to be classified as "national Poles" and hence as potentially inimical to the German nation? Motivated by this question, the authorities started extensive investigations on their exact origin, mother tongue and language skills, religion, marriage behaviour, child education, political attitudes, interaction with native colleagues, etc. This material, which includes petitions from and interviews with the migrants, offers unique insights into the way East-Central-European working-class "emigres", who were often illiterate and whose voices were otherwise rarely recorded, described their social networks and sense of belonging in-between birth region, ethnolinguistic migrant community, and local German society.
State of In-Between: Rural Migration from Hungary to Urban America (1880s-1914)
Balázs Pálvölgyi
abstractBalázs Pálvölgyi
Between the 1880s and 1914, large numbers of Hungarian emigrants arrived in the United States. The majority of these migrants, originating from rural areas, found themselves not only in a foreign linguistic and cultural environment, but also within urban or metropolitan settings that differed markedly from their rural homes. The newcomers were able to establish new lives with the support of networks that emerged within their communities. Self-help groups, religious congregations, and cultural associations, which developed in these urban contexts, became key organisational pillars in the lives of immigrants.
It was within these communities that non-English-language newspapers were established. Furthermore, service providers, shopkeepers, landlords, travel agents, and employment agencies who catered to immigrants in their native languages played a crucial role in their adaptation.
Immigrant communities soon became recognisable features of American cities, often occupying distinct spatial areas that reflected the particular identity and traditions of each group. Among the most striking manifestations of these communities in the urban landscape were the churches built by religious congregations. However, community centres and association buildings, along with the broader immigrant service infrastructure, also attained considerable significance.
A prominent feature of Hungarian migration during this period was the strategy of circular migration. This entailed the maintenance of strong ties with the country of origin, home communities, and family members. As a result, in addition to the transatlantic movement of people, channels of monetary remittance and knowledge transfer also emerged.
In urban environments, the communal identities of immigrant groups, the specific activities undertaken by their organisations, and the dynamics associated with the phenomenon of ‘new immigration’ often contributed to a slower process of assimilation. The strategy of circular migration further reinforced this trend. Consequently, a distinct migrant identity emerged: Hungarian immigrants in the United States frequently defined themselves according to the linguistic and religious frameworks of their homeland, while during their temporary or extended visits to Hungary, they often adopted an ‘American’ identity.
I aim to explore the complexity of Hungarian emigrants’ strategies, the layered nature of transition, and contemporary perceptions of these experiences
Women from Ukraine: Topographies of Migration in Weimar-Era Berlin
Oleksandra Bienert
abstractOleksandra Bienert
After 1918 Berlin became one of the centers of migration from East Central Europe. Among those arriving were numerous women from the territory of today’s Ukraine who came as political exiles, students, artists, and intellectuals. While their male counterparts have been more visible in existing historiography, these women’s lives reveal how exile, gender, and urban space intersected in complex and dynamic ways. This paper examines how women from Ukraine established new professional and social networks in Weimar Berlin and how their activities reshaped the city’s transnational public sphere. The project traces their presence in associations such as the “Ukrainian National Women’s Council” or the “Ukrainian Red Cross“. It examines newspaper archives, institutional records of Ukrainian diplomatic missions in Germany (1918–1923), statutes, articles of association, address books, association minutes, and memoirs. The theoretical framework combines spatial and feminist theory. Using Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space (Lefebvre 1974) and Doreen Massey’s relational understanding of space and gender (Massey 1994), the study approaches Berlin as space produced and contested along overlapping axes of gender and visibility. Karl Schlögel’s idea of reading time through space (Schlögel 2003) further supports a spatial-temporal reading of these women’s trajectories and their inscriptions into the city’s fabric. The project also engages with the silences of the archive (Trouillot 1995). The analysis foregrounds both visible contributions and archival silences, treating absence and fragmentation as meaningful historical data rather than gaps to be filled. Ultimately, the paper argues that women from the territory of present-day Ukraine created a distinct “female topography” in Weimar-Era Berlin — an ephemeral but powerful network of places, encounters, and silences that reflected both the transnational dynamics of exile and the gendered politics of visibility and remembrance within the modern city. They inscribed themselves into public space individually and collectively — through politicizing private space, professional notices, and political work. Through engagement, work, and movement across the city they wove a new, dense network of connections, appropriating the city for themselves.
Galicia on the Hudson: Regional Belonging in Jewish New York and the Aftermath of World War I
Oskar Czendze
abstractOskar Czendze
This paper challenges the dominance of nationalist narratives in histories of Jewish migration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By analyzing the daily lives of Galician Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, it emphasizes the importance of regionalism in community-building and expressions of the self among eastern European Jews in the American diaspora. Unlike most immigrants from the Russian Empire, Galician Jews, for the most part, did not experience ethnic violence or political oppression in the places they left. On the contrary, these emigres left the Habsburg province with a sense of supranational belonging to a region that provided them with rights as citizens of an imperial state, characterized by the paternalistic figure of the emperor who stood above ethnic and religious conflicts. Pursuing economic opportunities in New York, Galician Jews faced the challenge of cultural belonging within the diverse immigrant neighborhood. To foster community and combat the frequent othering by Russian Jewish intellectuals and activists in the press and workplaces, they reactivated this idea of supranational belonging by creating and mobilizing the cultural label of the Galitsyaner (Yiddish: Jews from Habsburg Galicia) in dialogue with the places of origin.
Drawing on both institutional records from landsmanshaftn (Jewish hometown associations) and local relief organizations in interwar Poland, as well as cultural production such as the Yiddish theatre and the press, this paper will focus on the key turning point of World War I in shaping the concept of the Galitsyaner. When Galicia disappeared from the map of Europe, Galician Jews used this label to unite over 300 immigrant associations in New York, which were based on local identifications with the towns and cities of origin in former Galicia. They mobilized personal and institutional networks in interwar Poland as part of a larger transnational community of Galitsyaner. As a result, Galician Jews successfully shifted the meaning of the Galitsyaner from a negative stereotype to a symbol of unity and humanitarianism in Jewish New York. The paper calls for a more nuanced distinction between local, regional, and national forms of Jewish belonging before the Holocaust. It shows how concepts of regional belonging from the imperial era in East Central Europe not only persisted but became even stronger amid the disruptive forces of migration and war in the modern era.
The Difficult Integration of Emigrants from the Austrian Littoral into Yugoslav Urban Realities after 1918
Marta Verginella, Marta Verginella
abstractMarta Verginella, Marta Verginella
Following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the subsequent occupation of the former Austrian Littoral by the Italian army, a process of large-scale emigration unfolded, initially involving former Austrian citizens. As calculated by Piero Purini, after 1918 the majority of the region’s German-speaking population departed, reducing this community to roughly one third of its previous size—around 3,700 individuals—by the 1920s. In the case of Gorizia, the demographic shift was particularly pronounced: approximately one third of the city’s inhabitants changed between 1922 and 1925.
The estimated number of Slovenes and Croats who left the Julian March between 1919 and 1922 for the newly established Yugoslav state ranges from 30,000 to 40,000 and remains approximate. By 1934, this figure had risen to about 50,000, and according to other calculations, possibly as high as 70,000. The motives behind this emigration were heterogeneous, encompassing the loss of employment or citizenship, political coercion and expulsions, as well as a general unwillingness to live under Italian rule.
Most Slovenes and Croats resettled within Yugoslavia, particularly in territories vacated by emigrant German and Hungarian populations. Yet migrants from the Austrian Littoral—especially those who settled in the urban centres of Carniola and Styria (Ljubljana, Maribor, and Celje)—were often received with suspicion or hostility, partly owing to perceived cultural differences. A chronic shortage of housing and high unemployment exacerbated local resentment, even in cases where newcomers occupied dwellings abandoned or expropriated from departing German-speaking residents.
During episodes of social tension, local inhabitants resorted to pejorative labels such as Lahs or Taljans (Italians) to denigrate the newcomers. Numerous autobiographical testimonies—particularly those authored by women—attest to the difficulties of integration into the postwar Yugoslav social enivironment. Comparable experiences of displacement, identity dislocation, and the psychological strains of adaptation are documented in the medical records of the Ljubljana Psychiatric Hospital. The loss of former social status, professional identity, citizenship, and, more broadly, of the cosmopolitan urban environment of the Habsburg period, produced varying outcomes: for some, psychological trauma and alienation; for others, a profound nostalgia for the lost cityscape and way of life.
Session 43 - On Cities and Homeless Youths: All about Histories, Historiographies, Methodologies and Praxes of European Networks
In 2024, 700,000 diverse homeless youths across Europe highlighted enduring socio-urban challenges, prompting reflections on present & past European homeless youth networks & their urban & architectural correlates, urging a rethinking of our discipline to comprehend & address socio-urban inequalities, respectively, in past & present European cities.
Coordinators: Davide Landi, Yahya Lavaf-Pour, Fidel Meraz
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Coordinators: Davide Landi, Yahya Lavaf-Pour, Fidel Meraz
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Session 43 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 309 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
A Stairway to Youths’ – lessness: A Review of Twentieth Century Western Histories and Historiographies of Dilemmas of Homes, Houses, their Cities and Networks.
Davide Landi, Carolina Pacchi
abstractDavide Landi, Carolina Pacchi
Thorny dilemmas of homes, houses, cities, their dwellers and their networks have, in various ways and with varying effects, been buried in their lives, experiences, and languages. And perhaps not surprisingly, youths and their networks have been among the age groups most touched. Whilst rarely, both radical and moderate voices of the youth dwellers could be heard, these thorny dilemmas, quite often, emerged through the insights of a single-handed critic, a group, and/or groups of minds in policymaking, urban and architectural discourses. All of them, however, stimulated discussions that may have continued for years and then gradually faded from sight, only to reappear after decades and/or centuries. European and non-European newspapers over the last few years, such as a 2023 The Guardian article, and in the recent past, such as a 1992 The New York Times article, have covered the rise in the cost of housing and services in European cities, such as respectively Rome, Italy and London, UK, impacting youths, for instance. Yet these youths’ dilemmas of homes, houses, and their cities are as old as Western History. In the Hellenistic period, for example, discussions of domesticity raised problems of identity among poor youths, their homes, houses and -lessness. What the paper offers, therefore, is not a theory of, but rather a brief Western historiographical and historical analysis of 20th-century dilemmas of homes, houses, and their cities affecting youths, their networks and their possible responses. In airing these historiographies and histories, the paper aims not so much to contradict contemporary prevailing discourses - in which terms such as youth house- and/or home- less and youth citizens and/or non-citizens have been used regularly - but simply to show what happens if these dilemmas are examined in continuity and very closely from the architectural to the urban scale and vice versa. The paper then goes on to enquire whether these dilemmas are taken very seriously, at times even literally, and may depict a contemporary, albeit alternative, interpretation of these dilemmas, acknowledging an impossible pragmatic differentiation between home- and city-lessness. In this vision, perhaps these historiographies and histories are finally no longer the only ones that speak to us, but an opportunity for youth voices, experiences, and stories to be the most telling image evincing the necessity of opening up questions and setting an agenda for further research.
Whispers of Home: Networks, Spatial Practices and Everyday Lives of Young Internally Displaced Abkhazians in Tskaltubo's Sanatoriums
Nino Chkhaidze
abstractNino Chkhaidze
The years 1992-93 marked the most painful period in Georgia’s history, during the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict rooted in earlier Soviet policies, led to war and Russian occupation. In this, thousands of people were killed while 251,000 were displaced. In the absence of adequate housing, many of these Internally Displaced People (i.e. IDP) informally occupied Soviet sanatoriums originally built for health tourism. The most notable case is Tskaltubo, known for its radon thermal waters and its network of sanatoriums. For over three decades, Tskaltubo sanatoriums have offered emergency lodging to IDPs. Many, including young families and adults, have grown up witnessing the functional and formal transformations of these sanatoriums and related socio-urban inequalities. Since 2021, the majority of IDPs have been relocated by the Georgian government in the peripheries of Tskaltubo, to privatize and readapt these sanatoriums for 21st-century tourism.
Considering this, the paper explores historical and contemporary network praxes of post-conflict young IDPs in post-Soviet Tskaltubo and its network of sanatoriums. It employs a mixed-methods approach including archival research, a literature review, spatial mapping and qualitative semi-structured interviews with young IDPs, Tskaltubo residents and municipal representatives to document the network of Aia, Friendship, Metallurg, and Railway sanatoriums, their dwellers’ collective memories of hybrid conditions of emergency housing, social exclusion and reactions through informal spatial practices and collective adaptations to transform spaces and create community in a post-socialist context.
From histories of Soviet sanatoriums and 20th-century socialist ideology generating networks of health and labor facilities for young workers in the Soviet Union to their transformations into a network of temporary accommodations for young IDPs, anticipating the conclusions, the paper enquires the tension between urban governance, state-led and heritage-driven approaches and informal practices of spatial transformations, social infrastructure of care and inclusion to formulate a notion of home with its own latent trans-critical perspective fostering both unity and division between young IDPs and locals in spaces not conceived for living to articulate new forms of community that brings young, fragile voices to the fore and challenge canonical narratives of heritage, welfare, and urban belonging in Europe and the rest of the world.
Spaces for Stability: The Social Condenser and the Soviet Legacy for Housing Security
Yahya Lavaf-Pour
abstractYahya Lavaf-Pour
Panel'noye domostroyeniye, the Soviet prefabricated panel housing system, emerged as a large-scale, networked urban response to acute housing shortages and the widespread absence of private home ownership following the World Wars. Rather than operating as isolated buildings, panel housing formed extensive residential networks integrated with factories, transport infrastructure, canteens, and Workers Clubs, collectively supporting a rapidly expanding industrial workforce. These workers were predominantly young rural migrants, early-career industrial labourers, and newly urbanised families whose access to housing was tied to employment rather than ownership, reflecting a state-managed housing system in which secure tenancy functioned as a substitute for private property.
The development of these networks was informed by earlier experiments in socialist domesticity, particularly communal housing prototypes that minimised private domestic space and redirected everyday activities into shared infrastructures. The removal of private kitchens, for example, embedded daily life within factory canteens and Workers Clubs, spaces that functioned simultaneously as sites of social reproduction, collective leisure, and ideological formation. Despite their uniformity and material limitations, these buildings provided millions with self-contained housing and helped reduce the overcrowding, shared facilities, and near homelessness that had defined earlier urban conditions.
The legacy of the Panel'noye domostroyeniye offers important reflections for the contemporary housing crisis. While not a model to be replicated, it demonstrates that large scale, state led housing provision can significantly reduce homelessness when combined with supportive social infrastructure. The paper will explore how this historical precedent might inform present discussions on home ownership amongst the youth.
Bokov, Anna. “Soviet workers’ clubs: lessons from the social condensers.” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 22, no. 3, 2017, pp. 403–436.
Khan Magomedov, S.O., 1987. Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s. Edited and translated by C. Cooke. London: Academy Editions.
Malaia, K., 2020. A Unit of Homemaking: The Prefabricated Panel and Domestic Architecture in the Late Soviet Union. Architectural Histories, 8(1), p.12.
Siegelbaum, Lewis H.; Sokolov, A. K.; Kosheleva, L.; Zhuravlev, S. V, (2000) Stalinism as a way of life : a narrative in document
Czechoslovak Housing Cooperatives: Between Collectivity and Individuality
Marta Edith Holečková
abstractMarta Edith Holečková
This paper examines the tension between collective and individual principles of ownership in the practice of Czechoslovak housing cooperatives, tracing how this relationship changed during the economic and political transformations after 1989. Although cooperatives had long been associated with collective forms of economic life, the period following the fall of state socialism was marked by entirely new conditions that required redefining economic mechanisms and the very meaning of ownership, solidarity, and responsibility.
The aim of the paper is to critically examine housing cooperatives’ efforts to survive and reshape themselves in a world of favored individual ownership strategies and market logic. The key questions are:
• How did housing cooperatives redefine their identity after 1989, balancing the principle of collective solidarity and the pressure to individualize ownership?
• What strategies did their representatives adopt to legitimize the cooperative model within the new institutional framework of transformation?
• And why did it eventually prove impossible to promote cooperatives as a viable alternative to a fully market-based housing model?
In theoretical terms, the paper draws on the concepts of co-ownership and collective responsibility as forms that challenge the dichotomy between public and private. The Czechoslovak experience makes it possible to observe how these principles were distorted in practice under the pressure of state socialism – in which cooperatives became instruments of state housing policy – and how efforts were made to renew them after 1989.
During the transformation processes between 1990 and 1994 associated with the privatization of the housing stock, cooperatives found themselves in a paradoxical situation: they were perceived as relics of the past, yet at the same time they offered a model of collective management that could mitigate the effects of deregulation and growing social inequality. The paper analyzes how cooperative unions sought to build on the experience of their Western European partners and redefine the legitimacy of the cooperative model outside the socialist heritage, while consciously renouncing from the legacy of the First Czechoslovak Republic and emphasizing modern European standards.
Finally, the paper examines why this attempt to reconstruct cooperative identity ultimately proved unsuccessful and what role the cooperative principle plays in today’s discourse on the crisis of affordable housing.
WELFARE RELOADED - ROME’S PALAZZO RIVALDI: STRATEGIES FOR PEDAGOGY AND PUBLIC HERITAGE
Consuelo Nuñez Ciuffa, Lavinia Ann Minciacchi
abstractConsuelo Nuñez Ciuffa, Lavinia Ann Minciacchi
Palazzo Silvestri Rivaldi is a former aristocratic residence built in 1542 in the heart of the historical center of Rome, enclosed within the Monti neighborhood and the edge of the Roman Forum. In 1662 the Palazzo became the ‘Conservatorio delle Zitelle Mendicanti’, a charitable institute providing for orphan young women a shelter where to live and learn professional skills with the aim of save them from a life on the streets. Such institutions were elevated to the role of a surrogate welfare system, repurposing existing buildings for new functions and spatial arrangements and defining a still scarcely studied typology that involved some buildings throughout the city.
The ‘Conservatorio’ lasted till 1932 when the destruction of a vast part of the complex for the opening of Via dei Fori Imperiali, forced the cease of its activity. In 1975 the complex was squatted by the political network ‘Movimento’ that claimed back the social role of the area offering civic and cultural activities till the ‘80s when the Palazzo was abandoned. Palazzo Rivaldi is nowadays a listed complex, an unalienable asset that the state can use only for a public function. But in considering what a public function should be any trace of the social role of the complex and of who benefitted from it disappeared: as the rest of Monti experienced a massive gentrification, following the systematic dismantling of its civic network of associations and of its social housing patrimony, so the Palazzo, once a shelter for fragile categories, it is destined to be another museum for touristic consumption. The area stands as an empty vessel of a forgotten public city, where the shift of the cultural value into an extractive activity is complete, and marginalization of multiple strata of society, because of their economical or social status, is clearly exposed by the dramatic dropping of residents’ percentage. Addressing this scenario from the pedagogical point of view, the Urban Studio course of the Iowa State University Rome Program asked 37 students to look back at the memory of Palazzo Rivaldi and its social role to develop a civic hub dedicated to fragile social categories.
Looking at the example of the ‘Conservatorio’ the course investigates the possibility of learning from past praxes to decline the adaptive re-use of our heritage both from an environmental and a social point of view and invest on the substantiation of the role of publicness, for a renovated approach to welfare.
Precarious dwelling and the phenomenology of youth homelessness.
Fidel Meraz
abstractFidel Meraz
This theoretical paper outlines an architectural phenomenology of youth homelessness. By bringing Merleau-Ponty’s embodied spatiality into dialogue with Heidegger’s ontology of dwelling, it asks what an existential lens reveals beyond necessary socio-economic accounts. It suggests that youth homelessness constitutes more than housing deprivation; it represents a disturbance in the spatial and temporal continuity through which 'becoming' ordinarily unfolds. Homelessness unsettles the lived body’s movement from being situated to becoming placed, rendering inhabitation precarious. Ultimately, this speculative inquiry invites scholarly dialogue, proposing that architectural responsibility lies not merely in providing functional shelter, but in cultivating conditions in which dwelling and belonging remain possible.
Session 44 - Urbanisation, policing and crime. The transnational establishment of modern urban police forces, 1789-1989
This panel explores the relationship between processes of urbanisation and the formation of modern police forces. It also analyses the coexistence between state police institutions and municipal bodies, the transnational circulation of policing models and techniques, and the rise of urban crime.
Coordinators: Assumpta Castillo Cañiz, Daniel Oviedo Silva, Sergio Vaquero Martínez
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Coordinators: Assumpta Castillo Cañiz, Daniel Oviedo Silva, Sergio Vaquero Martínez
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Session 44 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Policing the Transitional City: Urban Government, Public Works and Police Rationality in Santiago de Chile, 1786–1833
Katherine Vyhmeister
abstractKatherine Vyhmeister
This paper examines the relationship between urbanisation and policing through the material administration of the city of Santiago de Chile during the late colonial and early national periods (1786–1833). Rather than focusing on the emergence of uniformed police forces, it approaches policing —policía— as a broader governmental rationality embedded in everyday urban practices, infrastructures and municipal functions. This is exemplified through the examination of the case of the Plaza de Abastos. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Santiago experienced significant demographic growth that strained traditional forms of social control. Local authorities responded by mobilising a repertoire of policing practices rooted in municipal governance, with the cabildo (town council) coordinating the actors who together governed urban life through infrastructure maintenance and the regulation of everyday activities, coexisting, and at times conflicting, with the state-level institutions that emerged during independence and early state formation. Drawing on archival records from the municipal council, police regulations and public-works administration, the paper shows that policing in Santiago was neither linear nor purely state-driven, but characterised by multiple actors and overlapping scales of authority —municipal, regional and national. It also situates Santiago within broader transnational circuits of policing knowledge, since local practices were shaped by Spanish and European theories of police that had circulated since the eighteenth century and were adapted to local conditions. By foregrounding material governance and municipal initiative, the study complements institutional histories of policing with an account of how urban infrastructure and everyday administration shaped modern forms of social control.
URBAN REORGANIZATION, HEALTH POLICE, AND GOOD GOVERNMENT. MEXICO CITY, 1789-1850
Marcela Dávalos López
abstractMarcela Dávalos López
The Enlightenment precepts of good governance were in force in Mexico City until the mid-19th century. During that period, hundreds of documents linked the concepts of police and health (which then referred to "healthy sociability") to urban order. Based on the Plans, Ordinances, Regulations, and Reports of the alcaldes (mayors), I will address the role that the health police played in regulating the city. These texts show how the city was classified, differentiated, and marginalized based on the criteria of unhealthiness and lack of police.
Thus, the construction of a sanitation system (who monitored everything from fountains to the construction of sewers, including the circulation of clean water, garbage dumps, latrines and, in general, all the places identified as "prone to disorder"), allowed a vigilant eye to reach neighborhoods previously neglected by the levels of government. Reporting, recognizing, transforming, monitoring, or censuring were part of the tasks that the mayors of each district presented to the Police Judges. And poor and indigenous neighborhoods became the focus of police attention.
As the 19th century progressed, prohibitions, fines, reports, and punishments provided avenues for residents to reform their cultural practices. In this paper, I will discuss how the connection between police precepts and public health created a system capable of transforming not only urban territory but also the practices and expectations of its inhabitants.
Mediating Order: Community Policing in Kyiv in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Olha Krasinko
abstractOlha Krasinko
The large field of history of the crime and criminal justice has changed significantly in the last century. Yet, historiographical discussions remained regionally heterogeneous. The debate on policing concerned the studies of the Russian Empire only in passing, ironically, despite the image of the “police state.” Nevertheless, the case of the vast overland empire raises important questions about the viability and limits of control from a distance. How effective was central management of police in provincial cities? Did the decisions and motivations of policemen diverge from official instructions, and what influenced them? How was the relationship between the state representatives and local inhabitants established?
My research addresses the issue of provincial policing in the case study of Kyiv. It is the proper model as the city was located far from the imperial capitals and demanded increased police attention because of its status. It was an administrative, trading, and pilgrimage center of the Right-Bank Ukrainian region in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, annexed by the empire in the 1790s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the process of integration and assimilation was still ongoing and troubled. The challenged governing concerned navigating through a complex local population, which consisted of a mix of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish communities, and multiple authorities, including the general-governor’s office, the city magistrate, and the commandant of the local garrison.
The study is based on a number of sources, including imperial law, materials from the Central State Historical Archive of Kyiv and the State Archive of the City of Kyiv, and the reports from the newspaper Kievskie Gubernskie Vedomosti. I claim that the Kyiv police was influenced by the role of intermediary between the central administration, local habitants, and other municipal governmental bodies.The communal agreement in many cases outweighed the careful performance. The officers' decisions were not always defined by the orders. Relations between the city police and townsfolk were multipolar. Swinging from conflicts to cooperation impacted police’s frequent violations of prescriptions, including abuse of of authority or corruption. Dwellers also actively addressed the police, seeking help when victimized, confronting in case of quarrels, and even trying to manipulate the investigations in order to gain personal interests within the community.
The Atlantic Circulation of Police Models: Brazil and Portugal in the Second Half of 19th century.
Gonçalo Rocha Gonçalves
abstractGonçalo Rocha Gonçalves
The processes and ideas that underpinned urban police reform in Europe in the 19th century supported new police forces controlled by state, civilian authority, with professional, uniformed, more visible and disciplined men, focused on crime prevention and with providing city dwellers with a sense of security. In short, police forces more focused on citizens and their rights and less on state security. The new urban police forces that emerged throughout Europe this period were intended to be institutions that embodied the rule of law and less the protection of the interests of the governments in power. But somewhat paradoxically, on a continent undergoing a marked process of urbanization, the new police forces were also aimed to implement an urban order in which the role of the state as a regulator of social relations gained new prominence.
Historians have long noted how the debates and the circulation of ideas materialized in the transformation of urban policing transcended local, regional, and national borders. The transnational circulation of policing models occurred throughout Europe supported by processes of faster information circulation, via mail and the telegraph, and of people, especially through political exile. However, the study of the transnational circulation of policing models has been overly limited to the European context. Wilbur Miller's book "Cops and Bobbies" has established itself as a classic in the history of policing, but the study of the Atlantic circulation of ideas surrounding police modernity has been limited to the North Atlantic.
This paper examines the South Atlantic circulation of ideas urban police reform, focusing specifically on the creation of the Guardas Urbanas in Brazil in 1866 and the Polícia Civil in Portugal in 1867. Both institutions were meant to be professional civilian police forces dedicated to patrolling the streets of the major cities of the two countries. Based on parliamentary speeches and debates in the press in both countries, the main objective of the paper is to understand the ideas underlying these police reforms through the hypothesis that, rather than responding to local social conditions, especially in the case of a slavery society as the Brazilian, their creation and development in the following decades were based on the impact of the Atlantic transnational circulation of police ideas.
'Trans-imperial policing in treaty port: the intersection of British and French urban governance in Shanghai, 1854-1914'
Chong Xu
abstractChong Xu
The governance of Shanghai’s foreign concessions (1854–1914) presents a paradox for the study of transnational urban policing. The topography of the region was characterised by a division of authority, with the British-led Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) operating within the International Settlement and the French Garde municipale present in other areas. Nevertheless, this divided system effectively maintained order. The present article challenges the conventional wisdom that has hitherto treated these forces within the confines of separate, single-empire narratives. The argument is made that policing in Shanghai constituted a coherent, trans-imperial establishment, defined by an entangled trinity of competition, cooperation, and connectivity.
Drawing on a range of multilingual archival sources from Britain, France and China, the analysis compares the doctrines and repertoires of these rival forces. The text draws parallels between the SMP’s commercial-pragmatic mandate, which relies on Sikh constables, and the French Garde’s urbanist-moral doctrine, which utilised its own colonial (Annamite) recruits.
Despite the presence of divergent labour hierarchies and political accountabilities (SMC ratepayers vs. French consular prestige), the study reveals a significant degree of common ground. Both forces relied on Chinese auxiliaries and managed vice as a form of revenue and risk. Process tracing of emblematic crises, particularly the 1905 Mixed Court Riot, demonstrates that geopolitical rivalry was consistently subordinated to operational collaboration. The present article employs a novel theoretical framework to explore Shanghai from the perspective of a shared security economy, thereby unveiling the intricate mechanisms of inter-imperial coordination that characterised this distinctive transnational urban policing apparatus.
Urbanisation, crime and policing: the construction of an unsafe city (Lisbon, c. 1867–1910)
Maria João Vaz
abstractMaria João Vaz
Concerns about the extent of crime in Lisbon were one of the arguments used to ensure that this city was one of the first urban areas in Portugal to be equipped with a civil police force. Thus, following the model of the London Metropolitan Police (1829), from 1867 onwards a new police force, the Lisbon Civil Police (1867-1910), began to patrol the streets of the city, the political, administrative, economic, cultural and capital centre of Portugal, with the aim of maintaining public order and the safety of people and property.
Lisbon became an increasingly policed space, with a steady increase in the number of police officers who had an ever-greater presence in the daily lives of the people who lived and worked in the city. However, at the same time, crime recorded by the police and judicial authorities continued to rise, not only in terms of the absolute number of crimes reported, but also in terms of the crime rates that were recorded. Concerns that arose mainly from the 1880s onwards about the increase in crime in Lisbon and the danger that this would pose to the maintenance of order and security in the city contributed greatly to the city being perceived as an unsafe place, with the urban environment even being defined as a factor that encouraged criminal or deviant behaviour. While scholars and government officials warned of the dangers of city life and the criminogenic nature of urban spaces, idyllic descriptions of country life were also being produced.
In Lisbon, not only did the level of crime stand out, with rates much higher than in other cities and districts in the country, but also the type of crime, with a high incidence of petty offences, most of which did not occur in other areas of the country. Taking the city of Lisbon during the period of the Lisbon Civil Police (1867-1910) as a case study, this paper, revisiting debates already initiated by historiography, aims to discuss the relationship between urbanisation, policing and crime, considering that in 19th-century Portugal, the city had a special relationship with policing, as it was here that forms of policing defined as modern were first implemented, exploring the relationship between the process of urbanisation and the formation of modern police forces as a response to the difficulties posed by urban crime.
Policing the Emerging City: Urban Growth, Institutional Experimentation, and the Detective Imaginary (1888, Madrid)
Ramón Ojanguren Añover
abstractRamón Ojanguren Añover
This conference examines the case of the Fuencarral street crime to illuminate the entanglement of urbanization and the early formation of modern policing in Spain. Taking place during a period of asymmetric urban expansion—where ambitious enlargement projects failed to accommodate the influx of populations driven by rural exodus and agrarian rent crises—the case reveals how the hurried development of state police institutions was marked by institutional ambiguity and overlapping jurisdictions. In this context, the boundaries between judicial and policing functions were often blurred: judges could act as police officers, while police could perform judicial tasks, highlighting a moment in which professional specialization was still nascent.
Crucially, the Fuencarral case demonstrates that the modernization of policing was not only a matter of administrative or technical reform, but also a cultural and performative process. Contemporary press coverage, public trials, and courtroom performances show how both judges and police actively engaged with prevailing Victorian literary models of the detective. Through this performative lens, law enforcement and judicial authorities projected an image of rationality, investigative acumen, and procedural competence that mirrored the detective fiction circulating transnationally, despite the unevenness and improvisation of actual police practices. In doing so, the authorities performed both legitimacy and modernity, signaling their alignment with international trends in urban policing while navigating the contradictions of a society undergoing rapid demographic, social, and spatial transformation.
This case study underscores the importance of analyzing policing not merely as a technical or institutional endeavor, but as a social and cultural practice shaped by urban conditions, public imagination, and transnational circulations of knowledge. By situating the Fuencarral crime within the broader processes of urbanization and police formation, the paper highlights the tensions between ambitious modernization projects, uneven urban growth, and the performative enactments of law and order. It contributes to a deeper understanding of how early modern police forces emerged in cities where demographic pressures, institutional improvisation, and cultural imaginaries intersected, shaping both the realities and the representations of urban crime and policing.
Session 44 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 2 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Public Space Policing in Madrid During the 1920s and 1930s: A Material and Street-Level Approach
Pablo de Mora
abstractPablo de Mora
There are several studies concerning historical police circulations in the cities and its presence in the urban landscape (see f.e. Deluermoz). Albeit, there is still need for analysing material and spatial presence of police agents on the ground. Some approximations orbitating this scope were made by scholars such as de Miguel and de Pedro in Madrid, and also in Bolonian and few English cities (see Rose and Eisner). However, these studies mainly focused in other urban disturbances or practices (prostitution, vagabonds or crime) rather than on police corpses. This paper aims to show new approaches on urban police history, following the path from the spatial turn and previous studies from other disciplines such as sociology and geography (see Herbert, Gasgonia). The main goal of this paper is to show the possibilities of using GIS on historical policing studies, specifically focusing in police patrols and interventions in urban streetscape. Through very scarce and fragmentary police archives, we will show the patterns of police distribution throughout the city. We will examine how several practices were applied in urban space such as patrols, detentions, crime prosecutions and conflict mediations. Moreover, we'll find some connections between street patrolling and popular demands and complaints in specific neighbourhoods. Besides, police's physical presence in the streets was a source of conflict by itself, due to a continuous struggle for it's legitimacy. That's why we'll see how police circulations were also part of a normalization program for guaranteeing the state's securitization of urban space during the first third of the 20th century. Some of our preliminary results show how policing had a strong connection with the reshaping of urban streetscape during this period. Thus, the wide range of police practices (patroling, detentions, spying, etc.) were strongly conditioned by urban landscape and the evolution and disruption of new urban practices in the Roaring Twenties.
Women Police in the Policing of Italian Cities between the 1960s and 1970s
Michele Di Giorgio, Molly Tambor
abstractMichele Di Giorgio, Molly Tambor
This study examines the role of the women police in the control of Italian cities between the 1960s and 1970s, situating it within the broader processes of urbanization and social and political transformation in republican Italy. Established in 1959 at the end of a long legislative process, the women’s police began its activities in the early 1960s with functions related to the protection of public morality, the family, and women’s and juvenile labor, as well as the assistance and supervision of women and minors “in a state of moral and social abandonment”, and also in response to new needs for the control of prostitution following the abolition of regulated brothels (Merlin Law, 1958).
Similar in conception to women’s police units created in Europe and the United States since the early twentieth century, the Polizia femminile were employed mainly in urban contexts and called upon to serve at-risk women and children in tasks that emphasized policing’s social assistance aspects. Those tasks, however, were immediately called into question by a series of factors that redefined social life and criminality in Italian cities: the impact of Italy’s economic boom, the resulting internal migrations, the subsequent increase in social and political conflict, and, not least, changing social customs.
By comparing the first phase of full operation of the corps, in the second half of the 1960s, with the period immediately preceding the police reform at the end of the 1970s, and drawing on the analysis of service reports drafted in the police headquarters of numerous Italian cities, this paper seeks to reconstruct the transformation of the everyday practices of the women’s police force in urban policing and its positioning within the state security apparatuses. The sources make it possible to shed light on under-explored areas such as juvenile delinquency, sexual violence, suicides, begging, the spread of narcotics, prostitution, and the policing of homosexuality, showing how policewomen’s work constituted a privileged vantage point on processes of urban marginalization and on the ambivalences of social control in Italian cities in the 1960s and 1970s.
Figures of Threat: Youth, Exclusion and Police Control in Contexts of Accelerated Urbanization
Iñigo López Simón
abstractIñigo López Simón
Various studies have shown how, in the context of economic crises and accelerated urbanization, certain figures of juvenile delinquency were constructed as social threats and served to justify the expansion of police and penal apparatuses. In the United Kingdom, the emergence of so-called "mugging" became a catalyst for moral panics that legitimized new forms of police and judicial control (Hall et al., 1978). In Spain, the phenomenon of the so-called "quinquis" evidenced the inability of the State to socially integrate the inhabitants of the peripheral neighborhoods that emerged from Franco's developmentalism and the Transition, while the media contributed to consolidate a criminal imaginary that turned these young people into a symbol of urban threat (López Simón, 2022).
Both contexts allow us to examine the connections between urbanization, youth marginalization and the expansion of police institutions in the twentieth century. While in Great Britain the racial issue was at the center of the discourse on crime, in Spain it was class fractures and urbanistic policies that articulated the figure of the young delinquent. However, in both cases a common pattern is observed: the production of categories of dangerousness, amplified by the media, which reinforced the legitimacy of the police forces and new strategies of surveillance and repression.
The communication proposes a comparative analysis that places the Spanish case within a global framework of study on the criminalization of youth in accelerated urbanization processes and economical crises. This is intended to contribute to the debate on the formation of the neoliberal state and on the transnational circulation of discourses about crime and order.
In dialogue with the axes of the table, the communication will address the way in which the processes of urbanization and social exclusion contributed to the construction of new threat figures, paying attention to the coexistence and often conflictive relationship between the different control apparatuses – state, municipal and neighborhood – in the management of crime. It will also analyse the role played by the media in generating moral panics that served to legitimise the expansion of police action, as well as the forms of resistance, both cultural and symbolic, that emerged from the urban peripheries in the face of these dynamics of criminalisation.
The Madrid Municipal Police and the “Modern Performance of Public Safety”: Practices, Actors, Challenges, and Resistances in the Fight Against Drugs (1977–1987).
María José León Robles
abstractMaría José León Robles
Since the late 1970s, during Spain’s democratization process, debates about citizen insecurity began to proliferate throughout the country. Various conflicts in public spaces drew the attention of the media, specialists, and public authorities. These conflicts were particularly significant in cities such as Madrid, in a context of crisis and profound urban transformation, where phenomena such as rising crime rates, the emergence of new forms of youth leisure, and the spread of practices like drug consumption were becoming increasingly visible. In response to this situation, measures were implemented both at the state and municipal levels to control and regulate a public space that seemed to be growing ever more conflictive.
This paper examines the role played by the Madrid Municipal Police—who were granted new powers and responsibilities from the 1980s onward—in the realm of so-called “citizen security.” To do so, it focuses on police activity in the fight against drugs in the capital between 1977 and 1987, one of the central issues on the public agenda at the time, which also allows for a discussion of related topics such as the rise of criminality and processes of social marginalization.
First, a brief review of the existing literature on the subject will be presented, highlighting the most relevant contributions. Second, the roles played by the local police in Madrid will be analysed and discussed, linking the new urban context with changes in police responsibilities and the evolution of the force itself. Third, the paper will examine specific police practices in the fight against drugs, paying particular attention to the various actions undertaken, the actors involved (police officers themselves, but also those persecuted, residents, and other authorities), and the spaces subjected to surveillance. Finally, it will trace the forms of resistance and challenges encountered by these policing practices.
This research draws on sources from the Municipal Police section of the Archivo de Villa de Madrid covering the indicated years, including information on street arrests, special services, letters, and residents’ complaints. It also incorporates oral sources from three interviews with one national police officer and two municipal police officers who worked in Madrid during that period.
Session 45 - Tracing urban inequalities in the past through census data and statistical sources. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
This panel discusses the use of census and other statistical sources to study the social impact of urbanization in late modern times. Three main issues will organize the debate: methodological questions on exploiting census data, different types of inequality and their intersectional analysis, and social mobility and its measurement across time.
Coordinators: José Luis Oyón, Ruben Pallol
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Coordinators: José Luis Oyón, Ruben Pallol
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Session 45 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Wealth, Material Culture, and Urban Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Antwerp
Jeroen Kole
abstractJeroen Kole
This paper contributes to debates on measuring and representing historical urban inequalities by tracing how unequal access to wealth, goods, and credit shaped Antwerp’s social fabric during the long nineteenth century. Drawing on 450 matched probate inventories and inheritance declarations (1835–1912), it reconstructs the distribution of wealth across households. Because these sources primarily capture middle-class, bourgeois, and elite individuals, the analysis focuses on the upper half of Antwerp’s society, where strategies of wealth management and cultural distinction were most explicit.
By linking demographic and fiscal information with object-level data, the paper analyses inequality not only through absolute wealth, but also through the composition of financial and material portfolios, the use of informal versus formal credit, and the organisation of domestic space. Material culture adds a crucial layer: households of similar wealth or occupational standing often differed sharply in their investment in furniture, decorative objects, or silverware. Cluster analysis reveals persistent economic and material stratification, while also uncovering divergent group cultures not reducible to economic position. Domestic ideals such as multi-room layouts or decorative displays became more common over time, yet their adoption varied sharply, with some groups embracing them as markers of respectability and others remaining excluded even as their economic position improved.
The paper addresses two axes of the session. First, it engages with methodological challenges in rendering probate documents into quantitative evidence, discussing stratification strategies, a material culture index, and the integration of qualitative detail into statistical modelling. Second, it adopts a multidimensional view of inequality, combining wealth, credit, and material culture to capture how disparities evolved during Antwerp’s transformation into a booming port city. This approach shows how inequalities were not only persistent but also reshaped by urban growth, industrialisation, and demographic change.
Ultimately, this case study demonstrates how probate and fiscal sources can capture multiple dimensions of inequality in nineteenth-century cities. By linking wealth, material goods, and social opportunity, it proposes a replicable methodology that also highlights the domestic sphere as a key arena where inequalities were materialised, reproduced, and occasionally contested.
Beyond Class: Exploring Multidimensional Segregation in 1828 Ghent
Martijn Collijs
abstractMartijn Collijs
Studies of nineteenth-century residential segregation have largely focused on a single axis of division, most commonly socioeconomic status in Europe and ethnicity in the United States. Although the two are increasingly considered together, segregation often remains conceptualized through a narrow, one-dimensional lens. Such approaches risk obscuring the ways in which multiple characteristics possibly intersect to shape urban segregation. This paper explores the potential for a multidimensional understanding of segregation. Intersectional analyses of this period remain rare, partly because techniques developed for twentieth-century aggregated census data are not easily applied to earlier individual-level sources.
The study examines early-nineteenth century Ghent, located in present-day Belgium. The city housed roughly 80,000 inhabitants. It was characterized by industrialization, substantial rural in-migration and growing socio-economic disparities. The study integrates information on 70,000 individuals from the 1827 Register der Bevolking, specifically age, household composition, occupation, and migration status. Ethnicity is not considered, as large-scale ethnic migration only began in the mid-twentieth century. The data is georeferenced in 13,000 properties from the 1828 land registry and linked to cadastral income. The resulting spatialized micro-dataset provides an unusually detailed basis for analyzing how multiple dimensions may have clustered, or failed to cluster, across neighborhoods.
This paper hypothesises that the intersection of age or life stage, household structure, occupation, migration status, and socioeconomic position shaped residential patterns in nineteenth-century Ghent, and that segregation cannot be understood through any single dimension. A multidimensional perspective may reveal patterns of segregation and cohabitation that remained invisible in conventional analyses. As an exploratory study, the paper will examine the methodological difficulties of adapting modern quantitative techniques to nineteenth-century sources and will contribute to broader debates on the measurement and representation of historical urban segregation.
Measuring Literacy Inequality in Early 19th-Century Krakow: Human Capital, Occupation, and Gender.
Bartosz Ogórek
abstractBartosz Ogórek
Literacy, understood as the ability to read and write, has long served economic historians as an important indicator of human capital in past societies. The concept of literacy itself has changed considerably, however, with the emergence of New Literacy Studies, which shifted attention from a simple literate/illiterate dichotomy towards literacy as a differentiated and socially situated practice. This paper seeks to bring these perspectives together by developing a graded measure of pre-marital literacy resources and asking how estimates of social inequality change when different thresholds of literacy are applied.
The analysis uses 2045 civil marriage records compiled under the Napoleonic Code in the parish of St Stephen in Kraków (1810-1845), covering 4090 brides and grooms. Instead of classifying individuals solely according to whether they signed their marriage act, the proposed measure distinguishes eight levels ranging from no observed literacy resources, through access to literate witnesses of different social proximity (including friends, neighbours and relatives) to low, medium and high levels of individual signature proficiency. The approach thus incorporates both personally embodied writing skills and observable access to literate social resources.
The results reproduce the familiar gender and occupational inequalities found in conventional signature-literacy studies, but also reveal a pronounced threshold effect. Inequalities are greatest, or close to greatest, around the conventional distinction between signers and non-signers—the threshold most commonly employed in historical literacy research. They become smaller in both directions: when the definition of literacy is broadened to include access to literate social networks, but also when stricter criteria distinguishing medium and high levels of writing proficiency are applied. Gender differences are assessed through gaps in standardized predicted probabilities, while occupational inequality is summarized using η²; both measures show this general pattern, although occupational stratification remains considerably stronger and more persistent.
The findings suggest that the conventional binary signature measure may capture a particularly socially selective point on a broader continuum of literacy resources. Historical estimates of inequality in human capital therefore depend not only on who is defined as literate, but also on where the boundary of literacy is drawn.
The modern city and its undercurrents: social cartographies of nineteenth-century Barcelona
Eduard Page Campos
abstractEduard Page Campos
The demolition of medieval walls and the emergence of new urbanization projects inaugurated, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a new era for major cities. Physical growth spurred the expansion of horizontal social segregation, undermining the dense and compact urban model characterized by everyday interclass contact. The advance of the modern city entailed the spatial embodiment of unequal access to resources, opportunities, and infrastructures essential to life. This restructuring gave rise to clearly differentiated areas in terms of income, living conditions, and services. Moreover, the process brought about a significant shift in the universes and horizons of different social groups, inscribing in the urban space the fracture of civil society into increasingly antagonistic classes.
While other cities have been extensively studied, the case of Barcelona remains less well understood. The scarcity of sociodemographic sources has hindered efforts to fill the gaps in our knowledge of the social dynamics that accompanied its modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century. This contrasts with the extensive understanding we possess for the early decades of the twentieth century, thanks especially to the analysis of the 1930 municipal population register.
Between 1848 and 1900, Barcelona more than doubled its population and underwent notable physical expansion. This paper proposes an approach to the early formation of urban inequality in nineteenth-century Barcelona, drawing on sources that have so far been scarcely used for this purpose: electoral registers, civil records, municipal infrastructure and service reports, contemporary press, and literature.
Our aim is to critically assess the possibilities offered by the combined treatment and analysis of these sources. To this end, we present a provisional reconstruction of the city’s social maps at key moments in the period, with particular emphasis on electoral registers and selected data on mortality, education, and infrastructure. This predominantly quantitative analysis will be complemented by an examination of how different urban actors interpreted and represented these increasingly segregated worlds. Alongside the reconfiguration of Barcelona’s social maps, key transformations also took place in the mental and identity maps of the city and its different spaces.
Datafying Amsterdam's Housing History: Unlocking Housing Records for Modern Urban Historians
Tim Verlaan, Melvin Wevers, Thomas Smits
abstractTim Verlaan, Melvin Wevers, Thomas Smits
Over thirty years ago, Charles Tilly urged urban historians to address big questions, connect large-scale processes with local life, and consider how time and place shape urban evolution. Yet archival constraints - manual reading of thousands of documents, difficulty tracing individuals, and challenges in analysing city-scale patterns - have long limited such work. Recent advances in digitization and computational methods, particularly Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs), now make it possible to pursue Tilly’s vision at scale.
This paper presents early results from a project centred on Amsterdam’s woningkaarten (housing cards), maintained by the City Archives from 1924 to 1989. These cards recorded every residential address, noting occupants’ names, arrival and departure dates, previous and next addresses, and household changes. Spanning seven decades marked by occupation, postwar crisis, decolonization, migration, redevelopment, and deindustrialization, the collection forms a unique longitudinal record of millions of urban lives. Despite their potential, these 400,000 typewritten cards have remained largely unused because they are not searchable or analysable.
Our research shows how VLLMs can extract structured information from these records, transforming static archives into dynamic datasets. Our processing pipeline interprets semi-structured layouts and links data across cards to reconstruct residential histories, track individuals and families through multiple addresses, and map demographic change at street, neighbourhood, and city levels.
In Barcelona we will present a case study of several streets (1945–1990) addressing urban inequality by tracing residential mobility across social groups, by reconstructing neighbourhood composition over time, by examining how major historical events shaped specific streets and buildings, and by connecting individual life courses with planning and housing policy.
Beyond methodological issues, we will engage with the ethics of datafying personal information from administrative records. The woningkaarten contain sensitive details about real people, raising questions of privacy, consent, and responsibility. By making these sources computationally accessible, we aim to illuminate Amsterdam’s development while providing a model for similar projects elsewhere - opening a window onto ordinary lives at the scale Tilly imagined.
Session 45 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Urban Displacement and Mobility in Victorian Manchester, 1851-1901
Emily Chung, Guillaume Proffit
abstractEmily Chung, Guillaume Proffit
While Manchester’s early industrial growth was dramatic and unregulated, emerging forms of municipal politics and urban health reform in the second half of the nineteenth century reflected attempts at shaping cities into more physical and morally healthful environments. Waves of slum clearances and urban expansion substantially changed the character and form of the city according to the tenets of Liberalism and modernity. While the politics of such movements have been extensively studied, few spatial studies have examined the precise demographic and residential patterns underlying such transformations. This paper draws on census microdata from the English Censuses 1851-1901 to observe changes in residential conditions in this period. Leveraging linked census data, we are able to observe spatial mobility at a high degree of granularity in and around the Greater Manchester area, alongside changes in the quantity and compositions of housing stock. We focus on the relationship between slum clearances in the city centre and new housing stock on the outskirts of the city, in particular, to evaluate the extent and distance of residential dislocation over this period, and assessing whether urban ‘improvement’ schemes offered genuine opportunities for rehousing. By combining longitudinal demographic data with spatial analysis, this study offers a new perspective on the measurement and representation of urban inequality in the nineteenth century, revealing how reform, displacement, and mobility were intertwined in the making of the modern industrial city.
Mapping of census data and analysis together with its urban environment: method and case study in Valladolid, Spain (c. 1850-1925)
Miguel Fernández-Maroto, Daniel López-Bragado, Federico Camerin, Víctor-Antonio Lafuente-Sánchez
abstractMiguel Fernández-Maroto, Daniel López-Bragado, Federico Camerin, Víctor-Antonio Lafuente-Sánchez
Since the mid-19th century, municipal censuses in many cities (particularly in the Western world) became sufficiently detailed to provide a fairly accurate picture of the social structure of different neighbourhoods through analysis of family composition, occupations, etc. This data is usually analysed using statistical methods, but there are still few studies that have delved deeper into this information through mapping, i.e. through the precise geolocation of all this data, which opens up new perspectives by allowing it to be contrasted with their spatial reality, i.e. with their urban environment, including both the residential stock and the first public facilities.
This paper presents a method for mapping municipal census data and comparing it with the creation and transformation of the residential environment (through building permits) and the creation of the first public urban facilities (mainly primary schools) in the specific context of Western cities (particularly Spanish cities) between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Based on a series of historical maps and the geolocation of municipal census data, residential buildings (created or transformed) and the first public urban facilities, it is possible to delve deeper into the socio-spatial structure at specific moments in time, as well as observe its evolution.
To illustrate the method, its application will be shown in a study referring to the San Andrés neighbourhood of Valladolid (Spain), a suburb that was transformed and expanded in the wake of the city's initial industrialisation, where a large working-class population was concentrated. Taking as initial and final references two sufficiently detailed historical maps (from 1863 and 1915), the data from the municipal registers for that period have been mapped, as well as the transformation of the urban environment, allowing conclusions to be drawn about the processes of settlement and internal displacement of the neighbourhood's population, as well as evaluating their living conditions and access to the first municipal facilities that emerged during that same period. The aim is to open up new perspectives in the historical study of the socio-spatial structure of cities by mapping methods.
Establishing a place in the city: census household positions as indicators of social inequalities between migrants and natives in Danish cities 1880-1921
Lise Bødtker Sunde
abstractLise Bødtker Sunde
This paper will explore household position in Danish censuses 1880–1921 as a lens for understanding urban inequality in social status and living conditions, asking whether the difference in previous experience of urban life and access to existing familial ties and social connections within the community between migrants and native urban residents, affected which options and strategies they were able to pursue for establishing themselves in the city.
Using linked individual level Danish census records 1880–1921, I compare the household positions of recent migrants to those of demographically similar urban natives. The longitudinal nature of the data enables tracking individuals across census years, assessing whether initial disparities persisted or diminished over time as the migrants adapted to urban life.
The Danish censuses of the 19th and 20th centuries registered individuals within their households, using order of appearance on the page combined with recorded positions in household to capture the status, role, and relationships of each individual within the household unit. These household positions also reflect the degree of stability and security in an individual's living arrangements, their level of independence and personal autonomy within their home, as well as the strength and character of their social ties to their household and community of residence. As such, they offer a fascinating insight into the social aspects of how people lived and established a place for themselves in the city, which other common indicators of socio-economic status and living conditions, such as income, occupation, and housing quality, fail to capture.
This perspective is particularly valuable in examining the experiences of the large numbers of rural migrants arriving in Danish towns and cities during the late 19th and early 20th century, trying to establish a place for themselves a new unfamiliar community while often lacking the knowledge and social connections available to native residents.
Housing and Urban Inequalities in the Twin Capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: A Comparative Statistical Analysis of Vienna and Budapest, 1890–1910
Monika Pilkhoffer
abstractMonika Pilkhoffer
The period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy offers exceptionally rich statistical material, owing to the decennial population censuses. From the turn of the century onwards, these surveys extended beyond demographic data to include information on residential buildings and dwellings. This presentation compares the Monarchy’s two capitals—Vienna and Budapest—by examining the distribution of populations living in houses and apartments of varying sizes, types, and locations.
Despite the apparent precision of quantitative research, its results are shaped by numerous methodological challenges. The censuses in the two halves of the Empire were based on differing criteria. Conceptual ambiguity also posed difficulties, as even the definition of a “residential building” was not consistent—summer houses or multiple dwellings under a single street number were often classified differently. Nevertheless, the data reveal discernible patterns and correlations: beyond Vienna’s role as a model, Budapest’s strong ambition to emulate and catch up with its western counterpart is clearly evident.
The presentation analyses census data from 1890 to 1910 to trace population size and change in both the inner and outer districts, as well as the distribution of inhabitants by dwelling size. Hungarian data also allow for the exploration of correlations between housing size and the nationality or religion of the household head, as well as between property ownership and occupational structure. Household composition can be examined in terms of family members and non-family residents, including servants, lodgers, and apprentices. Urban inequalities are clearly reflected in housing density, both between districts and in the comparison of the two capitals. In connection with urbanisation, the analysis also considers the proportion of the population living in dwellings equipped with a kitchen, maid’s room, and/or bathroom. The poor housing conditions of the lower social class were indicated not only by smaller and less comfortable dwellings but also by the necessity of sharing them with non-family residents such as boarders or bed tenants.
By comparing building statistics with population data, the presentation aims to provide an integrated analysis of the development of the Monarchy’s two capitals, revealing both the similarities and differences between Vienna and Budapest, as well as the pronounced housing inequalities characteristic of early twentieth-century metropolitan life.
Tuberculosis and urban inequalities in Barcelona 1929-1936
Celia Miralles Buil
abstractCelia Miralles Buil
This paper aims to study the urban impact of tuberculosis (TB) on Barcelona social topography during the 1930’s (before the Civil War).
More than any other disease, TB was, and still is today, strongly associated with social inequalities in cities. For this reason, TB found its place in the social revindications that agitated Barcelona in the 1930’s, and became a main issue for the newly elected Catalan Government in 1931.
The established relation between TB and urban misery drove the experts (physicians and public authorities) to focus on a particular group of individuals, who, because of their social and spatial characteristics, became the favored object for health control.
This paper intends to resituate this group of individuals into the Barcelona socio-spatial frame. For this purpose, it looks at information regarding 5000 patients who were free-assisted by Barcelona public authorities between 1929 and 1936 and relates them to the 1930 census. Instead of explaining the TB distribution in the whole city, the paper rather analyzes its unequal impact on the working-class city. Indeed, the assisted patients were mostly young male workers living in the most degraded neighborhoods and had a lesser social integration in the city. By using Historical GIS, the paper investigates the social fragmentation of a working-class city at diverse geographical levels: neighborhood, streets, building and house, with the aim of completing the works previously done regarding urban segregation in Barcelona (see Oyón JL, The split of the working-class city 2009).
Furthermore, the paper intends to demonstrate that TB was not only an indicator of socio-spatial inequality. It was also a factor that increased the social fragmentation of the city by worsening the precarious situation of many families. For instance, TB frequently prevented the patient from working, forcing his family to find other precarious solutions to survive, to move to a cheaper house, etc.
Finally, to complete the picture, the paper focuses on the inequality of medical treatment. While the doctors generally explained the differences of treatment by the patients’ pathologies, clinical reports clearly show that other factors (unhealthy urban environment, overcrowded houses, professions, gender etc.) were already considered.
Mercado laboral y movilidad social en la Andalucía urbana. Granada, 1900-1930
Ana Belén Gómez Fernández, David Martínez López
abstractAna Belén Gómez Fernández, David Martínez López
Esta comunicación pretende analizar la movilidad social en la ciudad de Granada en el primer tercio del siglo XX. Un momento clave para la configuración de la sociedad urbana andaluza, donde el avance de la urbanización, la intensificación del proceso de inmigración y la transformación en el mercado laboral marcaron las líneas básicas de un proceso de cambio. Una situación que repercutió en el mundo del trabajo y en la estructura social. Así, pues, en este contexto cambiante ¿favoreció esta dinámica situación un nuevo marco de movilidad social?.
Los datos empíricos proceden de una fuente sociodemográfica como son los padrones municipales de habitantes a partir de dos cortes o hitos cronológicos: 1900 y 1930. Una fuente esencial cuya información nominal de la población se ha establecido a través de un muestreo aleatorio sobre el total de la población y organizada a través de hogares e individuos. A partir de aquí, nos centramos en la correspondencia entre padres e hijos, teniendo en cuenta la división por sexos, en un momento del ciclo vital de los hijos e hijas, cuando siguen en el hogar paterno y se incorporan al mundo del trabajo de forma generalizada. Sin embargo, este análisis no está exento de problemas ya que conlleva la asimetría en el diferente momento vital de los individuos. Además, la incorporación al mundo laboral no se produce de la misma forma para todas las personas, ya que factores como la clase social o el género son determinantes.
Los datos obtenidos han sido clasificados a través de HISCLASS, lo que nos permite establecer diferentes grupos sociales y clasificar a los individuos.
Se puede avanzar como existe cierta inmovilidad social para la mayor parte de la población, especialmente en las categorías más bajas. No obstante, a la altura de los años 30, la movilidad social resulta más destacada especialmente para aquellos trabajadores de cuello blanco, del mundo del comercio, etc. que lograban de forma discreta que sus hijos escalaran en la escala social. En las familias de clase media se atisba una mayor movilidad social, donde diferentes familias supieron aprovechar las oportunidades de bienestar y prestigio que ofrecía el empleo estable y bien remunerado que las profesiones liberales, la burocracia y los nuevos servicios de telecomunicaciones ofrecían a su descendencia. En el escalafón más alto se observa cierta inmovilidad, ya que al estar en el techo social, la trayectoria social ascendente parece inexistente.
Session 45 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 310 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Mortality inequalities between natives and migrants: Cause-specific mortality differences in the port city of Antwerp from a long-term perspective (1840–1920)
Joeri Aerts, Hilde Greefs, Paul Puschmann
abstractJoeri Aerts, Hilde Greefs, Paul Puschmann
In our paper, we explore the dynamics of 19th- and 20th-century urban inequalities through the lens of mortality differences between population groups. It specifically aims to study inequalities in cause-specific adult mortality between ‘natives’ and migrants and how they evolved in the port city of Antwerp (1840-1920). In this period, the city’s population grew rapidly, and the number of yearly newcomers rose sharply, among whom an increasing share of foreign migrants. Previous research has shown notable mortality differences between migrants and locally born inhabitants in cities, unveiling a “Healthy Migrant Effect”. For Antwerp, previous studies uncovered differences even within groups of origin that related to their sex, migration distance, and other factors, which calls for more detailed analysis of inequalities both between and within these groups.
We will look more closely into these mortality differences between groups of origin by combining several quantitative sources. We use cause-of-death registers digitized by the citizen-science project S.O.S. Antwerp, covering all deaths in Antwerp between 1820 and 1946 (ca. 500,000), supplemented with information from death certificates. The resulting dataset includes individual-level data on age, sex, origin, address and cause of death. The data are studied together with population census data (LOKSTAT). Combining these sources allows us to (1) zoom in on differences between and within groups of origin and (2) conduct a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of these differences.
Where previous research on mortality differences between natives and migrants generally focuses on all-cause mortality, our data allow us to conduct cause-specific analyses. Distinguishing between causes will help us better understand the dynamics of mortality differences between migrants and natives, the specific health risks they faced, and how these risks and differences were shaped by the specific historical context of Antwerp. As our preliminary findings suggest that migrants were more vulnerable to epidemics, we will zoom in on the multiple cholera epidemics that plagued the city of Antwerp as a case study.
By combining longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses of cause-specific adult mortality differences between natives and migrants, made possible by the combination of detailed large-scale datasets, our paper highlights how urban mortality inequalities were shaped by mobility and social environment in a dynamic port city.
Beyond Occupations: Rethinking Social Inequality through Population Registers in Basque Urban History
Jon Aldabaldetreku Delgado, José María Beascoechea Gangoiti
abstractJon Aldabaldetreku Delgado, José María Beascoechea Gangoiti
The main objective of this proposal is to advance the debate on how historians can investigate processes of social inequality in urban settings through the analysis of municipal registers of inhabitants. The study focuses on two specific cases: the two main Basque cities—Bilbao and San Sebastián—and their population lists from 1900 and 1935/40. Although these cities are located barely one hundred kilometers apart and share interconnected social and spatial dynamics, they also display significant differences. By comparing these registers, the study aims first to highlight their similarities and the opportunities they offer for historical research, while also emphasizing their limitations and the methodological adjustments required to address the differences in the nature of their variables.
The use of these sources for the study of urban inequality is often grounded in the classification of professional or occupational categories, drawing on analytical frameworks such as HISCO or HISCLASS. However, these approaches face major constraints imposed by the sources themselves. During the period under consideration, the occupational variable exhibits a high degree of ambiguity, which hinders the production of consistent and comparable analyses. Acknowledging these limitations encourages reflection on how to broaden the range of indicators used to reconstruct patterns of social inequality within the city.
Accordingly, this paper proposes exploring additional variables within the same sources that may complement professional information. Elements such as family composition, educational level, domestic service, salaries, or property ownership provide promising avenues for deepening the analysis of class and social inequality in historical urban contexts. Likewise, combining these with variables drawn from other sources—such as fiscal or administrative records—offers further potential. Ultimately, this study seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how inequality was structured, experienced, and recorded in Basque cities during the first half of the twentieth century.
Towards the disappearance of residential inequalities in working-class suburbs: the (r)evolution of working-class housing conditions in Barcelona´s first metropolitan ring during the Franco regime, 1936-1970/1975
David Hernández Falagán, Manel Guàrdia Bassols, Maribel Rosselló Nicolau
abstractDavid Hernández Falagán, Manel Guàrdia Bassols, Maribel Rosselló Nicolau
Census enumerators books (Padrones de habitantes) have have historically been utilised as a primary source in urban historical research, particularly in the study immigration, residential segregation, and social mobility. Nevertheless, they offer significant potential for the study of housing conditions, particularly when cross-referenced with other specific sources in this field, such as the building and housing censuses conducted during the Franco regime (Censos de edificios y viviendas). Commonly used for 19th and early 20th centuries urban history, it is now possible to consult the complete padrones de habitantes from the Franco dictatorship. Specifically, Padrones´ and Censos de edificios y viviendas´ study corresponding to the period from the Civil War (1936-1939) to the dictator's death in 1975 now allows us to take stock of the evolution of working-class housing conditions during that period.
Based on the 1936 Padrón of Sant Adrià del Besós, an industrial, working-class, immigrant municipality in the Barcelona first metropolitan ring, and also using other sources such as residential building permits and the cadastre, the research cross-references both sources for 1970. By accurately locating specific families in specific homes for that year, the study first notes a general improvement in working-class housing conditions. This improvement, which followed a period of decline in housing conditions during the years of autarchy (1939-1953), gained unusual strength during the years of so-called developmentalism (1959-1975). Secondly, the considerable disparities in working-class housing conditions t the inception of of the Franco regime, with regard to skill and regional origin within the same skill, began to dissipate from 1960 onwards, ultimately resulting in a relatively homogeneous situation by the conclusion of the Franco period. With some slight exceptions for the lowest skill levels of some migrant communities, the enormous inequalities within the different groups of workers of different skill levels and origins at the beginning of the Franco regime in terms of homeownership rates, floor space per inhabitant, levels of cohabitation, domestic comfort equipment and appliances, and connection to urban technical networks had vanished by 1970/1975.
The social worlds of shanty towns in Madrid in the 1950s
Charlotte Vorms
abstractCharlotte Vorms
This paper discusses the interest of the statistical and spatial analysis of nominative
administrative records for the understanding of a particular society.
The research, based on the exploitation of an administrative file recording irregular housing
in Madrid un the 1950s and 1960s, explores the social worlds of these peculiar urban spaces.
While, seen from far away, these populations seem relatively homogeneous, a more subtle
analysis, crossing the spatial dimension with the material and the social information, gives a
better knowledge of this reality. It highlights different social worlds, which give new insights
on the Francoist regime and society
The 1954 Census of the Seine: Measuring and Mapping Urban and Social Conditions in the Paris Metropolis
Paul Lecat, Paul Lecat
abstractPaul Lecat, Paul Lecat
In the late 1950s, faced with rapid demographic growth and a severe housing shortage, the Seine Prefecture commissioned an exceptional statistical and cartographic processing of the 1954 census. Conducted in collaboration with INSEE and the newly established regional planning institute (IAURP), this operation aggregated demographic, occupational, and housing data for more than 14,000 urban blocks across seventy-one communes of the Seine département. By mapping each block and linking it to detailed statistical tables, the project produced a very fine-grained statistical cartography of the Paris metropolitan area, conceived to guide large-scale planning and to address the pressing question of inadequate and poorly equipped housing.
This large-scale administrative initiative marked a decisive step in the use of census data for urban planning. By producing both statistical summaries and block-level maps, it introduced a new spatial precision that went beyond traditional administrative boundaries. The resulting corpus cross-tabulates population structure, socio-professional categories, building typology, and indicators of dwelling comfort—such as access to running water, sanitation, or central heating. These variables make it possible to assess both the social composition of neighborhoods and the material quality of housing at mid-century, a few months after Abbé Pierre’s appeal had revealed the scale of the housing crisis.
For historians, this corpus offers an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct the geography of social and residential inequalities on a metropolitan scale. Now transformed into a Geographic Information System, it provides exploitable data for detailed statistical and spatial analysis. It allows fine-grained comparisons between Paris and its surrounding communes, highlights contrasts in density and housing conditions, and documents the uneven rhythms of urbanization between industrial eastern suburbs and more residential western areas.
The talk will examine the conditions under which this statistical and cartographic corpus was produced and discuss its potential as a source for historical research. It shows how this administrative project, conceived to serve the needs of planning, today provides historians with a unique tool to analyze the social and spatial structure of Greater Paris in the mid-twentieth century.
The city directories of Paris, a digital source for a socio-spatial history of the city throughout the 19th century
Bertrand Duménieu, Julie Gravier, Stéphane Baciocchi, Pascal Cristofoli
abstractBertrand Duménieu, Julie Gravier, Stéphane Baciocchi, Pascal Cristofoli
In Paris, as in other major commercial cities in Europe and North America, the introduction of a house numbering system during the 18th century was quickly followed by the appearance of several series of directories. Their purpose was to publish, at the address level, commercial and industrial activities, liberal and administrative professions, as well as notable personalities in the city.
The ANR SoDUCo program (2019-2023) produced an open geo-historical database [1] through an automated pipeline extracting, structuring and geolocating information from several hundred lists in the original volumes [2], yielding 23M entries documenting, on a yearly basis, the activities or statuses of individual and collective entities.
This dataset and the associated archival corpus offer an opportunity to revisit several core themes in the social sciences: our relationship to sources, social categorizations, and quantitative approaches. It also invites reflection on recent developments in digital tools and computational methods in digital humanities [3].
It offers a framework for studying urban dynamics across several temporal, spatial and functional scales, allowing the study of the entire city over a century to analyze urban densification [3] or the dynamics of urban activities [4].In addition, the precise geolocation of activities offers a unique opportunity for grounded and in-depth explorations of how specific activities or particular areas within the city have evolved over time By examining them in the context of the many transformations of Parisian space and successive fronts of urbanization, it is now possible to reveal the dynamics that shaped inequalities in urban territory.
[1] GeoHistoricalData (2023) “Annuaires historiques parisiens, 1798-1914.”. NAKALA. DOI: https://doi.org/qc44.
[2] Abadie, N. et al. (2022) "A Benchmark of Named Entity Recognition Approaches in Historical Documents Application to 19th Century French Directories" Document Analysis Systems. No. 13237. Springer, Cham. DOI : https://doi.org/qc45
[3] Gravier, J. et al. (forthcoming 2025) “Evaluating and Understanding the Geocoding of City Directories of Paris (1787-1914): Data-Driven Geography of Urban Sprawl and Densification”, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 19(3), p. 814.
[4] Gravier, J. and Barthelemy, M. (2024) “A typology of activities over a century of urban growth”, Nature Cities, 1(9), pp. 567–575. DOI: https://doi.org/qc46
; OA: https://hal.science/hal-04691067v1
Session 46 - Rethinking modern urban infrastructures in the light of the Anthropocene (19th/20th century)
The transdisciplinary Anthropocene debate pays much attention to the role of the history of urbanisation for the earth system. Against this background the session will discuss new approaches in the study of urban infrastructures. Paper givers are asked to address issues related to the Anthropocene concept and to present empirical studies.
Discussant: Carl Nightinghale
Coordinators: Christoph Bernhardt, Nathalie Roseau
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Discussant: Carl Nightinghale
Coordinators: Christoph Bernhardt, Nathalie Roseau
show/hide introduction
Session 46 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 1 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Agip gas stations and the making of the Italian “petroleumscape”.
Giulia Scotto
abstractGiulia Scotto
The establishment of the Italian National Hydrocarbon Agency (ENI) in 1953 marked a turning point in postwar Italy’s modernization. Created to secure energy autonomy and support national development, ENI built a vast network of pipelines, refineries, and gas stations that rapidly transformed the Italian landscape. Through its commercial branch Agip, the company promoted automobility and a new consumer lifestyle, commissioning leading architects to design modern service stations, motels, and roadside restaurants. Architecture thus became a medium of propaganda, translating national pride and technical progress into spatial form.
During the 1950s and 1960s, largely through the exploitation of oilfields abroad, ENI’s operations helped convert a predominantly rural country into a proto-industrialized, consumption-oriented society. This process reveals how the spread of petrocapitalism profoundly altered both everyday life and the physical environment. Gas stations, once emblems of modernity, have since become almost invisible, yet they remain crucial sites for understanding how global energy systems were inscribed into local geographies.
This paper argues that if we approach gas stations as operating infrastructures rather than finished architectural objects, we uncover their evolving role within wider circulatory networks of extraction, production, and consumption. Designed by collective and often anonymous actors, these infrastructures exemplify the multiscalar processes through which space is continuously produced and reproduced.
By linking ENI’s architectural and infrastructural operations to broader networks of petrocapitalism, the paper situates the Italian petroleumscape within the Anthropocene debate. Drawing on Carola Hein’s notion of the petroleumscape and Lefebvre’s triad of material, represented, and lived spaces, it proposes a reading of architecture as part of the metabolic flows of goods, people, and capital that define the “Capitalocene.” Such a perspective invites urban history to trace not only the forms of modernity but also the extractive relations and planetary consequences embedded within them.
Zooming into the core: A nuclear reactor in the streets of Barcelona, 1962-2005
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez
abstractJaume Valentines-Álvarez
Cityscapes have usually been an invisible part of the nuclearized globescape that has characterized the Anthropocene (and the debates over its golden spike). Radioisotopes, uranium, nuclear waste and reactors have circulated worldwide, crossing borders and cities by truck, railway and boat. This paper delves into the production of the nuclear geographies of Barcelona.
The long-lasting fascist-leaning dictatorship in Spain (1939-1977) left a large (and uneasy) technological legacy in cities such as Barcelona, including asbestos-based structures, alumina-based concrete, toxic hubs and nuclear landscapes. The Argos experimental nuclear reactor in Barcelona was one of these artifacts containing not only radioactivity but politics, media discourses, professional ideologies, national economics, aesthetics and law. This paper deals with these issues in a multiscalar approach, by “zooming in” in five steps from the global scale to the inside of the reactor: (1) from the globescape to the nation, (2), from the nation to the urban geographies, (3) to the academic architectures of the university campus, (4) to the interior spaces of the nuclear containment building, and finally, (5) to the very core of the reactor (5). These movements will approach us to the many actors involved in the making (and de-making) of this urban object, including energy companies, urban developers, tourism planners, and anti-nuclear activists. The research draws on textual, visual and oral sources, as well as fieldwork conducted inside the nuclear building conducted prior its demolition in 2005.
The cold chain as a paroxysmal form of the industrial socio-metabolic regime in the 20th century : Paris, the Parisians and the cold
Sabine Barles
abstractSabine Barles
The cold chain has gradually become established in urban, regional and international spaces, as well as in lifestyles and agri-food systems, to name but a few. In 150 years, it has taken on such a structural role that it seems impossible to imagine a world without a cold chain and it seems essential to implement it where it is still lacking. From a historical perspective, it is often discussed in terms of its technical aspects (food preservation, artificial cold production), logistics and supply chain (continuity of the chain, links with agricultural supply chains).
In this paper, I propose to address the place of the cold chain in urban metabolism and its major role in its transformation and, more generally, in the anthropisation of the world. The aim is to show how it constitutes a paroxysmal form of the industrial socio-metabolic regime: based on considerable energy consumption, contributing to the globalisation of urban metabolism, erasing seasons and climatic differences. This paroxysm is perfectly embodied by the Palais du Froid (Palace of Cold) and its snow tower, built for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris.
The cold chain will be considered both as a soft network (in the same way as the waste network) and as a hard infrastructure given its multiple material manifestations. It is thus probably possible to distinguish two ages of the cold chain based on artificial refrigeration (the boundaries of which will need to be specified): one characterised by the high visibility of its infrastructure in urban spaces (particularly refrigerated railway stations and cold stores), and the other where it is more discreet but just as important, occupying private spaces (mobile – refrigerated lorries – and fixed – refrigerators and freezers).
The paper is the result of ongoing research aimed at analysing how the cold chain emerged and consolidated, with a particular focus on its metabolic and urban dimensions, with an emphasis on Paris: urban because it is consubstantial with urban lifestyles, urban because it is materially embedded in urban space and the fabric of the city, urban because it has become a constituent part of the urban metabolism. It is based on a review of technical literature (Revue générale du froid, founded in 1909) and Parisian sources (municipal council proceedings, and railway company publications, ect.). The underlying question is that of sober alternatives to the cold chain (forgotten, neglected, condemned or yet to be invented).
Promoting the recycling of organic waste into fertilizers : the metabolic approach of the International Research Group on Refuse Disposal (IRGRD) from 1955 to 1970.
Etienne Dufour
abstractEtienne Dufour
During the 1950s and 1960s, a transnational movement emerged in Europe and around the world, forming an association: the International Research Group on Refuse Disposal (IRGRD). Observing the exacerbation of the metabolic rift, namely the growing production of urban waste and the decline in agricultural recycling of food residues and, as a result, the risk of agricultural soil depletion, engineers, agronomists, and entrepreneurs of various nationalities (French, Dutch, Belgian, Swiss, German, Italian, etc.) came together to promote the recycling of urban organic waste in agriculture. Far from being marginal, this group had a significant impact on national waste management policies at the beginning of the Great Acceleration that characterized the post-war decades (WW2). In Europe and beyond (in Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Japan, the USSR, etc.), it promoted the planning and construction of composting plants in many localities. This was particularly the case in France, where the national branch of the association was able to find support among local authorities. Our presentation aims to highlight and examine the existence of this pioneering organization which, throughout its existence (from 1955 to 1970), paid particular attention to issues related to urban organic waste management and the importance of closing the biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, which are now largely disrupted according to analyses by the Stockholm Resilience Center and the planetary boundaries framework. It is based on the organization's bulletins and archival records from the French branch of the association. This paper is the result of a thesis (defended in 2024) on the history of urban metabolism in France. In addition to providing historical insight into a little-known movement in the history of waste management and urban sanitation, it aims to show how the framework of urban metabolism can be useful for historians in understanding the contemporary challenges of the Anthropocene.
Consciousness of/in the Anthropocene. How did New York envision its future in the early 1970s?
Nathalie Roseau
abstractNathalie Roseau
The Anthropocene time (Chakrabarty, 2018) is a long-lasting history marked by competing reasons that are acknowledged when it is time to move on. One of its aporias concerns the notions of “consciousness” and “denial.” The rise of knowledge has continually taught us about the risks of upheaval and multiplied warnings. Yet, despite the predicted disasters, trajectories have followed their course and the “Great Acceleration” has pursued.
The paper focuses on New York City in the early 1970s. This moment, fractured by the end of the Vietnam War, was also a moment of awareness of the planetary dimension of the world (photographed by the Apollo missions, from EarthRise in 1968 to Blue Marble in 1972) and its finitude (The Limits to Growth is published in 1972, followed by the oil crisis of 1973), while 1970 saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In New York, three major exhibitions presented the state and future of the metropolis, reflecting the socio-environmental catastrophe. In May 1970, the exhibition “The Rise of American Architecture, 1815-1915” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking back at the architectural heritage of the 19th century. In October 1972, the exhibition “Olmsted's New York” at the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect and designer, with Calvert Vaux, of Prospect Park and Central Park. The exhibition toured the United States under the title “The New York that might have been.” The installation of scenographic devices immersing visitors in the scale of the creations and destructions that shaped metropolitan urbanism echoed CITYRAMA, inaugurated at the same time by the Museum of the City of New York, a multimedia device in which visitors were exposed to the city's centuries-old history in 17 minutes.
By focusing on the exhibitions through which New York represents and renews itself in this moment of lucidity, the article seeks to understand the mirror that opens onto the metropolis, that of an awareness of the environmental crisis. By scrutinizing this infrastructure of visuality through which the city envisions its future, we will seek to understand the enigma of clarification and blindness in which urban societies are caught.
Session 46 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 1 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Usable infrastructure pasts for liveable urban futures:
unbuilt visions for addressing environmental boundaries in Berlin
Timothy Moss
abstractTimothy Moss
This paper is about the infrastructures for Berlin that didn’t get built. It uses emblematic infrastructural visions to explore past engagements with resource-based limits to urban life, their expression of the city’s changing political geographies and their legacies for transformative agendas in Berlin today. The paper poses a counterpoint to debates in research and policy on problems of path dependence emanating from existing urban infrastructures by studying those infrastructures that failed to come into existence that, nevertheless, prove insightful and impactful in dealing with social-ecological boundaries and their technopolitical configuration at the urban scale. It draws on literatures on sociotechnical imaginaries, unbuilt infrastructures and infrastructural temporalities to generate ways of rendering infrastructure histories usable in debates on “planetary boundaries” today.
Cases of infrastructural visioning are selected to address three of the nine planetary boundaries identified by earth systems research: freshwater change (here: water supply), biogeochemical flows (here: of nutrients) and novel entities (here: nuclear power). The cases chosen each represent different ways of acknowledging and dealing with metabolic limits to urban development, whether pushing back limits, internalizing limits or living within limits. In chronological order they are: 1) the hydraulic hubris underpinning a plan of 1928 to enrol regional water resources to serve a city of 7 million people, 2) a grandiose concept of 1931 to recycle nutrients for mass food production for Berlin founded on social control, and 3) West Berlin’s schemes between the late 1950s and early 1970s to build nuclear power stations in the city as an answer to Cold War confinement.
Each vision for the city is analysed in terms of the metabolic boundaries addressed, the technopolitical configurations expressed and the scalar enrolments envisaged, as well as the reasons for its non-implementation. A subsequent section considers how the visions have, nevertheless, lived on – in differing degrees – in approaches to urban metabolism, logics of infrastructure management and policy debates on the urban environment since reunification in 1990. How this knowledge can generate usable pasts to inspire more liveable futures is then explored with reflections on experiences gained in interactions with Berlin stakeholders encountering the above cases through historical material. The paper concludes by drawin
Failing water infrastructures. Dealing with the ecological risks of capitalist urbanization in the home
Matthijs Degraeve
abstractMatthijs Degraeve
The urban Technosphere, which emerged in the 19th century and resulted in a deep transformation of the urban metabolism, extended its networked infrastructures beyond the edges of the city and blurred the line between urban and rural up to the scale of planetary urbanization that we know today. Capitalism and urbanization have both been identified as root causes of current climate change (Moore 2016, Nightingale 2024) and when looking in particular at its 19th-century roots (Malm 2016, Altvater 2016), Immerwahr (2024) recently drew new links between urban-environmental history and the history of capitalism by arguing that the dynamics of capitalist urbanization both mitigated and exacerbated ecological risk in the modern city.
These early ecological effects of capitalist urbanization were particularly tangible at the scale of private property and the home. The advance of urban infrastructure not only took shape in outward expansions, but also extended inward, spreading its extremities into the private Technosphere of indoor plumbing, gas and drainage pipes, electrical wiring systems, etc., that brought modern comforts but also new risks into the home. Often it is assumed that these modern infrastructures worked flawlessly, effectively transforming habits of water use and cleanliness, and thereby also public health. But as the failures of infrastructures receive more attention (Soppelsa 2009, Iuorio 2023), even on an in-house scale (Crook 2016), it becomes clear how their recurrent fallibility exposes how capitalist urbanization created new ecological risks and impacted how they were dealt with and experienced from below.
With the case study of failing water infrastructures in London, Paris, and Brussels (1850-1940), I propose to look at the roots of the Anthropocene through the intersection of capitalist urbanization and the exacerbation of ecological risk. I investigate how these modern risks took shape at the scale of the home and how they were dealt with on an everyday basis. I use archives from public services and distribution companies to trace cases of water leaks, sewer floods and appropriations of the water supply categorized as ‘waste’ or ‘abuse’. These cases shed light on the challenges involved in managing infrastructures at the intersection of the public and private sphere, as they were manifested on private property but interfered with urban governments’ public sanitation goals and utility providers’ attempts to commodify water as a resource.
Liquid roads silted rivers: Fluidity, viscosity, and the Irish city in the rain, 1900-2000
Erika Hanna
abstractErika Hanna
Located at the closest point between Europe and America, the towns of Ireland’s Atlantic coast are it is seemingly perfectly located as a trade node between continents. However, this cartographic advantage comes with concomitant challenges: a weather system which brings rain 250 days a year to the cities’ streets, flooding roadways, delaying trains, drenching bodies and clothes, and soaking and ruining produce destined for export.
This paper attempts to situate debates regarding the Anthropocene by exploring responses to the challenge of the weather in Ireland’s western towns in the period 1850-1950. Ireland’s weather has always been profoundly transnational, with wet air and high precipitation brought by the Gulf Stream, and responses to the weather, from fears of crop failure, to concerns about nuclear fallout, acid rain, and climate change, always revealing a local sense of powerlessness within entwined global ecological and capitalist systems. However, responses to this sense of anxiety concerning the weather are also profoundly local. In this period a range of new urban infrastructures including tarmac, sewerage, river drainage, and the arrival of the motor car created a city which was seemingly more stable to the changes of the weather. However, any sense of stability or urban resilience brought by these new infrastructures was constantly called into question by new vulnerabilities of modern solutions and increased demands of punctuality of modern work-time.
This paper examines the paradoxes at the heart of attempts to ensure urban resilience during the twentieth century as a way of understanding the local and situated experiences of the Anthropocene.
Where the water flows. Athens’s hidden rivers and the urban commons.
Dimitra Kanellopoulou
abstractDimitra Kanellopoulou
In the aftermath of the catastrophic floods in Greece's western metropolitan region in 2017, the issue of dammed rivers was reexamined. Following the 1950s, the enhancement of road infrastructure escalated over two centuries, reducing subterranean water flow in Athens. During the 19th century, the Attica basin was intersected by more than 700 rivers, streams, brooks, lakes, and waterfalls. The rivers of ancient Athens remain as remains, underground legends, and technical obstacles for the subway system built for the Olympics. Research demonstrates that water currents revitalize highly populated communities in the Eastern Mediterranean. Besides its symbolic importance and religious connotations, blue roads constituted a significant network of land that mirrored local characteristics. We assert that historical narratives and views of rivers in Athens exemplify a dynamic framework of shifting infrastructural ideals from modernism to ecology. Athens serves as an exemplary site for the examination of this issue due to its topography, which has shown an extensive history of water usage for both symbolic and practical use. A comprehensive road network interrupted this continuity in several European countries after the war. Following World War II, Marshall Plan funds for flood control and drainage were used to dam all significant rivers and build roads or recreational sports facilities. Athens did not embrace the sustainable transformation in urban redevelopment that European cities implemented post-1990s. Cities after the Olympics encounter congestion and limited access to public places due to governmental rules. The urban production trajectory contradicts public demands and climate claims. This research utilizes environmental history, urban history, and social movements theory to analyze the alteration of the Athenian landscape through the lens of the Anthropocene discourse. We use several primary and secondary sources, together with archival investigations, to elucidate discourses about the relocation of conceptual progressive narratives inside the metropolis. From Wilbur Smith's designs to more recent assessments of blue corridors regional plans, the study highlights nearly a century of advancements that need a new multidisciplinary approach to Mediterranean urban infrastructure. In a city marked by intense heat and drought, both peripheral and dominant narratives about water depict the conditions for inhabitants advocating for the new urban commons.
Cyborg Territories.
Infrastructural Heritage and the Rehydration of the Anthropocene City.
Learning from Grenoble
Charles Ambrosino, Antoine Brochet
abstractCharles Ambrosino, Antoine Brochet
The Anthropocene framework has reshaped urban studies by revealing the infrastructural, metabolic and ecological dimensions of urbanization. It redirects attention to “strong” and “weak” (infra)structures (Vigano, 2023; Roseaux, 2025), planetary interdependencies (Brenner, Katsikis, 2020) and new cartographic methods, positioning heritage at the core of Anthropocene urbanism and prompting reflection on how to inherit and represent hybrid and more-than-human cyborg territories (Swyngedouw, 1996, 2006; Braun, 2005; Gandy, 2005). This also entails addressing the political implications of such heritage for sustainable territorial planning and governance.
The Grenoble plain offers a paradigmatic case. Since the late seventeenth century, two imaginaries—draining land and making water available—have guided its transformation from swamp to polder and ultimately into a “water tower.” Supported by “strong” hydraulic infrastructures, the floodplain was dammed, drained and urbanized as major systems harnessing local aquifers, by the late nineteenth century, enabled large-scale water mobilization for industry and domestic use (Brochet, 2023). Water thus became “modern” (Linton, 2011): abstracted, homogenized and subordinated to urban and economic development. This hydraulic order fostered a Large Technical Systems urbanism (Lopez, 2018) that rendered “weak” aquatic structures—groundwater, torrents, wetlands—invisible (Ambrosino, Brochet, 2025). In the current context of Alpine warming, intensified droughts, and recurrent flooding (Blanc, 2022), emerging imaginaries of “rehydrating the earth” (Morizot, Husky, 2024) challenge inherited separations between land and water, calling for a reconceptualization of water infrastructures as socio-political interfaces with the living (Roseau, 2025). Our research project (POPSU Transitions) explores how this cyborg hydrosocial territory (Boelens et al., 2016) might be reimagined through a Water Atlas, inspired by Feral Atlas (Tsing et al., 2020) and Petrochemical America (Misrach, Orff, 2023). Combining maps, photographs and situated narratives, the Atlas conducts a critical inquiry into the Anthropocene heritage. It examines how infrastructures that once separated water from land might now be rendered porous to their environments. Through a fine-grained characterization of water-related infrastructures and Grenoble’s hydrosocial metabolism, the project aims to delineate potential pathways of adaptation for cyborg territories.
Infrastructural Sediments. Constructing Lagoon Urbanism in the Anthropocene
Monika Motylinska, Johan Lagae
abstractMonika Motylinska, Johan Lagae
The piercing of the Vridi Canal in 1950-1951 in Abidjan marked a crucial moment in the history of the West African metropolis of Abidjan, opening up the Ébrié lagoon to the Atlantic Ocean and thus enabling the development of a deep sea port and of a major industrial area. While it was preceded by the construction of the railway and roads into the hinterland of the French colony of the Ivory Coast, it introduced a more radical environmental derangement. The consequent construction of large-scale bridge infrastructures for train and car mobility across the lagoon in the following two decades further stimulated Abidjan’s lagoon urbanism.
Taking clues from Amitav Ghosh (2016), this paper examines the (ir-)rationalities of these spectacular projects of transport infrastructure executed in Abidjan in the late colonial and early post-independence period. Built in technically most challenging settings of unstable ground of the lagoon, constantly exposed to (saline) water and high humidity, threatened by erosion, the construction of bridges, quay walls, canals, dredges, etc. required not only advanced expertise (e.g. in piling and wide-span prestressed concrete elements) delivered by contractors such as Boussiron, but also conscious disregard of the natural conditions and the element of risk, similar to what Ghosh observed for exposed coastal cities such as Mumbai. Abidjan’s bridges, high-rise buildings and ever-expanding modern residential areas along the lagoon speak of the “miracle ivorien” of the 1970s, yet their official histories remain silent on the drastic operations of eviction and relocation of those inhabiting its shores.
These radical interventions into the ecologies, but also socio-cultural landscapes of the lagoon (Terrier 1995) left an unmissable and irreversible footprint, becoming simultaneously a sediment (Hutton 2020) and creating an “ecological pluriverse” (Gandy 2022, cf. Tsing at al. 2021). By investigating these infrastructural operations both in their materiality and the ways they unsettled the livelihoods of those dwelling around and living of the lagoon, we seek to use the case of Abidjan as a lens to write an urban history of a broader lagoon urbanism in Africa and beyond that gives voice not only to experts, builders and urban dwellers, but also takes into consideration the agency of non-human species as well as those génies lagunaires who were so crucial for those who understood the lagoon as a “living entity”.
Session 47 - Translocal Infrastructures: Rethinking Modernities Across the Global South and Beyond, 19th-21st centuries
This session examines how infrastructure connects and transforms cities within and beyond Europe through colonial and postcolonial ties. We invite work on water, energy, transport, and waste systems that challenge Eurocentric narratives, highlighting their gendered, ecological, and political dimensions across time and space.
Coordinators: Georgia Daskalaki, Stavroula Michael
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Coordinators: Georgia Daskalaki, Stavroula Michael
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Session 47 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 220 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Belgian Capital and Translocal Infrastructures, 1855–1937
Wouter Ryckbosch, Nicolas Brenninkmeijer
abstractWouter Ryckbosch, Nicolas Brenninkmeijer
This paper examines how Belgian investors participated in shaping infrastructural modernities beyond Europe through transnational capital flows between 1855 and 1937. While scholarship on global infrastructure often foregrounds engineering and state-led projects, we highlight the financial underpinnings that connected European urban elites to infrastructural transformations across the Global South. Drawing on inheritance declarations of wealth holders in Brussels for four benchmark years (1855, 1900, 1921, and 1937), we reconstruct investment portfolios to trace the penetration of foreign infrastructure assets—railways, utilities, and sovereign bonds—across different social strata.
By situating these investments within the broader urban networks of colonial and postcolonial development, we explore how decisions were shaped by information asymmetries, financial intermediation, and domestic inequality. Belgian capital did not merely circulate abstractly; it materialized in ports, railways, and energy systems that reconfigured urban geographies from Latin America to Africa. Our analysis reveals how infrastructural modernities were co-produced through financial practices in European cities, challenging narratives that isolate technical modernization from the social and economic logics of capital.
In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on the relational nature of urbanization and the uneven geographies of infrastructure, showing how Brussels functioned as a node in translocal networks that territorialized modernity across continents.
Correlating Research in Hospitals with Military Reforms: The Case Study of Military Hospitals in the Madras Presidency from 1780-1857
Kunal Shanker Mathur
abstractKunal Shanker Mathur
Colonial cities in British India have been most commonly analysed as centres of trade. The British prioritised defensive measures in cities for protection from other European colonies and regional empires during the Age of Commerce (1500-1800). In recent years, scholars have acknowledged the intrinsic role of public health and race in the planning of these colonial cities from the late 18th century. However, the role of healthcare infrastructure, like hospitals, in promoting, informing and enforcing public health initiatives has not been adequately explored.
Existing scholarship has researched the treatments and practice of surgeons in certain hospitals as their contributions to public and military health and medicine. Their analysis of research at hospitals has been restricted to medical breakthroughs but has not analysed how they informed sanitary reforms.
This research aims to theorise the research conducted at hospitals as tools to analyse and contribute to military health by taking examples of medical documentation in Madras from different time periods. Medical statistics and their development over the years form a part of this discussion, as they served as a source of information that could be understood by the colonial administration.
Through this research, the relationship between hospitals, administrations and the military can be better understood. By applying the research framework of this study to multiple hospitals in a region, military health initiatives in different cities, cantonments, and towns can be analysed.
Of Oil and Sanitation: S. Pearson & Son’s Port and City Scheme for Cartagena, 1913-15
Julio D Davila, Hernando Vargas Caicedo
abstractJulio D Davila, Hernando Vargas Caicedo
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, Cartagena de Indias was one of Imperial Spain’s most important colonial cities. Its deep, sheltered bay, and proximity to main trade routes on the Caribbean made it a strategic port and major defensive stronghold. It was also a commercial centre, a slave trade hub, and Inquisition HQ.
Following Independence from Spain in the early 19th century it lost much of its strategic value to cities like Barranquilla, on the Magdalena River, offering a more advantageous location for steam navigation and modern port facilities. In the 1880s, parts of Cartagena’s defensive walls were demolished to create market squares and new gates to link the densely populated colonial-era town to new suburbs. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and growing value of exports like coffee offered new opportunities. US Canal authorities enforced strict sanitary regulations on neighbouring ports and ships to prevent outbreaks of tropical diseases, demanding improved sewerage systems, drained swamps, and clean water supplies.
Although the 19th century brought foreign investment mainly from the US, during his long Presidency Mexico’s Porfirio Diaz sought to balance US interests by attracting British firms. S. Pearson and Son Ltd proved a willing investor in oil and infrastructure, having built extensively in the UK, North America, South Africa and South America. In 1913 the firm was awarded a major contract to position Cartagena as Colombia’s main port. This comprised port dredging, sanitation and beautification, with paved streets and concrete sidewalks, stormwater and sewerage systems, an energy system, and relocation of neighbourhoods and avenues, among others.
World War I and local fiscal difficulties delayed implementation of most of the proposed interventions. Archival analysis shows the translocal nature of Pearson’s global engineering staff, the role of nascent government institutions and weak local expertise. The proposal to demolish the ancient walls and forcibly relocate three informal settlements reveals the modernising and speculative aspirations of the city’s commercial and political elite. It also shows that the firm’s real intention in taking on this “small job” was to be awarded an oil concession by the Colombian government. But US imperialist ambitions in the region put paid to that.
“The threat is in fluidity”. On water management and sanitation in colonial Congo through the lens of Tillema’s Kromoblanda.
Johan Lagae
abstractJohan Lagae
In his compelling cultural study of Dutch colonialism in the Indies, entitled Engineers of the Happy Land, Rudolf Mzárek argues that in the modern cities in the Indies “the threat was in fluidity. In semen and blood untamed […] in water – polluted, dripping, leaking, or flowing unregulated.” (2002) Tellingly, the most engaged writings on urbanism in colonial Indonesia, the five volumes of a publication entitled Kromoblanda, were authored by H. F. Tillema, a pharmacist who also made a career and fortune out of providing drinkable water (1915-23). In this paper, I will take Mzárek’s observation and the Tillema’s publication as a starting point to discuss practices of water management and sanitation in two cities in colonial Congo: (1) the main port city of Matadi that was of key importance for the mise-en-valeur (exploitation) of Congo; and (2) Coquilhatville (or today Mbandaka), the provincial capital of the Equateur-province which Joseph Conrad famously has described as the “Heart of Darkness”.
Two particular aspects of water management at the heart of colonial urban planning practices during the interwar years will be addressed. Using the case of Mbandaka, a city on the Congo river built in a swampy area, I will discuss the flawed interwar urban operations geared at controlling flooding through the construction of drainage infrastructures. In Matadi, I will focus on the troublesome provision of public toilets for its rapidly growing labor force which was crucial to service rapidly expanding harbor activities. In both cases specific dimensions of the mindset of what Nancy Hunt has coined as the "nervous state" (2016) come to the fore and which Belgian colonial authorities, at least in part, shared with their Dutch counterparts: an obsession with cleanliness and hygiene triggered by a concern to “safeguard” the physical and mental well-being of the colonizer (Van Dijk & Gelman 2011), and a deliberate attempt of introducing spatial segregation in urban space based on racial grounds during a period which urban historian Carl Nightingale tellingly described as the “era of segregation mania” (2012).
I will argue that from this sharing in fact also followed a practice of “selective borrowing”. Belgian technicians indeed closely monitored and took direct inspiration from sanitizing practices in the so-called kampungs of Dutch colonial cities, yet remained blind for differences in socio-cultural practices of dealing with water between Indonesia and Congo.
Session 47 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 220 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Fresh cargoes : (dis)connected networks of cooling infrastructures in the Central African meat trade (Chad, Republic of Congo, DRC) after 1950.
Louise Barré
abstractLouise Barré
For the field of commodity studies, of which this research is part, Helen Blaszkiewicz’s call (2024) to rethink “the complementarity of logistic networks” between firm-led shipping systems and so-called informal ones proves highly informative, as she showed that both were closely interconnected in Africa. This presentation seeks to engage with this debate from the vantage point of the meat trade to the cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, focusing in particular on cooling facilities. Meat has been a highly internationalized trade since the early 1920s, given the modest presence of cattle husbandry in this region, and even more so as dietary transitions and increased reliance on food imports paved the way for a boom in frozen-meat consumption. This presentation examines how cooling infrastructures developed over the second half of the twentieth century in and around these two interconnected and neighbouring cities, including along illegal routes.
It traces the early development and changing technologies of cold-storage facilities in major colonial harbours such as Matadi from the early 1920s, and near airports in the 1950s, through to their privatization and dissemination among market women from the 1980s onward. The contribution of this research is to highlight the competing interactions between female distributors and international importers in the race to control the “last kilometer” and the retail trade over the past forty years. As oral interviews conducted with female vendors suggest, women’s entrepreneurship played a leading role in opening new markets for frozen meat in the hinterland beyond major infrastructure. However, the increasing establishment of importers directly within urban markets has recently narrowed their ability to make a profit. These relations nevertheless remain equivocal, as former vendors can be promoted to heads of local market “frozen houses,” and a few have succeeded in accumulating enough capital to open their own.
Drawing on communal archives from the city of Brazzaville, oral interviews with male and female meat vendors, and professional documentation produced by logistics and cold-chain specialists, this research approaches infrastructure development as a site of competing opportunities, highlighting the role that female traders themselves played in its expansion. It forms part of an ongoing postdoctoral project on trade and consumption in African cities, financed by ERC Cattlefrontiers.
Cementing a New City: Socialist Infrastructures and the Making of Nuevitas, Cuba (1961–1972)
Juliane Richter
abstractJuliane Richter
In the early years of the Cuban Revolution, the small fishing town of Nuevitas became a testing ground for socialist modernization. Within a decade, it was transformed into an industrial "new town," hosting factories and plants built with aid from CSSR, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At its center stood the 26 de Julio cement plant, planned and built with Cuban and German expertise between 1961 and 1972.
This paper examines the 26 de Julio plant as a meta-infrastructure (Fivez and Motylińska 2022). It explores how industrial construction functioned both as a material and symbolic vehicle of revolutionary ambition and as a medium of infrastructural worldmaking across socialist networks. Drawing on East German and Cuban archival sources, it traces the plant's uneven trajectory, shaped by geopolitical realignments, material shortages, and ideological frictions between Cuba's autonomous socialism and the Eastern Bloc's technocratic planning culture.
I argue that the building of Nuevitas's industrial zone reveals a form of socialist infrastructural modernity. The GDR's involvement was framed as "solidarity" yet inscribed new dependencies of expertise, machinery, and energy. Cement — the literal foundation of Cuba's new cities — becomes a lens to read the entanglement of resource regimes and labour systems.
To contextualize this transformation, the paper juxtaposes the factory's history with the Cuban feature film Una mujer, un hombre, una ciudad (dir. Manuel Octavio Gómez, 1978), shot on location in Nuevitas. Combining documentary footage with a fictional narrative, the film portrays industrialization as both utopian promise and intimate dislocation. Reading the film alongside the infrastructural archive enables a translocal interpretation of socialist urbanization that foregrounds lived experience and the ambivalent affect of building a new world.
Situating Nuevitas within this wider network of socialist industrial aid, the paper argues that infrastructure connected and transformed places outside the usual colonial and capitalist story of development, while also creating new dependencies of its own.
Motorways and Modernity: The Rio–Santos Road and the Reconfiguration of Coastal Territories in São Paulo
Carolina Carrijo Costa, Inés Aquilué Junyent
abstractCarolina Carrijo Costa, Inés Aquilué Junyent
Infrastructure elements such as motorways can act at the same time as connectors
between distinct territories and disruptors of existing socio-spatial dynamics. This paper
investigates how the construction of the Rio–Santos motorway contributed to the
reconfiguration of coastal territories and examines its role as an instrument of state-led
modernisation, tourism development, and territorial colonisation during and after Brazil’s
military regime. Drawing on historical literature, demographic data, and landscape
photography, the study examines changes in social and settlement dynamics associated with
the motorway, with special focus on the caiçara traditional community. Population and
dwelling data reveal markedly different trajectories between municipalities connected by the
motorway and those remaining outside its direct influence, while the growth of occasionaluse dwellings illustrates the increasing importance of second homes and coastal tourism. The
findings suggest that the Rio–Santos was not merely a transportation infrastructure, but a
territorial instrument that connected previously fragmented coastal landscapes to broader
circuits of tourism and real estate investment, while simultaneously disrupting traditional
forms of socio-ecological relations.
Great Water Leaps Forward:
Transforming Infrastructural Heritage of the Postwar Cross-Border Water Supply Projects between Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao
Jing Xiao, Tongtong Zhang, Doreen Heng Liu
abstractJing Xiao, Tongtong Zhang, Doreen Heng Liu
As part of the national social scheme during the period of Great Leap Forward, water supply projects and other infrastructure for both agriculture and industrial upgrade became top priorities to the Pearl River Delta in South China. They belonged to the local campaign unleashed to increase food production, energy and water conservancy. Among them, the Dongjiang-Shenzhen and Zhuhai-Macao Water Supply Projects were two of the most significant infrastructure projects ever built since the 1960s. While incorporated into a bigger picture of politics, they were important initiative to build water conservancy facilities to stabilize water supply for Hong Kong and Macao in 1959. The projects covered multiple functions, including water, power, irrigation, transportation and flood control along the route, and therefore concentrated a large amount of early infrastructural heritage of power stations, channels, bridges, as well as water filtration facilities and rural irrigation system. They also indicate the long-term topological variation for both rural and urban landscape. Despite the unique political heritage value of water supply projects as well as their contemporary urban regeneration, it is difficult to promote them to listed heritage because of its cross-border nature.
By presenting the trajectory of the postwar water infrastructure over the region, this study focuses on the twin projects and a series of water infrastructure under transformation in terms of technical history, urban redevelopment and industrial heritage. This article will conduct archival studies of project documents and building practice, and systematically explore the possibility of evaluating, taking construction of dam, drainage and water purification plants as case study, the historical, social and technological significance of water infrastructure. It also investigates the intrinsic mechanism of technology transfer of the applied engineering of water infrastructural construction from the then Soviet Union and other countries. The study provides a tentative epistemological framework to understand the particular set of infrastructural heritage for regions of stakeholder, the very symbol of the imagined national progress which still defines the mutual, not conflicting, legitimacy of contemporary urban regeneration and heritage protection in all the regions aforementioned.
Transimperial and Transwar Perspectives on Radio Infrastructures in Japan and Southeast Asia
Carolyn Birdsall
abstractCarolyn Birdsall
In histories of urbanization, scholars have confirmed the role of communications technologies within urban development (Graham & Marvin 2002), and, in turn, how these telegraph and wireless systems were bound up with Western imperial expansion (Winseck & Pike 2007). In the examination of radio buildings in urban areas, too, there has been a tendency to foreground ‘architectural icons’ in cities of the Global North, such as London or New York (Thompson 2002, Ericson & Riegert 2010).
Taking up critical perspectives from urban history, infrastructure studies and media geography, this presentation takes the 1930s establishment of new radio buildings and broadcast infrastructures in Imperial Japan as its departure point. The infrastructural prestige associated with radio can be observed in Japan’s colonies (e.g. Korea, Taiwan), along with the architectural ‘ultra modernism’ established in tandem with Japanese communications network incursions into Manchuria (Denison and Ren 2016, Yang 2010).
In identifying radio as a key tool for Japan’s wartime occupations in South-East Asia, it is helpful to understand its logistical role in territorial expansion and control, as well as in the realm of ‘infrastructural imaginaries’ (Parks 2015). Occupied radio and its infrastructures should necessarily be identified as sites of continual struggle, whether at the level of content production through to active disruptions to communications technologies during and after World War II, as part of a “wiring of decolonization” (Goscha 2012). A critical infrastructural perspective can help to highlight how radio took on a new significance in 1945 for both communicating Japanese surrender and declarations of independence (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia), followed by further efforts by anti-imperialist groups to repurpose broadcast buildings and technical infrastructures for an independent radio (Masduki 2023).
These broader reconfigurations of radio across the 1930s and 1940s offers an opportunity to highlight how radio infrastructures required significant labour, capital and environmental resources, and to further reconsider the changing “urban emotions” connected to broadcast buildings (Kenny 2020). I will conclude with a critical evaluation of this case for a research agenda that seeks to establish more relational and networked histories of urbanization, but also to examine how radio urban buildings and infrastructures figure within transimperial interactions in Southeast Asia.
A Border Before Its Traffic: Developmental Surveillance and the Second Line of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, 1982–2018
Yuming Cui
abstractYuming Cui
Border scholarship has long understood boundaries as answers to conditions already in place: lines constituted by the practices that sustain them, or sorting devices filtering an existing traffic on unequal terms. In either reading, the watching responds to something already there. The Second Line of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone conforms to neither. Authorised in 1982, when the zone existed largely on paper, and the land it enclosed was still agrarian Bao'an county, it ran inland of the international First Line along the Shenzhen River and enclosed the SEZ with the full apparatus of a frontier turned inward: wire fencing, patrol roads, watchtowers, and graded checkpoints. Yet existing accounts treat it as policy, political architecture, or labour history rather than as a designed scheme of surveillance.
Shenzhen Museum records, the governing regulations, and British Foreign Office files now allow a detailed reconstruction of its design. They reveal a boundary whose objects of surveillance were yet to arrive: permit categories were drawn for the residents and workers the zone was expected to acquire, named by the very authority deciding to summon them, rather than derived from Bao'an's existing population. How, then, does one reconcile theories of the border premised on existing circulation with a border that preceded its own traffic? This paper proposes developmental surveillance: sovereign-grade equipment turned inward, classification prospective rather than descriptive, and an installation whose value lay in the possibility of closure.
With this concurrency in mind, the paper traces how a single apparatus planned the SEZ and raised its line, with one official holding both posts, and how each crossing was fixed to a specific agency, document, and jurisdiction. It explores the grading of apertures and permits alongside the rigidity of the scheme: openings could not be increased without provincial approval, so the line could not adapt to the growth it was built to summon. By the late 1980s, an instrument designed to regulate goods worked mainly as a bottleneck on persons, a flaw checkpoint redesign could not repair, until the zone's citywide extension in 2010 and the line's abolition in 2018. This reexamination argues that internal borders deserve study in their own right, shedding new light on a city made by planning, where surveillance is better understood as a term through which space is produced than as a programme applied to space afterwards.
Session 49 - Railways and the consolidation of the urban network in Europe, in the 19th and 20th centuries
From 1830 to 1850, the first railway lines connecting cities, mining areas and ports took a step forward to become real networks. From then on, railway networks expanded dramatically in both Europe and the rest of the world, reaching a peak extension by 1910.
Coordinators: Jordi Marti-Henneberg, Barbara Polo-Martín, Thomas Thevenin
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Coordinators: Jordi Marti-Henneberg, Barbara Polo-Martín, Thomas Thevenin
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Session 49 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 2 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
From Railway Hub to Logistics Platform: Transport Technologies and the Spatial Dynamics of Industry in Zaragoza, 1930-2025
Guillermo Esteban-Oliver, Maria Pilar Alonso-Logroño
abstractGuillermo Esteban-Oliver, Maria Pilar Alonso-Logroño
Transformations in transport technologies have reshaped the urban industrial geography, influencing the location and the dynamics of productive sectors. Both classical scholarship and recent approaches in economic geography highlight the role of transport in industrial location; empirical evidence underscores the centralizing effect of the railway—fostering concentration around stations and sidings—as well as the suburbanizing impact of highways, which drove dispersion toward the periphery. However, much of the research on the relationship between transport and industry has been conducted at national or regional scales. As a result, long-term analyses that reconstruct and quantify these transformations at the metropolitan scale—and enable a detailed observation of the intra-urban evolution of industrial location patterns—remain scarce.
This paper addresses this gap through a longitudinal analysis of how shifts in dominant transport technologies have shaped the spatial distribution of industry in Zaragoza, Spain. The city constitutes an exemplary case study, having transitioned from a pivotal node in Spain’s early railway network to the site of the largest multimodal logistics platform in Southern Europe (PLAZA). To undertake this analysis, we compiled a georeferenced dataset of industrial firms (sector and size) for three benchmark years: 1930, representing the height of the railway era; 1990, reflecting the predominance of road transport; and 2025, capturing the current intermodal context. These data were integrated with a detailed reconstruction of Zaragoza’s transport infrastructures for each period.
Preliminary findings reveal that in 1930 industry—particularly the metal-mechanical sector—was concentrated along railway corridors and around the city’s stations, which connected Zaragoza with Madrid and Barcelona. By the 1990s, industrial activity had expanded into business parks located along major highways, while railway stations remained relevant only for large-scale enterprises. By 2025, multimodal logistics centers are emerging as the principal attractors of industrial activity, alongside a revival of rail transport and the growing importance of airports. By offering a fine-grained, long-term perspective on how transport systems have historically structured the urban industrial landscape, this study provides insights for contemporary spatial planning, infrastructure policy, and sustainable logistics development.
From fascination to conflict. An analysis of the relationship between the city of Igualada and the railroad.
Carles Gorini Santo
abstractCarles Gorini Santo
In terms of opportunity, various investigations have focused on how the railway fits into large and medium-sized cities, all of them provincial capitals. Historians, architects, and geographers have addressed this topic. Our research, however, examines it in a small city: Igualada.
To document our study, we have used the bibliography that has explored city-railway relations. However, we have mainly worked with primary sources from the Compañía General de los Ferrocarriles Catalanes and the Igualada City Council, preserved by FGC and the Anoia Regional Archive, respectively. When necessary, we have also contrasted these with secondary sources, especially the periodical press.
The result recovers the relationship between Igualada and the railway, as well as the limitations faced by the involved actors—often overlooked—in addressing this integration according to the needs of each period, between 1893 and 1977.
Borders, power and dependence: Territorial dynamics in Atlantic cities
Barbara Polo-Martín, Daniel Castillo-Hidalgo, César Ducruet
abstractBarbara Polo-Martín, Daniel Castillo-Hidalgo, César Ducruet
The expansion of the economic globalisation process, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, primarily took place within the trade and financial networks established across the Atlantic Ocean. Port cities became key players in facilitating the integration of their surrounding regions into larger-scale economic systems. The major financial capitals of Europe and North America will extend their significant influence to colonial territories in Africa and to those countries in Latin America with a colonial past. Between 1880 and 1940, these economies in the Global South experienced sustained growth in export-oriented trade, reinforcing their role as suppliers of raw materials within the international division of labour. This phenomenon was accompanied by a significant improvement in transport infrastructure, particularly ports and railways. This infrastructure was financed primarily by international financial institutions, both in Latin America and in Africa. The purpose of these investments was to boost the export of agricultural and mineral raw materials, which were of great interest to industrialised countries. The significant weight of these economic sectors exerted a pull effect on the overall regional economies, shaping their economic structure towards specialisation in the production of raw materials. This persistent dynamic affected the spatial distribution and urban concentration patterns in the main trade hubs, particularly in port areas and regions more closely linked to international trade. This persistent trend reinforced the central role of these urban centres, concentrating a larger population and economic power through positive feedback mechanisms and economies of scale. Conversely, regions with poorer infrastructure related to export sectors experienced relative decline, losing economic, political, and demographic significance.
Our investigation offers a comparative exploration of transport infrastructures and urban development in two geographical contexts: Latin America and Atlantic Africa. To do this, we analysed the spatial configuration around major transport infrastructure networks (ports and railways) and its relationship with urban centres that developed in both regions between 1880 and 1940. We focus focus on the transportation systems in a number of Latin American export-oriented economies (Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina), compared to those colonial economies in Atlantic Africa (Senegal, Gold Coast, Nigeria,
The Anatolian Railway and the Creation of a Central-Northwestern Network in Late and Post-Ottoman Anatolia: Centralization and Ankara’s Road to Capital City Status, 1872-1923
E. Attila Aytekin, Fatma Eda Celik
abstractE. Attila Aytekin, Fatma Eda Celik
The scholarship on Ottoman railways has mostly focused on Baghdad and Hejaz Railways and studied these two lines from the perspective of imperialist rivalry and Ottoman attempts to assert sovereignty. Other lines such as the Anatolian Railway were deemed less important and thus has received scant attention.
Ankara was the seat of the parliament and provisional government between 1920 and 1923 during the War of Independence which followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. It officially became the capital of Turkey in late 1923. The dominant view is that Ankara’s acquiring capital status was a product of strategic-military considerations where the railway played a limited role by facilitating transportation of men and arms during the War of Independence and would make national defense easier later on. Alternative explanations have stressed ideological opposition of the nationalists to Istanbul, considered too imperial and cosmopolitan to be the capital of the nascent nation-state. Contrary to these accounts, we argue that the centralization process that the rail connection had initiated is the main reason why Ankara became the capital of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
The construction of Anatolian Railway from the Anatolian side of Istanbul westwards began in 1872 and the line reached Ankara in 1892. It brought about major changes in all the areas it reached. It connected Ankara and some other towns in Central and Northwestern Anatolia to the Ottoman capital, a port city. The link to the port led to rapid commercialization of agriculture and dramatic increase in production. Large numbers of Muslim immigrants and refugees were also settled along the railway line. Ankara’s urban morphology changed; the city expanded and property prices rose. Settlements that hardly existed before such as Eskişehir and Polatlı became midsize towns. The line led to a process of centralization where a network of towns located on the line as well as supported by new and improved road structure emerged, with Ankara as the center.
The paper aims to share some of the results of an ongoing research project. In addition to Ottoman state documents, local press and historical maps, it will make use of underutilized archival sources to investigate Ankara-centered Anatolian network. These include documents of the internationally-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration (located in Istanbul and Roubaix) and the Orientbüro fund of the Frankfurt archives of the Deutsche Bank.
The Portuguese Railway Network: A History of its Relationship with Ports and International Connections
Ana Cardoso de Matos, Magda Pinheiro
abstractAna Cardoso de Matos, Magda Pinheiro
This presentation explores the history of the Portuguese railway network, which was initially designed to connect Lisbon internationally and to link Lisbon with Oporto, with a particular focus on its relationship with the country's ports. The creation of the first international railway line was marked by a tension between the desire for a direct connection to France and the need to preserve national independence. As a result, some of the original goals were initially not achieved.
The port modernization was a parallel preoccupation but when the railway to Spain was open the modern Lisbon's port was not yet built, so the Santa Apolónia railway station had its own dock being a multimodal station.
In Oporto, such connection did not exist until much later, as the line initially terminated in Vila Nova de Gaia, far from both the river and the sea. The bridge over the Douro was only constructed much later, and Oporto’s station itself was located far from the city center. Even after a connection to the city center was built, it remained far from the old port.
A more direct connection to France though the Beira Alta line also became important to the development of the port of Figueira da Foz.
As a reaction to Portuguese nationalism, Spain planned what the Portuguese called “La cinta de hierro”, that would duplicate the frontier in order to bring traffic to Spanish ports. With the crisis of the end of the nineteenth century the project was abandoned.
The Ones in-Between and Building a Port City: Traders and Changing Perception of İzmir in the Long-19th Century
Fatma Tanış
abstractFatma Tanış
Social relations between Turkish dignitaries and European elites—and their extended networks—shaped the physical and cultural development of İzmir throughout the long nineteenth century. The hospitable bureaucratic settings of the multinational, multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman Empire, complemented by the 1838 Treaty of Baltalimanı between the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain, broadened European merchants’ access to the Ottoman market. Its impact soon appeared in the expanding overseas trade of Ottoman traders of European descent—such as the Girauds and the Whittals—whose exports grew substantially. Their ‘Orientalist Carpet Manufacturers’ played a central role, promoting the ‘Smyrna Carpet’ and branding the city with an image of wealth and vitality through illustrated catalogues and postcards. Travel writing reinforced this portrayal; Murray’s handbooks, for example, praised local life: “How different are now my feelings towards the Turks… I have found truth, honesty, and kindness.”
These deepening personal and commercial ties attracted growing interest from travelers and European migrants, including the extended families of established merchants. Among them were the Guiffrays, related to the French Giraud family and the Dussaud Brothers—renowned builders of nineteenth-century industrial ports. The Guiffrays immigrated to Izmir and were responsible for running the tramline linking the new İzmir–Aydın Railway with the industrial port.
Through a micro-historical study of interconnected merchant families combined with analyses of Orientalist accounts, the writings of Mark Twain and Hans Christian Andersen, Goad insurance maps, and diaries of Gertrude Bell and Ray Turrel, a granddaughter of the Giraud Family—this paper examines how actors with “in-between” status shaped İzmir’s port-city development. It highlights their role in forming new residential quarters and in producing urban imaginaries that circulated through cultural products. By tracing the knowledge-transfer mechanisms (i.e., space, representation, practice) these elite trading families facilitated as they navigated local bureaucracies, global trade networks, and the itineraries of travelers and writers, the article foregrounds the crucial contributions of non-architects and their capacity to utilise their knowledge and mobilise resources in both site-specific development and the city’s broader urban culture.
Session 49 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 2 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
When West meets East. Border stations between Russia and its western neighbors in the 19th and 20th centuries and their impact on urban development
Kamil Smiechowski
abstractKamil Smiechowski
The 19th and 20th centuries saw tremendous growth in the European railway network. Border stations were also built during this time, sometimes serving as points of contact between railway networks with different gauges. One of the most notable examples is the border between Russia (and later the USSR) and its western neighbours (Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary before 1914, and later the Baltic States and Poland). These were places where 1435 mm gauge tracks ended and 1524 mm gauge tracks began. This required not only the construction of stations, but also complex equipment for reloading trains. The location of a border station could determine the fate of a town. Some towns competed fiercely for the location of a border station, using economic and political arguments. Some grew to become important cities, while others did not take advantage of this historic opportunity for various reasons. This was determined not only by economic factors, but also by geography and, of course, politics. This paper aims to discuss the impact of border stations on the development of towns and the urban network through selected examples. The analysis will cover border stations operating before 1918: Aleksandrów Kujawski, Nowe Skalmierzyce and Sosnowiec in the Kingdom of Poland and Volochysk in Galicia. It will also cover border stations operating in the interwar period: Stolpcy in the Second Polish Republic, and Daugavpils/Duneburd in Latvia. Finally, the paper will present a typology of the factors that determine whether a border station is successful in promoting town development.
Tracks and Blocks: How Railways Rewrote Romania’s Urban Landscape
Liviu Gabriel Baicu
abstractLiviu Gabriel Baicu
From the mid‑19th century onward, Romania’s railways progressively connected cities, ports and resource basins, evolving from isolated lines into a national network that peaked in spatial reach in the early 20th century. In this long arc—monarchy, socialist industrialization, post‑1990 restructuring, and the current decarbonization push—railway stations have repeatedly redefined the relationship between networks and settlements.
Methodologically, the research connects morphology and network mobility in the context of determination of the nowadays metropolitan areas: stations are treated as urban assets whose design and land‑use interfaces influence both travel behavior and spatial structure. GIS‑based approaches (historical evolution, isochrones, catchment buffers, network overlays) help quantify changes in morphology and test design scenarios at the urban scale, while also reading regional effects along corridors. Social surveys have been deployed by the author to gather information about home/work/study patterns
The research questions this article proposes focus on: In Romanian metropolitan areas, did rail networks primarily connect pre‑existing urban nodes, or did stations catalyze new urban growth around them (especially in suburban belts)?
To what extent can changes in urban form—block structure, land‑use mix, density gradients—be attributed to the presence and (re)design of suburban stations versus other drivers (roads, zoning, real‑estate cycles)?
How did historical reconfigurations of borders and administrative systems affect network continuity and station roles, and how integrated are today’s services across metropolitan boundaries (city–county–region)?
Romania had established cities and ports before rail (e.g., Danube and Black Sea gateways). How far did the network adapt to this urban hierarchy, and in which cases did stations reshape it?
Did railways facilitate an effective inter‑regional mesh beyond administrative borders, and how is the new metropolitan focus re‑stitching regional accessibility in the XXth century?
Most Romanian work to date has been case‑based; this article proposes a shared, GIS‑enabled methodology that integrates historical analysis, service patterns and land‑use to evaluate suburban stations as levers of polycentric development throughout the XIX and XXth century.
Network-Building in the Kingdom of Sardinia: The Genoese Line (1853–1873)
Federico Meneghini Sassoli
abstractFederico Meneghini Sassoli
The construction of the Turin–Genoa railway line represented one of the most decisive infrastructural undertakings of the Kingdom of Sardinia in the mid-nineteenth century. Conceived as a vital link between the political and industrial capital, Turin, and its maritime outlet, the port city of Genoa, the line embodied the political, economic, and territorial ambitions of a monarchy engaged in a process of modernization and state-building. From its inception, the project faced social opposition from landowners fearing market integration and formidable engineering obstacles such as the Ligurian Apennines, overcome through the construction of the Giovi Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in the world at its inauguration in 1854.
This study examines the process of network-building in the Kingdom of Sardinia and its twenty-year expansion, from the completion of the Genoese line to the 1870 restructuring of the Milanese rail system. Adopting the perspective of infrastructure as a tool of political integration and economic modernization, it explores how railway construction reshaped spatial configurations of power and production. The Turin–Genoa line not only supported the industrial rise of Turin by ensuring rapid access to maritime trade routes but also revitalized historical commercial and cultural ties between Piedmont and Liguria.
The subsequent connection to Milan, completed a few years later, redefined the geography of exchange in Northern Italy. Despite earlier Austrian attempts to orient Lombardy’s economy toward Venice, Genoa re-emerged as the natural maritime outlet for Milan’s commerce. With the annexation of Milan to the Kingdom in 1859, this infrastructural system acquired a new political significance: the railway became an instrument and a symbol of national unification. By linking Turin, Genoa, and Milan the so-called Triangolo industrial emerged as a spatial manifestation of the economic core of modern Italy. This research draws upon archival sources from the municipal administrations of the three nodal cities, official industrial reports, contemporary publications as well as the existing bibliography. Through this empirical foundation, the study aims to reassess the relationship between infrastructure, state-building, and territorial integration, situating the Genoese line within the broader European context of infrastructural modernization and the transformation of nineteenth-century mobility networks.
The urban impact of railway lines and stations in Spain and Portugal, 1848–2023
Zahra Behrouzmoghadam, Jordi Martí Henneberg, Mateu Morillas Torné
abstractZahra Behrouzmoghadam, Jordi Martí Henneberg, Mateu Morillas Torné
The aim of this research is to interpret how railway has influenced the expansion of urban fabric during a period of significant transformation. To do so, we will demonstrate a series of maps we have compiled for 116 cities on the Iberian Peninsula from the beginning of railway to present. The method of analysis consisted of superimposing the historical series of maps on some cities as case studies.
Specifically, we put together a unified collection of historical maps and early aerial photos of Spain and Portugal (1848–2026) from national and local archives and mapping organizations. Before being georeferenced in a GIS environment, all sheets and photos were scanned, organized, and pre-processed (tiling, contrast normalization). Control points were chosen only on structures that have long-term positional stability, such as churches, administrative buildings, stone bridges, coastline headlands, and cadastral parcel corners. This way, changes in the urban fabric over time did not affect their position. Each sheet was registered to its own ETRS89–UTM zone using either affine or low-order polynomial transformations, depending on the source distortion. Residual errors were tracked and maintained within bounds that matched the original map scales. Aerial pictures were orthorectified when camera geometry and elevation data allowed; otherwise, they were co-registered to the georeferenced map mosaic.
Rail infrastructure was digitized from georeferenced sources as polylines (railway lines), points (stations) and polygons (station fields), ensuring topology with no overlaps and dangles at nodes. A standardized attribute schema was applied, including gauge type (Main lines, narrow-gauge lines, High-Speed lines and Freight Only lines), year of opening, and periods of operation or closure, along with source fields for uncertain dates. The multi-temporal collection facilitates chronological overlays and animated sequences of network development, including openings and closures, in conjunction with urban growth. This enables systematic GIS-based analysis of the rail–city relationship, such as distance-to-station profiles, corridor-parallel expansion, and comparative visualizations across decades, while ensuring a consistent spatial reference and verification record for all analytical outputs.
This paper represents five of the case studies. Based on this detailed work, it will be possible to discuss its applicability to any city in the world with similar data available.
From Tracks to Networks: Railway Evolution and Urban Scaling in Britain and France, 1840s–2020s
Zhenhua Chen, Alexis Letivine, Leigh Shaw-Talyor, Guillaume Proffit
abstractZhenhua Chen, Alexis Letivine, Leigh Shaw-Talyor, Guillaume Proffit
This study examines the long-term coevolution of railway networks and urban systems in Britain and France from the 1840s to the 2020s. Railways have both shaped and been shaped by urbanization over two centuries, yet comparative historical analyses linking network evolution with urban scaling dynamics remain limited. Drawing on urban scaling theory and transport geography, the research employs a geospatial and quantitative historical approach to reveal how changes in railway density, connectivity, and topology interacted with urban growth and morphological transformation.
Using historical GIS for both countries, the study reconstructs railway networks and urban populations at four benchmark periods, the 1840s (early expansion), 1910s (network maturity), 1930s (interwar adaptation), and 2020s (modern high-speed rail era). For each period, the spatial structure of the rail system is assessed using graph-based metrics (degree, betweenness, centrality) and compared with the population hierarchy to estimate scaling relations of the form R ∝ kP^β, where R reflects railway connectivity or accessibility and β the scaling parameter. The evolution of β indicates whether rail infrastructure accumulated more than proportionally in large cities (β > 1), diffused more evenly (β < 1), or remained proportional (β ≈ 1). Tracking these shifts over time allows assessment of whether railway expansion reinforced existing hierarchies or promoted new patterns of regional integration.
The comparative analysis is expected to identify distinct yet generalizable trajectories. In Britain, early network growth likely aligned with the rise of industrial cities, with later densification supporting suburbanization and regional diffusion. In France, a more centralized development, strongly shaped by the state and later the TGV, may reveal how planning institutions influenced network morphology and the balance between concentration and diffusion.
Beyond empirical insights, the study demonstrates how historical GIS and scaling analysis can bridge urban history and transport science. It provides theoretical understanding of the persistent interplay between mobility infrastructure and urban hierarchy, showing how 19th-century railway legacies continue to structure European urban systems. Ultimately, the research highlights the reciprocal relationship between cities and railways and the long-term imprint of institutional and spatial path dependence.
Session 49 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 2 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Urban consolidation of a paradigmatic mining railway line
Joan Solà Font
abstractJoan Solà Font
Between 1861 and 1913, Spain’s main coal production was centered in Asturias, accounting for nearly 60% of the output, while Catalonia produced only about 1.3%. This made Catalonia highly dependent on imported coal, as local deposits were scarce and only briefly prosperous. Catalonia’s main coal mining sites built small settlements and dedicated railway lines to transport their production. The Surroca and Ogassa deposit near Sant Joan de les Abadesses (SJA), which supplied over one million tonnes of coal until 1928, illustrates the challenges of Catalan mining in the 19th century. Three main factors led to its shortcomings: the mistaken belief in endless reserves, the expectation that extraction would remain cheap, and overconfidence that constructing a mining railway would make local coal more competitive. Nonetheless, building railway lines to serve the mining areas became essential, shaping urban development by leaving behind expensive infrastructure now seen as a potential asset.
Ildefons Cerdà’s 1856 project for the SJA line, drafted alongside the Barcelona Eixample plan, exemplifies how urban consolidation developed around a railway initially designed to link mines with the seaport. The goal was to transport coal from the Pyrenees and reduce dependency on costly imported English coal. Cerdà’s report countered earlier proposals to route the line to the port of Roses, instead emphasizing the benefits of connecting to Barcelona’s port, which also supported textile factories along the River Ter. Cerdà envisioned “urbanizing” the countryside, with the railway running tangential to settlements to encourage interaction. From planning through construction, the project facilitated a dialogue between industrial purpose and modernizing influence, shaping the unique development of communities throughout the 20th century.
Despite their significance, the impact of railways on interior Catalan lines outside metropolitan areas is understudied, particularly in towns with fewer than 50,000 residents where their importance remains visible. This relevance is often overlooked in favor of their transportation function alone. The motivation for this research lies in collecting information that is rarely digitized or easily accessed. As a result, the methodology relies on fieldwork and local surveys to uncover new insights that can inform administrative decisions.
Country towns and the railway in the Great Hungarian Plain between 1850 and 1930
Gábor Buzgó
abstractGábor Buzgó
In the second half of the 19th century, a profound economic restructuring took place in the Carpathian Basin, and especially in the Great Hungarian Plain, with monocultural grain production replacing livestock farming. This change in economic structure also had an impact on the landscape, as meadows and pastures were replaced by arable land. The change in the economic structure was stimulated by the long-lasting grain boom that unfolded between 1852 and 1878 due to the food needs of the growing population of Western Europe, and its development was made possible by two infrastructural developments: the construction of the railway network and river regulation and and the start of marsh drainage works. The development of freight transport enabled the rapid growth of grain exports, laid the foundations for the modernization of the towns of the Great Hungarian Plain, and influenced the economy, society, and urbanization of the region. One of the main questions of my presentation is whether, thanks to the development of infrastructure, there were country towns that were able to break ahead in terms of their economic position within the urban network or whether the structure that had developed before the railway continued. Furthermore, using the example of Debrecen, the most populous town in the Great Hungarian Plain, and its agglomeration, I would also like to show how the development of the railway shaped the landscape and the relationship between the town and the countryside. To examine this question, I use military maps and statistical surveys as sources. I analyze the historical maps using the hGIS methodological toolkit. The economy and society of the Carpathian Basin faced new challenges after World War I due to the new state borders, a phenomenon that did not spare the Great Hungarian Plain, as a border zone of approximately 900 km was established in the region. The new state borders naturally also affected the region's railway network. In my presentation, I would also like to use the example of Debrecen and its agglomeration to analyze how the economic structure developed between the two world wars compared to the previous period, and what role the railway played in this. By analyzing these three research questions, I aim to create a differentiated picture of the relationship between country towns in the Great Hungarian Plain and the railway from the second half of the 19th century to the first third of the 20th century.
A Janus-faced street? Reconstructing the demographic geography in the ‘microscapes’ of Antwerp’s and Marseille’s railway station boulevards (late 19th-early 20th centuries)
Jasper Segerink
abstractJasper Segerink
The impact of railways on urban space has been one of the most prominent debates in urban history debates of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Yet the debate has mostly focussed on changes in urban form and the expansion of urban space, while we know far less about how the railway station affected its immediate environment of the railway neighbourhood. Traditional historiography posits that railway neighbourhoods were specifically designed to create socio-spatial inequalities on the “wrong side of the tracks”, while more recent interpretations suggest that these geographies were borne out of liberal capitalist markets. This paper aims to address this question by analysing the demographic change in the ‘microscape’ of the railway boulevard: the main boulevard connecting the railway station to the city. It introduces the spatial concept of the ‘microscape’ – a microscopic landscape that focusses on the building blocks surrounding a street, thus including side- and backstreets – to investigate how living patterns varied depending on connectivity and visibility within the streetscape. In so doing it looks beyond the often-studied ‘frontside’ of the station boulevard to capture the full complexity of socio-spatial demographic change in the railway neighbourhood. The analysis is based on data from census/population register data, approached from a spatial perspective through GIS. As case-study, it compares Antwerp and Marseille in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, allowing to investigate precisely how the neighbourhood’s social fabric transformed along with increasing connectivity and globalisation of the cities.
Legislating the Peripheral Network: Railway Laws, Political Discourse and Urban Integration in Italy and Spain (1879–1915). A Digital Comparative Approach
Leandro Stacchini
abstractLeandro Stacchini
This paper investigates how secondary railway legislation and parliamentary debates in Italy and Spain shaped the construction of the urban–peripheral network between 1879 and 1915, a crucial phase of infrastructural consolidation in Southern Europe. Combining archival research with Natural Language Processing (NLP), it examines how concepts such as modernisation, territorial integration, and complementary network were articulated in legal frameworks and reflected in broader discourse on railways and urban growth.
The study focuses on the Italian Legge Baccarini (1879) and its amendments, and the Spanish railway laws of 1904, 1908, and 1912 regulating ferrocarriles de vía estrecha. These acts defined technical standards, financial mechanisms, and visions of urban hierarchy and territorial connectivity. Using a corpus of about 200,000 words—including parliamentary proceedings, legal texts, and ministerial reports—the paper applies topic modelling, keyword co-occurrence, and semantic network analysis to trace the evolution of railway-related vocabulary in both countries.
Preliminary results show that Italian discourse emphasised a top-down infrastructural model, with frequent terms such as lines, authority, railway, construction, State, and public, reflecting a centralised rhetoric focused on state power, financial control, and network completion. The Spanish corpus displays a more dispersed vocabulary centred on right, public, Madrid, gauge, development, and concession, indicating a discourse grounded in legal negotiation, administrative procedures, and local cooperation. Linguistic frequencies mirror institutional differences: Italy prioritised state authority and network completion, while Spain foregrounded procedural and decentralised approaches. In both cases, however, lines, railway, and public confirm that railways were seen as instruments of urban and territorial cohesion rather than solely economic entities.
By integrating computational text analysis with historical interpretation, this study contributes to a renewed understanding of railways as political and cultural objects, showing that the shaping of Europe’s urban networks was both technical and linguistic, guided by competing narratives of progress, modernity, and governance.
Token Politics versus Economic Precariousness in the Urban Undergrounding of a Secondary Railway. The Case of the CGFC in Barcelona, Hospitalet, and Cornellá
Íngrid Castañé Curiel, Carles Gorini Santo
abstractÍngrid Castañé Curiel, Carles Gorini Santo
The successive railway connection plans for Barcelona — those of 1933 and especially 1944, along with their subsequent modifications — did not take into account the presence of a narrow-gauge line in the city. The rapid and exponential growth of the municipalities bordering the capital, Hospitalet and Cornellà, created the urgent need for a solution to its surface alignment that would ensure the continuity of the urban fabric. The railway’s barrier effect not only had repercussions for urban planning but also caused numerous accidents that claimed human lives.
Research in the primary sources of the Compañía General de los Ferrocarriles Catalanes (CGFC) and in local archives has been complemented by the literature on the transformation of urban peripheries and on the social movements of late Francoism. This combined approach offers a fresh and critical perspective on the process that ultimately led to the undergrounding of this railway. The project was presented by its political promoters as one of the most important challenges facing Catalonia in the 1960s, yet its implementation was delayed for nearly two decades due to financial constraints.
Session 50 - Port Communities in the Urban Context: labour, gender, identities and networks (19th-20th centuries)
The session explores the comparative history of port communities during industrialization and the process of global market integration. Locally rooted yet globally connected, they developed distinct urban traits. We welcome papers that examine them through topics such as labor or gender relations, cultural representations, urban narratives or their transnational links.
Coordinators: Eduard Page Campos, Mònica Borrell Cairol, Laura Caruso
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Coordinators: Eduard Page Campos, Mònica Borrell Cairol, Laura Caruso
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Session 50 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The creation of a new identity. Sailors in the city, trough the example of Le Havre in the 19th century.
Nicolas Cochard
abstractNicolas Cochard
In the 19th century, the large port city of Le Havre underwent a transformation. With industrialization, this military port became an important commercial center. There was significant population growth, and the maritime community contributed to this strong growth. Workers from industrial regions far from the coast came to work at sea, particularly to operate the steam engines that were transforming navigation. It must be said that wages for engine room workers at sea were higher than wages on land. These workers redefined Le Havre's maritime identity, as sailors increasingly lived alongside workers in the port, which was becoming industrialized. Marriages were a strong sign of this change, with sailors increasingly marrying women from families other than those of seafarers. Studies of households indicate that different types of workers in the city were living alongside sailors. Furthermore, bars were no longer just sailors' bars, but workers' bars in the broadest sense.
These indicators reveal a significant change in the identity of maritime workers. This is what we call a maritime-port identity. The concept is easy to understand. Before the 19th century, literature and research largely emphasized the specific characteristics of seafarers. They lived among themselves, married among themselves, frequented bars among themselves, or came from the same regions. This insularity set them apart from the rest of the population. But with the advent of steam navigation, the recruitment of sailors expanded socially and geographically, resulting in a more diverse population. This is what reshaped the maritime population of a large commercial port such as Le Havre.
I therefore propose to examine this concept of maritime-port identity through a few indicators that I have just mentioned. We can study how a merchant seaman was defined at the beginning of the 19th century and at the end of the 19th century by describing a composite sketch.
Interurban mobility among students at the Barcelona Nautical School (1848-1899)
Pau Márquez-Antón
abstractPau Márquez-Antón
This communication is aimed at the doctoral thesis I am working on, which is dedicated to researching Spanish Merchant Marine mates at the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. To research this topic, I have consulted and examined the archives of the Rector Gabriel Ferraté Library at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), which contain the academic records of students enrolled in the Merchant Marine mate programme, the main source for this paper.
Thus, the files contain, among many other details, the students' place of birth and address, as well as, in a large number of cases, the address of their parents or guardians and guarantors, if any. The archive has been emptied, revealing a total of approximately 3,000 students between the aforementioned dates. Of these, approximately 2,400 addresses are currently on record, solely for the first year, located in the city of Barcelona. There are also more than 2,900 towns and municipalities of origin for each student.
With all this data, it is possible to track the origin of these students at the municipal, national and international levels. On the other hand, it is possible to track the evolution of students' places of residence throughout the second half of the 19th century in Barcelona, observing how, as the Eixample project developed and transport in the city improved, students left their residences around the Barcelona Nautical School in Ciutat Vella and began to live further away from them. Furthermore, due to the high influx of students from the municipalities of the Maresme region, it is also possible to trace and observe how the railway between Mataró and Barcelona, inaugurated in 1848, mobilised students between these two regions, especially in the period 1868-1874, with the liberalisation of education, when students would go to the Barcelona Nautical School solely to take their exams or to obtain their mate's certificate.
With all this, the communication aims to give visibility to the places where the mate students in Barcelona lived, where they came from, and how they did so, since many of them share the same address in the same year, and it is also possible to locate guarantors and people who were in charge of the student residence.
Beyond the horizon: The international links and outlook of London’s maritime neighbourhoods, 1880s-1930s
Guy Collender
abstractGuy Collender
The Port of London was a magnet for people, goods and ideas from across the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Working-class residents and missionaries recalled seeing seafarers from China, India, Africa and North America. Historians have recognised this global workforce and have studied certain districts associated with particular nationalities, such as the Chinese in Limehouse. However, the complexity and two-way nature of these transnational links has not been explored in depth. This paper draws on primary sources, including autobiographies by working-class residents and seafarers, court records, and census data to show the international diversity of London’s population and the differences between maritime neighbourhoods. Crown Street in Poplar, for example, was home to seafarers from Barbados, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, yet the only foreigners on Wapping High Street came from Ireland. This paper also demonstrates how foreigners swapped their lives of international seafaring to settle down in London, start land-based jobs, and build their own families.
The London-born population also had international ambitions. Like an umbilical cord, the Thames linked working-class communities to similar maritime neighbourhoods across the world. Many carried out their work in the North Sea and the Channel, and others looked to the Continent for work, including in Hamburg during a dockers’ strike in 1906. From childhood many youngsters marvelled at the imperial produce being unloaded in the capital, and many later built their careers in far-flung places. This paper shows how the ties of loyalty between distant colonies and Britain were greater than the other way round. The Australians, for example, donated £60,000 to the strike relief fund during the victorious Great Dock Strike in London in 1889, but the British only provided £4,000 the following year during the unsuccessful Australian Maritime Strike.
Finally, this paper demonstrates how the relationship between Britain and foreign seafarers hardened in the early twentieth century, particularly with the passing of the Special Restrictions (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order in 1925. The international links and tolerance often associated with the Port of London were not immutable during a period of tumultuous political, social and economic change.
Session 50 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Port Communities in Transition: A Gendered Approach to Community, Emotion and Place
Nikki Sikkema, Rayke Van Lent
abstractNikki Sikkema, Rayke Van Lent
The first container ship entered the port of Rotterdam in 1968, marking the start of considerable changes to the labor process over the next decades. Dockwork became less physical and more solitary. The rise of the shipping container also reduced the demand for breakbulk labor, causing mass layoffs in stevedoring companies. The impact of these changes have been investigated by historians on a technological, logistical and economic level, yet the impact on the everyday lives of dockworkers and their families has been neglected in previous research.
Historically, dockworkers have been theorized to produce and sustain a community based on the tough and dangerous characteristics of their work. Occupation turned into a source of group identification, and shaped intimate social relations and behavior. This sense of community encouraged investing in relationships outside of work and developed (common) leisure interests. Community had an all-encompassing nature and involved both the occupational and domestic sphere. This means these communities bridged the gap between work and home, involving dockworkers as well as their families.
The nature of their occupation was central to dockworkers’ identity, altered their self-image, social relations, and daily lives in and beyond the workplace. Consequently, changes in their work could affect their sense of self, insider-outsider boundaries, and shared social codes. Little is known about how dockworkers responded to these changes, and whether this theorized community even continued to exist. Therefore this paper addresses the question: How did the port community in Rotterdam take shape, and why and how did this community either persist or transform in response to change in the port from the 1960s onwards? Oral history interviews provide evidence to addresses dockwork from the theoretical perspective of gender, place, emotion and community. This paper aims to answer questions about solidarity, sense of belonging and communal boundaries, and the particular role of mothers and wives within their communities.
The paper takes a comparative approach, distinguishing between breakbulk and nautical service workers in their experiences. The introduction of the container impacted both sectors differently. This distinction not only allows for wider comparison to other port cities around the world, but also addresses the heterogeneity of dockworkers as a community, and investigates their different experiences and responses to change.
Historical and Contemporary Maritimities in the Río de la Plata South Atlantic: Urban and Maritime Representations in Maldonado–Punta del Este
Leticia D'ambrosio Camarero
abstractLeticia D'ambrosio Camarero
This paper analyzes the historical and contemporary role of maritime colectives in the urban conglomerate of Punta del Este–Maldonado—a territory that, although it never developed into a large-scale industrial port, cultivated an intense maritime life linked to regional circulations, extractive economies, and coastal practices that profoundly shaped its urban and social configuration. From an anthropological and historical perspective, the research reconstructs how local maritimities—understood as the practices, knowledge, materialities, and sensibilities connected to the sea—gave rise to specific communities whose relationship with the city has been marked by tensions, processes of marginalization, and, simultaneously, strong territorial attachment and transformation.
Since the eighteenth century, the hunting of sea lions and, to a lesser extent, the exploitation of cetaceans constituted central activities that integrated the region into Atlantic circuits of labor and commerce. The early settlements associated with the sealing industry—seasonal camps, processing stations, maritime transport networks, and exchange corridors linking the area to Buenos Aires and southern Brazil—shaped the first portscapes of the territory and produced heterogeneous populations connected to both rural and coastal livelihoods.
From the twentieth century onward, and especially with the consolidation of Punta del Este as an international resort, these maritime-port trajectories were subordinated to new urban narratives that privileged an exclusive and cosmopolitan seaside image. Yet maritimity did not disappear; instead, it persists and is continually reconfigured in the practices of artisanal fishers, remnants of the sealing industry, local memories, objects and documents relating to the Royal Maritime Company, as well as museums, coastal toponymy, and, more recently, conservation policies such as the Whale and Dolphin Sanctuary and the expanding whale-watching as well as other practices linked to the sea and the coast.
The paper thus proposes interpreting Punta del Este–Maldonado in dialogue with urban history and the notion of maritimities wich makes possible to illuminate how trajectories of hunting, defense, industrial exploitation, recreational practices, fisheries and environmental conservation have configured social boundaries, local identification, and forms of belonging in the contemporary port city.
Session 51 - Local urban community networks and peripheral modernisation in the modern times (ca. 1850-1939)
Towns and cities were populated by people gathered in smaller-scale groupings such as local communities, bound by pre-existing estate bonds, religious creed, professional ties, elite networks or ethnicity. We would like to focus on the inner-city networks of communities as crucial social forces that played its autonomous role in modernisation of European peripheries.
Coordinators: Aleksander Łupienko, Michał Wiśniewski, Kamil Śmiechowski, Rafał Matyja
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Coordinators: Aleksander Łupienko, Michał Wiśniewski, Kamil Śmiechowski, Rafał Matyja
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Session 51 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Municipal Leaders Beyond Borders? Professional Solidarity and the Modernization of the Divided City of Teschen
Zora Piskacova
abstractZora Piskacova
The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 sent East-Central Europe into chaos. In Upper Silesia, the Polish and Czechoslovak nation-states clashed over the multiethnic Teschen region. To avoid further escalation of violence, the Allied powers divided the contested area, including its capital, the city of Teschen, between the two states in July 1920. For the Allies, the issue of Teschen Silesia was officially over; for the local urbanites, who found their workplaces, schools, and places of worship located not just over the river, but in a foreign country, it had only just begun.
This paper examines how municipal leaders in Polish Cieszyn and Czechoslovak Český Těšín balanced national and local interests to sustain urban life, resulting in both the modernization of the new border cityscape and, somewhat paradoxically, also the preservation of its prewar fabric.
I argue that these elites confronted one of modernity’s central challenges—the imposition of nation-state borders—by drawing on professional identities and networks forged under the Habsburg Empire. Rooted in imperial-era socialization and administrative norms, they cooperated across the new divide, prioritizing urban functionality and residents’ welfare over nationalist agendas or state security concerns. In doing so, they transformed imperial connections into transnational linkages that sustained and modernized essential services—such as joint fire brigade operations—and secured access for Czechoslovak citizens to the public hospital now on Polish territory.
At the same time, the border turned modernization into a political project. Cross-border interconnectedness sharpened competition, as local leaders shamed their national governments into investment by presenting the 'other' side as more modern and livable. Everyday governance thus took on political significance, with residents judging their national affiliation against the example across the river.
Drawing on municipal records, regional archives, correspondence with Prague and Warsaw, and local press, this paper challenges portrayals of East-Central European borderlands as passive, backward, and inherently conflict-ridden. Instead, it interrogates the urbanity of the periphery and demonstrates how interwar municipal leaders in Cieszyn and Český Těšín emerged as proactive actors who, by their professional networks, drove the modernization of the divided city while sustaining its everyday urban life.
From Margins to the Centre: The Transformation of the Working-Class Community in Ostrava (1867–1914 / 1918–1938)
Andrea Pokludová
abstractAndrea Pokludová
This paper explores the transformation of the working-class community in Ostrava—a key industrial centre of the Habsburg Empire and later Czechoslovakia—between 1867–1914 and 1918–1938. It employs a comparative historical approach to analyse how this urban community evolved from a loosely connected group of industrial workers into a self-aware and organized social force that actively shaped the city’s public space.
In the late Habsburg period, Ostrava’s working class formed a distinct urban grouping, tied together not only by shared labour conditions but also by emerging horizontal networks based on profession, political activism, and common cultural practices.
Following the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, the working class in Ostrava expanded its influence in the urban space.
This paper will focus on the transformation of the working class’s culture of protest in the city during the period under study. Methodologically, the topic will be approached in the context of places of memory in urban space related to social movements and strikes. It will examine the process of modernization of social movements, from spontaneous actions to organized protest in urban space.
City-forming role of local communities in the development of Lviv at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries
Joanna Kopacz- Gruzlewska, Yuriy Kryvoruchko
abstractJoanna Kopacz- Gruzlewska, Yuriy Kryvoruchko
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, urban modernisation accelerated and was associated with industrial development as a stimulating factor, but this was not the only circumstance. Transformation required creation of a new administration, integration of technical infrastructure and public transport networks.
The process of urban modernisation was part of a wider development strategy. Thus the diversification of individual cities’ character in the region deepened. This process was evident in Lviv - the former capital of Galicia. In 1877, the Polytechnic Society was established, one of the first communities to influence the city through promotion of technological development in Galicia. Their activities, focused on educating engineering staff, led to formation of the Lviv Polytechnic. The city became an important scientific centre in Poland.
Located on a merchant route, Lviv was a multicultural city, with communities coexisting around Jewish, Orthodox and Latin religious centres. Galicia's attainment of autonomy within the Austro-Hungarian Empire initiated the settlement of the Nobility in the suburbs and entailed a social stratification, which resulted in emergence of privileged settlement locations. The establishment of the Lviv Polytechnic initiated the creation of communities integrated with specific professions and education.
The real change came after the end of World War I, when Lviv lost its capital role. The city's development strategy encouraged specific professional groups: workers, officers and administrative staff to manage the extending urban infrastructure. In the 1920s, officers' colonies were built on military-owned land, followed by housing estates for municipal employees. These investments implemented a national style in architecture, but also provided a basis for reflection on the housing estate form.
The construction of modernist districts on the Lviv’s outskirts was a huge breakthrough. The estates were an initiative of housing cooperatives linked to financial and educational institutions. They developed means of identity expression through their repetitive house design, contributing to the building standardisation.
In the face of increasing complexity of the city, social mobility and changes in family structure, the aspect of community is becoming very relevant, although its character is changing. The contemporary concept of community encompasses inclusiveness and is based on a sense of belonging to a place.
Session 51 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
(Re)Creating European Communities Abroad – Community and Modernity in the Treaty Ports of East Asia in the late 19th century
Andreas Eichleter
abstractAndreas Eichleter
The European expansion in East Asia in the 19th century forced China and Japan into semi-colonial dependency embodied in the so-called treaty ports, designated urban spaces of foreign interaction. To these new urban spaces on the periphery of a European dominated globe, Western settlers brought their ideas of European civilization and modernity. These ranged from infrastructure such as street lighting, to modern amenities such as newspapers and even past times such as lawn tennis. In essence, they attempted to recreate a European life style in the Far East, often in a conscious differentiation to the native communities. In this presentation, the European urban community formation in the treaty ports of China and Japan will be analyzed in the late 19th century. It will look at the foreign communities themselves, their networks of inclusion and exclusion, as well as their role in the modernization of these urban spaces.
In regard to the local foreign communities, their composition and self-image will be examined, as well as their segregation from the native Chinese and Japanese population and their partition into different social groups and networks. Despite the fact that they shared commonalities, including a joint European identity in contrast to the native ‘Other’, the communities were simultaneously split along the lines of social status, profession and gender. These hierarchies of exclusion and inclusion framed their everyday lives such as membership in social or sports clubs. Therefore, they determined their social and professional networks, and led to significant tensions, especially with marginalized groups such as transient sailors or women.
In terms of modernity, the Europeans communities in East Asia considered themselves as ‘bringers of civilization’. They were firm believers in the superiority of their civilization and strove to bring modern amenities and achievements with them to the treaty ports. Aside from notable technologies such as railways, other exemplary amenities were newspapers, European sports, notably horse racing, or eating habits. It should also be noted that while modernity was rapidly introduced to ports with large European populations such as Shanghai or Yokohama, it was often found lacking in smaller treaty ports with few foreign residents. They had to live in close contact with natives, a fact often lamented in contemporary writings, as modernity was only associated with the acceptance and adoption of European life styles.
Polish Cities of Print: Multiethnic Urban Printing Networks in the former territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth annexed by the Russian Empire (1865–1918)
Elżbieta Nowosielska, Victoria Gerasimova
abstractElżbieta Nowosielska, Victoria Gerasimova
The second half of the 19th century was a time of rapid development of the mass press and the emergence of an authentic mass culture. The spread of mass printing was undoubtedly a sign of modernization. Although printing houses specializing in one-off or holiday pamphlets sometimes operated even in small towns, large enterprises that published daily and weekly newspapers with circulations in the hundreds of thousands were concentrated in the big cities. To support them, a whole infrastructure for the production and distribution of periodicals emerged, along with a specialized professional group, namely printers and typesetters.
Based on data collected by the team of the ‘Section for the Retrospective Bibliography for the 19th and 20th Centuries’ in the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences on periodicals, pamphlets, and calendars – which will in the future be made available as part of the Vademecum digital cultural map of the Polish lands project – we would like to show how the printing centers of the press operated in the cities of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (that is, in the so-called Russian partition) in the years 1865–1918.
Polish cities were multiethnic communities. Not only Poles, but also Jews, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Germans, and other ethnic groups had a need for their own periodical publications. Printing in the many languages used in this region required investments in appropriate typefaces.
In our presentation, we will analyze the activity of urban printing houses as a special kind of network that offered multilingual products to the inhabitants of Polish cities and towns. Using the approach of cultural history and the tools of network analysis, we will address the following questions:
• Did the ethnic structure of cities directly influence the offerings of printing houses?
• Were there noticeable differences between the printing practices of various ethnic groups?
• To what extent did state policy affect the development or loss of significance of particular cities as printing centers?
We will discuss the problem of centralization and decentralization of printing services in large and small provincial towns of the Russian partition, in the context of several ethnic groups, with a particular focus on Poles and Jews.
From the Manor House to the Urban Salon: Social Transformation and Community Networks between Town and Countryside in the Kingdom of Poland (c. 1880–1914)
Michał Raczkowski
abstractMichał Raczkowski
This paper examines the social transformation of the landed gentry in the Kingdom of Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It focuses on the formation of new urban community networks in Warsaw and their role in peripheral modernisation. Economic and social changes in the second half of the 19th century led to the impoverishment of a part of the landed elite, forcing many families to sell their estates and move to Warsaw. This migration generated new forms of social integration as well as new functional links between town and countryside.
Despite their changing status, the paper argues that former landowners became active participants in Warsaw’s associational life, professional structures, and informal networks. This enabled them to retain elements of their previous identity while integrating into the urban elite. By maintaining dense kinship and friendship ties, they supported newly arrived relatives in securing housing, employment, and professional advancement. Many entered the liberal professions and joined civic, cultural, and scientific organisations, encouraging provincial relatives to follow similar paths.
Taking a microhistorical and prosopographical approach, the paper shows how these networks operated in practice. Hosting students from gentry families as boarders strengthened ties between the urban and rural branches. Former landowners also acted as intermediaries by facilitating the circulation of goods, artistic commissions, and labour.
Economic connections formed another dimension of these networks. Former landowners, who possessed capital from the sale of their estates, invested in agro-industrial enterprises, becoming co-founders or board members of factories whose production sites were located in provincial towns and whose management offices were in Warsaw. As representatives of these enterprises, they mediated contacts with administrative authorities and business partners, thereby shaping the flow of influence between peripheral industrial regions and the metropolitan centre.
This paper demonstrates that this group functioned as a socially cohesive and adaptable community whose networks contributed to the modernisation of Warsaw and surrounding provincial towns. By analysing these ties, the study emphasises the agency of local urban communities in peripheral modernisation processes and offers a case study of how elite migration reshaped the social geography of urban-rural interaction in East-Central Europe.
Galician Cultural Societies - A Case Study of Community Networks and Urban Modernisation on the Imperial Periphery.
Adrianna Sznapik
abstractAdrianna Sznapik
This paper examines how interpersonal ties shaped the functioning of Galician cultural societies and how these community networks supported processes of modernisation within urban communities located on the peripheries of the Habsburg Monarchy. Using selected associations as case studies, I analyse both the effectiveness of informal networks and the characteristic profile of activists involved in heritage-oriented organisational work.
Galicia occupied a peripheral position within the Habsburg Empire, marked by two major centres: Cracow, the former royal capital, symbolic intellectual centre of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Lviv, the administrative capital, a much more ethnically diverse metropolis. Despite its smaller scale, Cracow set the tone for cultural and social initiatives. It functioned as the gateway through which modern approaches to monument protection and ideas associated with the Heimatschutz movement reached Galicia. Yet Cracow’s artistic and intellectual life remained compact, with many of its leading figures connected through interpersonal ties.
These personal connections strongly influenced the composition of the membership lists and boards of organisations devoted to the protection of local cultural heritage. The overlap of individuals across societies facilitated collaboration and increasingly coordinated action. This cooperation soon became institutionalised with the creation of the Artistic–Cultural Union, which gathered representatives of the important Cracow societies. Its objective was to coordinate work on key issues and to exert pressure on municipal authorities.
However, not everyone welcomed the concentration of influence within a narrow elite circle. At the meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Polish Monuments of Art and Culture, lawyer and art collector A. Sternschuss proposed removing candidates already overloaded with responsibilities in other organisations. His intervention led to the exclusion of prominent cultural figures from the newly formed board. Instead, President Count Mycielski assembled a leadership group dominated by aristocratic and academic circles. Through an informal network of regional delegates, the society expanded its reach across all areas of the former Commonwealth.
The case of Galician societies demonstrates how modern organisational models and heritage ideals were transmitted to local centres on the imperial periphery, while their success depended on overlapping community networks
Session 52 - Factory gardens and workers' gardens, 18th to 20th centuries
The session calls for the presentation of studies related to the construction of gardens in factories, including case studies and design proposals; the garden as a means of corporate promotion and brand prestige; as a response to the
hygienic and social problems of the Industrial Revolution; the role of vegetable gardens and workers' food self-sufficiency; and the ontological aspects of factory gardens.
Coordinators: Vicenç Casals Costa, Jordi Diaz, Maricarmen Tapia Gómez
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hygienic and social problems of the Industrial Revolution; the role of vegetable gardens and workers' food self-sufficiency; and the ontological aspects of factory gardens.
Coordinators: Vicenç Casals Costa, Jordi Diaz, Maricarmen Tapia Gómez
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Session 52 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
‘Tanner’s Moat was hell’: factory gardens, human efficiency, and the politics of industrial green space
Sian Broadhurst
abstractSian Broadhurst
Described in the 1930s press as “the most unworkslike of works,” the Rowntree chocolate factory stood as a striking example of landscaped industrial design. This paper explores the ideological, physiological, and social functions of the factory gardens, situating them within broader debates on the historical evolution of the politics of green space. From rose gardens and allotments to sports fields and ornamental ponds, Rowntree’s site was carefully curated to promote worker wellbeing, rational recreation, and corporate prestige.
The original factory at Tanner’s Moat was condemned by Seebohm Rowntree as ‘hell’. It occupied numerous buildings, crammed together on the banks of the River Ouse, in the centre of York. The relocation to a peripheral, purpose-built factory in the early 20th century marked a shift toward more humane and efficient industrial design. Gardens and greenspace offered respite from factory monotony. Yet these landscapes of leisure were also landscapes of control.
The vision was bounded by paternalist instincts and the drive for increased productivity. Welfare amenities were designed not only to improve morale but also to shape behaviour. The landscaped factory was part of a broader strategy aimed at cultivating the ideal employee: healthy, thrifty, and morally upright. The provision of leisure facilities and access to nature was inseparable from managerial oversight. Welfare workers monitored behaviour, timekeeping was strictly enforced, and recreational activities were curated to align with corporate values. Open to visitors and used to host dignitaries, the gardens became part of Rowntree’s brand identity. In this way, the factory landscape operated simultaneously as a space of care and a site of corporate performance.
By examining the Rowntree gardens as both ideological and material constructs, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of factory gardens as a historical phenomenon.
It asks whether such gardens were ever truly emancipatory or whether they were always, in part, a cultivated illusion. In doing so, the paper challenges simplistic narratives of industrial benevolence and highlights the enduring tension between welfare and control in the design of working environments. It also raises questions about the legacy of such spaces in the present day: what can the history of factory gardens tell us about the aesthetics of care, the politics of visibility, and the limits of reform within capitalist production?
Gardens and Industrialization. The Legacy of J.C.N. Forestier
Jordi Diaz, Vicenç Casals, Maricarmen Tapia
abstractJordi Diaz, Vicenç Casals, Maricarmen Tapia
This paper analyzes the relationship between landscape, industry, and modernity through the study of factory gardens that emerged between Novecentismo—Noucentisme in Catalonia—and functionalism, focusing on the influence of Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier and the international reach of his ideas. It proposes a comparative reading encompassing cases from Catalonia—such as the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, the Sant Adrià de Besòs thermal power plant, and the Artextil factory in Sabadell—and from Mexico, with the gardens of the Santa Rosa textile factory (CIVSA), designed under the direction of Miguel Ángel de Quevedo.
The study shows how, beginning with Forestier and his followers—Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí, Javier de Winthuysen, Fernando García Mercadal, and Miguel A. de Quevedo—a conception of the industrial garden developed as an intermediate space between production and everyday life, where aesthetics, hygiene, and the ethics of work were integrated into a unified socio-spatial conception. These “industrial gardens” articulated an ethic of the productive landscape, reconciling utility, beauty, and social function, and anticipating contemporary theories of landscape and sustainability.
From a comparative perspective, the work identifies two historical phases: Noucentisme, characterized by formal and representative gardens of French and Mediterranean inspiration, and functionalism, which rationalized green space in the service of well-being, productivity, and urban-industrial integration.
The analysis concludes that factory gardens constitute a transnational cultural heritage, an expression of a modernity that linked technology and nature, industry and landscape. Their critical recovery allows us to understand the aesthetic and social dimensions of industrialization and to reclaim these spaces as key elements in the history of urbanism and modern environmental thought.
Landscape and factory: the forgotten gardens of the National Institute of Industry
Carmen Toribio Marín, Rafael García García
abstractCarmen Toribio Marín, Rafael García García
This study examines the gardens associated with Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI) buildings, an overlooked dimension of Spanish industrial heritage. We posit that INI facilities, constructed during Franco's industrial development period, incorporated gardens serving representative, productive, and social functions, exemplifying a distinctive approach to industrial landscape design. This research aims to identify and document these gardens, establish their geographic and typological diversity, and trace their historical evolution using archival sources.
The methodology relies on visual analysis of images published in the IN magazine, selecting and categorising cases by building type, with particular focus on factories due to their limited prior study. The research is complemented by contemporary architectural journals, historic aerial photography, and graphic material sourced from digital archives and networks of former workers, documenting sites now lost or significantly altered.
The results reveal a heterogeneous gardening culture, where conventional landscaping coexists with remarkably singular interventions. While Spanish industrial landscape theory in the mid-20th century may not have achieved the level of systematization found in other European contexts, the cases studied demonstrate an early commitment to integrating gardens and landscapes into industrial environments, transforming factories into spaces for representation and well-being.
The analysis focuses on gardens found at prominent INI factories—including Construcciones Aeronáuticas (CASA), Elcano, Butano SA, Boetticher and Navarro, Marconi, Empresa Nacional de Rodamientos, and ENASA—located in Madrid, Seville, Cádiz, Getafe, Valencia, and Barcelona. These gardens embody diverse landscape typologies, ranging from traditional courtyards and productive orchards to corporate mosaiculture, sports facilities, and integrated designs that blend industrial functions with green spaces for offices and workers' housing.
Collectively, these interventions illustrate a complex and early relationship between industry, landscape, and society. This research represents the first systematic study of the INI’s gardens and contributes to highlighting their heritage value and potential as objects of study within the history of Spanish industrial landscape design. Their typological diversity and originality stand out as distinctive features warranting further scholarly attention.
Between the Factory and the Land: Transformed Ecologies and Silenced Epistemologies
María Esperanza Rock Núnez
abstractMaría Esperanza Rock Núnez
This paper proposes a critical reading of the emergence of factory gardens and workers’ orchards in industrial contexts, highlighting how European urban and hygienist ideologies did not translate in the same way outside their original geopolitical setting. Through the case of the Coal Mining Basin in southern Chile, the analysis questions the transfer of these models into territories where relationships with land and sea were articulated through relational ontologies and cosmologies, rather than through techniques of control or domination.
Far from being simple spaces of well-being or environmental balance, these gardens reveal the profound ecological and social transformations produced by industrialisation and by the outward projection of European “modernity” beyond its own context. Their installation in territories previously inhabited by communities whose worldviews conceived the land through relational meanings—characterised by close human–nature connections and by practices of gathering, domestic cultivation, and communal subsistence—entailed the imposition of an exogenous civilisational imaginary that paralleled the industrial project itself.
In many cases, the parks and green areas designed under these logics did not integrate into local knowledge or practices; on the contrary, they reinforced processes of urban and class segregation, deepening the inequalities characteristic of industrial landscapes.
From an ethnohistorical and decolonial perspective, the paper argues that these gardens expose ideological tensions in contexts where an externally imposed human–nature relationship differed substantially from existing relational worldviews. While in Europe hygienism and urban gardens emerged from revolutionary ideals, in some industrial installations outside Europe their meaning diverged sharply: private parks inserted into abundant natural environments, disconnected from the experiences and needs of working-class communities.
The paper thus aims to contribute to a critical understanding of the role of these green spaces from the onset of industrialisation to the present, showing how, in certain countries, they ultimately became elite amenities situated within predominantly working-class territories.
Session 53 - (Re)discovering the Urban Corner Shop: the Histories of Interaction, Integration and Commerical Variety
The session will focus on the phenomenon of urban commercial(ized) corners - corner shops, which became widespread during the late 18th and early 19th century. Considering their various performances and meanings, but also contemporary (re)interpretations, a multidisciplinary insight into various aspects of this urban element is highlighted.
Coordinators: Laura Kolbe, Aleksandra Stupar
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Coordinators: Laura Kolbe, Aleksandra Stupar
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Session 53 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 303 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Cornered Expressionism: The Folded Condition Between Urban Form, Ambience, and Pictorial Space
Cristian Suau Ibanez
abstractCristian Suau Ibanez
This paper examines the urban corner as a spatial hinge linking architecture, painting and lived experience. It compares Fritz Höger's Chilehaus (1922–24) in Hamburg with Ludwig Meidner's Eckhaus (1913), asking how the corner becomes an expressive device rather than simply a junction between façades and streets. The analysis focuses on the relationship between geometry, materiality, movement, perception and atmosphere.
A simplified interdisciplinary framework combines urban morphology, atmospheric theory, psychogeography and rhythmanalysis. These perspectives are translated into observable indicators concerning geometry, material expression, compositional tension, perceptual distortion, atmosphere, movement and urban expression. Architectural observation, archival research, sketch analysis and comparative mapping are used to examine the two cases.
The comparison identifies two contrasting but related conditions. Höger's folded corner uses stable geometry, material articulation and visual convergence to guide movement and attention. Meidner's exploded corner uses distortion, fragmentation and unstable perspective to intensify perception and emotional response. Despite their differences, both demonstrate that the corner can operate as a micro-landscape in which spatial form, movement and atmosphere converge.
The paper's main contribution is a transferable taxonomy of corner conditions that connects urban morphology with perceptual and atmospheric experience. The findings suggest applications in urban design, heritage interpretation and the analysis of formal, informal and hybrid urban fabrics.
Corner shops in Victorian and Edwardian London
Richard Dennis
abstractRichard Dennis
Focusing on small corner shops in working-class neighbourhoods of late 19th- and early 20th-century inner London, typically chandler's, grocer's and dairies, I ask what distinguishes a 'corner shop' from any small shop situated mid-terrace rather than on a corner? In a British context, in the absence of maps with street numbers, can we even be confident from, e.g., a census enumerator's book, ratebook or directory, whether shops were situated on street corners or in continuous rows of buildings? Anecdotally, neighbourhood shops were as much social as commercial spaces, centres of sociability and conduits of news and security, screening outsiders who sought information about local residents. More formally, they displayed small ads offering or seeking jobs and lodgings. They might be places from which phone calls could be made or telegrams sent. They provided accommodation addresses for those who did not want mail delivered to their home address. As family businesses, they kept long hours. Economically, they might offer short-term credit to trusted customers and sold small portions of relatively expensive products. But despite low overheads (cheap sites, family labour) their prices were often higher than those of market stalls and larger, high-street 'multiples' and chain stores, who could negotiate keener prices from wholesalers and producers. These characteristics applied to all small shops on residential streets, but corner shops benefitted from enhanced visibility and the potential for architectural features highlighting their privileged situations.
To get beyond reputation to more solid factual information, the method proposed here centres on systematic case studies of corner shops that survive architecturally, albeit rarely still as grocers' or dairies. 'Listings' by English Heritage or inclusion in volumes of the Survey of London record buildings whose histories, owners and occupiers can be traced through censuses, ratebooks, newspaper articles, court records, and social surveys (such as Booth's Poverty Survey). Diaries, reminiscences and realist novels (by 'slum novelists' such as George Gissing and Arthur Morrison) also provide valuable information.
In all these ways we can further our knowledge of corner shops and their proprietors, their longevity, change over time, and turnover/persistence/mobility rates of businesses and residents, developing hypotheses about their place in both neighbourhoods and the wider economy of the city.
Corner shops as social hubs in the neighbourhoods of Athens, 1834-1922
Nikos Potamianos
abstractNikos Potamianos
Athens underwent rapid growth and profound transformations during the period 1834–1922. Among these developments was the proliferation of retail shops and their diffusion throughout the urban fabric—an enduring feature of the city’s spatial and social organization. This phenomenon has been taken into account in contemporary academic debates concerning the existence of a widespread petty bourgeoisie in Greece, as well as in interwar discussions around the issue of "overcrowding in the professions". A substantial portion of these shops can be characterized as small corner stores, dispersed throughout neighborhoods.
I will examine the shift of retail trade away from the central market and the factors that contributed to the spatial diffusion of shops throughout the city. My primary focus, however, will be on how these corner shops functioned—thanks in part to their extended opening hours—as social hubs at the neighborhood level.
Neighborhood shopkeepers often functioned as “bankers of the poor,” both by lending small sums of money and by offering goods on credit, thereby creating relations of obligation and reciprocity. Groceries also served as gathering places where neighborhood men could drink wine and eat. Male sociability was further cultivated in barbershops and, of course, in cafés and taverns, which also constituted characteristic forms of corner shops.
Many of these shops served as reference points for the migrant communities, as their owners often originated from the provinces. Shopkeepers occupied a middle position within the internal hierarchies of these communities, as evidenced by the naming of the shops, the statutes of regional and ethnic associations, and the prominent participation of such shopkeepers in their boards.
Neighborhood shopkeepers occupied a significant position also within the political networks that had developed at the local level, in a country where universal male suffrage had been established early on. Coffeehouse and tavern owners were disproportionately represented in 1919 among the members of the boards of “People’s political clubs”—essentially the first formal local party organizations. Moreover, coffeehouse owners and grocers were frequently mentioned in newspaper reports covering the campaign tours of politicians and mayoral candidates in Athens. These candidates and their entourages would routinely stop at such neighborhood shops to interact with the public or deliver brief addresses.
Session 53 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 303 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Urban Corner Shop in the Early Railway Era: The Case of Brussels (1830–1870)
Christophe Loir
abstractChristophe Loir
This paper aims to examine the commercial, architectural, urban, and circulation-related dimensions of Urban Corner Shops, as well as the historical contexts that facilitated their development in the 19th century.
The study focuses on Brussels, where this typology emerged notably with the expansion of the railway network from the 1830s. While chamfered-corner buildings existed since the late 18th century, their proliferation, monumentalization, and commercialization as Urban Corner Shops were closely linked to urban mobility and the commercial opportunities generated by railway passenger flows. The lack of direct connections between stations required travelers to traverse the historic city, creating a unique setting for corner shops along these pedestrian routes.
Urban Corner Shops functioned simultaneously as urban markers, highly visible commercial spaces, desirable residences, and urban solutions at the intersection of narrow streets. The construction of wide boulevards from the 1870s onward curtailed their expansion in the historic center.
Using period maps, visual sources, commercial directories, and archival records (including building permits from the Public Works archives), this paper maps the distribution of Urban Corner Shops in Brussels between 1830 and 1870, and examines the heritage and commercial significance of the approximately fourty surviving examples along the former route between the stations.
This research complements ongoing studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles on architectural and urban mobility history and reflects my role as a member of the Royal Commission of Monuments and Sites (CRMS).
Restaurants on the streetwiew of Finnish cities in the 1930´s
Pirjo Ovaskainen
abstractPirjo Ovaskainen
Alcohol company had a clear vision of where restaurants should be located and what kind they should look like. Problem was that Finnish cities were too small and here were many small restaurants which located in old buildings. Restaurant premises were small and in some places were many small rooms. Alcohol company wanted big and bright rooms in which it was easy to control people. That was key point of Finnish alcohol law.
Corners of Collectivity: The Socialist Reinterpretation of the Urban Corner Shop in Bucharest
Andra Maria Ghenoiu
abstractAndra Maria Ghenoiu
This paper explores the transformation of the corner shop typology within the socialist city, focusing on Bucharest’s "Alimentara" stores. While the late 18th and 19th centuries established the urban corner shop as a vital interface between domestic and public life, socialist urbanism reconfigured this spatial and social function within a centrally planned and typified system of consumption, where architectural standardization became both an economic instrument and an ideological expression of collective life. The "Alimentara", typically located at the ground floor of housing blocks, embodied a socialist reinterpretation of the urban corner: standardized, state-owned, yet serving as an essential node of everyday sociability. These shops mediated between domestic routines and collective life, generating a choreography of waiting, exchange, and informal encounters that contrasted sharply with the scarcity and regulation of goods they offered. In the process of understanding how the commercial network actually functioned within the community, the research offers an empirical insight thorough a case study on one of Bucharest’s socialist neighborhoods.
By analyzing their spatial configurations, architectural language, and social performances, the paper argues that these sites operated as corners of collectivity: infrastructural and symbolic thresholds where the ideals of accessibility, community, and everyday encounter had materialized under the conditions of state socialism, and later redefined in the post-socialist city. Thus, the article is built upon the premise: What if the remedy for the emptiness of newly built—and even older—neighborhoods might not lie in large malls or supermarkets, but rather in these small-scale, hybrid spaces that integrate commerce and public life, operating at a human scale and allowing forms of encounter not mediated by consumption?
The circle is (perhaps) already closed - the genesis of the significance of small local shops in the residential superblocks of modernist urbanism – the case of New Belgrade, Serbia
Ranka Gajic, Darinka Golubovic Matic
abstractRanka Gajic, Darinka Golubovic Matic
The paper traces the development of New Belgrade, a modernist urban settlement built in the period following World War II on approximately 4,050 hectares of flood-prone and marshland terrain at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, practically within the wider central zone of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. Through key stages of its urban evolution, it highlights the role of small local shops as social nodes and generators of “place” within the open superblocks. Over time, these shops have largely disappeared.
The periods to be examined include: From the establishment of New Belgrade to the 1960s – a phase during which the settlement carried the pejorative label of a “dormitory town,” when small local shops made a significant contribution to the quality of life of its residents. From the 1960s to the 1980s – the period marked by the construction of “local community centers” within the superblocks. The role of small shops from the previous stage gradually declined as new gathering places emerged within these centers. From the 1990s to the present – the period of socio-economic transition from a socialist, non-market system to a capitalist, market-oriented economy, which profoundly transformed the structure of New Belgrade. Drugstores, retail chains, hypermarkets, and shopping malls appeared, while local shops disappeared almost entirely, surviving only as rare relics of the past.
Several themes will be explored in the paper. The first concerns the morphological aspect of the “corner shop” within the open urban block and its relation to the core principles of modernist urbanism. The discussion will question whether the open-block concept is inherently more compatible with large-scale retail formats such as hypermarkets and shopping malls. The economic dimension will address both the loss of small shop owners and employees and the benefits of lower prices offered by retail chains, as well as the quality of goods. The social and psychological aspects include the everyday need for proximity—having a shop just steps from home—and the sense of familiarity, safety, and satisfaction it brings. Finally, the ecological aspect will consider contemporary urban concepts promoting walking and cycling, suggesting that the modern sustainable city may, in fact, require the reintroduction of the corner shop, even within the open superblocks of settlements like New Belgrade.
Session 54 - The Networked City: Between Collectivity and Individuality (19th-20th Centuries)
Urban historians emphasize cities as collective spaces, yet cities also enabled individual identities. This session examines individualization's social, political, and spatial impacts on urban life (19th-20th centuries), exploring tensions between individuality and collectivity in governance, social networks, and spatial planning.
Coordinators: Stefan Couperus, Tim Verlaan
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Coordinators: Stefan Couperus, Tim Verlaan
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Session 54 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Balancing Individual and Collective Life: Housing Morphology and Governance in Lisbon and Beyond
Simão Botelho
abstractSimão Botelho
This paper examines how housing models negotiate the tension between individuality and collectivity within the networked city of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taking Lisbon as the primary case and contrasting it with innovative international models such as co-living, cluster apartments and cohousing. Building on the concept of graded privacy (the transition from public street, to semi-public communal zones, to intimate domestic space) the study explores how architectural design and spatial organisation influence everyday interaction and the conditions under which neighbourly ties emerge.
The methodology centres on a comprehensive mapping of housing models, combining morphological analysis with governance structures. It identifies and characterises the housing typologies embedded in Lisbon’s urban plans (for example, Campo de Ourique, Avenidas Novas, Alvalade and Olivais), clarifying how circulation systems, transitional spaces and the presence or absence of shared areas support or inhibit interaction among residents. This mapping is then placed in dialogue with international models whose spatial configurations and collective management practices intentionally strengthen everyday encounters and community-building. Through this comparative approach, the study highlights how variations in built form, privacy gradients and governance arrangements shape the possibilities for neighbourly cohesion.
By situating Lisbon’s housing landscape within broader European developments, the paper examines how architectural form, spatial organisation and modes of resident governance mediate the relationship between private autonomy and collective life in the modern city. While urban planning provides the context in which these models emerge, the analysis remains centred on the scale of buildings, their internal organisation, and their relationship with the surrounding urban environment. The findings offer insights into the spatial and organisational conditions that influence neighbourhood cohesion and social resilience, while informing contemporary discussions on housing and community life.
East Berlin: The Typological Significance of Hermann Henselmann’s “der Turm der Signale”
Nick Haynes
abstractNick Haynes
During the late 1950s, both sides of divided Berlin ran separate design competitions to imagine what a unified German capital city should look like. Though the Western event is well documented, the East German (GDR) counterpart, held just months later, has received comparatively little coverage in contemporary discourse, despite its influence in determining the form and operation of East Berlin as a capital city.
This paper foregrounds the 1958/59 Hauptstadt Competition, and more significantly its ramifications. Particular attention is given to Henselmann's scheme, which rejected many of the competition's underlying assumptions yet proved influential in the subsequent development of East Berlin. Using original archival material from the competition and Henselmann’s estate, the paper reveals a reframing of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Underlying the proposals was a morphological arrangement that flattened the city hierarchy into two areas, the ‘Hauptstadt’ and ‘hinterlands’, corresponding to domains of ‘public’ life (governed by the collective mass) and ‘private’ life (concerning the individual, but not inherently private).Rather than the trend towards individualisation in other Western contexts, the paper highlights the built environment’s role in orchestrating a collective identity devoid of hierarchy. The manifestation of these precepts marks Henselmann’s scheme as the fundamental pivot between ideological ambition and the material development of the GDR city.
Spatially, this transformation is examined through a typological analysis informed by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s concept of “Transparency”. The paper reads across successive developments in East Berlin’s urban structure to identify typological characteristics and trace the development of a performative urban logic. Through the redistribution of functions, the mobilisation of void space, and the coordination of movement across a dispersed urban field, Henselmann formulated an organisational model that endured beyond the proposal’s rejection and informed later development of the city.
The paper argues that architecture’s agency resides less in ideological representation than in the organisation of spatial relations. Type is consequently understood as operating beyond the physical limits of individual artefacts, shaping wider urban development through the performative effects of spatial organisation.
Decentralising socialist Yugoslavia: housing and the structures of self-management in the 1960s and 1970s
Igor Duda, Antun Dulibić
abstractIgor Duda, Antun Dulibić
In 1950, in its pursuit of a socialist path independent from the Soviet bloc, socialist Yugoslavia introduced the system of workers’ self-management. This feature soon evolved from working councils into a general concept of social self-management, implemented across all spheres of governance and social relations. The system reached its peak in the mid-1970s with the adoption of new Constitution and the Act of Associated Labour. In this long process, the post-war rigid administrative structures were decentralised, the communal system introduced, and local governance fragmented into more than 500 municipalities, over 13,500 local communities, and a vast number of housing councils. Housing construction also peaked in the mid-1970s, producing new neighbourhoods that accelerated urbanisation and migration from rural or less developed areas. These spaces fostered new social networks and prompted efforts to articulate citizens’ rights and responsibilities. The citizens were encouraged to act as self-managing subjects, so both micro-collectives and individuals learned how to navigate the system, resolve tensions, and contribute to its functionality – thus contributing to the general aim of participation strengthening. Organisations which served as exchange platforms between citizens, local administration, policy-making bodies and experts in architecture and spatial planning were the Socialist Alliance of the Working People and the Standing Conference of Cities and Municipalities of Yugoslavia.
This paper examines the position of housing within Yugoslavia’s self-management system and legislation, focusing on the 1960s and 1970s as key decades for housing construction and final restructuring of the socio-political system. In addition to offering a top-down perspective, it follows the path of individualisation – tracing decentralisation from higher to lower levels of governance, as well as decision-making process at the workplace and place of residence where, the voices of workers and tenants were heard thus reflecting their individual aspirations intertwined with collective needs and interests, reciprocity and solidarity. The paper draws on various historical sources, including the specialised federal periodicals Komuna (Commune) and Mjesna zajednica (Local Community), legislation, statistics, and archival records. It forms a part of the historical research stream within the recently started multidisciplinary ERC project Housing.Yu.
Spaces of Negotiation: Social Housing and the Spatial Politics of Self-Management in Late Socialist Yugoslavia
Lidija Butković Mićin
abstractLidija Butković Mićin
Postwar architecture in Yugoslavia developed within the socialist self-management system, introduced in 1950 after the country’s abrupt break with the Soviet bloc. Conceived as a “third way” between East and West, self-management aimed at the gradual “withering away of the state” through forms of direct democracy in both economic and political spheres. Although it stimulated rapid regional development, the system generated persistent contradictions—between democratization and single-party rule, planned and market logics, and individualist and collectivist values.
This paper examines how these tensions materialized in the field of housing through the mid-1970s experiment of socially directed housing construction (DUSI). Emerging amid broader constitutional reforms, DUSI sought to embed self-management principles into housing policy by shifting authority from state bureaucracies to self-managing interest communities. These bodies brought together workers’ organizations, urban planning institutes, architectural offices, construction enterprises, and municipalities in the collective deliberation of financing, planning, and allocating housing. While envisioned as an instrument of solidarity—promoting equity, participation, and distributive justice—DUSI simultaneously opened new forms of individual agency. For the first time, citizens could articulate housing needs and preferences, potentially shaping their own environments.
Architectural and urban form reflected this participatory ethos: from flexible apartment layouts to neighborhood units conceived as self-managing communities, positioning design as a medium of civic negotiation and ideological expression. Drawing on planning documents, legislation, and case studies from major Yugoslav cities, the paper analyzes DUSI as a laboratory for rethinking relations between collective governance and individual agency within the socialist city. It situates the experiment in wider twentieth-century debates on participatory design, welfare-state housing, and the politics of urban form, showing how complex mechanisms of negotiation blurred professional hierarchies and recast architects as mediators among diverse social interests.
Ultimately, the paper argues that DUSI reveals the paradoxes of participatory models: systems meant to decentralize power often produced new institutional rigidities and failed to resolve enduring inequalities in access, influence, and the distribution of urban resources.
Collectivity and Individuality in “Projective City” of Socialism: Computation and Urban Form in Post-World War II Yugoslavia
Aleksandar Vujkov
abstractAleksandar Vujkov
Readings of socialist societies often portray them as exclusively collectivist, unable to cultivate and accommodate a sense of individuality. This paper challenges this claim by analyzing treatment of a normative subject in planning practices of post-war Yugoslavia. It will adumbrate alternative genealogies of a “projective city” in circumstances of socialist production relations, by analyzing, among other pertinent instances, studies of territorial planning by Doxiadis in the case of Skopje, implementation of data banks in the context of Novi Sad, and transportation studies in circumstances of Belgrade. These developments appear at the intersection of international exchanges and local political, economic and planning investments. The mentioned episodes, while mostly rationalized as a way to inform a better planning practice and to overcome limitations of modernism, were actually indicative of a deployment of a „technostructure“ in Galbraith’s meaning of a term; their emergence coincided with changing content of worker’s self-management and increased experimentation in the field of planning with marketing strategies for collecting information and analyzing the urban condition. Rethinking of planning protocols often justifiably invited flexibility of both planning process and urban structure, while at the same time social milieu was dominantly informed by consumerist practices; by arguably postulating a subject as a mere consumer, planning practices were increasingly defining themselves as service-oriented and were supposedly abdicating in face of expanding market forces. In discussing this body of historical experience, this paper will investigate tensions between public and private within the context of socialist society, that disclose a limited understanding of the subject. These developments also invite further rethinking of a notion of equality within socialist society and in general, that by gradually foregrounding individuality was overlooking emancipatory potential of class, and oddly enough substantiating alienation and atomization of society.
Session 54 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 212 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Cultural life courses. Tracking individual preferences and trajectories in clubs and cultural associations in early nineteenth-century Amsterdam
Jan Hein Furnée
abstractJan Hein Furnée
Over the last decades, the stunning growth and popularity of nineteenth-century clubland in European cities - ranging from social clubs to a literary, musical, artistic, scientific, sportive and other cultural associations - has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Many historians have demonstrated how clubs and cultural associations played a crucial role in e.g. reinforcing and changing class, gender and ethnic boundaries, relations and identities; in promoting and exercising with new political practices and procedures; in stimulating all sorts of cultural transfer and exchange. In this paper, I would like to shift the focus from these key social, political and cultural processes towards the level of the individua. How did individual men and women actually navigate in the expanding urban clubland? How did they made use of membership of associations to shape their personal lives, their social networks, their cultural preferences? Based on a rich collection of membership lists of early nineteenth-century clubs and associations in Amsterdam, this papers primarily aims to explore the possibilities of a ‘cultural life course’ approach, focusing on key patterns in the age of access, the continuity/discontinuity and the combinations of memberships as proxies of social convention, individual agency and potentially shifting cultural preferences during people’s individual lives.
The Metered City: Individuality and Infrastructure in Los Angeles, 1910–1930
Jan Hansen
abstractJan Hansen
Los Angeles offers a revealing example of how the tension between collectivity and individuality played out beyond Europe. This paper examines how the introduction of water and electricity meters reshaped the relationship between citizens, utilities, and municipal government in a rapidly expanding city at the margins of the Western world between 1910 and 1930. Its guiding question is: how did everyday consumers adapt to having water and electricity in their daily lives, and what role did the regulation of consumption through meters play in that process? Focusing on the first decades of the twentieth century, the paper draws on utility reports, citizen complaint letters, promotional materials, and newspaper articles to analyze the meter as both a material artifact and a technology of power. Meters rendered private consumption—and by extension, domestic life—legible and administrable, translating habits into data that city authorities could monitor, compare, and regulate. In the spirit of James C. Scott’s notion of legibility, meters extended the reach of municipal oversight into kitchens, bathrooms, and gardens—spaces long associated with intimacy and privacy—while simultaneously granting residents a new sense of control and autonomy over their own consumption. At the same time, the home and its utility connections became key sites where urban modernity was negotiated. Conservation programs, electricity-use campaigns, and homeowner education initiatives—teaching residents how to read meters and maintain plumbing and wiring—sought to align domestic routines with civic ideals of order, efficiency, and rational consumption. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the social production of space, the paper shows how collective infrastructures inscribed norms of behavior into the intimate materialities of the home. By analyzing the co-construction of technology, space, and social order, the paper argues that Los Angeles exemplifies a central paradox of modern urbanism: the pursuit of individuality through collective systems. In this sense, the networked city functioned as a laboratory in which norms of autonomy, responsibility, and self-control were both imagined and contested.
Selves in the Street: Individualization and Urban Life in 1980s Shanghai
Yang Yang
abstractYang Yang
How did urban environments shape individual subjectivities, challenge governance, and reconfigure collective life? This paper explores this question through 1980s Shanghai, when China began transitioning from a socialist planned economy to a state-managed, market-oriented model. Individualization, rising alongside an emerging consumer culture, unfolded within—rather than outside—the state’s enduring ideology of collectivism. Shanghai’s streets became the key arena for reworking collectivism and negotiating individuality, where selfhood, sense of citizenship, and urban modernity were continuously rehearsed and reimagined.
Culturally, popular media treated the body as a vehicle of individuality, unsettling Maoist moral judgments on consumption and pleasure. Films of the decade staged gendered self-expression in streets and parks, turning the tension between collective duty and personal enjoyment into public debate. Politically, artists of the ‘85 Art Movement occupied streets with provocative performances and candid photography, using public space as a site of civic and aesthetic contestation that asserted autonomy beyond state-sanctioned institutions. Spatially, informal housing exchanges in parks and plazas let residents bypass bureaucratic allocation and negotiate dwelling trade-offs directly, anticipating market logics of the coming decades. Meanwhile, new infrastructures—pedestrian overpasses, late-night parks, and emerging commercial subcenters—reshaped how people encountered the modernizing metropolis. Together, these practices made the street the operative medium of individualization in reform-era Shanghai.
By examining the streets as a site where socialist legacies and market logics intersected in contingent, improvised ways, this paper highlights the distinct trajectories of urban modernity in China. As historian Jeffery Wasserstrom notes, Shanghai’s local specificity within the global market exposes tensions between homogenization and individualization that challenge Western-centric models of the metropolis. Unlike the struggle of individual internal integrity described by Simmel, Shanghai’s street life reveals subjectivities forged through negotiation and encounter. The street—resonant with the modernist readings of urban life by Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Berman—revived a public sphere long suppressed under socialist collectivism and functioned as both medium and infrastructure for individualization, accommodating continuity as well as rupture.
Beautify Our City from within: Self-help Domestic Improvement and Civic Engagement Networked by Urban Governance in Early Reform-era Guangzhou, China, 1985-1988
Yuchu Marcus Cui
abstractYuchu Marcus Cui
Following China’s economic reform and Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy since the first decade of the post-Mao era, the Guangzhou government in January 1985 launched a full-scale citywide operation of urban governance titled “Beautify Guangzhou in Three Years.” It connected progress in urban aesthetic qualities to cultivation of civic virtues through authority-sanctioned popular entertainment against the backdrop of the 1980s political campaign of "Building Spiritual Civilization - formulated by the Chinese Communist Party to safeguard ideological control under societal changes. This research examines two self-help home improvement contests under this political movement in 1986 and 1987, both named "Beautify Home Contest," by lay residents of Guangzhou who were not professional architects but intrigued by the popular trend of DIY home design across 1980s China. Through lifestyle magazines, governmental archives, and unpublished internal institutional records from 1980s Guangzhou, the research reveals market-driven popular cultures and private leisure as a vehicle for both the authorities and ordinary citizens, with their consensus on aesthetics as essential to material and spiritual wellness in contemporary urban life. Both home design contests in cultural politics of the early reform era reveal an interplay of compatibility and tension between state authority and personal taste that still reverberates today. The Guangzhou government repositioned self-help home design as a state-directed instrument of securing social stability while benefiting from real estate markets and consolidated family structures. As the home design contests demonstrate, the research argues that state authority appropriated domestic aesthetics, labor productivity, and individual authorship to secure social and ideological disciplines in the official rhetorics of civic virtues under the market reform, whereas private domestic practices reacted to the official metanarrative of citizen identity and moral order by asserting individual subjectivity through partipatory design to manifest their personal rights and increasing domestic privacy within a growing market economy.
Individual Roads to Collective Recognition. Pioneers of the first Turkish Student Association (TSV) in the Netherlands
Laura Van Hasselt
abstractLaura Van Hasselt
Individual roads to collective recognition
Pioneers of the first Turkish Student Association (TSV) in the Netherlands
From the late 1950s, thousands of so-called ‘guest workers’ moved to Northern European countries to work in factories, heavy industry, and other sectors where the local population was reluctant to work. This type of low-paid work is what Turks and Moroccans kept being associated with, also in the following years. However, some of their children chose a different path. From the 1980s, second generation migrants started founding their own student associations in cities in their new home countries, including the Netherlands. In this paper I will focus on the first Turkish Student Association, which was founded in 1988 in Amsterdam and had branches in Rotterdam, Delft, Utrecht, Tilburg, Nijmegen and Groningen.
At a time when Turkish migrants in Western cities were increasingly discriminated against and accused of a lack of integration, these young men and women followed different paths than their parents. As a rule, they were the first in their families to reach higher education. This required exceptional individual qualities, but also a lively urban environment. Growing up in the city allowed these young men and women to discover educational possibilities, meeting places and networks, which were all but non-existent in rural areas. Living in cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Utrecht was a prerequisite for self-development and emancipation.
This paper is based on twenty in-depth interviews with the founders and leading members of TSV (Turkse Studenten Vereniging), complemented with the association’s archival sources (party from private collections, partly from the Amsterdam City Archives). These former students have been remarkably successful socially: they are now doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, university professors, and more. However, their individual trajectories have not been easy. Student association TSV has played a pivotal role in each of their lives.
Central questions in this paper are: what individual paths brought these Turkish-Dutch students together? How did their respective cities facilitate or shape their local TSV-networks? Why did they choose to unite based on a shared ethnic background, while simultaneously breaking with family traditions? And finally: what did their collective identity in TSV mean to them?
From Social Citizens to Dividuals: Welfare Institutions, Neoliberal Governance and Networked Urbanity in the Late-20th-Century.
Eleni Axioti
abstractEleni Axioti
This paper looks into the welfare social institutions as spaces of collectivity that defined the post-war European cities, but were also spaces of social enclosure and normalization of the individuals as citizens. The paper focuses on the moment that these institutions start opening up and they are succeeded by open circuits and spaces of modulations in networked globalized cities. The paper outlines the political, economic and technological changes that started in the 1970s and developed further during the 80s and 90s until today and presents the transformations that took place in social policies and welfare provisions, but most importantly in the production of the built environment and how this addressed and included people as subjects. More specifically, the paper focuses on the changes that were realized during that time on the way that the state understood the concept of the citizen and addressed the social subject. This way, the paper attempts to describe the implications of neoliberal government and ideology on the formation of urban environments and considers the effects that these changes had on the production and nature of city as well as on the formation of specific subjectivities. Following this history, the paper traces the transition from the individual as a social citizen to what Gilles Deleuze names as the dividual and the self-actualizing monad.
Session 55 - The Liberal City: Construction, Representation, Politics and Sociability in the Spanish Public and Private Space (1820-1930)
During the long nineteenth century, public space was radically reconfigured. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this session seeks to examine the processes of transformation, representation, and reappropriation of public space as key dimensions in the development of social, political, and cultural life.
Coordinators: Rebeca Viguera, Maria Llombart Huesca, Manuel Santirso Rodríguez, Jordi Roca Vernet
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Coordinators: Rebeca Viguera, Maria Llombart Huesca, Manuel Santirso Rodríguez, Jordi Roca Vernet
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Session 55 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The House of All Republicans: The Inauguration of Republican Clubs in the Early Years of Lerrouxism in Barcelona (1901–1905)
Àlex Pocino Pérez
abstractÀlex Pocino Pérez
During the Bourbon Restoration, republican political culture, marginalized and excluded by the system, was forced to relegate its activity to the private sphere. From the 1880s onward, the main private space for republicanism was the republican clubs—places where conferences, gatherings, dances were held, and the committees of the various parties were elected. However, the clear division of these spaces of sociability among the different republican parties led them to become echo chambers for a specific party and its republican leader, where republican elites were often overrepresented. This situation would eventually lead, in the final decade of the 19th century, to the emergence of a number of republican clubs that dissented from the party elites.
The emergence of Lerrouxism at the beginning of the 20th century led to a reformulation of these spaces. Alejandro Lerroux sought to overcome the divisions of historical republicanism and create common spaces of sociability that transcended these splits. An essential part of this change was the result of Barcelona's urban transformation following the annexation of surrounding municipalities in 1897. The extensive network of Lerrouxist clubs—around forty spread throughout the city—helped unify the republicans of the new Barcelona. Most of the newly established organizations were concentrated in these newly incorporated neighborhoods (districts I, VII, VIII, IX, and X), which had a strong prior republican tradition and were predominantly made up of working-class and popular social sectors.
These new centers, rather than serving a specific party or individual leader, aimed to unite republicans of all tendencies through continuous propaganda activities and leisure offerings, as well as a variety of services such as schools, theater societies, medical clinics, and legal aid. The clearest example of these new organizations were the republican fraternities. This capacity for grassroots organization contributed to the renewal of republican mobilization in public spaces at the beginning of the 20th century, despite ongoing restrictions imposed by Restoration-era authorities.
On this basis, the present paper aims to explore how the conjunction of Barcelona’s urban transformation at the turn of the century and the revitalization of republican political culture through Lerrouxism led to a transformation of republican spaces of sociability through new forms of leisure and political mobilization. This shift would have conseq
Urban Geometry: a study of Spatial Intentions in the Eixample District of Barcelona
Gregory Iboshi
abstractGregory Iboshi
The spatial geometry of the urban environment is not neutral; it is inherently political and asserts a profound influence on a city’s social order and community structure. The configuration, scale, and proportional relationships of public and private spaces within the urban fabric significantly shape patterns of social interaction, economic exchange, and collective urban perception. While not the sole determinant of urban life, spatial form serves as a critical medium through which societal values are either reinforced or constrained.
The Barcelona’s Eixample District will be a model for exploring the persistence and transformation of ideologically motivated spatial design through subsequent waves of development. Examining the mechanisms that allow the liberal ideals embedded in Ildefons Cerdà’s mid-nineteenth-century planning proposal to persist, despite economic and social influence of capitalist forces that prioritize fiscal return and spatial commodification.
Several key geometric strategies of the Cerdà Plan will be analyzed. Identifying intended effect and discussing long-term outcomes as the plan is transformed through implementation. For instance, because of its specific size and shape, the seemingly innocuous uniform 113-meter square block pattern limits overt property commodification and creates an internal shared semi-public domain within each block. This element is essential to Cerda’s intentions to create an egalitarian environment balanced between public, semi-public and private space. Other geometric mechanism to be studied – chamfered corners, proportional street relationships, solar alignment and the inverted dwelling strata.
A discussion of the broader historical and political context will include the paradox of the Cerdà Plan’s adoption. The plan, conceived as an instrument of social reform intended to create a highly egalitarian society promoting hygienic conditions and the mixing of social classes, was instead perceived as a hegemonic imposition from the central Spanish state. Whereas, the counter-hegemonic forces of the emergent bourgeois order set out to maintain social stratification, albeit defined by wealth rather than patrimony.
This analysis aligns with the first thematic axis of the session and contributes to the debate on the role of urban form/geometry in shaping the lived experience of the city; offering a historically grounded illustration of spatial form as an instrument of social transformation and ideological influence.
The liberal city reflected through its margins: urban peripheries, exclusion, and criminalized representation around “El tejar del Tío Sixto” (1892–1920)
Ramón Ojanguren Añover
abstractRamón Ojanguren Añover
The lecture examines how, behind the official image of liberal Madrid as a model of order, hygiene, and technical rationality, there existed urban peripheries excluded from the project of modernity. The case of "El tejar del Tío Sixto" (1892–1920) shows how these margins—essential to the city’s physical expansion because they supplied the bricks and tiles that enabled liberal urbanization—were nevertheless ignored by institutions and portrayed as criminal spaces in the press.
Working-class outskirts were not recognized as zones of labor and production; instead, newspapers linked them almost exclusively to violent events: knife fights in taverns, drunken brawls, robberies, and bloodshed. Journalism built a mythical image of the periphery as a dangerous territory, only occasionally softened by paternalistic stories, such as that of a charitable couple adopting an abandoned child.
Meanwhile, the real life of the neighborhood—industrial accidents, extreme exploitation, child labor—was reduced to brief, undeveloped notes. After decades of media silence, it was the unions that finally exposed the situation: brick, tile, and adobe factories where adults and children worked in misery, and where complaints were useless because employers routinely evaded sanctions from the Local Board of Social Reforms.
The UGT’s Local Federation of Construction denounced the sector as “ignominious,” unlike any other industry, with workers condemned to “moral and material misery.” The lecture ultimately exposes the deep contradiction between the self-celebratory discourse of the liberal city and the hidden regime of exploitation that sustained its modernization. Territorial segregation, administrative neglect, and symbolic degradation were not accidental defects but structural pillars of urban growth. The celebrated progress of Madrid was built—quite literally—upon the systematic abandonment of the very zones that made that progress materially possible.
Session 56 - Infrastruggles and citizenship: Urban public services, 1840-1940
In the second half of the nineteenth-century, many urban public services were instituted. This meant a change in the nature of urban politics. Those who benefited from the new public services demanded a say in their organisation. Others were denied access to the city, and 'infrastruggles' became the battle ground to claim citizenship.
Coordinators: André Klaassen, Magnus Linnarsson, Greet De Block
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Coordinators: André Klaassen, Magnus Linnarsson, Greet De Block
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Session 56 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Electric Idea: Consumption, Crime and Citizenship in a Divided City
Patrick Gigacz
abstractPatrick Gigacz
In the shadow of the Depression in late 1932, with unemployment above 30%, a painter was caught by municipal authorities in suburban Melbourne tampering with his meter to steal electricity. After pleading his “grave error” to the paternal town clerk, the tradesman quietly repaid his debt to the community with municipal works. Half a mile away, a barely literate husband and father would almost certainly have faced criminal conviction for the same misdemeanour. Melbourne was divided between two starkly different visions of the electrified city. For one half of the metropolis, a “charmed circle” of mostly working-class municipalities controlled electrical distribution in the traditions of British municipal socialism. For the other part, electricity was supplied by a technocratic state commission, which had usurped a ruthlessly efficient and highly profitable London firm. This paper explores how the material and social infrastructure of these distinct imperial inheritances mediated the “infrastruggles” of Melburnians. It argues, following Bill Luckin, that electrical administrators used these modes of governance to promote municipal and metropolitan visions of urban citizenship respectively. Further, it suggests that Melburnians were closely attuned to these cleavages in the constituency of the electrical city, and worked within and across these boundaries to demand that electrical authorities perform mutual obligations and address public anxieties. It considers three electrical spaces for this encounter. First, it examines how electrical authorities imagined a “good consumer” – and good urban citizen – with the construction of a new electrical tariff, and how Melburnians formed new coalitions of urban participation across class and gender boundaries in reply. Second, it considers how urban communities adopted and reoriented engineering rhetoric of safety and reliability, influencing the material dimensions of the electricity system to service the needs and ideals of suburban expansion. Third, it considers how the geography of the electricity system generated a social and moral topography of electrical crime. In doing so, this paper uses the methods of urban history to respond to a historiography of electrification which has called for a deeper understanding of the agency of the consumer. It proposes that the role of the urban electrical consumer is inseparable from the performance of the rights and obligations of the urban citizen.
Yes, in my back yard! Petitioning, protest and public transport in Nordic capital cities, c. 1900
Mats Hallenberg
abstractMats Hallenberg
Mats Hallenberg, Stockholm university mats.hallenberg@historia.su.se
Yes, in my back yard! Petitioning, protest and public transport in Nordic capital cities, c. 1900
Abstract: From the mid-nineteenth century, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation
changed the face of city landscapes. As urban centres became progressively dense and
overcrowded, new settlements spread outwards into the surrounding rural areas.
Meanwhile, modern infrastructure in the forms of water pipes, gasworks, electricity and
railed transport gave local politicians incitement to intervene in the structuring of the
networked city.
In this paper I argue that the expansion of public networks encouraged urban residents to
form new local alliances, claiming the infrastructural citizenship that the new technology
seemed to offer. I will discuss examples addressing the expansion of tramways in four
Nordic capitals, were various local groups acted to influence the political process through
petitions, public meetings and newspaper submits.
The paper addresses the negotiations of infrastructural citizenship, inspired by Charlotte
Lemanski and others who has studied the relation between urban public services and
political contestation. Ultimately, the conflicts over the extension of tramway lines
demonstrate a new articulation of publicness, that would promote social inclusion and
spatial connectivity. The empirical examples will be taken from municipal debates on the
extension of tramway lines in Copenhagen, Kristiania (present-day Oslo), Stockholm and
Helsinki c. 1890-1914.
Keywords: tramways, municipalization, publicness, citizenship, welfare cities
"No Czech will set foot on a German tram." Public transport infrastructure as a tool of national and social struggle. The example of the Czech lands (1870-1918)
Michaela Závodná
abstractMichaela Závodná
The historical lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (after 1918 Czechoslovakia) were part of the Habsburg Monarchy's Cisleithania. The evolution of urban infrastructure transpired on two interconnected levels. The construction of modern infrastructure (gasworks, power plants, public transport) was linked to the transformation of the urban ruling classes. The traditional principle of urban governance, which was based on social status and the "historical" rights of long-established families, was replaced in the second half of the 19th century by the principle of so-called Leistungsverwaltung, which was led by experts and entrepreneurs. Concurrently, contemporary construction and operational methodologies for infrastructure were disseminated from the West to the East, concomitant with the market entry of substantial foreign corporations into the Czech market. The process of constructing modern infrastructure in the Czech lands was influenced not only by financial aspects, but also, towards the close of the 19th century, by significant national tensions, in which the Czech-speaking and socially marginalised majority began to demand a greater share of power and control over municipal property, which was managed by a small circle of German-speaking residents.
These contradictions are observable also in the construction and management of urban infrastructure. The presentation focuses on urban public transport (trams) in the Moravian and Silesian cities of Brno, Olomouc, Ostrava, and Opava.
The presentation will focuses on: 1. The development of transport infrastructure and its modernisation in multilingual society. 2. Negotiations between municipal authorities and the administrative bodies of incoming international companies resulted in changes to the concept of public service. 3. The impact of national and linguistic struggles on the transformation of transport networks, including the so-called "empowerment" of public transport as a national element in public space. 4. The cultural concept of urban public transport underwent a transformation, becoming a space where social classes – the bourgeoisie and the working class – intermingle. 5. The concept of urban public transport underwent a transformation before and after World War I, with a shift from national struggle to political and social struggle. The contribution may represent a valuable addition to research in other parts of Europe, focusing on the research area of national and social changes in society.
Public transport in urban regions 1840-1940. The Copenhagen region as a case study
Henning Bro
abstractHenning Bro
With the breakthrough and accelerating spread of industrial capitalism, first in England and then on the continent, public transport became crucial throughout the 19th century for the increasingly longer and more extensive labor commutes that accompanied the ever-increasing urban sprawl. Initially, an ever-increasing network of public transport lines was established within the municipal boundaries of the cities, but as soon as the urban sprawl overflowed first one and then several surrounding municipalities, public transport coverage became a challenge. It was particularly pronounced in those European cities that developed into urban regions up until the middle of the 20th century. This applied to most European capital metropolises, but also to other urban conglomerates; e.g. the Ruhr district.
In 1940, the Danish capital metropolis (the Copenhagen region) had reached 1 million in-habitants. As an urban region, it was by far the largest in the Nordic countries and ranked among the larger European ones, if we disregard the very large metropolitan areas and oth-er large cities, especially in England, France, Germany, Northern Italy and the Soviet Union. The Danish metropolitan area can thus be included as an example of the features of public transport development in a major European urban region in the 100 years between 1840 and 1940, but also of the challenges and conflicts that followed the expansion of public transport in step with the metropolis's ever-increasing spread. The purpose of this paper is to uncover this problem and put it into perspective in a larger European urban context.
Urban Infrastructure and the Suburbs – Finnish City of Tampere and Its Suburb Kyttälä in the Late Nineteenth Century
Juulia Erämo
abstractJuulia Erämo
In the late 19th century, Finnish cities began to improve living conditions and economic opportunities by developing infrastructure and public services. However, the strongest urban growth occurred on the outskirts, which formed a distinct zone outside the formal city boundaries. These areas were closely connected to the city, but city services did not cover them. As only a few could afford to live in the city center at the end of the 19th century, most people working or doing business in the city lived beyond its limits and services.
In my paper, I examine the development of urban infrastructure and the differences in living conditions between Tampere and its suburb Kyttälä in the late 19th century. I also consider who was ultimately considered a city dweller. I examine the lived experiences of Kyttälä residents in relation to their living environment and analyze how these perceptions diverged from those associated with the formal urban landscape. Kyttälä was a rapidly growing suburb situated right next to the city limits. Its residents worked and conducted their daily affairs within Tampere, yet the city’s infrastructure did not extend to their neighborhood. Demands were made for the suburb to be connected to the city and its services, and Kyttälä was finally incorporated into Tampere in 1877. However, this did not bring about the desired change in the living conditions for a long time. Kyttälä serves an example of how blurred the boundaries of urban belonging and citizenship could be, and how suburban residents actively sought access to city services.
I analyze environmental experiences of Kyttälä residents using readers’ letters published in newspapers as source material. These letters, a distinctive feature of the Finnish press in the late 19th century, were written by private individuals. The contents of the letters varied from describing everyday events to writings that took a stand on social issues. In principle, anyone who could write could get their writings published, so the letters to the editor can be seen as material representing different social classes. Research of urban history has often relied on official records, whereas readers’ letters offer resident-oriented perspective on cities as lived and experienced environments.
This paper is based on my doctoral research at Tampere University, in which I analyze the evolving environmental relationships of urban Finns in the late 19th century.
The Poverty Construction Fund - Social Housing in 1850s Stockholm
Hannes Rolf, Christopher Vainesworth
abstractHannes Rolf, Christopher Vainesworth
Based on municipal non-profit rental housing, the Swedish social housing model is often seen as a product of the mid-20th century. There are, however, earlier municipal precursors. One of these, the subject of this article, was Stockholms Stads Brandförsäkringskontors Fattigbyggnadsfond, a fund from 1849 to 1873 that gave favourable
loans to private entrepreneurs who agreed to build rental apartments for
poor working-class families. These entrepreneurs would then be placed under strict building standards and rent control. Combining source material from municipal authorities together with building permits and drawings, this paper explores the conflicts and compromises that occurred when the social ambitions of the city collided with the financial interests of the builders and landlords. The combined source material allows us to view social interaction and the built environment. The paper concludes that the city officials were unable to enforce the regulations for a longer period, resulting in a variety of usage of the buildings. However, the fund was important both as an early attempt at social housing and as an enabler of the early working-class apartment buildings in Stockholm.
Session 57 - Knowledge in Interurban Transit: Networks, Actors and Agencies
After 1850 an interurban knowledge exchange network emerged in Europe. Urban actors reached out for best practices. The section supposes that this exchange of urban ideas, strategies and models was extended globally. It uses the concepts of “transnational municipalism” of “knowledge in transit” for linking the presentations on case studies.
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Session 57 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Displaying Civilisation - Museums and the Epistemic Architecture of Urban Modernity in Europe 1850-1930
Alexander Stoeger
abstractAlexander Stoeger
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, museums became vital tools for expanding a city’s influence and modernising its urban structures. They were closely linked to ideologies of national identity, epistemic imperialism, and new ideals of democratising access to knowledge, and connected urban reform to notions of self-education and civilising advancement. Their influence was believed to extend beyond their walls and exhibitions, elevating their host cities into modern European capitals able to compete with their neighbouring countries.
Simultaneously, the creation of such institutions was part of broader interurban dynamics involving observation, emulation, and competition. Politicians and cultural reformers invoked other European capitals as reference points to legitimise their own projects of urban modernity and to demand comparable epistemic infrastructures. Especially in the context of imperial expansion and industrial rivalry, architects, politicians, and intellectuals looked to established museum ideas elsewhere to support their arguments, find inspiration, and delineate unique approaches to museums within their urban environments.
Furthermore, the museums themselves were the result of a dense exchange of ideas and inspiration crossing urban boundaries. Architects and artisans frequently crossed national borders, transferring aesthetic models, materials, and technical expertise that contributed to a shared but contested vocabulary of applied urban knowledge.
This paper examines the cases of the Rijksmuseum, the Museum Island, and the Musée de la Porte Dorée in Paris and their impact on the urban structures of their respective capitals in European urban modernisation. It focuses on the museums as architectural monuments, instruments of spatial expansion, and arenas of conflicting interests among urban planners, politicians, curators, and the public. Drawing on architectural discussions related to design competitions, public debates in newspapers, and city maps and floor plans, the paper demonstrates how these museums acted as instruments to reform and modernise European capitals in the context of national identity, imperial competition, and ideologies of civilisation embedded in urban structures. By situating these examples within a trans-European network of urban knowledge exchange, the paper contributes to understanding how ideas of modernity, culture, and civilisation circulated across Europe’s capitals, reflected in their museums.
Between Calcutta and Buenos Aires. Animals and the interurban zoo network around 1900
Oliver Hochadel
abstractOliver Hochadel
The zoological garden is a child of the nineteenth century. Initially a Western European phenomenon this fundamentally urban institution spread soon around the globe. By 1900 there were zoos on every continent. From early on these institutions were very much aware of one another. Their specific challenges, in particular how to keep, feed, house, breed and cure exotic creatures as well as the global animal trade, bound them together. This mutual interest generated numerous “zoo journeys”, publications, surveys, and reform schemes, transcending national borders, well before the zoos formally organized themselves in international associations in the twentieth century.
This paper conceives of the late nineteenth-century-zoo as a large interurban network in which knowledge but also animals and people circulated. This network was uneven, patchy, transient and hierarchical. It was shaped by the political and economic asymmetries of the colonial world order. Still, as this paper will argue, it would be problematic to describe this network as solely dominated by the Western European Zoos while non-Western Zoos merely imitated the metropolitan model. Rather, a number of zoos on the “periphery” proved highly innovative in terms of zookeeping. By focusing on the examples of the zoos of Calcutta and Buenos Aires (founded in 1875 and 1888 respectively) this paper will attempt to decentre zoo history and highlight its interurban features.
Title: International networks and the development of urban epidemic protection in Lisbon
Celia Miralles Buil
abstractCelia Miralles Buil
This paper explores the sanitary measures developed to protect Lisbon from epidemic threats arriving by sea at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
For both urban and national authorities, the challenge was to reconcile the health protection of the city and its inhabitants with their international commercial interests (which required to accelerate maritime traffic and to reduce ship retention). They implemented and tested several solutions, for instance, the “modern” Lazaretto built in 1875 at the city’s gate was gradually replaced, in the 20th century, by a more “flexible” system, located in the urban port and closely connected to urban infrastructure.
Lisbon’s approach was not unique, similar strategies were seen in other port cities. Moreover, after the 19th-century cholera outbreaks, various countries began to establish a vast network based on the exchange of scientific knowledge and health information, paving the way for the creation of a common international health organization.
This paper shows how Lisbon's urban sanitary border was implemented in connection with ongoing interurban scientific and professional exchanges, becoming part of an emerging international health network.
It first examines the building of the 1875 Lazaretto in line with the international health standards under construction, the travel of agents to study best practices in other cities, and the strategies employed to attract renowned international professionals in Lisbon to enhance the prestige and legitimacy of the Lazaretto both locally and internationally.
Indeed, while Lisbon drew inspiration from abroad, exchanges between the Maritime health service and its international counterparts reveal an ambition to create a “modern model” that could itself serve as a reference, particularly by leveraging Lisbon’s position as both imperial (colonial) capital and key maritime point between Europe and Latin America.
Finally, the communication also explores the everyday practices used locally to fight imported disease and how these were shaped by ongoing exchanges. Lisbon and the port authorities maintained daily contact with other ports by dense correspondence, receiving information through ship captains, onboard physicians and travelers. The presentation pays particular attention to these everyday workers who played a crucial role in shaping this interurban knowledge exchange network.
Information Infrastructure in Cities: From Trade Routes to Artificial Intelligence
Joanna Kopacz- Gruzlewska, Bartosz Lewandowski
abstractJoanna Kopacz- Gruzlewska, Bartosz Lewandowski
In ancient times and the Middle Ages, merchant routes served not only as transport roads, but also as information highways. During the Crusades, leading commercial centers created codes of law which were passed on to new settlements along trade routes. The period of intensive industrialization, coinciding with the decline of feudalism and centralization of power, led to central information management policies. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, urban planning theories emerged to improve living conditions. Ebenezer Howard's garden city concept spread out among municipal authorities to form the basis for regulatory plans integrating suburbs and villages with city centers into coherent structures.
We are currently living in the era of post-industrial urban regeneration, associated with intensive development of Internet and IT infrastructures. Smart City is a concept where urban development is supported by technology improving conditions of living and using the city. The prerequisite for Smart City functioning is availability and efficient flow of open data, including spatial data, allowing city users to participate in its shaping. The decentralization and diversity of data producers required creating common platforms to optimize data management and sharing. This was addressed in the 2007 European INSPIRE Directive, obliging authorities to create National Spatial Data Infrastructure guaranteeing data interoperability, metadata harmonization, unambiguous labeling, and quality control mechanisms.
In the 18 years since, Artificial Intelligence has significantly changed how data is accessed and consumed. AI chatbots are emerging as a novel mode of information and service consumption for citizens, businesses, and institutions, progressively displacing organic traffic to websites and search engines. This shift may inadvertently address data fragmentation across municipal platforms, as AI systems aggregate dispersed information into unified conversational interfaces. Furthermore, growing reliance on AI-mediated access to public data could catalyze a second wave of open data initiatives, compelling authorities to ensure datasets are not only available but also machine-readable and semantically structured for AI consumption.
Lost in Circulation? The Many Lives of a Sanitary Paper Technology between Europe and the Americas
Stephan Strunz
abstractStephan Strunz
This paper examines the transnational and inter-urban circulation of a sanitary paper technology around the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on the casier sanitaire des maisons—a statistical tool designed to correlate disease incidence with housing conditions. Between 1871 and 1945, this register was implemented in municipalities across four continents. Originally developed by the Brussels hygiene office in 1871, the casier sanitaire gained prominence through the work of French hygienist Paul Juillerat, who used it to quantify the relationship between densely built urban areas (îlots insalubres) and tuberculosis. Promoting the register at numerous international conferences, Juillerat inspired cities such as Buenos Aires, Eupen, Fez, Lausanne, Montreal, and Santiago de Chile to adopt their own versions.
Drawing on primary sources from Eupen, Lausanne, Montréal and Santiago de Chile, this paper explores the fundamental tension between the globalist ambition to standardize the casier sanitaire and the inevitable local transformations that accompanied its diffusion. Notably, the register was never implemented on a national scale; rather, its spread depended on the exchange and mobility of municipal health officials. Returning from international conferences, these actors sought to integrate the casier sanitaire into their local administrative structure, fostering a rhetoric of global uniformity that stood in stark contrast to the administrative realities of practice.
While contemporary reports often echoed Juillerat’s diffusionist narrative, the statistical units, paper formats, and functionalities of each register varied so widely that meaningful international comparisons were effectively impossible. Contrary to its universalist rhetoric, the casier sanitaire served less as a tool for comparing housing conditions across cities than as a local administrative instrument. Outside of France, epidemiology played only a marginal role; instead, “insalubrious houses” were typically identified through inventories of defective architectural and sanitary features that differed significantly from city to city. Instead of legitimizing large-scale urban renewal, the casiers sanitaires outside Paris remained limited to localized interventions. As a transnational paper technology, the casier sanitaire was simultaneously hybridized and molded to align with distinct architectural, administrative, and hygiene cultures.
Session 57 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Knowledge in Transit between Nordic and Other Cities – A Case of Finland
Kati Katajisto
abstractKati Katajisto
This presentation will examine the transfer of knowledge related to municipal legislation in Finland, focusing on the parameters that established a new type of municipal governance, particularly through the lens of the ‘welfare city’ thesis (Linnarsson, Magnus, and Mats Hallenberg. Nordic Welfare Cities: Negotiating Urban Citizenship since 1850, Routledge, 2024). By analyzing the case study of public labor exchanges, this discussion will illustrate how new municipal welfare structures emerged within inter-city networks both transnationally and nationally, and how these developments profoundly influenced the structures of the emerging Nordic welfare states (Cf. Rothstein & Trägårdh 2007).
As a latecomer to urbanization, Finland's capital, Helsinki, sought inspiration from Sweden and other Nordic countries, as well as from Germany and various parts of Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the French Revolution, a significant series of local self-governance reforms began across Europe, starting in Prussia and extending to England, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland (1863 and 1873). These reforms marked a shift from sparse and vague legislation regarding local self-governance to more structured municipal administration.
Finland's municipal administration reforms closely mirrored those in Sweden, serving as a near-verbatim translation despite Finland's status as part of the Russian Empire. The governing paradigm during this period transitioned from minimal city governance to an active, reformist municipalism focused on various forms of welfare, redefining the parameters of citizenship, inclusion, and exclusion within the municipal framework.
Helsinki's municipal officials actively sought best practices from other European cities, undertaking 154 study tours to Sweden between 1870 and 1917, with significant attention to Stockholm. Additionally, they made 148 visits to Germany and 93 to Denmark, while only eight visits were made to Russia, highlighting a preference for Western models of urban governance (Bell, Marjatta, and Marjatta Hietala. Helsinki: The Innovative City: Historical Perspectives, Finnish Literature Society, 2002). This study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how knowledge transfer shaped municipal governance in Finland and its implications for the broader context of Nordic welfare city development.
The Garden City Model in Romanian Urban Planning in the First Half of the 20th Century
Toader Popescu
abstractToader Popescu
The Garden City movement, inspired by Ebenezer Howard and originating in English planning culture, has greatly influenced European urban planning in the first decades of the 20th century. If the impact of this model in countries where urbanism was already, at the time, an established discipline has been extensively studied, the European periphery has less benefited from this kind of research. One of the specific features in these areas has been the strong influence of some identifiable individuals (“founding father” figures) who, benefiting from their special status within a disciplinary void, shaped the profession following their own preferences, convictions or formation.
Engineer Cincinat Sfințescu has been such a figure in the case of Romania. During his post-graduate formation in Western Europe, between 1910 and 1913, he came into direct contact with the theory and practice of the Garden City model, becoming a member of the Deutsche Gartenstadt Gesselschaft in Berlin and thoroughly visiting, in the summer of 1912, almost all the garden cities / suburbs in the outskirts of English metropolises. After returning to Romania, he extensively published on this topic, both in professional journals and in popular ones, exposing Howard’s theories and its practical accomplishments in Britain.
During the next three decades, in his capacities as head of the planning department of the Bucharest municipality, author or co-author of the two General Urban Plans for Bucharest approved in 1921 and 1935, chief editor of the Urbanismul journal and professor of urban planning in several higher education institutions, Sfințescu (now also representing Bucharest in the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Federation) constantly promoted this model and tried to give it a local adaptation, as he did not believe that its original doctrine and applications were transferable “as such” to the local urban situation.
The paper follows Sfințescu’s shifting relation to the Garden City planning model, from the initial discovery and introduction to Romanian urbanism, going through successive theoretical and practical questionings and adaptations and finding its way into official planning documents and successive publications. We believe that this kind of research sheds light on the role individuals and professional networks played in disseminating and locally amending widespread and influential planning models outside their original and well-studied initial areas of influence.
Circulating City Planning Ideas: Professional Networks in Early Twentieth-Century Sweden
Andreea Blaga
abstractAndreea Blaga
This article examines how early twentieth-century Swedish city planners transformed domestic urban design by actively engaging with transnational professional networks. Moving beyond isolated pioneers, it analyses a collaborative cohort including Per O. Hallman, Fredrik Sundbärg, Albert Lilienberg, Nils Gellerstedt and Anders Nilsson. To counter rigid gridiron planning favoured by older engineering establishments, they adapted artistically and topographically sensitive ideals from the German-speaking area before shifting toward reformist British town planning models. Using a microhistorical approach grounded in archival research of surviving correspondence and professional records, the study maps their development across three distinct tiers of professional maturity: theoretical introduction via study trips, practical adaptation through planning competitions, and international dissemination at large-scale public exhibitions. Tracing these specific interpersonal and institutional channels demonstrates exactly how Swedish practitioners successfully evolved from passive recipients of continental concepts into highly active contributors to a bi-directional, transnational exchange of urban expertise.
Modern Urban Strategies and Indoor Retail Markets in Japan: European and Asian Planning Influences
Fuki Wada
abstractFuki Wada
This paper examines the influence of European and Asian urban planning on Japanese strategies for indoor retail markets in the early 20th century. The first Japanese public retail market emerged in 1918, following the Rice Riots and wartime price hikes, but the debates on public markets had begun in the late 19th century with the aim of stabilizing food supply and prices. During the period, Japan actively references foreign precedents through field surveys and literature reviews on retail markets. Between the 1900s and 1920s, local governments and national agencies investigated markets in Europe, the United States, and Asia; for example, Kyoto officials visited Berlin and returned with architectural drawings, while Richard Schachner’s 1914 report was translates by multiple municipal and ministries. “The Central Wholesale Market drawings” incorporated global examples collected by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, demonstrating the role of transnational knowledge in shaping Japanese planning.
The first guidelines for public retail markets were issued by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry Research Committee in 1918 prior to the Rice Riots, drawing on European and Taiwan markets. However, fully enclosed indoor markets were not immediately constructed according to these guidelines, and implementation varied across municipalities. Public markets were established under local government leadership, resulting in diverse strategies.
In fact, in Japan, retail markets spread nationwide not through public retail markets established by local governmental entities, but through privately established retail markets modeled after public markets. By 1930, 350 public retail markets and 756 privately established retail markets were in operation. Examining the locations of public and private retail markets reveals that public retail markets were established in a planned manner. Conversely, private retail markets were in response to individual demand, often adjacent to public retail markets or near existing private retail markets, without undergoing urban planning controls.
This study argues that while Japan adopted modern planning principles for public markets, the nationwide spread of indoor markets was driven by private initiatives responding to local demand. Using archival sources, architectural drawings, and government reports, it reveals how transnational knowledge shaped Japanese urban policy, yet local socio-economic conditions determined actual outcomes.
Session 58 - Urban Planning and local Urban Strategies (1850-2025)
To what extent can Urban Planning be considered a universal discipline, and how have local urban strategies shaped or or been interpreted by its global ambitions? This session explores the complex and evolving relationship between Urban Planning ideals and place-based urban strategies from the mid-19th century to the present.
Coordinators: Javier Monclús, Sara Sucena
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Coordinators: Javier Monclús, Sara Sucena
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Session 58 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 303 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Universal Models and Local Realities: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Urban Planning in Italy and Iran (1850–2025)
Homa Habibian, Michela Lazzeroni
abstractHoma Habibian, Michela Lazzeroni
This paper investigates the evolving interplay between universal urban planning doctrines and locally grounded strategies in Italy and Iran from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Adopting a comparative-historical methodology based on planning legislation, archival documents, and critical scholarship, the study examines how both countries have negotiated, adapted, or resisted global planning paradigms across different political and cultural periods.
In Italy, the trajectory of urban planning—from early modernization and post-war reconstruction to the rise of participatory and sustainability-oriented approaches—illustrates a continuous dialogue between international models and strong municipal governance traditions. Practices such as the Piano Regolatore Generale, heritage-centered planning, and recent climate-oriented policies reveal how global ideas have been selectively reinterpreted within culturally embedded frameworks.
In contrast, Iran’s planning history reflects a more conflictive engagement with imported Western models, particularly during the modernization era of the 1950s–1970s, when comprehensive master plans—such as the 1968 Tehran Master Plan—were introduced with limited alignment to socio-cultural realities. Post-1979 developments show a gradual reorientation toward locally rooted approaches, integrating traditional urban morphologies, environmental constraints, and emerging forms of community participation.
Through the juxtaposition of these two distinct contexts, the paper argues that both Italy and Iran exemplify hybrid planning cultures that challenge simplistic binaries of universalism versus localism. The comparison sheds light on how planning models travel, transform, and acquire new meanings, contributing to broader debates on the transversality of planning practices, postcolonial critiques, and the need for culturally informed strategies to address contemporary challenges such as spatial inequality, heritage protection, and environmental resilience
Malmö in the World – Planning Trends – 1985 to 2025
Per-Markku Ristilammi
abstractPer-Markku Ristilammi
This paper aims to analyse the impact of international planning trends in the comprehensive plans from the City of Malmö in Sweden from 1985 to 2025. Even though there is an extensive national regulatory framework governing planning in Sweden, it is time-bound and not immune to what could be called planning trends. In the material analysed - the various comprehensive plans - it is possible to trace international trends that have influenced the planning decisions in Malmö during the time period. The transformation from an industrial society to what is sometimes called a knowledge society is one macrotrend that can be said to still be ongoing and that leads to transformations of the urban landscape. Another trend that can be seen in the material is the proliferation of more advanced renderings of visual planning visions. The paper will follow the historical change in Malmö from industrial society to service and knowledge society as seen in the comprehensive plans. On a discursive scale the shift from city-branding ideologies to environmental and resilience strategies ending in the present-day concerns about civil and military defence infrastructures in light of Sweden’s recent Nato affiliation will be analysed.
Continuity versus Rupture: Town Planning Models and Practices in the Polish Peripheries of Empires (at the turn 19th-20th Centuries)
Makary Górzyński
abstractMakary Górzyński
Nineteenth-century town planning systems were important tools of the bureaucratic apparatuses of modern states, crucial for economic and social management and transformations of the epoch. In this contribution, following my extensive studies on planning procedures and practicies of the Western peripheries of the Russian Empire, I offer a comparative study on urban planning models applied across Polish territories, partitioned by Russian, Austrian and Prussian empries in the late 18th Century and transformed during the first and second industrial revolutions. By studying legal codes and administrative ways of land and construction management in towns, I will present different political and imperial interests invested in urban transformations, effective on the part of the state apparatuses in multhi-ethnic cities of the Polish lands. On the other hand, my approach is based on historical analysis of practicies and interpretation of planning systems by investors and inhabitants of Polish cities from the late 19th Century to the interwar (1918-1939) period. Henceforth, in this study I will show how international and imperial planning systems were interpreted, contested, manipulated or ignored by different social actors of imperial peripheries, who promoted more localised, ground-based approach to urban management. On the other hand, this contribution will present long lasting effects of bygone imperial planning systems on the urban management problems in the second Polish Republic (1918-1939). Offering case-studies from Poland I will contribute to debates on town planning as a universal discipline (with aims to continuity), contrasted with its more local, diverse adaptations, ruptures of political regimes or reinterpretations, serving needs of imperial, capitalist and commercial currents of modern societies.
From the Neighbourhood Unit to the Self-Managed Housing Community: Local Urban Strategies and Transnational Transfers in Yugoslavia during the 1950s
Hana Bečeić
abstractHana Bečeić
After the Second World War, Yugoslav architects and planners faced the challenge of rebuilding cities and redefining collective life through new models of housing and urban development. With no established institutions or planning guidelines, they lacked a clear framework and turned to contemporary European experiences for guidance. The welfare-state housing programmes of Britain and Sweden, widely regarded as leading examples of neighbourhood planning, offered crucial points of reference. Encounters such as the 1948 exhibition of the British Ministry of Town and Country Planning in Belgrade, Tito’s 1953 visit to Britain, and a Yugoslav housing delegation’s 1955 study tour of Sweden exposed local professionals to these new approaches to neighbourhood design and community facilities, prompting their adaptation within a socialist planning framework. Building on these influences, the concept of the stambena zajednica (housing community) took shape during the second half of the 1950s as a Yugoslav reinterpretation of the neighbourhood unit, grounded in the principles of workers’ self-management and collective urban life. Evolving through dialogue rather than imitation, it aimed to define a distinctly Yugoslav approach to modern planning and socialist everyday life. Architects and planners including Branko Petrović, Mate Bajlon, Edvard Ravnikar, and Zdenko Kolacio mediated international experience through study travel, publications, exhibitions, and projects, while federal consultations in Rogaška Slatina, Ljubljana, Portorož and Zagreb helped consolidate the emerging framework. The analysis proceeds in two parts. First, it reconstructs the formation of the housing-community concept through transnational exchange and federal professional debate. Second, it compares four built cases grouped into three modes of application: an enterprise-based workers' settlement (Litostroj), two forms of urban residential expansion with different degrees of institutional coordination (Savsko naselje and Gosposvetska), and a purpose-planned metropolitan neighbourhood (Trnsko). Drawing on archival sources, exhibition catalogues, professional journals, and comparative analysis, the paper argues that the stambena zajednica functioned both as a planning framework and as an instrument of socialist urban governance. Rather than a direct import, it emerged through negotiations that reorganised internationally circulating planning ideas within a distinct Yugoslav institutional framework.
Circulating “Urbanisme”: Catastrophe, Concept, and Reconstruction in France and Japan
Sayuri Hayakawa
abstractSayuri Hayakawa
This paper aims to extend the conceptual history of urbanisme, hitherto written as an internal European narrative, by examining its transfer to non-Western Japan through two moments of reconstruction after catastrophe: the First World War in France and the Great Kanto Earthquake in Japan.
In France, the Exposition de la cité reconstituée (1916, Paris), held during the First World War, marked a concept’s comprehensive public presentation. Among the wartime reconstruction projects exhibited there, the plan for Revigny-sur-Ornain was described as a case where urbanisme could exert its “beneficial influence”. Practice thus preceded institutionalisation under the word’s name: the Cornudet Law and the first school of urbanisme both date from 1919.
In the same year, 1919, Japan promulgated its (old) Toshi keikaku hō [City Planning Act]; by this time, the term toshi keikaku [city planning] was already taking root, after the Town Planning Conference (1910, London) had been promptly introduced to Japan. The Great Kanto Earthquake occurred four years later, in 1923, and it was in the context of its reconstruction that urbanisme reached Japan: architect Jumpei Nakamura introduced it in 1924, phonetically transcribing it as yurubanisumu. Beyond Nakamura, the concept was refracted into distinct modes: semantic displacement, from unanchored readings as mere urbanity to deliberate localisation in the Japanese context; conversion into a proper noun designating Le Corbusier’s book; and assimilation into the existing institutional vocabulary of toshi keikaku.
In both countries, catastrophe acted as the catalyst that made urbanisme visible; however, the concept’s trajectory was shaped not by these synchronised catastrophes but by the lexical and institutional environment each context had prepared. In France, practice preceded law under the word’s name, and the word received an institutional home; in Japan, the word arrived to find the institutional slot already filled, and yurubanisumu remained a mutable concept—reinterpreted, assimilated, and never institutionalised. This historical resonance between war and earthquake reconstruction may still repay attention as cities again confront reconstruction amid global crises.
New towns as mirrors for planning ideals
Raoul Van Stipriaan Luiscius
abstractRaoul Van Stipriaan Luiscius
Planning ideas circulate globally through expert networks and policy exchange, shaping a shared disciplinary language. Yet these “universal” ideals only gain meaning when translated into local spatial and institutional contexts. This paper argues that new towns offer a uniquely revealing lens on this translation, functioning as mirrors and testbeds for dominant planning ideologies. Unlike historical cities that evolve incrementally, new towns begin as tabula rasa, allowing planning ideals to be implemented with exceptional clarity, and therefore, exposing with equal clarity their contradictions over time.
Between 1945 and 1975, hundreds of new towns aros. The European new towns were part of the post-war welfare-state project and embodied a modernist belief that comprehensive, technocratic planning could solve urban problems and create an ideal society. Because they develop rapidly and in distinct phases, new towns clearly display how universal planning ambitions are reinterpreted, layered, and reversed as paradigms evolve. As they aged, these “ideal cities” became palimpsests, accumulating successive layers of planning theory, exposing both the reach of universal models and their limits when confronted with local governance, civic life, and market realities.
Focusing on Almere, the Netherlands’ largest new town, and set within a broader European frame, the paper traces how successive planning paradigms materialized and evolved from 1945 to 2010. Almere’s polycentric form and phased growth reveal this layering: from welfare-state modernism to participatory and market-oriented governance. Dutch planners absorbed international ideas to create a national planning doctrine, yet overlapping paradigms generated tensions and paradoxes rather than continuity: in Almere’s early years, modernist car-oriented design clashed with 1970s ideals of small-scale urbanity, leading planners to introduce pedestrian-based neighborhoods within a car-dependent city.
Based on written and oral sources, the study combines policy genealogy and discourse analysis to show that new towns, though born from shared universal ideals, evolved through locally contingent reinterpretations and spatial translations of successive universal theories that overlapped and competed. Across Europe, these planned cities display shared patterns yet divergent outcomes, revealing the tension between the global ambitions of planning and the local realities that ultimately shape its socio-spatial expression.
Session 58 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 211 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
PLANIFICATION UNIVERSELLE, URBANISME SITUÉ.
Les ZUP de Lorraine, entre politique d’État et fabrique locale. 1958-1985
Hugo Steinmetz
abstractHugo Steinmetz
À la fin des années 1950, dans un contexte de crise persistante du logement, la France met en place un dispositif inédit d’aménagement du territoire : les zones à urbaniser par priorité (ZUP). Pensées comme instruments d’un urbanisme d’État modernisateur, elles visent à rationaliser la production du logement et des équipements collectifs dans un cadre à la fois normé et adaptable. Si leur création s’inscrit dans une logique universelle de planification, portée par les doctrines du Mouvement moderne et la montée de la technocratie française, leur mise en œuvre révèle au contraire une diversité d’ajustements spécifiques.
En Lorraine, puissante région industrielle, les ZUP illustrent cette tension entre planification centralisée et pratiques situées, particulièrement visible dans les bassins sidérurgiques où la ville se construit autour de l’usine. Créées au tournant des années 1960, celles de Mont-Saint-Martin, Fameck et Forbach logent les milliers d’ouvriers attirés par l’expansion des aciéries et des Houillères du Bassin de Lorraine. Elles constituent des cas remarquables du délicat équilibre entre un urbanisme productif et des logiques d’action portées par les acteurs locaux. Cette dialectique entre universalité et particularisme interroge la nature même de la planification moderne : est-elle une science transposable ou une grammaire d’action ancrée dans le territoire ? En mobilisant un matériau archivistique inédit, nous cherchons à montrer que les ZUP industrielles de Lorraine sont le fruit d’un urbanisme à la fois prescriptif, adaptatif et négocié.
Dans quelle mesure ces opérations révèlent-elles l’émergence d’une gouvernance hybride, où la planification d’État s’ajuste aux intérêts industriels ?
L’analyse croisée des trois cas conduit à réévaluer les ZUP non comme l’application mécanique d’une doctrine centralisée, mais comme le produit d’une coproduction entre différents acteurs. Loin d’une simple déclinaison du modèle moderniste, elles apparaissent comme des expériences d’ajustement où enjeux politiques, économiques et sociaux redéfinissent les cadres de l’action publique. En réexaminant ces expériences, cette communication envisage les ZUP comme un laboratoire de la gouvernance territoriale et de l’urbanisme productif, à la croisée de la planification nationale et des stratégies d’entreprise. Leur étude éclaire la fabrique concrète du territoire lorrain et, plus largement, la transformation d’une planification universelle en pratique située.
The costs of modernisation: peri-urbanisation and landscape degradation in Zaragoza’s historic huerta
Cecilia Sanz-García, Carmen Díez-Medina
abstractCecilia Sanz-García, Carmen Díez-Medina
Urban expansion processes have been intensifying in Europe since the mid-20th century. The relevance of this issue is particularly notable in debates on the contemporary city and its recent spatial and functional changes. Within this broader context, this paper focuses on an area that has received limited scholarly attention but possesses significant potential: the metropolitan fringe of Zaragoza, and specifically its historic huerta. This traditional irrigated landscape, structured around a dense hydraulic network and a long-standing agricultural organisation, has undergone profound transformations. The resulting complexity increasingly obscures the legibility of the peri-urban territory and has contributed to the gradual disappearance of its heritage.
The aim of this contribution is to interpret the impact of peri-urbanisation processes in this area between 1970 and 2020 and to examine their relationship with the various urban and environmental control measures implemented during this period. The methodology combines historical analysis with geospatial representation. On the one hand, the study investigates key aspects of territorial transformation: the relocation of activities, the advance of land consumption, the territorial fragmentation caused by new infrastructures, and the proliferation of these infrastructures along the principal metropolitan corridors. On the other hand, it identifies, analyses, and evaluates the intervention tools applied in the area, considering the responsible authority, territorial scope, regulatory mechanisms, and their actual influence on the preservation —or loss— of the landscape. Particular attention is paid to the designation of peri-urban land as “Non-Developable” and to its effectiveness in containing transformative dynamics.
The analysis draws on historical and regulatory sources, GIS tools, and multiple cartographic datasets, including CORINE Land Cover, the Spanish SIOSE database, and nighttime satellite data from DMSP-OLS.
The results shed new light on the recent configuration of Zaragoza’s periphery —a special case due to the exceptional size of the municipal district, yet representative of dynamics observable in many Spanish cities. Furthermore, the critical review of local planning practices reveals sectoral impacts and disparities in eco-cultural heritage conservation, leading to the central question posed by this paper: has the territorial and heritage cost of a localised modernisation been worth it?
Diagonal "Mal", the first open criticism towards Barcelona's practices in urban spaces.
Alessandro Scarnato
abstractAlessandro Scarnato
Mayor Maragall's 1996 proposal for the Universal Forum of Cultures (Fòrum) in Diagonal Mar former industrial area, initially aimed to solidify Barcelona's reputation as a global urban reference, aligning with contemporary European political confidence in architectural solutions for civic improvement.
However, the event's preparation and execution were marked by significant public controversy. Despite drawing crowds, the ambiguity of the Fòrum's content and the contentious management of the city's transformation led to its near-total historical effacement—a stark contrast to the enduring legacy of the 1992 Olympics.
While publicly perceived as a failure, the project was functionally crucial, addressing long-standing urban deficits in the northern edge and facilitating the development of the promising Diagonal Mar area. This success is credited to planners who sought long-term improvements shielded from financial speculation, updating the "Barcelona Model" of public-private financing.
Nevertheless, the Fòrum's planning was undermined by a lack of coherent urban strategy. The administration wavered between social objectives and a strong business-friendly attitude. This conflicted vision, combined with the unclear definition of the cultural mandate of the Fòrum initiative, resulted in a failure to mobilize local public enthusiasm or secure favorable international critical reception. Media responses ranged from skepticism to outright condemnation.
This analysis aims to provide a critical review of the Fòrum's narrative through media analysis and stakeholder testimony, evaluating it as a definitive large-scale urban initiative of the pre-global technology era.
Malagueira Neighbourhood: designing a new city extension between the Local and the Universal
João Rodrigo Parreira Coelho
abstractJoão Rodrigo Parreira Coelho
The choice of the Malagueira neighbourhood (1977–1997), in the outskirts of the city of Évora, designed by Álvaro Siza, as a case study for Session 58, titled Urban Planning and Local Urban Strategies (1850–2025), seems pertinent and stimulating. The project exemplifies - at the urban and architectural scale, and from public space point of view - a productive and intense “interplay between theory and practice, universality and specificity, continuity and rupture”.
Across these different scales, the project confronted an urban context located outside Évora’s historic walls, where problems of discontinuity, dispersion, heterogeneity, and fragmentation were clearly perceptible. These pre-existing settlements had developed and transformed over time in the absence of enduring references or structuring elements linking the city to its surrounding territory.
What is especially relevant is that, in addressing this context, Siza deliberately sought to “found” a new interstitial sector on the outskirts of Évora. On one hand, the project draws upon the variations and theoretical principles underpinning the residential experiments of the Modern Movement—such as the German Siedlungen or the Dutch housing ensembles built between the wars. On the other hand, it unfolds within a more unstable urban, cultural, and social reality, characteristic of many contemporary urban territories—a condition that Siza does not attempt to conceal, but rather incorporates as an essential component of his response to the problem.
In this sense, the main lesson of the Malagueira neighbourhood, and the focus of this paper, lies in its capacity to address contemporary urban problems without renouncing the principles and “materials” inherited from the historical city of Évora, while also revisiting and adapting models derived from modern movement residential design (Martí, 1991). These principles are adapted, recreated, and combined with new “components,” new scales, and new problems arising from the local context.
The urban project is, therefore, above all, a reflection on a contemporary idea of the city and of public space—one that is responsive to a specific urban reality. As with all coherent design responses, its forms and spaces are characterised by a certain elementarity, derived from a simple yet universal logic that emerges from a complex reality and from a meticulous, sensitive, and objective reading of the local condition.
From Letchworth to Porto and São Paulo: Barry Parker and the adaptation of Garden City principles (1905-1919)
Angelo Bertoni
abstractAngelo Bertoni
The mobility of professional actors specializing in urban issues—emerging in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and becoming widespread around 1900—played a decisive role in constructing and consolidating knowledge about the modern city. This intense circulation is evidenced by the proliferation of congresses, journals, and associations that adopted an international framework as their operative arena, as well as by alliances between professionals and social reformers, and between technical experts and political elites, particularly at the local scale.
After an early career in private architectural practice—culminating in a volume co-authored with Raymond Unwin—Barry Parker worked between 1905 and 1915 on the development of the first garden city (Letchworth) and the first garden suburb (Hampstead) in the United Kingdom. These experiences, together with his active involvement in the Garden City movement, secured his place on the international urban-planning stage and enabled him to embark on a career as an urban expert, the main phases of which this study seeks to reconstruct. Following his work in England, Parker was invited in 1915 by the municipality of Porto to redesign the city’s central area—a commission that marked a significant turning point before he was called to Brazil in 1917 by the Companhia City Improvements Ltd to develop São Paulo’s first garden suburbs.
This study sheds light on the circumstances and conditions that allowed Parker to shift his professional focus—from architecture to urban planning—while forging connections with the professional, political, and economic circles of the cities in which he worked. Reconstructing his professional trajectory and the genesis of several of his projects—still insufficiently examined in the historiography of urban planning—allows us to better understand how garden city principles circulated internationally, and how they were transferred and adapted to diverse local contexts.
The main sources for this research include printed materials (periodicals, essays, conference proceedings, and exhibition catalogues), public archival records (municipal and national), and private professional and corporate archives.
Session 59 - Epidemics and Cities: Public Prevention, Management and Governability during the European Long 19th Century
The session seeks to bring together papers that analyse the actions of central governments and local administrations in the prevention and management of epidemics between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from urban and long-term historiographical perspectives, to assess how epidemic crises affected their governability.
Coordinators: Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, Pere Salas-Vives
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Coordinators: Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, Pere Salas-Vives
show/hide introduction
Session 59 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Purging operations in times of plague: The case of southern Italy at the beginning of the 19th century
Alberto Tanturri
abstractAlberto Tanturri
This paper examines the sanitation measures implemented in Noja (now Noicàttaro), a small town in southern Italy, following one of the last plague outbreaks in continental Europe, between November 1815 and June 1816. The focus of this contribution is on the purging operations conducted after the epidemic subsided, which were intended to eliminate all sources of contagion before the territory was re-admitted to free practice. These cleansing activities were structured into three phases: 1) Observation Quarantine: A forty-day period intended to confirm the plague's disappearance, preceded by a medical examination of all inhabitants, with residents mandated to remain indoors as much as possible. 2) Actual Purging Operations: A forty-day phase of disinfection, during which the town was divided into non-communicating sections. 3) Contact Quarantine: A final forty-day quarantine where gates between sections were removed, obligating citizens to gather to ascertain if renewed social interactions would cause the disease to resurge.
The practical purging procedures varied between contaminated areas (locations where a sick person or burial had occurred, including churches) and non-contaminated areas. Disinfection relied extensively on air, water, and fire. Infected houses involved a meticulous, multi-step process: burning furniture and belongings; scraping and washing walls/floors with hot seawater or vinegar and water; washing wooden objects and utensils with hot soapy water, with particular care to destroy any insects; and multiple fumigations (first with muriatic acid, then with sulphur, gunpowder, and pitch). Once purging was complete, the entire population was required to bathe and anoint hair-bearing areas with olive oil.
In terms of modern epidemiological assessment, the procedures were a mix of the ineffective and the unintentionally effective. The mandatory indoor stay during observation quarantine was counterproductive, as it could increase household transmission. Conversely, incineration, washing, sealing crevices, and the use of olive oil (an effective flea repellent) were inadvertently prophylactic. Finally, sulphur fumigation produced sulphur dioxide, lethal not only to humans but also to rats and fleas (the primary contagion vectors). Thus, despite being based on the flawed miasmatic theory (that plague originated from poisonous particles infecting the air), the methods were often effective, justifying the substantial costs incurred by affected cities
The passenger and the stowaway: the impact of transport networks on the diffusion of cholera in nineteenth century Spain
Zahra Behrouzmoghadam, Guillermo Esteban-Oliver, Eduard J. Alvarez Palau, Joana Maria Pujadas Mora
abstractZahra Behrouzmoghadam, Guillermo Esteban-Oliver, Eduard J. Alvarez Palau, Joana Maria Pujadas Mora
Human beings are disease carriers. Sick people travel and, with them, viruses, bacteria, fungus and protozoa spread around. This is a general statement, which is well known and well documented in today’s Live Sciences. However, the measurement of such effect is blurred, especially in historical terms. Data availability of cases at the individual level is scarce, and calculating accessibility variables is rather complicated because of the lack of daily data to model infrastructure, vehicles, and travel conditions.
In this paper, we aim to address this issue in an innovative way. Detailed data on cholera’s diffusion during the 1885 Spanish epidemic allows us to estimate daily, and weekly, cases and deaths across Spain at municipal level, covering all registered cases from June 18th to November 18th of 1885. We use these data series to calculate the propagation outbreaks using Optimized Hot Spot Analysis (Getis-Ord Gi), identifying weekly clusters of significant cholera outbreak and focusing further analysis on the most affected municipalities. We then calculate transport accessibility using a historical multi-modal model (including roads, railways, coastal shipping, and waterways) estimating weekly travel times from each municipality to the nearest hot spot, accounting for contemporary travel speeds by transport mode and intermodal delays. Moreover, this data is analyzed using negative binomial panel regression, controlling for lagged cases, population size, Euclidean distance, and local disease intensity.
Our main empirical finding reveals that each additional hour of travel time to the nearest hot spot is associated with approximately 4.8% fewer expected cases. This effect remains robust across alternative model specifications and travel estimates. Our results showed that transport infrastructure was highly significant although had a moderate effect in the spread of cholera during the 1885 epidemic.
Cholera in Paris in 1832 : The governance of an epidemic
Jérémy Lefort
abstractJérémy Lefort
The cholera epidemic in 1832 is considered as the first epidemic of the 19th century. However, this major event used to be treated as a general context, and not as a proper history subject. Yet, this epidemic deserves to be studied in a global way, and especially in its urban implications. The purpose of my contribution would be to explain how the cholera epidemic gripped the entire urban society in different domains. This way of questioning the epidemic is possible thanks to many archives that had not been properly studied yet. It is more frequent to propose a cultural study of the epidemic throughout famous authors. The scientific study of the epidemic has already been produced by science historians. Nevertheless, the social and urban implications are particularly rare in historian studies, whereas the urban and social questions are everywhere in 19th century literature, including official works such as the works of Villermé and Benoiston de Châteauneuf.
Starting from this incomplete historiography, this is precisely the discovery of archives that had not been studied yet which gave the opportunity of extending the historiography of this epidemic, by questioning this particular event in its urban and social implications. Thanks to municipal archives, we have the access to the way the municipal power manages the epidemic. This is precisely why we can talk about a real government of the epidemic. The health aspect of the epidemic is at the beginning of the government, but the governability of the epidemic affects all the different aspects of the Parisian society. If archives are also incomplete for the first 19th century concerning the city of Paris, it is possible to find particularly interesting documents in the funds of the district town halls. Precisely, with such archives, it is possible to explore how the epidemic is governed by a very local power, and supervised by a higher power.
The study of those archives gives the possibility to question the epidemic through the perspective of urban history in three different ways. First and foremost, the municipal archives allow us to understand how the municipal power tries to manage the crisis by reinventing itself; secondly, the different works conducted by the municipal power allow us to notice that the social question of the orphans of cholera is a challenge that concerns the administration; thirdly, the creation of the health commissions. Therefore, we can study how the urban question appears crucial.
Epidemic Prevention and the Flow of Information: Mallorca, 1800–1918
Pere Salas-Vives, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora
abstractPere Salas-Vives, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora
Epidemic Prevention and the Flow of Information: Mallorca, 1800–1918
Throughout the nineteenth century, Europe faced an escalating risk of epidemic disease. The plague persisted in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, while cholera and yellow fever spread along expanding global routes. These developments were closely linked to the growth of international trade, advances in communication, and the worldwide reach of European imperialism. As Eric Hobsbawm observed, this was the moment when “the globe ceased to be a mere geographical expression and became a genuine operational reality,” marking the emergence of a truly interconnected world. At the same time, the consolidation of the nation-state across Europe brought a marked increase in administrative capacity and state intervention in social life, particularly in matters of public health. This expanding authority extended to every level of government, from national ministries to provincial and, most importantly, municipal administrations, which became increasingly responsible for implementing sanitary measures and managing local outbreaks.
This paper examines how public administration in Mallorca responded proactively to the threat of epidemics between 1800 and 1918. The period is broad enough to cover all stages in the formation of the Spanish nation-state, the development of the press, and the varied societal responses to epidemics such as cholera, plague, yellow fever, and influenza. It also encompasses the critical medical transition from the Hippocratic tradition to the adoption of the new bacteriological paradigm. More specifically, the study investigates how information about these four diseases circulated, how it was received by provincial and local authorities, and the measures implemented to prevent their introduction or spread on the island. This requires attention to the origin of each epidemic, the nature of the disease, its distance from Mallorca, and the public health strategies applied at different times throughout the period. Beyond geographic considerations, the analysis also takes into account the economic, political, and imperial factors that may have shaped the measures adopted, regardless of the threat’s proximity. Ultimately, the study aims to identify patterns of administrative response by examining all of these interconnected variables.
Methodologically, this study draws on data from a systematic review of the regional press of the period, including general newspapers and off
Session 59 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Understanding pandemic severity: Pandemic waves, re-infection and immunity in Sweden 1918 in urban and rural areas
Lars Fredrik Andersson, Liselotte Eriksson, Paul Nystedt
abstractLars Fredrik Andersson, Liselotte Eriksson, Paul Nystedt
The 1918 influenza pandemic is notable not only for its extraordinary death toll but also for its three distinct waves, which had varying characteristics in terms of transmission, severity, and impact. In this paper we employ a longitudinal database with information on individual morbidity and mortality based on one of the largest Swedish nation-wide sickness funds operating during the time of the pandemic. This dataset enables us to, in detail, follow the sickness trajectories of individuals during the different pandemic waves and examine infection transmission and re-infection between city/towns and rural areas. Because our data makes it possible to investigate the relationship between morbidity and mortality, we can provide an in-depth analysis of the role of immunity and re-infection for pandemic severity.
The Spanish Flu in Girona: Professional Associations, Authorities and the Press
Lluís Coromina Verdaguer, Pau Font Masdeu
abstractLluís Coromina Verdaguer, Pau Font Masdeu
The purpose of this research is to study the 1918-1920 flu epidemic—commonly, though inaccurately, referred to as the Spanish flu—in the city of Girona, with additional references to the wider province (provincia). The study is grounded in local history, employing microhistorical methodology, as well as sociocultural and political historiography. It also draws upon the historiography of medicine and pharmacy.
The paper is divided into two main sections. First, it offers a brief historiographical overview of academic work on modern epidemics in the province of Girona. Second, it presents an in-depth analysis of the press of the time, both general and professional (medical and pharmaceutical), in order to investigate the impact and consequences of the epidemic—from its social and cultural implications to the political and public health responses.
The narrative is structured around the key social actors involved in managing the pandemic: professional associations, the national government, local administrations, ecclesiastical authorities, and the media. The study concludes that the multifaceted response to the epidemic reveals new dimensions, as the influence and role of these actors varied across different local contexts and over time. While each municipality exhibited its own particularities, overall patterns of action—as well as the contradictions and uncertainties—are broadly consistent with those observed in the rest of Catalonia and Spain.
The End of the Sick Cinderella: Rebuilding the Former Jewish Ghetto of Prague
Michaela Janečková
abstractMichaela Janečková
From the late 18th century, when Jews were first allowed to settle outside the Prague ghetto, Josefov—already densely built and lacking basic infrastructure—gradually became an overcrowded district associated with poverty, poor sanitation, and recurrent fears of stench, infection, and epidemics. By the end of the century, the Jewish population had largely moved away, while public discussion increasingly framed the area as a hygienic threat in the centre of the city, reinforcing calls for radical urban clearence.
Throughout the 19th century, public authorities, engineers, and architects justified the transformation of Josefov primarily through modern hygienic ideals. The 1873 memorandum of the Association of Engineers and Architects demanded a unified urban plan focused on inhabitants’ health, reflecting the era’s belief that only new, spacious, and hygienic neighbourhoods could protect cities from disease. Admiration for modernity and sanitation clashed with concerns about preserving historic buildings and the district’s collective memory.
With the 1886 Building Regulations and the 1887 competition design Finis Ghetto, a vision of a clean, epidemic-resistant city gained official backing. Although the plan provoked debate—especially about demolishing centuries-old Jewish heritage—its hygienic rationale ultimately prevailed. Despite protests after the 1893 redevelopment laws, most of Josefov was demolished in the decade after 1896 in the name of public health.
This paper examines how discourses of hygiene and epidemic prevention shaped redevelopment plans and aligned the interests of technical professionals, architects, city and state officials, and wealthy citizens. The transformation was also intertwined with national politics: Prague’s leaders envisioned a Slavic and Christian metropolis, distancing the city from its Jewish past and from foreign (especially Parisian) models. At the time, nostalgia for the old quarter was overshadowed by the optimistic belief that a modernized Josefov would ensure a healthier, epidemic-free Prague, celebrated in contemporary rhetoric: „The main artery of our heart—royal, golden Slavic Prague—flows steadily past palaces where once stood shabby houses. The silvery Vltava kisses the magnificent embankment of the new Josefov, lying in the heart of royal Prague, and the former Cinderella — our Josefov — has become, as in a fairy tale, a princess, a queen."
Entangled governance: local administration, charitable organisations and epidemic management in nineteenth-century Poznań
Agata Łysakowska-Trzoss
abstractAgata Łysakowska-Trzoss
The paper examines the complex relations between German local administration and Polish charitable organisations in nineteenth-century Poznań, focusing on their work in the face of epidemic crises. Poznań, which had been under Prussian rule since 1793, occupied a distinctive position: on the one hand, it served as the capital of the province; on the other, as a city located only a few dozen kilometres from the Russian border, it remained at the periphery of the Prussian state. Lacking a university clinic, scientific infrastructure and modern sanitary facilities, and further constrained by its status as a fortress city, Poznań faced chronic institutional deficits. In this configuration, epidemics—above all cholera—became a critical test for local institutions and charitable organisations.
The paper shows that, faced with these challenges, Polish charitable organisations assumed many functions typically attributed to local government and public health services. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, the Society of Ladies of Charity, and other associations created an alternative welfare infrastructure: they organised visits to the sick, provided medicines, brought in physicians for the poor, and conducted preventive measures among the most vulnerable. Physicians active in these charitable societies—such as Karol Marcinkowski, Ludwik Gąsiorowski and Teofil Matecki—served as health authorities and advocates of the Polish population, while simultaneously cooperating with municipal authorities and influencing the direction of urban sanitary policy. Charitable organisations filled gaps wherever local authorities lacked resources, tools, or public trust, effectively taking over aspects of sanitary governance; at the same time, they sought cooperation with local administration, who in turn supported their work. This was one of the few areas in which urban action took on a genuinely transnational character.
In this perspective, the relations between municipal authorities, the Prussian state, and charitable environments become key to understanding the “governability” of Poznań—a city whose capacity to manage health crises was limited by infrastructural deficiencies as well as Polish-German tensions. This analysis demonstrates that, in the reality of a nineteenth-century peripheral city, charity evolved into a crucial element of urban governance and the co-creation of social order, situating Poznań within the broader history of modern responses to epidemic threats.
Session 59 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The City of the Dead: Cemeteries in Turin during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Giorgia Morabito
abstractGiorgia Morabito
The study examines the debate in Turin during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerning the relocation of cemeteries from church grounds to sites beyond the city walls. By analysing case studies in relation to urban transformations and comparing them with broader European practices – particularly those in France – the research identifies new architectural models. The primary source was the City Historical Archive, which preserves project drawings, minutes and other administrative documents that reconstruct the debate on the municipal management of burial grounds. In 1776, a severe heatwave in Turin facilitated the spread of a new epidemic, highlighting the need to prevent the recurrence of past outbreaks. In response, King Vittorio Amedeo III reformed the city’s burial system, enacting a late eighteenth-century planning measure grounded in hygienic theories that associated disease with air contaminated by decomposing bodies. The Royal Decree of 1777 prohibited burials within the city walls and established two new cemeteries – San Pietro in Vincoli and San Lazzaro – marking the beginning of state control over a domain traditionally managed by the Church. This law anticipated, by almost three decades, the Napoleonic Edict of 1804, later extended to Italian territories in 1806. During the nineteenth century, population growth and urban expansion rendered the two cemeteries insufficient, prompting the construction of new ones. Consequently, cemetery services were gradually expanded by building a system of fourteen parish cemeteries serving the hamlets of Turin located outside the city walls. Most of the case studies examined were built between the late 18th century and the 1830s. The architectural features of these cemeteries and the processes through which they were developed reflect the emergence of a new way of inhabiting the space of death. This phenomenon was closely linked to emerging hygienist theories, which gained wider acceptance in the late nineteenth century through medical and scientific advances. Debates on hygiene consistently influenced administrative and planning decisions in Turin until the 1880s, making the construction and modification of cemeteries part of broader interventions that reshaped both the urban fabric and contemporary perceptions of burial spaces. Within this context of renewal, the municipality of Turin once again took the lead in promoting hygiene standards and applying them to the design of cemetery spaces.
The Management of Undesirable Flows as a Matriz for Ordering the Industrial City:
Barcelona 1849–1917.
Francisco Xico Da Costa
abstractFrancisco Xico Da Costa
an approach to the new responsibilities assumed by municipal administrations, which began to take charge of matters previously confined to the private sphere, as well as to the impact of the scientific and technological innovations accompanying these measures. The year 1848 emerges as a turning point, from which European administrations became aware of the need to establish an institutional and operational framework capable of carrying out the interventions required for the modernization of the city. This modernization sought to adapt the urban fabric to new productive modes, grounded both in technical rationality and in a redefinition of the boundaries between the public and the private domains.
This model has its origins in the systematic and rational incorporation of the functional logic of technical networks that organize flows of people, goods, energy, information, waste, and more. Among the services structured according to this model, those related to public health occupy a strategically decisive position. Thus, although often perceived as an issue particularly affecting the lower classes, the logic of networks imposes a forced intersection that brings to light the fundamental role of public authority in urban modernization.
Barcelona, by presenting one of the most significant urban projects of the nineteenth century—the Proyecto de Reforma y Ensanche by engineer Ildefonso Cerdà—offers a valuable opportunity to understand the dynamics of implementing these new urban logics. These logics are linked to the notion of the city as a body and, consequently, to a network-based operational system. At the same time, however, sanitary conditions continued to be managed individually through latrine systems, which ensured a degree of security for certain property owners and residents.
This condition of security, however, would change radically with the introduction of network logics which, more than a mere technological innovation, signified the primacy of public interest over private interest, thereby diminishing the influence of individual property owners over the sanitary conditions of the city.
Social and political conflict in the implementation of preventive health measures in the city of Porto in the 19th century – the case of unhealthy industries
Tânia Ferreira, Alexandra Esteves
abstractTânia Ferreira, Alexandra Esteves
In the mid-19th century, basic sanitation in the city of Porto was practically non-existent and poor hygiene conditions were widespread, which is why diseases and epidemics such as cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, among others, regularly afflicted the population. At the same time, the city was becoming more industrialized through the establishment of small and medium-sized industries. However, the industrialization process would contribute even more to the deregulation of sanitary and environmental conditions in the territory.
A significant milestone in health and hygiene concerns in Portugal was the approval of the decree of 27 August 1855 on Manufactures, Factories, Workshops, and other unhealthy, inconvenient, or dangerous industrial establishments, according to which the Government sought to systematically regulate and categorize existing and future industrial establishments according to their danger to public health.
From that moment on, whenever an owner wanted to open a manufacturing unit, they had to initiate a process to obtain an operating license, complying with the health parameters established by the health delegate.
However, implementing preventive measures to minimize the impact of industry on public health at a time when discussions about hygiene and prevention were becoming increasingly important was no easy task. It was a complex reality, accompanied by significant social and political conflict.
The economic and political dynamics of the city of Porto itself helped to explain the tensions experienced at the time. As a maritime city, with great economic importance for northern Portugal, with a very strong commercial class and great influence with the city council, the commercial and industrial sector would always be strongly opposed to quarantines or sanitary cordons during epidemic periods.
Using various documentary sources, particularly from the Civil Governor and Porto City Council, as well as the periodical and medical press, the main objective of this communication is to assess the tensions that arose between economic development and public health in the city of Porto in relation to unhealthy industries. Despite complaints and petitions from the population and negative opinions from the health delegate, industrialization in the city of Porto became a reality in the middle of the century, despite being a source of unsanitary conditions due to bad smells, sewage disposal, contamination of soil and water resources.
Session 59 - Slot IV
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 209 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Transport, Living Standards, and Urban Economies in Late 19th-Century Catalonia: Evidence from Height Data
Ramon Ramon-Muñoz, Guillermo Esteban-Oliver, Josep-Maria Ramon-Muñoz
abstractRamon Ramon-Muñoz, Guillermo Esteban-Oliver, Josep-Maria Ramon-Muñoz
The living standard of a population is influenced by numerous factors, which, in addition, may
change over time. Transport can be one of them as it acts as a mediator for other factors: it
influences the price and supply of essential foods; it affects wages and income; it has an impact
on the speed of contagious disease spread; it plays a role in the time to access health services.
Using Catalonia as a case study, we explore the relationship between transport linkages and
well-being in the late nineteenth century. To test this relationship, we rely on two rich and new
datasets; one is on individual male heights, and the other consists of municipal market and port
access. We conclude that the transport linkages-height nexus was positive, statistically
significant and of a non-negligible magnitude, and, contrary to other studies, we do not find
evidence that rural areas were negatively affected by market integration, although urban settings
appear to have benefited the most. We suggest that the primary mechanisms underlying this
positive association were improved food accessibility, along with urban economies and rural
development. A first version of the paper can be downloaded from: https://ehes.org/wp/EHES_277.pdf
A Struggle with an Invisible Threat: The Development of Anti-Epidemic Measures and Public Health in Košice During the 19th Century
Nikola Regináčová
abstractNikola Regináčová
My goal is to offer you a deeper insight into the epidemiological situation in the city of Košice (currently the second-largest city in Slovakia) during the 19th century, a period which was for the city not only an era of dynamic development but also a constant struggle with invisible enemies – epidemic diseases. The situation concerning the prevention and management of epidemics in the Kingdom of Hungary in the 19th century was characterized by the gradual centralization of health administration and a transition from ad hoc measures to more systematic legislation, albeit with varying effectiveness at the local level.
The nineteenth century represented a breakthrough period for Košice, similar to many other European cities. The transformation from a fortress town to a modern center brought with it new challenges in the area of hygiene and sanitation. The growing population, often living in cramped and unhygienic conditions, created an ideal breeding ground for the spread of infectious diseases.
Among the most feared and frequently recurring diseases were cholera, typhus, and smallpox. Cholera struck the region several times; the epidemic of the turn of 1872 and 1873 is particularly well-known. Contemporary medical reports by the chief official physician of the city of Košice unflatteringly described the causes of the mass spread. The main factors identified were the absence of sidewalks, pavement, and an inadequate sewage system, which was directly related to the contamination of drinking water sources. Certain changes are also visible based on individual city districts and the type of society that inhabited the area. At the time, medical knowledge did not yet fully understand the germ theory of disease (which began to gain ground only at the end of the century), but practice and empirical experience led to the introduction of the first anti-epidemic and quarantine measures.
The municipal government and health authorities introduced various restrictions and efforts to improve public health. These involved the construction of isolation stations, efforts to regulate the burial of the dead during epidemics, and stricter regulations concerning cleanliness in the city. Despite these efforts, mortality rates were high during the peaks of the epidemics, which had an impact on the social structure and economy of the city.
It is precisely the study of these historical events that allows us to better understand the development of medicine and public health.
Rural Penalty in Morbidity
Cause-Specific Morbidity Among Working-Class Men and Women in Early Twentieth Century Sweden
Liselotte Eriksson, Lars Fredrik Andersson, Bernard Harris
abstractLiselotte Eriksson, Lars Fredrik Andersson, Bernard Harris
This paper uses data from a nationwide Swedish health insurance society (1912–1914) to explore how gendered rural and urban living conditions shaped morbidity during a period characterized by the epidemiological transition and an urban penalty in mortality. Infectious diseases were more common in rural areas, driving the urban–rural morbidity gap. Urban regions experienced less sickness episodes due to lower fertility and pregnancy-related illnesses among women, and safer workplaces for men. The findings indicate that urban areas led the epidemiological transition, with urban populations benefiting from more favourable living conditions, while rural populations experienced a rural penalty in morbidity
Session 60 - Cities & Corruption in European History, a comparative perspective (1850-present)
From 1850, rapid urban growth and the need to provide services generated great economic opportunities and, in parallel, new scenarios for the corruption of local managers appeared. The session proposes to address, from the perspective of urban history, the question of good governance in European cities throughout the processes of democratisation.
Coordinators: Santiago De Miguel Salanova, Gemma Rubí I Casals, Joan Torrents Juncà
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Coordinators: Santiago De Miguel Salanova, Gemma Rubí I Casals, Joan Torrents Juncà
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Session 60 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 1 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
Corruption in the fold of the urban administration in Transylvania during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: practices, discourse, shifts
Oana Sorescu-Iudean
abstractOana Sorescu-Iudean
The present paper proposes to examine the shifts in the understanding of corruption in public urban administration in the city of Hermannstadt (nowadays Sibiu) from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. For most of the eighteenth century, Hermannstadt was the capital of the newly incorporated Habsburg province of Transylvania; at the same time, since the late fifteenth century, it was the seat of power of the territorial estate of the Transylvanian Saxons, one of the three major players on the province’s political scene up to the mid-1850s. As such, the content, contours and practices of its urban administration were profoundly shaped by its ties to provincial politics, and it witnessed first-hand pronounced interventionist policies within the framework of Habsburg state-building. While this process has mostly been examined from the perspective of counter-reformation measures, with the Habsburg state promoting the inclusion and ascendancy of Catholic members in the town councils, this paper aims to explore a different avenue, which has remained largely unexplored. Based primarily on the city’s extensive town council meeting protocols as well as on other contemporary official sources and private correspondence from leading members in the urban administration, the paper offers a long-term exploration of how practices that can be assimilated to the modern understanding of corruption (such as bribery, fraud, embezzlement, nepotism) appeared over the course of this period, and, more importantly, how they were discussed, instrumentalized, or alternately concealed and obscured by the various historical actors and factions vying for power within the city (and the region). The study will emphasize not merely the existence of such practices – which has already been documented for some shorter periods, albeit in a piecemeal fashion – but rather tease out the threads through which ‘corruption’ was woven and how they evolved (if at all) over the course of this period, at the intersection of the urban administration and the state-building process.
Rubber, corruption and urbanization. How does Leopold II developed Brussels
Javier Sacristán de Alva
abstractJavier Sacristán de Alva
Following the Berlin Conference and with the assistance of the United States, Leopold II secured a portion of the Congo that he would administer as a private company. The Congo Free State, as the king named it, was a prosperous territory that allowed Leopold to make concessions to companies near him, thereby enriching himself and using the money for the development of Brussels.
The Anglo-Belgian Indian Rubber Company was one of the principal actors implicated in this case of structural corruption, from which Leopold obtained the funds to build historical buildings, including the Royal Palace.
The objective of my investigation is to explain how the king used the clientelism that developed in the colonies to create and embellish a capital. Leopold was named as the construction king, but I found it necessary to explain where the money for these buildings came from and how the big scandal of corruption ended due to international pressure.
Soft corruption or good governance? Municipal board system and hidden power in Stockholm and Helsinki
Laura Kolbe
abstractLaura Kolbe
In the 19th century, advocates of European municipalism in Scandinavian countries emphasized the freedom of municipalities from the state. From Germany arrived the idea, that citizenship in a municipality was established based on business, and house ownership, or dwelling. Cities were guaranteed the right to local decision making and taxation, and voting rights were tied to a certain amount of tax revenue.
In Scandinavia, after the municipal reforms in mid-19th century, local governance was based on a strong ruling of the city council. A network of boards (sv: nämnd, fi: lautakunta), was established. Boards had the authority to make decisions within an agenda specified by the law and city council concerned. The number of boards grew throughout the 19th and 20th century, and members were chosen by the local parties.
Although this system of boards is deeply rooted in local decision making, very little comparative studies have been made on their role, composition and influence. Before the democratization of the municipal governance in early years of 20th century, the board members were high-income urban residents, senior civil servants, and soon, members of the new business community. After the municipal democratization, socialists got a strong (but never majority) position in boards.
My aim is to analyze two powerful boards, the board of construction & real estate and the board of urban planning, in Stockholm and Helsinki (from 1875 onwards), to see how its members were chosen after the local elections. Key questions are: what kind of members were nominated by parties to these boards? How did democratization change their balance? Were the members of the board selected because of political merits or professional interests and knowledge? Did the boards increase the sector's lobbying networks in the city halls or were they platforms of good governance? Was the Scandinavian municipal model, anyways, a system to implement soft sectoral lobbying in local political decision making, approved by all political parties? In the light of non-corruption reputation of Scandinavian countries, was this a masked form of local corruption?
“¡Vivan los hombres honrados! Las campañas morales contra la corrupción administrativa y su politización en el Madrid de fin de siglo (1884.-1896)”.
Lluís Ferran Toledano Gonzàlez
abstractLluís Ferran Toledano Gonzàlez
Turn-of-the-century Madrid was a city marked by intense social and political tensions, the product of rapid growth and the misuse of public resources. During the 1880s and mid-1890s, the Madrid City Council was governed by various administrations, both conservative and dynastic liberal, which accused each other of corruption. Particularly noteworthy was the outcome of the inspection of services and the subsequent evaluation reports on municipal management. In this paper, we analyze their impact on public opinion, the production of discourse, and the role of the middle classes (specifically the commercial sector) and the working class. This led to successive collective mobilizations that culminated in the massive demonstration of December 1895, controlled by the elites, following the scandal denounced by the Marquis of Cabriñana.
The fight against Caciquism in Barcelona: The Stained Construction of the Hospital de Sant Pau i de la Santa Creu
Martí Grau Alemany
abstractMartí Grau Alemany
The construction of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, one of the most known and admired Catalan art-nouveau buildings, designed by the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, was surrounded by controversy following the death of banker Pau Gil, whose fortune was meant to fund a hospital for the poor in Barcelona. The quarrel was sparked by an announcement published by Josep Domènech i Estapà in several Barcelona newspapers accusing the Lliga Regionalista party and especially Domènech i Montaner of caciquismo (Spanish political micropolitics) for having been awarded the construction project and the direction of the construction by means of favouritism. Between January and March 1902, the republican newspapers El Diluvio and L’Esquella de la Torratxa and the catalanist La Renaixensa published a series of articles accusing the executors of Gil’s will of various corrupt practices; and the regionalist newspaper La Veu de Catalunya defended itself and counterattacked. The conflict shows us the political battle between the Unión Republicana and the Lliga Regionalista for Barcelona’s political hegemony and how corruption is used as a tool for political and moral combat. For the republicans the Sant Pau case was a unique chance to defeat and discredit the other moralizing project of the city, the “new caciquismo” which would represent the Lliga. This investigation delves into the context of caciquismo in the city of Barcelona, where urban projects such as a public hospital were under public scrutiny. Whether or not there was corruption, we must understand how, why, and in what language this behaviour was reported, perceived, or justified, because this will help us understand the contemporary political view of the time and Catalan democratic culture.
Session 60 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
Local Officials of the World United (and Skilled). Debates and Shared Experiences in Public Servants’ Training within the Union Internationale des Villes et Pouvoirs Locaux (1913-1936)
Joan Torrents Juncà
abstractJoan Torrents Juncà
During the final decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, cities across Europe underwent rapid growth. This urban expansion naturally entailed an increase in the responsibilities of local governments and the size of their bureaucracies. On the one hand, these dynamics opened new opportunities for corruption and the infiltration of political clientelistic networks into city halls, as reflected in the proliferation of scandals. On the other hand, they also fostered a growing concern for good governance and for improving the management of urban affairs.
The aim of this paper is to explore a specific aspect of what might be termed the other side of the coin in the history of corruption: the pursuit of good urban governance through the establishment of a corps of skilled and ethical local officials. Not in vain, as recent scholarship in the history of corruption has emphasized, debates surrounding administrative reform and the strengthening of a civil service ethos were central to anti-corruption practices.
Accordingly, this study focuses on a key component in cultivating a professional public service ethos: the education and training of local officials. Rather than limiting the analysis to a single national or regional case, the paper adopts a transnational perspective. This approach is enabled through an examination of the activities of the Union Internationale des Villes et Pouvoirs Locaux, a Belgium-based international association that brought together municipal organizations from around the world –primarily from Europe and the United States– to exchange ideas and best practices on urban governance.
Drawing on the Union’s publications and conference proceedings –held in Ghent (1913), Amsterdam (1924), Paris (1925), Barcelona and Seville (1929), London (1932), Lyon (1934), and Berlin (1936)– this paper seeks to address the following questions: How was the education and training of local officials organized in the member countries? Which areas of expertise were prioritized? What common challenges –particularly regarding corruption, malpractice, and administrative efficiency– did cities face, and what solutions were proposed? Were shared anti-corruption values and practices promoted across national boundaries? Finally, to what extent were these transnational exchanges translated into practical reforms at the national or regional level –for example, in Spain and Catalonia, the latter with its well-established tradition of municipalism?
Between persecution and corruption. The Price Control Prosecution Office and its control-management of food supply in post-war Madrid (1940-1952)
Juan Cordón Herce
abstractJuan Cordón Herce
Following the occupation of Madrid, Francoist troops promised the restoration of law and order in the capital after the Republican "disorder." One of the dictatorship's key obstacles that the new administration faced was provisioning a city whose infrastructure was largely destroyed by the siege and which housed a starving populace. The establishment of an autarkic policy, materialized through ration cards, imposed strict control over the population’s access to basic foodstuffs, often with basic goods priced unaffordable for many. Hence, the sectors most affected in the aftermath of the Civil War were compelled to turn to channels outside the official market to secure either food or tradable incomes. As a result, black market expanded throughout the capital, leading Franco’s regime to mobilize significant resources to repress it. Its main effort to end commercial informality was the creation of the Superior Price Control Prosecution Office in 1940, which, working in conjunction with state security forces, was tasked with enforcing regulations issued by General Commission for Supplies and Transportation, the highest authority overseeing food distribution. Its management proved both inefficient and ineffective for several reasons. Primarily, the limited presence of authorities across the territory. Tension over regulating street vending in Madrid’s periphery had already been a contentious issue since the early twentieth century; this, combined with a deeply rooted culture of protest, created grey zones where state power could not settle without negotiating with its inhabitants. Furthermore, corruption among tax inspectors themselves, who at times exploited their position and internal connections to appropriate confiscated foodstuffs, forced the Superior Price Control Prosecution Office to open disciplinary proceedings based on complaints filed based on colleagues’ denunciations. Also, retailers played an important role in the supply chain, as they were responsible for distributing goods. They were frequently accused by their neighbors of hoarding products in order to resell them on the black market for personal gain. This paper analyzes denunciations against Madrid Provincial Price Control Prosecution Office inspectors and retailers concerning the supply of essential goods within a specific area: the northern Madrid periphery and the neighborhoods of Cuatro Caminos and Tetuán de las Victorias, viewing them as a grey zone where all these factors converged.
A touch of evil or a simple act of love? Urban planning and corruption in Vantaa 1974–2024
Matti O. Hannikainen
abstractMatti O. Hannikainen
Finland is one of the least corrupted countries in the world in addition to which the reliance both on police and justice system remain high amongst the population. Yet minor cracks on this polished non-corrupted brand appear constantly. These are reported as individual cases, but they exemplify a culture in which corruption is perceived and understood strictly legally, which may differ markedly from other European countries.
This presentation analyses of the planning history of the City of Vantaa from mid-1970s to the mid- 2020s. More precisely, the presentation depicts how the planning culture functioned and how the well-known cases of corruption were reported. The period studied witnessed the transformation of a rural municipality into one of the largest cities in Finland following a continuous population growth that required new infrastructure, most notably housing. There were only two widely publicised cases on corruption linked to urban planning that took place in 1996 and in 2019 respectively. Both lead to convictions. Yet there were numerous smaller cases that could be considered corruption in the strict legal sense analysed from the contemporary perspective. Despite being overlooked, these cases illuminate peculiar characteristics of Finnish planning culture.
Instead portraying Vantaa as a corrupted city or Finnish planning culture as rotten, the presentation ponders upon the concept of corruption itself highlighting the need to reassess its definition. Based on critical analysis of planning documents attached to the council minutes that include land-use contracts, the presentation analyses the emerging planning culture of a new town and the key players in the planning game. The presentation moreover argues that Vantaa provides us with an example of the Finnish planning culture dominated by close contacts between councillors and builders as well as political parties and construction companies.
Session 61 - Geopolitics and the spread of Art Nouveau in Europe
Art Nouveau was the first architectural movement to appear in Europe with a clear cosmopolitan ethos in the newly industrialising and bourgeois cities away from the great capitals. However, this process was linked to the construction of national identities when the European map underwent profound changes. This session explores this contradiction in the urban sphere, describing the geopolitics of Art Nouveau.
Coordinators: Ramon Graus, Mireia Freixa
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Coordinators: Ramon Graus, Mireia Freixa
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Session 61 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
Early Art Nouveau in Belgium. The dark power of associations, etnocentrism and colonisation
Stefaan Johan Grieten
abstractStefaan Johan Grieten
Although Art Nouveau as a style enjoyed a brief but intense success in Western architecture and interior design, its introduction and spread did not occur uniformly across the entire spectrum of architectural typology. In Belgium, Art Nouveau became the artistic component of an elite group of progressive liberals and socialists, serving as an expression of ideological renewal and an alternative to established styles. In Brussels, where the new style was coined in 1893 by early realizations by Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, the Maison du Peuple, commissioned by the Belgian Workers’ Party and built in 1896-1899 after the design of Horta, was a manifesto for the combination of these stylistic, typological, and ideological innovations. The introduction of Art Nouveau in Antwerp, an important port city and one of the pillars of the young state’s economic growth, followed this Brussels example with the construction of the people’s house of the liberal cooperative ‘Help U Zelve’, built in 1899-1901 to a design by Jan Van Asperen. This building manifested a program of social renewal through a working-class and pastoral iconography in the mosaics of the facade, combined with references to old and new cornerstones of society: the belfry and the train station.
At the same time, the Antwerp Zoo built a banquet hall complex (1895-1897) with a wing on the station square in Art Nouveau style, one of the most monumental and remarkable achievements in the city. The modern visual language of this façade was in keeping with the concept of the zoo as a contemporary architectural type and its function as a center of bourgeois social life, but contrasts with the Belle Époque eclecticism of the complex’s front façade. The explanation for this choice of style therefore lies not only in the architectural type, but also in the cultural associations between Art Nouveau and an alternative reality, visualised by the untamed and mysterious nature, with its hardly explored secrets. A few years earlier, these associations had resulted in the design of the Congo Exhibition in Tervuren, designed by Hankar and other luminaries of Belgian Art Nouveau, as part of the 1897 World’s Fair in Brussels. In both realizations, Art Nouveau proved to be a fitting stylistic vehicle for projects with a colonial and etnocentric orientation.
Celebrating Regionally or Locally? The Contemporary Mobilisation of Art Nouveau and Art Deco Heritage across the Brussels Capital Region
Marie Palmers
abstractMarie Palmers
In 2023 and 2025 respectively, the Brussels-Capital Region organised two thematic years devoted to Art Nouveau and Art Deco. This paper examines how these thematic years build upon the architectural heritage across the urban territory, and considers how this contributes to Brussels’ ongoing claim to the title of “Art Nouveau Capital”. The study combines qualitative analysis of documents and interviews with geospatial mapping of 395 event locations, set against the official Art Nouveau and Art Deco listed heritage inventories. This approach allows for a comparison between the historical distribution of the styles in the city and the spatial image constructed during the thematic years. For the Art Nouveau Year, the concentration of heritage in the traditional core did not prevent a geographically dispersed urban program: non-heritage venues, outdoor routes, and existing festivals helped extend the image of “Art Nouveau Brussels” across the city. The Art Deco Year, by contrast, remained more limited in spatial reach, despite a broader historical base. These differences illustrate how the politics of Art Nouveau and Art Deco in Brussels depend not only on the historical footprint of the styles but also on contemporary political choices. The tension between concentration and dispersion observed in the events reflects broader questions about how architectural movements are anchored in, or extended beyond, their historical cores, and how contemporary urban policy uses cultural heritage to shape the image of the "Art Nouveau city" for both residents and international audiences.
Looking at the sky with your feet on the ground: Vallmitjana versus Maeterlinck
Eduard Molner
abstractEduard Molner
The theatre and narrative of the Catalan modernist author Juli Vallmitjana has been significant for its ability to represent the marginal Barcelona of the early 20th century and especially the gypsy communities, who inhabited the slopes of Montjuïc mountain from the end of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. The disappearance of these social realities is due to the “civilizing” drive, which culminated in the 1929 International Exhibition that generated a gentrifying process that would forever change the human geography of this city area. Theatrical works such as Els zin-calós (1911), En Terragada (1911), or A l'ombra de Montjuïc (1922), among others, have been the best known part of Vallmitjana's production (Foguet & Mestres, 2006).
Less significant, due to their volume, but also noteworthy, are the pieces that we want to discuss here and that correspond to a very early stage of the author as a playwright and that are permeable to symbolist theatrical currents, we refer to Els oposats (1906) and El corb (1911). In these pieces, the influence of Josep Plana i Dorca, modernist poet, one of the main introducers of theosophy in the Spanish State, is clearly felt. The influence of Plana i Dorca's thought on modernism has been studied by Eliseu Trenc Ballester (Trenc, 1979 and 2018) and reviewed by other scholars such as Teresa M. Sala (Sala, 2023). Sala assures that this theosophical influence on artists like Vallmitjana would have been expressed in their mysticism of action, that is, an aesthetic and an ethics imbued with a will to influence the social situation and, at the same time, an awareness of the presence of the transcendent.
These are not trends alien to their time. In fact, Vallmitjana certainly echoed the impact of the plays of the symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck such as La intrusa (1890), and Interior (1894). We aims to investigate the different ways of understanding the transcendent, knowledge understood as a higher truth, not demonstrable through positive science. In Maeterlinck's pieces, there are only individuals faced with the mystery of death that exceeds their capacities for understanding. The non-city of Maeterlinck's poetics contrasts with Vallmitjana's proposal, which delimits a civic and convivial framework, in which social differentiation, and the conflict it generates, is addressed by characters possessing a transcendental truth that provides them with a serenity to fight for another, better world.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner and the resignification of the Modernista city
Clàudia Sanmartí Martínez
abstractClàudia Sanmartí Martínez
Lluís Domènech i Montaner was a cultured architect who remained closely attuned to contemporary European developments and emerged as a key reference for the “New Catalan School,” which would fill Catalonia with Modernista architecture.
His cultural and political engagement with the nascent Catalanist movement is directly reflected in his architectural work, which evolved in tandem with his intellectual discourse. His prestige as an architect, as a political actor, and as the director of the Barcelona School of Architecture exerted significant influence on the new generations of Modernista architects.
During the early phase of his career, the rationalist principles of Viollet-le-Duc are clearly discernible in his work, as are the technical advances he studied during his travels across Europe and through his extensive German- and French-language bibliography. His small residential commissions—constrained by contemporary urban regulations—display façades of standardized composition consistent with the prevailing homogeneity. Nevertheless, Domènech began to experiment with a new architectural language. Drawing on the Catalan construction system characterized by thin brick walls, this new architecture combined structural iron with decoration rooted in historical references, in an effort to formulate a national architecture.
In the following phase, the 1891 revision of Barcelona’s building ordenances allowed for a break in the uniformity, provided him with an opportunity to re-signify the façades of his buildings. Rather than the standardization of his earlier period, his aim was now the monumentalization of his architecture. He applied this both in the Eixample and in the redevelopment of the historic city, in order to offer his bourgeois clients—sympathetic to Catalanism—buildings capable of expressing social prestige and cultural identity.
The façades, animated by a rich interplay of applied ceramics, sculpted stone elements, wrought iron, and stained glass, were further distinguished by prominent bay windows, elaborate ornamental terminations, and imposing corner towers. In some cases, ground floors covered with voltes a la catalana (tile vaults) served as transitional spaces between the public and private realms.
Three times awarded Barcelona’s “Building of the Year” prize, Domènech became an exemplary figure for his contemporaries in the redefinition and monumentalization of the Modernista city.
Between countryside and metropolis. The Krakow-based art nouveau architecture role in shaping the national art of Poland before the WWI and during the Interwar period
Michał Wiśniewski
abstractMichał Wiśniewski
In 1901, Krakow witnessed the establishment of the Polish Association of the Applied Arts, an artistic organization seeking innovative patterns in architecture and interior design rooted in Polish vernacular art and contemporary artistic developments related to the Arts and Crafts movement. The group's objective was to identify new methods for the proclaimed renaissance of Polish art. Despite its small size, neglect, and control by the Austrian army, Krakow has recently emerged as the preeminent center of Polish art. The initiatives pursued by the Polish Association of Applied Art received substantial backing from local elites and, prior to World War I, established a widely acclaimed model of national aesthetics. The 1912 Exhibition of Architecture and Interiors in Garden Settings was the pivotal initiative of the organization, connecting its art nouveau-inspired creative philosophy with the garden city concept of urban planning. The concepts articulated in contemporary discourse gained particular significance during World War I and were subsequently implemented due to the extensive demands associated with post-war reconstruction. Furthermore, several key authors of the organization secured positions within the administrations of the newly formed republics, intertwining their artistic ideas with the necessity for innovative official iconography and architecture. This paper will examine the influence of the Krakow-based milieu of Young Poland on the development of new architectural and design aesthetics and will demonstrate how these were subsequently disseminated in the extensive interwar architectural project known as the Krakow School.
Session 61 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
Art Nouveau and the Architecture of Zagreb – Between the National, the International, and the Commercial
Dragan Damjanovic
abstractDragan Damjanovic
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Zagreb, the political capital of the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, underwent rapid demographic, economic, cultural, and urban growth. Influenced by artistic and architectural trends from major centers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the German Empire, a new style, Art Nouveau, gradually spread in Zagreb’s architecture from the final years of the nineteenth century. It was embraced primarily by the emerging bourgeois class: entrepreneurs, physicians, and professionals of various kinds who were eager to entrust the construction of their lavish residential and mixed-use buildings to young architects returning from studies in Vienna, Munich, Karlsruhe, and other cities.
In their pursuit of anti-historicist façades more or less free from references to the grand styles of European architecture, Zagreb’s architects adopted a range of strategies. Some turned toward simplification and purification of ornamentation (criticized at the time as “nihilism” by contemporary Croatian art critics); others combined motifs of the new style with elements drawn from the past (most often Biedermeier or Neoclassical forms). Certain architects found inspiration in natural motifs, while others incorporated elements of traditional or “folk” Croatian architecture.
Perhaps the most intriguing strategy that emerged in Zagreb’s Art Nouveau was the development of distinctly commercial façades, designed as a kind of posters advertising the businesses of the buildings’ owners or investors. Although the use of building fronts for communication and advertising has a long history, it was in Zagreb’s Art Nouveau that entire façades were transformed into monumental, permanent billboards rendered in stucco, stone, glass, metal, and other materials.
This paper aims to highlight the diversity of Zagreb’s Art Nouveau architecture, emphasizing both its distinctive features and its connections to the architectural developments in other centers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It will demonstrate how, on the southern periphery of this vast Empire, Art Nouveau architecture was transformed under the influence of national tensions, commercial strategies, and modernist principles.
ART NOUVEAU IN BELGRADE – BETWEEN A MODERN EUROPEAN CAPITAL AND MEDIEVAL CULTURAL HERITAGE
Angelina Banković
abstractAngelina Banković
Even though Art Nouveau in Belgrade didn’t have the same accomplishments as in other European cities, its manifestations deserve analysis considering specific circumstances on the architectural scene and the realized objects. Since 1867, when the Serbian authorities took over the governance of Belgrade, aspirations for its transformation from a small frontier Ottoman town to a European capital were marked by a series of activities. They included urban planning, the construction of communal and traffic infrastructure, and public and private buildings in the likeness of those in Europe. Until the foundation of the Architecture Department at the Technical Faculty in 1897, Serbian architects were educated in various European cities. Upon returning to their homeland, they brought the knowledge they had acquired and their current stylistic aspirations with them. Thus, Art Nouveau, unlike other architectural styles, arrived in Belgrade synchronously with its appearance in Europe. It did not represent a critique of earlier architectural styles, but a variant among solutions that often presented different stylistic features simultaneously. It was mainly manifested in the form of decoration, applied to a greater or lesser extent on the variously designed facades. Over time, freer solutions appeared, including vertical division, polychromy, the larger glass surfaces, or new materials. The repertoire of Art Nouveau decoration largely originated from the Central European cultural area, but a distinctive local interpretation also appeared. It was created as part of a wider phenomenon, called "the search for a national style", which characterized the Serbian architecture throughout the second half of the 19th century and beyond. It was mainly reflected in attempts to create an architectural expression that could be defined as authentically Serbian. In the works of its protagonists, the usual Art Nouveau decorative repertoire was combined with elements that originated from the Serbian medieval churches or vernacular architecture. This paper, based on the project documentation of realized buildings and the results of previously published research, presents and analyzes various manifestations of Art Nouveau in Belgrade, proposing remarks about its significance and influence on Belgrade’s architecture at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
Szabadka/Subotica: a town that blossomed into a city among Art Nouveau tulips on the Great Plain
Dániel Veress, Attila Brunner
abstractDániel Veress, Attila Brunner
The Great Plain was one of the most rapidly modernizing regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Its population primarily earned income from agriculture even in the age of industrialisation, but built such “second cities” together with the fellow merchants that mirrored the urban culture of Budapest and Vienna, drawing closer only to a few hours’ distance thanks to the railway system’s development. The dwellers of the emerging regional centres—historically called oppida or market towns—, the “peasant bourgeoisie,” expressed their future-mindedness through construction activity on an unprecedented scale around 1900–1910. Locally elected mayors and councillors contributed much to this process, since they not only allowed new tendencies to prevail but embraced them to represent their town’s desired transformation into a modern city. In this spirit, the elite and even the lower middle class commissioned architects and master builders who partly adapted vernacular building traditions and partly overrode them by introducing different variants of Art Nouveau.
Szabadka (now Subotica, Serbia) was among these accelerating centres that also excelled in architectural modernization. In terms of urban representation, only Kecskemét, Szeged (now Hungary) and Nagyvárad (now Oradea, Romania) could compete with this multicultural city on the East of the Danube. The city’s prominence was certainly due to its colourful and flowered city hall and synagogue. Both monumental buildings were designed by the studio of Komor and Jakab, who followed Ödön Lechner’s efforts to create a Hungarian architectural style in an Art Nouveau manner. In addition, numerous residential and public buildings also reflected national stylistic aspirations. In the same years, brothers József and László Vágó as well as Alfréd Hajós—coincidentally the first Olympic champion of Hungary—blueprinted bourgeois luxury palaces in the Viennese sense of geometry, whilst other tenement buildings reflected the impact of such Western cities as Munich and Darmstadt. In the paper, our aim is to investigate the architectural taste of Szabadka/Subotica’s elite and the most intriguing local commissioners—with a special focus on the bourgeoisie—in the context of the Great Plain region and Central Europe.
Art Nouveau in Late Ottoman Istanbul Beyond D’Aronco: Vernacular and Local Craftsmanship through Catalogues and Prints
Dilara Tuygar
abstractDilara Tuygar
The spread and variety of the Art Nouveau movement becomes increasingly complex when examined in a city on the scale of Istanbul. With a population of over one million inhabitants, late-Ottoman Istanbul was defined as much by its local traditions as it was by those imported by foreign residents: Italians, Greeks, Germans, French, and Armenians.
In the dominant historical narrative, Art Nouveau in Istanbul is considered a product of European influence, brought in by figures like Raimondo D’Aronco who arrived in the city upon an invitation by Sultan Abdülhamid II and came to design several canonical structures, including the recently renovated Casa Botter (1900).
This paper offers an alternative history. The appearance of characteristic ‘Art Nouveau’ ornament in middle class wooden houses, constructed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, points to a more nuanced, distinctly local iteration of the design movement in Istanbul. Within individual neighbourhoods and the Prince Islands, Art Nouveau was reinterpreted through the lens of local craftmanship.
The architecture of these urban communities reveals how ornament could serve as a marker of an alternative modernity. Our understanding of this design movement is further complicated by the fact the architecture itself was predominately designed and built by unregistered (and unidentified) carpenter-architects.
The proposed contribution focuses on the unknown architects of Ottoman Art Nouveau by examining the popular source material that targeted them: printed catalogues, journals, magazines, book covers and advertisements of the commercialized design industry. The circulation of local and Western print media featuring Art Nouveau design – in the form of design embellishments, articles, drawings and photographs – was widespread in late Ottoman Istanbul.
The periodicals in question were not solely dedicated to architecture; more broadly, they were daily newspapers or women’s magazines, often bilingual, like Malûmat , Servet-i Fünun or Levant Herald showcase the complexity and eclectic audience. In examining this extensive documentary record, we gain insight into how Art Nouveau was defined in Istanbul, who published and distributed this material, and how these models (graphic and textual) were intended to address different audiences. Put differently, the publications cast light on the complex introduction of Art Nouveau in Istanbul before the arrival of a central figure like D’Aronco.
Session 61 - Slot III
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
Art Nouveau in Georgian Cities - Identity and Choice in the Geopolitical Landscape
Nini Sanadiradze
abstractNini Sanadiradze
At the turn of the twentieth century, Georgia occupied a precarious geopolitical position, situated between the Russian Empire, Ottoman Turkey, and Persia, yet culturally oriented toward Europe. Art Nouveau, or the “Modern Style,” was not merely an imported aesthetic but a geopolitical gesture: a conscious alignment with European modernity within an empire intent on reshaping its peripheries.
In Tbilisi, the style became a way to “speak European,” an intellectual and visual language through which citizens expressed both belonging and subtle defiance. Its emergence coincided with a cultural awakening marked by Georgian-language newspapers, secular schools, civic societies, the restoration of Georgian in administration, and the long effort to establish a university. Within this context, Art Nouveau became both symbol and instrument of a society reclaiming its right to modernity.
In Batumi, the style carried a different meaning. As a porto-franco (1878–1886) integrated into global oil-trade networks, the city reflected economic cosmopolitanism. Here Art Nouveau signalled international capital and industrial modernity, with residences associated with the Nobel and Rothschild networks embodying the intersection of European investment, imperial interests, and local ambitions.
The style appeared in Georgia almost simultaneously with its European development: the 1901 Nobel Pavilion in Tbilisi, featuring ornaments by sculptor Iakob Nikoladze, emerged only seven years after Horta’s Hotel Tassel (1894).
The paper examines key buildings in Tbilisi’s Art Nouveau landscape: the Writers’ House (Sarajishvili Palace), Simon Kldiashvili’s early residence on Rome Street, Grigol Kurdiani’s house on Ninoshvili Street, and representative façades in Tbilisi, Batumi, and other cities. These structures illustrate how local architects and patrons blended European formal language with Georgian ornamental traditions.
Traditional courtyard houses also absorbed the style: European façades faced the street, while wooden Georgian balconies opened to the courtyard, a spatial metaphor for Georgia’s geopolitical condition, balancing public modernity and private identity.
The paper argues that Art Nouveau in Georgia functioned as a strategy through which cultural and civic leaders expressed a European orientation under imperial rule. Linking early twentieth-century ambitions with present-day debates on heritage, it shows how the style continues to articulate identity.
Art Nouveau architecture in Lviv as a reflection of the political geography of the region
Zanna Komar
abstractZanna Komar
Lviv's Art Nouveau architecture is one of the most exquisite and well-preserved, yet least known, architectural ensembles of early 20th-century Central Europe. We firmly believe that Lviv's Art Nouveau architecture should constitute one of the most important chapters in the history of Polish, Ukrainian, and European architecture in general, yet this remains the case.
Architecture in this style dominated Lviv's built environment for a mere six or seven years, between 1902 and 1909! The later, rationally modernized version of Art Nouveau, which dominated architecture around 1910, definitively broke with naturalistic ornament and became a fundamentally different stylistic phenomenon.
Nineteenth-century Lviv, like other Central European cities, was a grand stage for the presentation of architectural costumes, dominated by various stylistic creations of historicism. At that time, Vienna was the most important point of reference for Lviv. Consequently, the Art Nouveau architecture of the early 20th century, based on unusual floral ornaments and the desire to liberate itself from historicism, was in Lviv dependent on this historicism, perceived far less as a program than as a manifestation of freedom and a denial, not so much of programmatic historicism, but rather an attempt to free itself from Vienna's dominant role.
This new style was not promoted at the official and administrative level, and it found no place in the architecture of public buildings. Floral Art Nouveau, on the other hand, gained unprecedented popularity among private clients, becoming the most frequently requested style for the townhouses of the urban bourgeoisie. Art Nouveau arrived in Lviv at a time when Galicia had gained independence after gaining autonomy, and Lviv had already established its status as the capital. Art Nouveau architecture is inextricably linked to the transition to autonomy, as well as to Lviv's emergence from Vienna's domination and its independence amidst the awakening of a variety of progressive and optimistic social, national, political, economic, and artistic movements.
The architectural ensemble of Lviv's Art Nouveau style is undoubtedly one of its most distinctive expressions and at the same time evidence of the city's distinctive character and distinctive role at this particular moment in history in this part of Europe.
Session 62 - Making Cities Visible. Global Perspectives on Urban Image-Production and -Circulation (19th-20th centuries)
Since the age of printmaking and boosted by photography, cities have been hubs for producing and distributing images locally and globally. This panel explores the urban imprint of the making of a 'society of images' by examining international visual discourses and local peculiarities, and by challenging Western-centric views on urban modernity.
Coordinators: Christina Reimann, Malte Zierenberg
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Coordinators: Christina Reimann, Malte Zierenberg
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Session 62 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Walls of Glass: photographic ateliers in a changing urban landscape
Ann-Sofi Forsmark
abstractAnn-Sofi Forsmark
Walls of glass: photographic ateliers in a changing urban landscape
My paper describes the rapid expansion of portrait photography ateliers in Stockholm 1860-1915, a new type of semi-public space in the cityscape.
The boom of mass-produced portrait photography left visible marks in the urban landscape. As early as the late 1850s, house owners in Stockholm began to set up studios in their properties, to let to a new group of professionals: the photographers.
Over the following decades, hundreds of dark attics transformed to glass-covered ateliers with generous light from the roof and walls. The main part of the ataliers were concentrated in areas of high social status, but as the city expanded, so did the location of the ateliers. For the customers, photography provided a new way to visually manifest themselves in a gradually more mobile society.
In this paper, my main focus will be on the physical ataliers. My prime source material is building permit drawings from the Stockholm City Planning Committee Archives, now in the Stockholm City Archives. Although listed as a Memory of the World by UNESCO since 2011, the building permit drawings are not widely known to researchers. The drawings, submitted to the city architect for approval, shows how the buildings were visually transformed by the inserting of large glass windows on the facade and roof. The interior plans are as interesting as the facades. The function of the rooms are often written out, among them the dark room that was introduced with the wet colllodion technique.
The complexity of the history of photography makes it necessary to use a variety of sources. Aside from carte-de visite photographs I have also studied urban documentary photographs from the 19th and 20th century from the collections of the Stockholm City Museum. They show that visible traces of the ataliers existed in the heart of the city well into the 1960s.
The study Walls of Glass was a part of the research project City Faces. visual culture and social structure in Stockholm 1860-1930.
Extermination and Emotions: The Visual Discourse of Urban Rat Extermination in 20th century Copenhagen
Mikkel Høghøj
abstractMikkel Høghøj
This paper investigates the visual discourse of urban rat extermination in 20th century Copenhagen with emphasis on the entanglements of extermination technologies, urban space and emotions. During the first half of the 20th century, rat extermination was professionalized and municipalized as a public service in Danish cities. This process involved not just new extermination methods but also the development of a new propaganda apparatus that actively worked to problematize urban rats through a variety of visual media productions including graphic posters, films and photographs.
By tracing the visual discourse of urban rat extermination over the course of the 20th century, this paper examines how the rat evolved as a powerful visual figure shaping not only human-animal relations but also urban imaginaries more broadly. In this context, the paper particularly emphasizes the role of emotions. By portraying and defining the rat through a whole range of negative and dangerous emotions including fear, disgust and enmity, visual representations helped delineate the rat as a distinctively ‘killable’ animal, particularly in an urban context. In doing so, I argue, these visuals also reproduced a specific form of urban order and imaginary characterized by certain notions of hygiene, cleanliness, gender and responsibility. As such, this paper addresses how visual discourses of urban modernity were intertwined with human-animal relations as well as how this entwinement came to influence approaches to and perceptions of wider urban issues of the period including welfare, public health, citizenship and the relationship between private and public.
Session 62 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Imagining Progress: From Colonial Legacies to Socialist Imaginaries in China
Maxim Tvorun-Dunn, Jie Shen
abstractMaxim Tvorun-Dunn, Jie Shen
The discursive construction of modernity has been historically rooted in the development of colonialism, through which technological and social progress is contrasted against the image of the allegedly uncivilized Other. Even when colonization is overthrown, discourses of modernity leave an imprint on the aspirations of post-colonial powers, structuring imaginations of future prosperity. This paper examines how visual representations of modernity in post-revolutionary China have been shaped by the enduring legacies of prior imperial capitalist powers.
In the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1950s, images of construction site consisted of construction machines, infrastructure, and collective labor, became central to representing socialist progress and national rejuvenation. Yet, these depictions closely resemble the visual language of Imperial Japan’s exhibition Progress in Manchuria (Chicago World’s Fair, 1933), where modernization was similarly visualized through mechanized construction and monumental images of industrial progress. Although the Communist government sought to erase the legacy of Manchurian development, archival evidence reveals that many of its technical experts and institutions were in fact incorporated into early PRC construction projects. Correspondingly, the visual expressions that signified technological progress under Manchukuo found renewed life within the iconography of socialist modernization. By tracing these representational continuities, the paper argues that revolutionary China reworked rather than erased the colonial grammar of modernity. Extrapolating this discussion to the present day, this paper concludes by examining images of China’s urban aspirations circulated in the Chinese Pavilion of the 2025 Osaka Expo.
In revealing these layers of continuity, we argue that just as post-revolutionary China adopted the visual language of Imperial Japanese imaginations, the aspirations of the contemporary CCP acquiesce to the design sensibilities of transnational neoliberal elites.
The Ephemeral Orient: Magic Posters, Urban Visuality and the Making of Modern Experience
Jiajun Li
abstractJiajun Li
This paper examines Oriental magic posters as an advertisement of magic performances with Orientalist imageries as well as a distinctive form of urban image-production that transformed the visual and sensory experience of European cities at the turn of the 20th century. Drawing on the methodological potential of posters as ephemera, it explores how these mass-produced images - widely displayed on hoardings, Morris columns, theater façades, and metropolitan streets - reconfigured the urban surface and made the modern city newly visible. Oriental magic posters functioned simultaneously as spectacles of novelty and as everyday encounters that shaped how urban dwellers perceived global difference, modernity, and their own place within an increasingly mediated world.
By analyzing the circulation, reception, and later collecting of these posters, the paper shows how urban contexts enabled a complex set of visual discourses: from democratized access to exotic imagery to the reinforcement of colonial hierarchies and fantasies. While posters offered distraction, pleasure, and sensory stimulation characteristic of fin-de-siècle hedonism and escapism, their ephemerality also intensified modern anxieties about transience and identity, prompting individuals to preserve them in private collections. This domestication of the exotic turned posters into miniature museums - sites in which the Orient was stabilized, categorized, and rendered timeless against the European modernity progress.
The paper traces Oriental visual images back to longer genealogies of Chinoiserie and Japonisme, demonstrating how earlier decorative traditions were transferred from elite interior spaces into the public arena of the modern street. Their hybrid, flattened, and homogenized visual language exemplifies how urban image-production fostered both global cultural entanglements and selective misrepresentations. Ultimately, this study argues that the emergence, proliferation, and preservation of Oriental magic posters reveal how European metropoles co-constructed urban modernity and global imaginaries through a fragmented yet powerful “society of images” shaped by and conversely shaping the visual rhythms, desires, and hierarchies of the fin-de-siècle.
Circulating Images: Imported Commercial Catalogues and the Transformation of Istanbul’s Urban Face in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries*
Feyza Yagci Ergun
abstractFeyza Yagci Ergun
This paper examines the influence of imported commercial visual culture on the built environment and visual landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Istanbul. During this period, the city became part of an expanding network in which architectural and material aesthetics circulated through multiple channels, with commercial print media playing a particularly visible role.
The study approaches the foreign catalogues not simply as commercial instruments but as visual-technical interfaces that shaped local understandings of construction, ornament, and stylistic modernity. Beyond the catalogues sent directly to the imperial court, many detailed visuals from European firms reached Istanbul through commission agents and major department stores catering to the city’s upper-middle classes. Many catalogues introduced mass-produced architectural components, from façade elements to decorative details. Others, such as M. Thams & Cie, Kaeffer & Cie, and Christoph & Unmack, went further, promoting fully prefabricated wooden structures designed to be shipped as complete sets for on-site assembly. Together, these materials expanded what builders and consumers in Istanbul could imagine—and practically realize—in domestic construction, while also interacting with local craft practices and existing timber-based building traditions, creating a field in which imported and indigenous visual cultures met and were reinterpreted. Drawing on archival catalogues, periodical sources, and surviving houses, the study compares patterns in the Paris-printed La Décoration en bois découpé and the Istanbul-produced Ahırkapı Factory catalogue, tracing their circulation and material reflections in Istanbul.
The paper suggests that architectural transformation in late Ottoman Istanbul was driven not only by stylistic adoption but by a broader visual economy that reorganized how buildings were conceived and assembled. Commercial catalogues acted as intermediaries between local craftsmanship and industrial production abroad, generating new aesthetic norms and material preferences. In this sense, Istanbul’s early twentieth-century urban modernity was shaped as much by the circulation of images as by the buildings constructed in their wake.
*This paper is supported by a research project funded by the Scientific Research Projects Unit (BAP) of Istanbul Technical University.
Session 63 - Changing emotions in changing cities. The emotions of customers and retailers in urbanising and globalising Europe (1850-1950)
Ways of buying and selling changed dramatically as Europe urbanised. This session investigates urban retailing and consumption from the perspective of the history of emotions, with a focus on globalising urban networks of commodities, bottom-up perspectives, and retailer's strategies.
Coordinators: Anneleen Arnout, Lea Leboissetier
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Coordinators: Anneleen Arnout, Lea Leboissetier
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Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 303 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Sound of Nineteenth-century Antwerp – towards an exploration of sonic territories in a modernizing city
Ilja Van Damme, Iason Jongepier
abstractIlja Van Damme, Iason Jongepier
Nineteenth-century Antwerp urban spaces are believed to have become increasingly ‘regulated’ and ‘disciplined’, heralding the the so-called ‘fall of public man’. At the same time, everyday life remained intimately tied to town squares and open public spaces, both for political, economic, and socio-cultural reasons. Various social groups, from retailers, over town criers, to flâneurs, tried to appropriate public spaces for their own goals and means. In what way did sounds play a role in this as obvious ‘performative constructs’, prompting people to respond in certain ways, and eliciting certain emotional responses, physical reactions, and socio-cultural perceptions and associations? This paper will explore the 19th century soundscape of Antwerp by assessing the spatial distribution of these various social groups and the ‘typical’ sounds associated with their activities. After a spatial exploration of the entire 19th century inner city, we will zoom-in geographically on a series of Antwerp town squares and public spaces, to determine their specificity through the notion of ‘sonic territory’. Which sounds are connected to which squares? What emotions, practices, and meanings do these sounds provoke? Do we notice ‘power battles’ over sound, in which certain social groups try to appropriate the character of place for their overall intentions?
‘No one was afraid of a young girl selling onions!’ How emotions shaped itinerant trading interaction in urban Britain (1850-1950)
Lea Leboissetier
abstractLea Leboissetier
'I think it was easier for a young girl like me to sell onions than it was for the men Onion Johnnies. In Scotland no one was afraid of a young girl selling onions! It was a question of charm, voilà! (…) I think people rather felt sorry for me!' recalls Anna Gourlet about her travels to Edinburgh as a teenage French onion pedlar in the mid-1930s (MACDOUGALL, 2002, p.63). Anna must have indeed seem rather out of the ordinary for her customers, rather than frightening. Between 1850 and 1950, Britain’s commercial landscape evolved tremendously: contemporaries argued that new outlets such as mail order or department stores allowed consumers to shop more rationally and anonymously. In the eyes of contemporary observers, these new means of distribution were bound to replace more ‘traditional’ retail outlets, such as fairs or itinerant retailers. They believed this was a positive change: negative stereotypes underlining the emotional aspect – and, in their eyes, irrational – of itinerant retailing were circulated among reformers, the police and in the press. These stereotypes were heavily gendered and racialised: pedlars were described as unscrupulous men or marginal vagrants who forced their wares on working-class housewives either by abusing their empathy, seducing or scaring them. As for female consumers, they were often pictured as impressionable and easily tempted to buy goods they did not need. However, looking at working-class autobiographies and ego document paint a different, more subtle picture. If emotions like fear and guilt did play a part in those interactions, so did more positive feelings, such as curiosity, joy, or sympathy. Adopting a bottom-up approach invites us to think about the agency of both traders and customers, who played on each other’s emotional expectations and engaged in performances designed to evoke a specific emotional response in the other – be it familiarity for regulars, pity for the poorest, curiosity for racialized pedlars or amusement and awe for quack doctors or those selling novelty goods on the street. Customers, on the other hand, were far from passive and responded to those performances, for example by displaying enthusiasm or suspicion. This paper explores how these emotions evolved in a period of urbanization, commercial innovations, and increased overseas migrations.
Session 64 - How did cities entertain their guests? Exploring the (dis)connections between tourism and entertainment industries, 1800-2000
This session explores the historical entanglements between tourism and entertainment. How crucial was entertainment to sell the city to tourists and conversely, how important were tourists for the development of entertainment industries in cities? Were certain activities, like gambling, more prone to being entangled with tourism than others?
Coordinators: Torsten Feys, Jan Hein Furnée, Gerrit Verhoeven
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Coordinators: Torsten Feys, Jan Hein Furnée, Gerrit Verhoeven
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Session 64 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 222 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Worth the gamble? Tourism and the embeddedness of gambling in seaside resorts: the case of Ostend at the Belgian coast (1878-1930)
Evert Lambrechts
abstractEvert Lambrechts
This PhD research examines the role of gambling and casinos in the development of seaside resorts between 1878 and 1930. Despite its economic and social significance, tourism remains underexplored in historical research. The project focuses on Ostend, a booming and well-connected European resort town that used gambling to spur its development, before it became increasingly contested, prohibited in 1902, and permitted again in the 1920s. This context allows for an exploration of both how gambling established itself as a key sector of the coastal tourist industry and how seaside resorts functioned as hubs of elite mobility with global ramifications within a specific local setting. The project adopts an actor-centred approach, analyzing (1) the transnational networks of Kursaal concession holders - with significant connections with French seaside resorts - and (2) the construction of Ostend’s gambling climate by various stakeholders within changing legal frameworks. The study integrates transnational (Sûreté Publique files, foreign archives), national (parliamentary debates, court case files), and local (travel guides, newspapers, city council records) sources, enabling a global microhistorical perspective. By combining quantitative analysis with qualitative methods, this project reconstructs the processes that made gambling central to Ostend’s tourist industry. Understanding the historical processes shaping seaside resorts provides broader insights into global trends that persist today.
Tourism, Nightlife and Transgression: Lisbon’s Downtown Clubs (1917-1928)
Cecília Vaz
abstractCecília Vaz
The diversification of nightlife leisure venues in a cosmopolitan urban space emerged almost as a requirement of “contemporary civilization” in the aftermath of the First World War. On its own scale, Lisbon also created its own spaces.
Between 1917 and 1928, it is possible to identify several establishments with similar characteristics. They were mostly concentrated in the downtown area, around Restauradores and Avenida da Liberdade, occupying luxurious townhouses or rehabilitating 19th-century buildings. Self-named as night-clubs or restaurant-dancings, later commonly known as “Downtown Clubs”, these venues catered to a young, bourgeois, well-travelled male clientele. They distinguished themselves from other venues by their late-night operation and forms of entertainment, which included drinking while watching variety shows, listening to a jazz band, dancing, and socializing with attractive women. However, gambling was consistently identified as their true essence and the most significant source of profit.
Associated with various forms of moral and legal transgression, these clubs were condemned as dens of physical and moral corruption, slowly degrading all social groups, while simultaneously praised as symbols of modern urban civilization, indispensable for welcoming foreign visitors. Their short and irregular existence was shaped largely by police raids to repress gambling and by the 1927 legislation, which prohibited gambling nationwide, except in designated tourist areas. The total prohibition of gambling in Lisbon contrasted sharply with its authorization in Estoril, less than 25 km away.
In this presentation, I will explore how Lisbon’s clubs embodied the political and social tensions raised by the ambition to expand attractions and entertainment that could stimulate leisure and tourism in Portugal’s capital city, an economic and political centre expected to be dedicated to work and productivity. To address these issues, I draw on a diverse set of sources, including the press, legislation, literary works, and iconography.
What were the main drivers behind the emergence of these night-clubs in Lisbon? What role did tourism play in their definition and development? To what extent were the activities promoted geared towards tourists rather than locals? How was the argument of tourism used to defend their continued existence? Why were some practices and behaviours seen as transgressive allowed in tourist contexts but not in the urban space?
Suburban Tourism and Gender in Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s
Shuichi Takashima
abstractShuichi Takashima
This paper examines which entertainment industries grew alongside the rise of tourism in Japanese cities from the 1910s to the 1960s and reveals the social issues hidden within them. One such issue was a persisting gender gap.
Tourism flourished in Japan during the first half of the 20th century. While Western tourists increased, the expansion of the entertainment industry was largely driven by domestic travel. Entertainment such as visiting suburban parks to view flowers existed since the Early Modern period, but these were not for families but rather for adult men accompanied by women (often not their wives). Visiting shrines and temples, too, was popular, partly because entertainment districts, including brothels, were in their vicinity. This situation persisted until the 1910s, with some railway companies even trying to attract passengers specifically to visit “pleasure quarters”
From the 1920s onward, tourism became more “wholesome” alongside the growth of the urban middle class and the rise of the Western-style modern family. “Amusement parks” transformed into places featuring attractions for children and sports fields. Shrines and temples also changed: for example, the premises of Hikawa Shrine in Saitama Prefecture, reachable by train from Tokyo in about an hour, saw “questionable” places removed and replaced with sports fields. However, the gender gap did not disappear. During World War II, the Japanese government promoted hiking under the banner of physical fitness, modeled after Germany's Wandervogel movement. While women weren't explicitly excluded, photographs and pamphlets featured only men.
Postwar tourism often featured representations that (unconsciously) treated women as appendages to men. Enryaku-ji Temple on Mount Hiei, with over 1000 years of history, collaborated with a railway company in the 1960s to build a toll road for motorists to attract tourists. Its brochure featured a photo of a man driving an American-made open-top car accompanied by two geisha (Japan's “traditional” female hostesses) in the back seat.
It will be argued, that, while the direct link between tourism and the sex industry weakened at least superficially after the 1920s, the reproduction of gender bias through the combination of tourism and commercialism continued far into the postwar period.
Tourism and the Entertainment Landscape in the Making of Post-war Greek Cities
Aikaterini Karadima
abstractAikaterini Karadima
This paper explores how Greek cities in the post-war period (1945–1974) constructed a diverse system of hospitality and entertainment for foreign visitors at a time when mass tourism was rapidly expanding. Focusing on Athens and selected island destinations, the study examines how state policies, architectural interventions and cultural representations intersected to create a coherent, though often ambivalent, entertainment environment for tourists.
Following the Second World War, tourism became a central component of Greece’s economic reconstruction. Integrated into the wider dynamics of global capitalism and the rise of consumer culture, the sector grew rapidly with the support of the Marshall Plan, American aid missions and early technical assessments of the country’s touristic assets. From the early 1950s, the Greek state sought to create a unified “tourist space” through the establishment of new institutional frameworks and the implementation of programmes targeting infrastructure, heritage management and the projection of an appealing national image abroad.
Within this evolving framework, Greek cities developed an entertainment landscape strongly shaped by cultural narratives. Antiquity served as a central reference point, while the islands were promoted as idealised settings of “sun and sea”, associated with simplicity, exoticism and local charm. Urban entertainment, however, extended beyond official sightseeing to include cosmopolitan nightlife, casinos, seaside recreation centres, modern hotels conceived as architectural landmarks and an expanding array of cultural events. These spaces carried both economic value and symbolic significance, expressing Greece’s aspirations for modernity and its desire to position itself within a broader Western cultural and touristic sphere.
Tourism-driven entertainment also reshaped the spatial and social fabric of cities, as visitor-oriented areas were arranged to appear welcoming and culturally distinctive, even when they reflected selective interpretations of local reality. As a result, communities increasingly adapted their customs and social practices to meet visitors’ expectations, incorporating aspects of everyday life into the entertainment economy.
The paper argues that entertainment in post-war Greece operated as a cultural and political force through which Greek cities reshaped their urban identity and space and devised new ways of presenting themselves to international audiences.
An (Un)eventful City. Festivals as entertainment for tourists and inhabitants alike in twentieth-century Ghent
Silke Geven
abstractSilke Geven
In 1962, a heated discussion arose between Henri Buntinx, the Flemish press representative of the Commissariaat Generaal voor Toerisme (CGT), and Jacques Vander Stegen, head of the Commission for Tourism Promotion of Ghent, regarding the Gentse Feesten [Ghent Festivities]. Buntinx suggested promoting the festivities as a national event to attract more domestic and international tourists. Yet according to Vander Stegen, these festivities were “an initiative of [the] local city administration, without any national, let alone international, pretenses and [were] only intended to offer relaxation to residents who cannot leave the city during the holiday period.” Nowadays, the Gentse Feesten have evolved into a ten-day festival, attracting more than a million visitors from the city itself, across the country, and even from the rest of Europe. Somewhere along the way, the target audience for the Gentse Feesten shifted from a primarily city-based festival to a much wider audience beyond the city walls.
Festivals have long been a key component of the urban economy. As John and Margaret Gold state, they are “media for the transmission and reception of culture, significant ingredients in creating and maintaining place identity and an intrinsic part of the urban economy”. Various researchers have identified a growing “festivalization” of post-industrial cities, in which the number and role of festivals increased, leading some cities to become “places of constant festival”. While the importance of festivals has been widely acknowledged, how they were incorporated into urban tourism promotion was not. This research delves deeper into the evolving urban promotional strategies of tourism organizations in the Belgian city of Ghent between 1880 and 1980. It examines the role these organizations assigned to events in their promotional strategies, which events they promoted to a broader audience, and how that audience evolved. To address these questions, a diverse corpus of sources will be analyzed, including the annual reports of local grassroots organizations Gent-Attractions and Gent-en-avant!, the Commissie voor Vreemdelingenverkeer [Ghent Commission for Tourism Promotion], letters addressed to this Commission, and newspaper articles from local newspapers De Vooruit, De Gentenaar, and Het Volk. Through this analysis, I aim to offer fresh insights into the role of festivals in promoting urban tourism.
Session 64 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 222 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Outward Splendor, Inner Division? Urban Entertainment Projects in Partitioned Poland
Vincent Hoyer
abstractVincent Hoyer
By the late 19th century, the partitioned Polish lands were often regarded as peripheral or backward from the imperial capitals. Cities such as Warsaw, Lviv, or Poznań made efforts to bring themselves onto the map, both in their empires and for tourists beyond. One of the means for visibility consisted of monumental and technologically advanced entertainment venues, such as entertainment parks, architecturally outstanding variety theaters, or so-called Ice Palaces. These venues were constructed to showcase modern urban life and attract tourists, confirming the supposed progress.
Yet, such flagship projects often led to conflicts in the cities. Existing venues feared competition, especially when backed by foreign investment. For example, initiators from the German Empire had trouble gaining a foothold in Warsaw and Lviv due to Polish-national advocacy. In contrast, investors from Great Britain and France, whose projects were framed as making the cities more appealing to foreign tourists, often received a warmer welcome. Still, the multiethnic character of these cities complicated matters further: In Poznan, the Polish press urged boycotts of German-led events, Warsaw newspapers ran campaigns against venues with Jewish shareholders, and Ruthenian nationalists tried to undermine entertainment offers associated with Polish nation-building efforts in Lviv.
This paper examines how local governments and businesses navigated these challenges and balanced the demands of local as well as foreign stakeholders and audiences. I argue that only projects that carefully evaluated and lobbied the different, often ethnically framed stakeholders in the cities had chances of success.
Come bike with me, let’s bike, let’s bike away. Analysing leisure cycling in interwar Flanders as a form of nation-building ‘adventure’.
Kas Swerts
abstractKas Swerts
The connection between cycling as a sport and nationalism has attracted plenty of attention in both historical and nationalism studies in recent years. In the Belgian case for example, this has resulted in an emphasis on the one hand on iconic cyclists (like Eddy Merckx) and their relation with (sub)national identity, and on the other hand on actors that helped shape narratives on cycling as a sport, which subsequently influenced (sub)national discourses - such as the early 20th-century Flemish national journalist Karel Van Wijnendaele.
The link between tourism and nationalism, by contrast, has only recently received more scholarly attention in Belgium. Recent research for example has paid attention to the way cycling as a tourist activity proved instrumental in creating and fostering national identities (both Flemish and Belgian) during the interwar period. This article will further explore this relation between cycling as a tourist – leisurely – activity and nationalism, by highlighting how this dynamic also influenced the entertainment industries in not only the bigger cities (such as Antwerp or Ghent), but also smaller Flemish towns and villages. Focusing on local cycling clubs associated with (sub)national tourist associations such as the Vlaamse Toeristenbond [Flemish Tourist Association] and the Touring Club de Belgique [Belgian Touring Club], this article will argue that cycling tourists were instrumental in the emergence of local tourism and relevant (local) entertainment as a new locus, in addition to the existing tourist ‘hotspots’ such as the Belgian coast and the major cities.
Cycling tourists, it will be argued, contributed to the emergence of local tourist entertainment, such as folklore museums and observation towers, and spurred the development of more nature-oriented entertaining activities (and by extension, ecological awareness). In addition, this article posits that cycling itself proved entertaining for the tourists, because it constituted – borrowing German sociologist Georg Simmel’s concept – an ‘adventure’: “a particular form”, as Simmel argued, “in which fundamental categories of life are synthesized.” By using Simmel’s concept, the article finally aims to highlight how cycling, because it constituted an ‘entertaining adventure’, also proved instrumental in the development of (sub)national identities during this period.
Siegfried Sitte’s design for Zell am See—touristic traces in the urban landscape
Stefan J Kubin, Angelika Psenner
abstractStefan J Kubin, Angelika Psenner
Siegfried Sitte’s design for Zell am See—touristic traces in the urban landscape
The paper deals with the morphogenetic analysis of an Austrian tourist destination, examining its development in the interwar period. As one of the most significant Alpine tourism hubs under the First Republic, Zell am See was able to maintain its upswing throughout the politically and economically difficult interwar period. In the mid-1920s, Austrian architect Siegfried Sitte—son of the well-known urban theorist Camillo Sitte—designed a development plan for the Salzburg municipality of Zell am See, enhancing its touristic importance. Based on extensive document- and plan-research in the relevant archives, it discusses various factors on the shaping of the city and its landscape.
In the first profound scientific examinations, it was possible to explore the planning process and determine how Siegfried applied the essential planning principles of his famous father, Camillo. The development plan was created using in-depth understanding of the local environment and conditions, considering the topography, the historical buildings, and the existing touristic infrastructure. Siegfried Sitte developed a forward-looking plan that aimed to guide the future development of the tourist resort in an orderly manner, adding specialized infrastructure.
Although Siegfried Sitte's urban planning ideas were closely related to those of his father, Camillo Sitte, they were hardly ever put into practice, according to a prior assessment of his works. As a result, the paper aims to address the following queries regarding Zell am See's urban history: What aspects of the development plan were really implemented, how important is Sitte's design for the municipality, and how viable were his ideas on “tourism” for the Salzburg community overall?
The “KdF City” as the “Gateway to the World”: Hamburg under the Nazi regime
Takahito Mori
abstractTakahito Mori
Under the Nazi regime, Hamburg was known as the “KdF City”. KdF (Kraft durch Freude [Strength through Joy]) was the national leisure organisation established by the Nazi regime, famous for developing a wide variety of domestic and international tours. Among these programs, the KdF Cruises to destinations such as the fjords of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean caused a great international sensation. Hamburg served as the port of departure and arrival for these KdF Cruises. Furthermore, from 1935 onwards, the city hosted the annual KdF National Congress, and in 1936, it became the venue for the Second World Recreation Congress. Consequently, Hamburg came to be known as the “KdF City”. During these Congresses, sports games, folk dance festivals and festive parades featuring groups invited from across Germany and Europe were held as entertainment programs. Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists from within Germany and abroad visited Hamburg to watch these events. The festive spaces staged by the KdF resulted in significant inbound effects for the city.
Moreover, it cannot be overlooked that Hamburg's appeal was promoted to tourists from both home and abroad under the catchphrase “Gateway to the World”. This catchphrase did not emerge during the Nazi regime; it was already widely established in the 1920s, a period considered to be the dawn of mass tourism. The phrase encapsulated the appeal of Hamburg as a port city – an ensemble of dreams and reality, labour and leisure, homeland and foreign lands. The elements representing the appeal of the “Gateway to the World” included not only the urban landscape, such as harbor facilities and modernism architectures exemplified by the Chilehaus, but also various entertainment venues like Hagenbeck Zoo, the vast green spaces of the Stadtpark, and the Reeperbahn, one of the world's most renowned entertainment districts. Among these, the Reeperbahn was particularly notable for the presence of foreign tourists.
How were the aspects of Hamburg as the “KdF City” and as the “Gateway to the World” each contributed to attract tourists? Furthermore, what synergistic effects did these two aspects produce in attracting tourists? Within this process, what strategies did the city's stakeholders deploy? Exploring these questions, this paper shows a case of the entanglements between tourism and entertainment under the Nazi regime.
Session 65 - Sexual Metropolitans? Intercity Networks and Shared Cultures of Sexuality in Modern Cities
This session offers to bring together historians and social scientists studying modern urban sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the following theme: is there a common sexual culture in large cities of the late modern and contemporary eras, and what role do inter-urban circulations and networks play in its development?
Coordinators: Cristina De Pedro Álvarez, Romain Jaouen
show/hide introduction
Coordinators: Cristina De Pedro Álvarez, Romain Jaouen
show/hide introduction
Session 65 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Sucking the Cane: Phallic Walking Sticks in the Late 19th Century City
Peter K. Andersson
abstractPeter K. Andersson
An urban type closely linked to the urbanisation of 19th-century Europe is the dandy. A recurring figure and object of scorn in media and popular culture across the western world from the 1810s until the early 20th century, the dandy personified the sexualised nature of the young urban male in a changing cultural and social landscape. Of the many attributes and fashions associated with dandies, the walking stick was perhaps the most evocative. Throughout the century, writers and commentators devoted exhaustive attention to the way canes were carried and held in public places. Some ways were obtrusive and flashy – others were suggestive. One of the most common ways of portraying dandies in art and caricature from the early 19th to the early 20th century was to show him with his cane to his mouth. The practice of “sucking the cane” was also frequently referenced in journalism, fiction and satire as a means of portraying the dandy’s idle and immoral nature. An apparently common and recognisable trope across the western world, dandies with canes to their mouths can be found as a motif in several countries, exemplifying the way not only fashions but also mannerisms and conduct spread from city to city.
Building on research carried out for the book The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2025), this paper explores the significance of the dandy as a sexualised figure in processes of urbanisation through the material culture of the walking stick. As demonstrated by the book, English dandy types such as the “swell” in the 1820s and the “masher” in the 1880s were defined by their sexual voraciousness and male gaze. This aspect was likewise accentuated in the Parisian gandins of the 1860s and the Viennese Gigerl of the 1890s. All these dandy types were intimately linked to the world of prostitution and entertainment, developing gestures and poses that can be found across wide geographical distances suggesting a circulation of non-verbal cues. The walking stick became the main phallic symbol in this culture. With examples from written sources and preserved walking sticks in museum collections, this paper will explore the role of dandyism in the inter-city dissemination of sexualised conduct codes.
Madams of the Margin: Entrepreneurs, Brothels and Urban Transformation in 's-Hertogenbosch, 1860-1905
Wilma Van Den Brink
abstractWilma Van Den Brink
This paper examines how brothel keepers in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch adapted their businesses to urban and cultural change between 1860 and the introduction of the local brothel ban in 1905. In this period of economic growth and rural to urban migration, the emerging middle classes reframed prostitution from a ‘necessary evil’ to a social problem that had to be abolished. As prostitution increasingly moved underground in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, it declined in medium-sized cities such as ’s-Hertogenbosch. As a provincial capital, garrison town, and transit hub, ’s-Hertogenbosch is used as a case study for this research. It draws primarily on archival sources, including population registers, court records, cadastral and mortgage data. The research shows a clear distinction of how the brothel keepers of smaller and of larger brothels dealt with the changes, organized their establishments and understood their business. Keepers of the smaller establishments treated their business as short-term sources of income. They rented premises, relied on alcohol sales, and were particularly vulnerable to urban redevelopment and the Dutch Liquor Act. Alcohol abuse, assault charges, and unstable recruitment practices undermined their reputations, and ultimately the continuity of their business. Consequently, most of these brothels had disappeared by the late 1880s. By contrast, brothel keepers with larger establishments treated their business as long-term investments. They purchased property, employed more women, and developed extensive networks in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. To adapt to changing circumstances, they recruited slightly older women and encouraged longer stays. They also invested more in complying with medical regulations and avoided legal conflicts, helping them to establish a more reliable reputation. The strategies enabled them to survive in an increasingly hostile urban and moral environment. The case study therefore presents these “madams of the margin” as professional entrepreneurs who built profitable businesses through financial capital, human assets, and social networks.
Towards a shared urban sexual material culture? Reflections from a Paris-based case study (1880s-1930s)
Pauline Mortas
abstractPauline Mortas
This paper draws on a PhD dissertation on the history of the market for sex products (contraceptives and abortifacients, remedies for sexual disorders, and erotic accessories) in France during the so-called “first sexual revolution” (1880s–1930s).
Focused primarily on France, this study revealed the existence of imperial and transnational circulations of both these products and the individuals involved in their trade, as well as transnational connections between vendors and customers. To investigate these dynamics, the research drew on advertising sources, industrial property records, judicial files, and business archives.
The paper first questions the urban nature of this market as it emerged in late nineteenth-century France. Although a large majority of the manufacturers and merchants involved in this trade lived in Paris or other large cities, various sources suggest that the consumption of these products was not confined to urban spaces and progressively spread to more rural areas, thanks to the large-scale development of mail-order sales.
It then addresses the transnational circulation of sex products. A study of advertisements, promotional leaflets, and trade catalogs first shows than many of the products circulating in Paris were not manufactured there, but came from other Western cities, including those in Britain, Germany, Austria or the United States, for example. Conversely, foreign marketing materials show that French products were sold and consumed abroad, suggesting the emergence of a transnational, inter-urban sexual material culture. The paper also underlines that, while several elements point to such developments, the market for sex products was not yet fully globalized and retained significant national specificities. It identifies several institutional, legal, and economic factors that help explain why certain sex products flourished in the cities of some countries but remained uncommon in others. Moreover, the geographical origin of these products often proves difficult to trace, as many vendors relied on foreign imagery to market goods that were in fact manufactured locally or elsewhere.
Finally, the paper examines the trajectories of a few Parisian vendors, showing that some of them led transnational lives. Others, while based in Paris, deliberately targeted foreign customers. These behaviours have facilitated the dissemination of sex products across cities and contributed to the homogenization of sexual practices across borders.
Erotic Innovations: Oral Sex as Modernity between Paris, London, and Buenos Aires
Magdalene Klassen
abstractMagdalene Klassen
Despite extensive documentation from classical sources onwards, oral sex appeared to interwar practitioners and detractors alike to be “the twentieth-century way.” It was also distinctly French—as one early pornographic film announced, oral sex was the “latest importation from Paris.” This paper seeks to understand the logics and practices of fellatio and cunnilingus between London, Paris, and Buenos Aires during the interwar period, when the commercial sexual cultures of these three cities were particularly interconnected. In doing so, I draw on the records and observations of anti-trafficking investigations by the National Vigilance Association and the League of Nations and pornographic depictions of oral sex from this period. My argument is twofold. Firstly, drawing on Christopher Chitty’s framework of “sexual hegemony” and Elisa Camiscioli’s recent study of the “Frenchness” of interwar commercial sex, I suggest that both anti-trafficking activists and brokers in the sex trades identified oral sex as a French innovation that escalated the efficiency and the transgression of paid sex. Appealing to the novelty of this innovation was both a regulatory and promotional strategy that connected urban sexual cultures through appeals to a sensationalised cosmopolitan modernity. Secondly, by analysing pornographic representations of oral sex, I show the material circulation of sexual practices through illicit networks and their use of increasingly accessible technologies of visual representation. In light of Heather Berg’s insight that “every porn scene is a record of people at work,” I analyse these images not only as examples of erotic labour, but as representations which eroticise workers and workplaces: the women and men depicted in these images have been photographed against backdrops evoking brothels, cafes, and kitchens. As these images of oral sex circulated across the world, they heightened the excitement of novel sexual practice by embedding it in scenes of everyday life.
Close reading of investigative reports and pornographic material from these three cities demonstrate that oral sex was at once an ethnic niche in the international sex trade, a pragmatic economic strategy, a convergence between heterosexual and queer sexual transgression, and a remarkably popular service.
Session 65 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Muguette and X. Pepito, from Barcelone to Paris, from Paris to Berlin: Interurban Circulations of Scene Practices through Queer Cabaret in Europe, 1919-1939
Sacha Najman
abstractSacha Najman
Given the shared culture of cross-dressing practices across European cities during the interwar period, this proposal adresses the circulation of female impersonators within the framework of professional touring. The notion of scene, drawn from sociology, is used, both to consider the cultural practices of camp and drag in spatial terms, and to observe the networks formed within a collective understood as a professional group: female impersonators and their workplace, the cabarets.
The intervention takes as its case study the social and artistic mobilities between Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona of two female impersonators understood in terms of their careers: Muguette and X. Pepito. Conceived as a way to move beyond the subcultures, frozen into binary oppositions, the notion of scene can be understood simultaneously in local and translocal terms, encouraging the observation of the of the artists’ and publics’ circulations between major cities.
Muguette leaves the cabaret La Petite Chaumière to work in Berlin – a journey documented both by the critic Gustave Fréjaville and by the police upon her return to Paris, marked by a mysterious and tragic death. Pepito arrives in Paris from Barcelona and is expelled from France after being arrested at La Petite Chaumière: the file kept in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior allows us to trace the role of cabaret and artistic work in his migratory trajectory, highlighting at the same time the value of an intersectional approach to study the processual dimension of deviance. Through the notion of scene, these cases help to articulate the idea that scene practices contribute to the formation of queer worlds, thereby raising questions about queerness as a cultural practice, through the circulation of professional knowledge.
Adopting the form of a microhistory, this proposal aims to explore the circulation of scene practices related to camp, drag, and cross-dressing, in order to examine the relationship between gender styles and working styles in interwar Europe. The circulation of cultural references through the performances of Muguette and Pepito, such as the showbiz queens Raquel Meller, Mistinguett, and Marlene Dietrich, helps to understand the fabric of a camp culture. In other words, this work is based on the idea that scene and sexuality do no preexist the discussion, but are rather woven through the interactions that occur withing these circulations: the scene practices.
Across the Atlantic and Back Again: Men, Migration, and the Making of Queer Belfast
Tom Hulme
abstractTom Hulme
This paper argues that the development of a modern male queer experience in Belfast in the early to mid-20th century must be understood not as the product of isolated social conditions, but as the outcome of sustained urban exchange across the Irish Sea and the Atlantic world. Rather than viewing Belfast as a peripheral or delayed participant in queer modernity, I argue it was an active node within networks linking cosmopolitan port cities such as London and New York. Through the circulation of migrant labourers, sailors, literary culture, and sexological discourse, Belfast’s urban environment became a contact zone in which competing models of gender and sexuality were transmitted, negotiated, and reconfigured.
Using a spatial lens, I examine how specific urban infrastructures - docks, boarding houses, public toilets, mission halls, libraries, and transport hubs - functioned as transitory yet crucial sites of queer encounter. These liminal zones shaped patterns of anonymous sociability and coded communication that mirrored similar practices in larger Atlantic cities, suggesting that a comparable scene emerged across transitory urban places. Belfast’s queer culture was thus not repressed or invisible, as we might have expected given the intense religiosity of Ireland, but rather embedded within everyday rhythms of circulation and exchange that characterised Irish life.
Intellectual frameworks of sexuality similarly travelled through these networks. Even in the absence of sustained public debate or governmental acknowledgement, imported medical, psychological, and theological ideas provided models of self-understanding for Belfast’s queer men. These discourses entered the city not through official channels but via informal reading networks, religious communities, and travel encounters. The result was queer subject formation at the intersection of local and global knowledge flows.
By foregrounding movement, whether of bodies, texts, or understandings, I challenge narratives of national stories of queerness that are rooted in legal or domestic developments. Instead, I propose a model of queer urban history that emphasises circulation as a way of creating belonging and identity.
Holiday Cities, Modern Desires: Mediterranean Mass Tourism and Sexual Liberalization in 1960s Opatija and Rimini
Anita Buhin
abstractAnita Buhin
This paper proposes a comparative urban history of Rimini (Italy) and Opatija (Yugoslavia) as Adriatic coastal cities that played a crucial role in reshaping sexual norms and leisure practices during the 1960s in their respective countries. Though not metropolitan centres, both towns had long histories as elite resorts dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1960s, they had undergone dramatic transformations into mass-tourism hubs, characterised by urban infrastructures catering to modern leisure: hotels, promenades, dance venues, and casinos. Despite belonging to opposing political systems during the Cold War, Rimini and Opatija exhibited strikingly similar developments in tourism, leisure, and sexuality. These parallels cannot be explained solely through domestic processes. The central argument is that tourist towns such as Rimini and Opatija functioned as key nodes of modernity within their respective national contexts, alongside capital cities. Their seasonal urbanism and international openness allowed them to operate as laboratories of social and sexual liberalisation. The internationalisation of the summer population, particularly the influx of young, often Northern or Western European female tourists, created new affective and sexual geographies, especially among local young men. These interactions were mediated and magnified through the European popular press, which presented images of fun-loving, sexually liberated foreign women and flirtatious Mediterranean men against a backdrop of sunny modernity or urban nightlife. By focusing on these representations, this paper contributes to rethinking the Mediterranean not as a static space of backwardness, underdevelopment, and sexual conservatism, as often suggested in Anglophone anthropological literature of the 1960s, but as a region actively participating in, and helping to shape, European sexual modernity. Opatija and Rimini, though politically and administratively marginal, emerged as highly connected urban nodes within a broader inter-city network of tourism, desire, and sexual experimentation. Ultimately, this paper suggests that Mediterranean tourist cities should be understood as central actors in the circulation of sexual cultures across post-war Europe. They not only absorbed but also projected new models of urban and sexual modernity, in that way complicating national, Cold War, and centre-periphery narratives in both urban and sexual historiography.
Scene But Not Heard: the hidden cultures of drag, gender and sexual identity in 1980s Hull
James Greenhalgh
abstractJames Greenhalgh
During the 1980s and 1990s a drag scene flourished in one of the most deprived areas of the northern English city of Kingston-upon-Hull. Along Hessle Road, once the epicentre of Hull’s fishing community, and in the adjacent streets and courts, night after night acts like West Yorkshire drag stars The Dreamgirls, or Hull’s own drag queen-pin Bobby Mandrell played to packed pubs and Working Men’s Clubs, to both locals and a cosmopolitan cast of ships’ crews spending their pay overnight in Hull’s docks. In a period marked by both violence against and activism by various coalitions amongst the emerging LGBTQ+ community , and, latterly the emergence of the more metropolitan, commercialised gay villages like that in Manchester, the drag scene in Hull represented something else. This paper - based on the ongoing Heritage Lottery Funded project ‘Scene But Not Heard’, a community heritage project run with art collective Three Ways East - demonstrates the existence of an LGBTQ+ scene and community that was malleable and resits easy classification, framed against the background of deprivation and deindustrialization amongst England's northern cities. It was a culture that was embedded within distinct regional networks of performers that spanned the northern part of England, from Liverpool and Leeds in the west to Hull and Newcastle in the North and East, stretching into midlands cities like Nottingham. It was at once a distinct ‘scene’, but almost entirely catered to hertronormative patterns of working-class culture, like club nights, ‘hen dos’ and a range of themed nights. Drag acts formed part of a culture of gay and trans performers and their supporting cast of costumiers, stylists, venue owners, comedians and musicians, that was paradoxically secretive whilst continually on display. The case study of Hull thus highlights both the complex layered networks in which a range of queer identities might flourish in the period, but also underscores the manner in which they were forced to remain hidden in plain sight within broader cultures of working-class performance and leisure.
Session 65 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Provincial Queers in Late-Francoist Northwestern Spain: “Decentering” the Dictatorship’s Dissident Cultural Repertoires
Miguel Fernández-Turuelo, Irene Marina Pérez-Méndez
abstractMiguel Fernández-Turuelo, Irene Marina Pérez-Méndez
When we think of sexual and gender dissidence, we usually picture subjectivities rooted in the gay (sub)cultures of major urban centres: Paris’ Le Marais, London’s Soho, or Madrid’s Chueca. This urban-centred conception not only shapes collective consciousness but also much of the theoretical scholarship on these issues. When Henning Bech described the city in 1997 as “the proper place of homosexual culture,” it was precisely such spaces that attracted most historiographical attention.
The study of dissident sexualities under Franco’s dictatorship has been no exception, focusing largely on Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, or Bilbao. This metropolitan bias has often obscured other realities, such as the case of Rambal, a cross-dresser from Gijón (Asturias). A key figure within the city’s queer landscape, Rambal openly embraced his sexuality under Francoism and endures in popular culture as a symbol of resistance. Yet his figure has remained largely overlooked in academic scholarship as a case of non-urban sex-gender dissidence.
This paper contributes to the “decentring” of that perspective by examining the cultural repertoires of the so-called maricas de provincia — queer subjects whose experiences diverged from those in large cities. Our analysis draws on the peligrosidad social (social dangerousness) case files opened against “homosexuals” in north-western Spain between 1966 and 1975. These files not only expose mechanisms of social control but — through behavioural reports and defendants’ statements — reveal dissident (sub)cultures that often elude historiographical attention. Oral testimonies complement these materials, helping to reconstruct our object of study.
Some of our guiding questions include: What cultural repertoires were deployed by sexual and gender dissidents in north-western Spain under Francoism? Were they influenced by major Spanish or European cities, or by other contexts? Can we identify provincial subcultures of sexual dissidence, or does this risk reproducing urban-centred paradigms? Ultimately, is it possible to write a history of sex-gender dissidence from the provinces without making the city the inevitable benchmark?
Rethinking Queer Political Participation through Urban Infrastructures: the Case of the Italian Homosexual Collective FUORI! (1971-1982)
Riccardo Bulgarelli
abstractRiccardo Bulgarelli
This paper examines the intersections between urbanity, sexuality, and the transformation of the political self within 1970s Italian homosexual political networks, focusing on the experience of FUORI! collective and its local, national, and transnational articulations. It explores the ambiguous nature of political self-recognition within the urban infrastructures of activism, understood as spaces where political and sexual networks overlap, generating at once change and persistence, visibility and marginality.
The analysis investigates the persistence of masculine cultures of urban sexuality, intersecting with the diffusion of transnational ideas linked to homosexual liberation. While activists’ narratives often described the 1970s as a period of radical self-transformation, sources and personal memories reveal the endurance of gender and sexual cultures and practices tied to the urban framework that continued to shape male and trans* sociability. The cultures of masculinity shaping urban queer geographies were reworked and re-signified through the creation of new urban political spaces.
By looking at masculinity as a relational practice, the paper addresses the ambiguous forms of marginality experienced by trans* subjectivities within these same activist infrastructures. Recalled in the memories of many activists yet often absent from the public agendas of homosexual liberation, trans* presences inhabited the urban collectives in ways that allowed them to reinterpret political goals through their embodied experiences. Even within male and cisgender-dominated settings, the urban activist group could become a site of partial political recognition and/or sociability, where marginality itself generated agency, translation, and new forms of self-recognition.
Situated at the intersection of political, urban, and sexual history, as well as of the history of queer subjectivity, this paper conceives homosexual politics as a queer process, in which the urban dimension operates as infrastructure. Urbanity appears as a space where gender, desire, and politics intertwine in the experience of individuals with different intersectional profiles, revealing the contradictory trajectories through which political participation around gender and sexuality took shape in 1970s Southern-Europe.
The imagery surrounding the "mecca of homosexual desire" in the Buenos Aires cultural movement of the 1980s
Marina Fernanda Suarez
abstractMarina Fernanda Suarez
The 1980s in Buenos Aires were a time between the end of military dictatorship and the dawn of democracy. In the gay community, which had been severely repressed during the years of state terrorism in Argentina (1976-1983) and punished by the repressive remnants of the democratic transition, both tourist travel and stays abroad played a fundamental role. In this context, in addition to transnational solidarity, certain cities positioned themselves as “gay travel destinations” among the people of Buenos Aires.
One of the “mecca” destinations for sexual dissidents were the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil, which represented a rite of passage for young people, especially homosexuals at that time. Perhaps one of the most prominent figures in the intellectual and artistic field of the 1980s who made the trip to São Paulo in 1982 (and never returned) was the writer Néstor Perlongher. Cecilia Palmeiro (2016) points out that his critical libertarian discourse on sexuality and drugs injected the force of the Brazilian sexual revolution into the underground of the 1980s through publications such as his newspaper articles published in El Porteño and in the Hojas de Ruta del Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Perlongher denounced the fact that there was no sexual liberation in Argentina, but rather persistent oppression of homosexuals, and he denounced the continuity of a morality from dictatorship to democracy, for example with the enforcement of police edicts that violated gay people. At the same time, as Perlongher pointed out in his seminal book El negocio del deseo (The Business of Desire, 1987), Brazil was the place in Latin America where homosexuals had achieved another level of organization (not without hierarchies). Another destination that positioned itself as an undisputed reference point for LGBT groups was the city of Madrid during the early years of Spain's transition to democracy. The “destape” (uncovering) and “la movida” (the movement) became synonymous with liberation and pride among the people of Buenos Aires. In this sense, transnational travel and movement involved not only the transfer of people, but also of practices and imaginaries that, in turn, positioned these destinations as “privileged” and as references for urban homosexual culture. This paper investigates the imaginaries that were constructed, from Buenos Aires, around São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid as modern and avant-garde cities within the gay world.
Beyond the Metropolis: Queer Connections and Regional Universities as Nodes of Circulation and Adaptation in Britain, 1970–1999
Garth Davis
abstractGarth Davis
The history of queer Britain has often been narrated through metropolitan centres, privileging urban density, anonymity and cultural visibility as foundations of modern sexual politics. This paper instead places non-metropolitan regional universities at the centre of analysis, examining how institutional structures shaped queer politics, organisation, welfare and sociability between 1970 and 1999. Comparing the University of Exeter, the University College of North Wales (UCNW) in Bangor and Lancaster University, it asks how institutional cultures, spatial arrangements and external relationships produced distinct conditions for queer activity while connecting local environments to regional and national networks.
Drawing on student newspapers, magazines and university handbooks, the paper examines institutionally situated forms of visibility, organisation and debate. Exeter’s concentrated campus enabled activists to receive and selectively reorganise circulating political forms while connecting students with the city and South-West networks. UCNW’s embedded position within a small bilingual city fostered relationships across Bangor, Gwynedd and North Wales, while wider queer politics was adapted through Welsh language and national identity. Lancaster’s purpose-built collegiate campus distributed welfare, representation and sociability across smaller institutional units, while its role as North-West coordinator in national student campaigning positioned it as an intermediary between regional campuses and networks.
Across the three cases, regional universities emerge as connective and interpretative nodes, receiving political languages, organisational models and welfare practices, reorganising them through distinctive institutional structures, and transmitting adapted forms across campus-city boundaries. The comparison also identifies an uneven shift from confrontational liberationist politics towards institutional recognition and welfare inclusion without displacing earlier activist repertoires. This process was neither synchronous nor cumulative. Institutionalisation expanded organisation, representation and support while preserving unequal access, disclosure risks and conditional forms of visibility. The paper therefore reframes British queer geography by demonstrating how historical significance could derive from institutional concentration, connectivity and network position without metropolitan urban scale.
Session 66 - Terraform: the interpretation of building as a practice of urbanization in the Anthropocene [Round Table]
This round table explores the study of building as practices of urbanization. Taking the lead of the broad understanding of building as terraforming (Nightingale) we will unpack the way in which cities have shaped both the conditions of their own construction as well as the contingent pathways for their sustainable transformation.
Coordinators: Michiel Dehaene, Tom Broes, Rika Devos, Carl Nightingale
show/hide introduction
Coordinators: Michiel Dehaene, Tom Broes, Rika Devos, Carl Nightingale
show/hide introduction
Session 66 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Practices of urbanization for the industrialization of the sites of urban construction:
Looking at the building of cities through the conditions of its production.
Michiel Dehaene, Tom Broes
abstractMichiel Dehaene, Tom Broes
Our contribution to the round table is based on the 3 years of research conducted within the EOS research project ‘Above and Beyond Construction History’ and more in particular the research track which looked at the urbanization of construction. We will unpack what it means to write urban construction histories attentive to the way in which practices of construction entail specific practices of urbanization and vice versa. In the period under study in the EOS project, roughly stretching from the second half of the 19th century to the end of the 20th, the story of urban construction is a story of the simultaneous industrialization and urbanization of city building. The literature on planetary urbanization engages in the interpretation of the shift from the city to extended urbanization and the changing relations between production and consumption. Less studied however is the role extended urbanization plays not only as growing markets of mass consumption but also as the fields where the final consumption of the construction industries are realized. In the context of the EOS project we looked at the suburban expansion of Belgium and the close ties between construction industries, spatial planning and public investment as a prefiguration of that logic. More specifically we will discuss where our efforts to study the industrialization of urban construction or alternatively the urbanization of industrial construction has methodologically led us. We will describe what needs to be studied and documented to understand which practices of urbanization the industrializing construction industries had to master to play their part in the building of entire urban landscapes. In our paper we will focus on one aspect in particular. We will discuss why building practices and their respective industries needed to be ‘federated’ in order to handle the question of continuous industrial production. We will discuss how the study of these industrial federations provides valuable sources to reconstruct the need to control the urbanization process (in particular infrastructure building) to guarantee the continuous realization of industrialized building materials in an urban market.
Urbanisation through mitigation. Urban political ecology and the black box of building practices and environmental policymaking
Koenraad Danneels
abstractKoenraad Danneels
Urban development has always involved negotiating between environmental ‘goods’—such as green space or clean air—and environmental ‘bads’—pollution, waste, or ecological degradation. From early modern public health campaigns to industrial-era zoning ordinances, from colonial ecological interventions to 20th-century greenbelt movements, cities have long experimented with mechanisms to manage, mitigate, or displace ecological harm. Today, however, compensation and mitigation are promoted by (landscape) planners as prime tools to offset—or neutralise—environmental impact, seemingly overlooking the trade-offs embedded in such technologies.
The (urban) history of such ‘socio-ecological trade-offs’ remains an undertheorised sidenote in studies of urban activism, urban nature conservation, and landscape and environmental history. Except for research on extractive landscapes and their management to immunise environmental harm it has been almost completely ignored in histories of architecture and urbanism. Recent ‘material histories’ of architecture and building focus on critiques of ‘building’ practices and their entangled landscapes.
In this contribution, I argue that an urban political ecology outlook on building practices frames them together with environmental mitigation as socio-spatial technologies to immunise environmental harm, and thus offers a lens to uncover how mitigation and compensation—beyond ‘building’ itself—structure urbanisation processes. I do so by arguing that place-based mitigation and compensation unlock continuous processes of (re)development and capital accumulation. Such a perspective builds an understanding of ecological infrastructure that, rather than an framed as the antidote, becomes a provider of urbanisation.
Indeed, in a longer historical framework, the history of planning can also be read as a history of managing impact as provider of urban development. How might such a perspective reframe current directions in ‘material’ histories of architecture and urbanisation? This approach shifts the debate on the mitigation of urban development away from the organisation of the technofix towards a more politically salient understanding of ecological urbanisation processes and their consequences.
Circularity in Construction: Basel’s pioneering project in Concrete Reuse and Urban Transformation
Kim Förster
abstractKim Förster
This contribution explores the transformative potential of reuse in architecture, focusing on the case of constructing with disassembled concrete elements within Basel’s urban redevelopment. The Lysbüchel parking garage, slated for deconstruction, and two public housing projects, Schliengerweg and Walkeweg, serve as case studies in recent Swiss construction history showcasing how concrete elements can be repurposed structurally in new residential developments, challenging traditional linear construction models. The projects, commission by the canton of Basel Stadt, by emerging architectural practices SVNM and Parabase exemplify how circular principles can be integrated into urban building processes, emphasizing non-extractive, locally supported, even bottom-up initiatives.
Historically rooted in responses to crises like war, deindustrialization, and resource scarcity, reuse throughout the C20 has oscillated between ecological critique and economic pragmatism. Today, while contributing massively to carbon emissions and construction and demolition waste, the construction sector accounts for only about 7% reuse of materials. Yet Basel aims to shift this paradigm by fostering policies, legal frameworks, and design approaches that support circularity. The two pioneering projects which integrate civil engineering skills to reuse concrete elements as a starting point and in their structural form—preserving their raw aesthetic—illustrate the radical shift from demolition, landfill or recycling to disassembly, reuse and reconfiguration, as alternative to non-demolition campaigns and maintennance and repair practices, illustrating a fundamental rethinking of architectural norms and responsibilities.
The historical and ethnographic research highlights the constructive, bureaucratic, economic, and political challenges of implementing such practices, including costs, regulatory hurdles, and stakeholder coordination. It underscores the necessity for legal reforms, new ownership models, and institutional support to scale up these initiatives. The projects demonstrate that embracing radical reuse can serve as a catalyst for broader socio-ecological transformation, fostering a construction culture that redefines urban development as a sustainable and just act. Ultimately, this approach critiques the industrial extraction and production paradigm, advocating for a shift toward localized, resilient, and responsible urban building practices aligned with degrowth principles.
Backstage urbanization: rubble recycling as a terraforming force.
Lionel Devlieger
abstractLionel Devlieger
This contribution zooms in on demolition, a necessary (counter)part of building, as a practice of urbanization in the Anthropocene, and puts the main material outcome of contemporary demolition practices central as object of inquiry.
The 20th Century saw the massification of a hitherto marginal practice in demolition: the ‘recycling of inert rubble’ from demolished buildings and infrastructure. After separation from chemically active waste materials, the remaining fraction of building materials (masonry, concrete, …) is mechanically crushed, sieved, and reduced to homogenous aggregate easily disposed of underground as road foundation or backfill. The practice first emerged in heavily urbanized areas, where landfilling demolition waste materials was not an option. In the 21st C it is spreading rapidly as a supposedly virtuous practice, because, under the guise of recycling, it would partake in the circular material economy.
This roundtable contribution sheds a different light on rubble recycling practices, denouncing them as tied to extractive, linear logics, on the one hand, and responsible for degrading alterations of soil geology and landscape morphology on a scale still poorly understood. In contrast to building component reuse, which dominated construction waste management practices before the 20th C, recycling by crushing components destroys their use value, and hence makes sure that no component (brick, tile, concrete element, …) will re-enter the supply chain for new construction. It thus renders a direct service to the building materials supply industry, by guaranteeing enduring demand for new components produced mostly with newly extracted, virgin materials. On the other hand, the flow of recycled rubble from demolitions has grown steadfastly over the past decades, especially in heavily urbanized areas, with increased impact. The days that the sector of road construction sufficed to absorb flows are over. Since a few decades, under the guise of backfilling, earthworks contractors are dumping inert rubble underground on a massive scale. This annual flow of millions of tons of rubble is reshaping landscapes, modifying hydrology, soil behavior, fertility, but remains understudied. This proposal wants to put the subject of these flows of recycled rubble on the table for research, with an emphasis on both its causes and effects.
Conquering (with) Concrete. (In-)Visible Liabilities of Urbanisation in Southern Africa
Monika Motylińska
abstractMonika Motylińska
The role of South Africa as one of the Southern “powerhouses” of industrialisation became evident from the onset of the long 20th century. In urban centres like Johannesburg, the construction industry thrived. The sheer scale of the extractive projects and their built infrastructures outmatched or at least kept up with the developments in the “North” – and more than a laboratory for the technologies or design these places were, in fact, drivers of economic growth and powerhouses in the rather literal sense. Consequently, a robust local industry of supply in construction materials, such as cement, and a vast network of local main contractors and subcontractors emerged quickly. Firms such as Concor or Murray & Stewart expanded throughout the continent and went overseas, while tightly controlling the local arena, by directly and indirectly influencing the development of urban centres and their hinterlands (cf. Hutton 2019).
In my proposed contribution to the roundtable, I aim to use the example of South African contractors to explore the extractivist underpinnings of construction and urbanisation. To do so, I propose shifting the focus from the usual narratives of technical progress, engineering prowess, and overcoming challenges through the boldness of the builders to dwell more closely on what remains beneath the propaganda of success. The notion of liability is central to this reflection. While rooted in the empirical observations on limited liability as an attribute of corporations, legal frameworks and financial contexts of the construction projects (liability as the opposite of asset), it will transgress the narrow legal or contractual sense, engaging with more blurry aspects of the state of implication and the fear of unfavourable outcomes, both visible and invisible (Appadurai 2016, Rothberg 2019). It will enable us to better understand the actions of contractors by uncovering their (implicit) apprehensions. Moreover, the exploration of liabilities of construction is a way to reconsider the material and immaterial footprint of construction projects (Hyde 2022) and their residue (Hecht 2023). Thus, this vantage point contributes to current discussions on the Anthropocene and the repercussions of the production of concrete and steel on the environment by directing attention to implicated–yet all too often still overlooked–actors and thus offering a more critical approach to the ongoing conquest with concrete.
Session 67 - Experiencing transition in modern urbanization
With the notion of transition and experience as lenses, this session explores the processes of urban-rural changes within the framework of modern urbanization in the 20 th century. It challenges straightforward modernization narratives, fosters cross-regional comparisons, and invites diverse perspectives to explore the alternative routes that the focus on transition offers.
Coordinators: Kristian Aarup, Mikkel Thelle, Tanja Vahtikari
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Coordinators: Kristian Aarup, Mikkel Thelle, Tanja Vahtikari
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Session 67 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Conceptualizing Transition: Mobility, Place, and Everyday Life
Pia Quist
abstractPia Quist
What can the concept of transition offer us? This paper discusses the concept of transition’s analytical potential for studying rural-urban transformations from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The twentieth century was marked by large-scale movements from rural areas to cities. Urban regions expanded and became increasingly heterogeneous – socially as well as linguistically – due to migration from diverse regions and countries. In recent decades, processes of gentrification have rendered some urban neighborhoods more homogeneous, and in rural districts, people experience the depopulation of villages, the closure of schools and local institutions. At the same time, agricultural production has undergone profound transformations, becoming increasingly industrialized and oriented toward global markets – all developments that have reshaped local geographies. Experiences of such changes are therefore tied both to mobility – that is, people’s lived experiences of moving across short and long distances – and to witnessing or participating in the transformations of places themselves, in both rural and urban contexts.
Exemplified by empirical cases from twentieth-century Denmark, this paper proposes transition as a conceptual lens for understanding these multifaceted processes of change. It is argued that transition can be understood simultaneously as a concrete historical shift – in this case, from agrarian to predominantly urban-centered society – and as a perspective that foregrounds peoples lived experiences of such shifts. As an analytical concept, transition allows us to capture both experiences of mobility and of place-transformations – and thereby bridging structural, social, and experiential dimensions of change. The presentation will draw on examples from various types of ego-documents as well as cultural-historical records from the Dialect Archive at the University of Copenhagen and the Archive for Industry, Craftsmen and Workers’ Memories (NIHA) at the National Museum of Denmark. In doing so, it will also address methodological questions, such as: How can experiences of transition be identified and articulated in the data?
"Transitional City": The Built and Social Environments of 19th-Century New York’s Irregular Settlements
Gergely Baics
abstractGergely Baics
I have been Co-PI on two very different public spatial history projects: “Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas” (mappinghny.com), a big data project, that creates and visualizes GIS census microdata for 1850, 1880, 1910, 1940 for New York’s five boroughs; Envisioning Seneca Village (envisioningsenecavillage.github.io), a narratively structured case-study, that uses GIS mapping and visualization to present an interactive 3D digital model of what this historically significant Black community might have looked like in 1855, just before its destruction to build Central Park. These projects have drawn my attention to 19th-century Manhattan’s periphery: a transitional area where our key sources of censuses and historical atlases can only provide patchy, difficult to map coverage. My new book project, "Transitional City: Built and Social Environments in 19th-Century Manhattan’s Urban Periphery," seeks to present a spatial history of New York’s peripheral urbanization from a novel viewpoint: from the periphery looking in, rather than from the center looking out. It seeks to map Manhattan’s 19th-century outskirts, a world of perpetual and intensive change, comprising a medley of transitional land-uses: farmlands for agriculture and animal husbandry, manufacturing plants with noxious industries, burial grounds and pleasure gardens, forming and disappearing shanty towns, elegant mansions.
Despite the periphery’s centrality to urbanization, this “transitional city” has attracted little research, perhaps due to source challenges. My project pursues a systematic spatial analysis based on censuses and historical atlases (including big GIS datasets from MHNY and new GIS data built with manual processes), along with social historical and narrative records for a layered reconstruction. At this early stage, I have mainly focused on "irregular settlements,” what we might describe today as informal housing. Belittled as “shanties” by contemporaries, they amounted to about 5% of the Manhattan housing stock, and were part and parcel of the periphery’s urbanization with land-use changes concurrently creating and destroying self-built communities. I have developed a workflow that expands the reach of census and cartographic records to create a spatial history archive of these peripheral, temporary, and hitherto invisible communities. At the 2026 EAUH conference, I plan to present on the geography of irregular settlements from my larger Transitional City project.
Beyond the Grand Narrative: Urban Fringe as a Site of Transition and Belonging in Helsinki 1900 - 1930
Marjaana Niemi
abstractMarjaana Niemi
The rural-urban fringe has often been perceived as a zone of transition: a space suspended between its rural past and urban future – more a phase rather than a place. Spatial planning has reinforced this perception by privileging linear development trajectories and single-purpose spaces, thereby framing the fringe, with its fragmented mix of urban and rural characteristics, as a transient stage. In this sense, the fringe resonates with Marc Augé’s notion of non-places: spaces defined by impermanence and functional ambiguity rather than identity or rootedness.
This paper investigates Helsinki’s urban fringe areas in the early 20th centuries, when industrialization, migration, and economic transformation drove rapid urban growth beyond municipal boundaries into relatively unplanned settlements. These areas, largely inhabited by working-class populations, occupied an ambiguous position: economically and spatially tied to the city through labor markets and transport links, yet socially and politically marginalized. Incomplete or entirely absent infrastructure and welfare services produced a form of graduated urban citizenship – if even that.
The paper explores how these semi-integrated areas were perceived by city authorities and experienced by residents, revealing tensions between planning imaginaries and lived realities. For example, from the perspective of urban planning, the poorest settlements and working-class suburbs were ‘transitory areas’, temporary arrangements for low-income groups until cleared or reorganized for the expanding city. Yet while planners imagined temporariness, residents invested in permanence – building homes, cultivating gardens, and forging community ties – creating a profound dissonance between official time and lived time.
The prolonged “state of waiting” for infrastructure and welfare was not simply a temporal gap but a lived condition that shaped everyday practices, aspirations, and claims to belonging within the urban community. Yet the desire to belong to the city did not imply rejecting the fringe. While authorities regarded the mix of urban and rural characteristics as problematic, residents often valued hybridity – proximity to urban employment combined with rural practices of self-sufficiency. This hybridity fostered resilience, identity, and alternative forms of belonging, challenging the binary logic of urban versus rural and complicating modernization narratives that frame the fringe merely as a transitory stage.
Urbanizing the Seaside:
Summer Vacation as Seasonal Transition in Europe in the early 20th Century
Dorothee Brantz
abstractDorothee Brantz
At the turn of the 20th century, a number of seaside villages underwent a notable temporary transition as a growing number of (mostly affluent) urbanites came to spend their summer vacation at the sea. Known as “Sommerfrische” this practice marked a recurring seasonal phenomenon across many European metropoles. Notably, though, this did not just entail a temporary transfer of people from one place to another; rather it led to the seasonal (and in some permanent) urbanization of the countryside. How and why did this take place in the first decades of the 20th century?
This presentation will highlight this practice of “Sommerfrische” and how it affected both the metropole and seaside towns. Why did “Sommerfrische” emerge and which temporary transitions were notable as many urbanites left the city to spend time at the sea (or in the mountains)? Who even participated in this practice and what how did it affect existing class and gender roles? How were traditional fishing villages transformed by this practice and how were they integrated into urban networks of cultural entertainment and how did new architectures and institutions contribute to the more permanent transformation of these places? Which role did the increasing mobilization of society play and which infrastructures went along with this mobilization?
On a more conceptual level, the paper will discuss the emerging tensions between the quest for individual experiences and the rising culture of consumption, particularly the consumption of nature and the countryside. The paper will address the notion of “transition” from a temporal vantage point to argue that we should pay more attention to seasonal phenomena and their effects on the transformation of urban and rural spaces. In doing so, it will raise questions about the notion of the temporary versus the permanent in such practices of transition. This presentation grows out of my larger research project on the impact of the seasons on urban life around the turn of the century (1880-1920) and the turn of the millennium (1980-2020).
Dreams of welfare and liveability in the golden age of Danish architecture.
An investigation of how the welfare society changed lives in the transitioning suburbs in early post war Denmark.
Lisbeth Hollensen, Bitten Larsen
abstractLisbeth Hollensen, Bitten Larsen
Danish housing history has traditionally neglected the diverse cultural heritage and history of the suburbs. The cityscapes and by some extent the inhabitants themselves are seen as detached from time and space. Thus, the urbanisation of the suburbs is seen as a simple transition from rural to urban.
The Museum of Suburbs has been working on this issue for many years. Recently we have examined the early suburban transition in the interwar period by looking at two on the surface similar villa quarters. The villa quarters were part of a huge expansion created by a massive housing shortage in Copenhagen and dreams of owning a single-family house and self-sufficiency. The development was on market terms and initiated by landowners visioning profit by dividing the agricultural land into plots and selling them to private individuals. Both settlements represented a way of improving the living conditions, but our investigation showed great variations between the settlers in the two areas regarding education level, employment place and income because of the market terms and the difference in distance to Copenhagen.
After WW2 the housing situation in Copenhagen once again was hopeless. The rising welfare state was intended to democratize welfare benefits including quality housing. The non-profit housing organizations therefore played a major role in implementing the policies on abolishing the housing shortage and became a corner stone in building the new welfare society.
Our main questions in this paper are:
Did those who moved to the new post-war non-profit social housing developments resemble one another socio-economically to a greater extent than those who moved during the interwar period? Comparing the two groups offers an indication of whether the welfare state’s expansion of democratic rights — such as access to quality housing — worked? And how did the post-war suburban families manage to achieve the good suburban life?
The Copenhagen suburbs form a solid case because of the rapid development in the interwar period and the early post-war period. A prototype on how to build the modern welfare society was developed and tested in the municipalities surrounding Copenhagen including Brøndby and Hvidovre.
By examining the socioeconomic differences and the life of the residents in two residential areas from the 1950s this article seeks to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the stereotypical representation of the suburb in the transition from rural to urban.
Session 67 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 219 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Welfare City in Transition: Copenhagen Gentrification Narratives as Source of Experience
Christian Steentofte Andersen
abstractChristian Steentofte Andersen
Gentrification is one of the most visible and wide-spread consequences of the recent decade’s post-Fordist urban transition of larger cities. Using Copenhagen’s recent and swift transition as case, this paper will demonstrate how literary fiction, if perceived as source material, has a potential for detecting how gentrification processes and their consequences has been experienced in the welfare cities of the Nordic region. Inspired by the field of Literary Urban Studies and the emerging field of History of Experience, the paper's main argument is that literary fiction is a valuable source for detecting lived experience connected to urban change. Literary texts, said with Michel de Certeau, often apply a “street view” of the city: A lived, phenomenological and embodied perspective which is not easily derived from other sources.
In the late 1980’ies Copenhagen was on the verge of bankruptcy due to middleclass exodus and outsourced production. As a response, the Danish state interfered and reversed the decline by, among other things, forming new partnership with the private sector, and by disposing of land and buildings owned by the municipality. Today, Copenhagen is often celebrated as one of the world’s most liveable cities. Nevertheless, critical voices have pointed out that Copenhagen’s transition is rather an example of state-led gentrification that has transformed the welfare city to a middle-class stronghold. But how is this transition experienced by the Copenhageners?
The paper presents two analytic examples:
1) Gentrification is often connected to evident changes in a city’s culture and aesthetics, which become moulded by middle-class lifestyle choices. In this part, I will present examples of gentrification experiences from the Danish authors Jan Sonnergaard and Søren Ulrik Thomsen, who in their works address the experience of loss of place and cultural displacement.
2)Copenhagen’s recent development has led to an immense rise in housing prices. Drawing on examples from young Danish authors, this part of the paper will demonstrate how the emerging genre of ‘housing fiction’ can help us imagining how the city’s material circumstances feed into the urban experiences of the so called ‘housing precariat’.
The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the potentials for using literary fiction as source of experience and the potentials for interdisciplinary research between History of Experience and literary scholarship.
Migration to Europe as Rural-Urban Transition: The Experience of Palestinians in West Berlin, 1970s-90s
Joseph Prestel
abstractJoseph Prestel
Historical research has frequently considered rural-urban migration as a process that occurs within a single nation state or world region. In contrast to this approach, my paper will explore migration from the Middle East to Europe, in the twentieth century, as a transition from a rural to an urban context. Among the millions of people who migrated between these two world regions, many originated in rural areas and went to cities. In my paper, I will zoom in on the case of the thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled from the Lebanese Civil War to West Berlin, between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Most of these migrants originated in Palestinian refugee camps, especially the Tal al-Za‘tar (Hill of Thyme) camp, which had been located on the North-Eastern outskirts of Beirut until its destruction at the hands of Christian militias, in 1976. How did Palestinian refugees from Lebanon experience categories of urban and rural as part of their migration process to Berlin? To answer this question, my paper will draw on autobiographies, interviews, and film documentaries that depict Palestinians who fled from Lebanon to West Berlin. Based on this material, I will argue that three different rural-urban references shaped these migrants’ experience: 1) The ancient homeland in Palestine, which they frequently represented as a rural village that their families had to leave behind in 1948 or 1967; 2.) Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that that they fled from during the Civil War and that combined rural and urban elements; 3) their urban present in (West-)Berlin, marked by a dense housing situation and legal liminality. Rather than standing in opposition to each other or representing a temporal succession, these different rural-urban references complemented each other and merged in how Palestinians in Berlin experienced their present and imagined their futures.
Traveling Through Transitions: The Perception of the Balkans in Helen Franklin´s Diaries (1910–1912)
Ida Ograjsek Gorenjak
abstractIda Ograjsek Gorenjak
Helen Franklin Bentwich (1892–1972) was a British social worker and politician, born into a prominent and affluent Jewish family in London. She is best remembered for her humanitarian efforts during the World Wars, her time in Palestine with her husband, and her involvement in the Labour Party. Less widely known is that she left two diaries which provide vivid accounts of her journeys through Bosnia, Dalmatia, Northern Croatia, and Italy in 1910. and 1912.
In these texts, a young upper-class girl from an industrialized urban centre encountered the peripheral regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which were navigating complex and often fragmented processes of modernization and transition. Her travels coincided with a period when Mediterranean cities were beginning to embrace tourism; Bosnia, recently annexed, displayed a layered mosaic of Oriental customs intertwined with Austro-Hungarian administrative practices; and Zagreb was rapidly evolving into a regional industrial hub. Her movement through the region was facilitated, but also at times limited, by traditional and modern transportation networks and her social standing and gender. The diaries offer detailed accounts of accommodations, transportation, food, local customs, and personal impressions. Therefore, they are invaluable source for understanding early 20th-century travel culture and providing a unique an outsider’s view of cities undergoing change, showing how they balance new modern developments with traditional customs.
By comparing the two diaries, this presentation investigates how Helen Franklin’s travel writing not only records experience but actively participates in shaping cultural and spatial knowledge of the Balkans. The analysis explores early 20th-century travel practices, traces possible shifts in her perception of the region between 1910 and 1912, and identifies subtle indications of the real social, cultural, and urban transformations taking place in the spaces she visited. Through this comparison, the diaries illuminate how travel narratives can reveal the interplay between personal perspective, modernization, and local tradition, offering a nuanced view of a region negotiating its identity amidst transition.
Sniffing Out the Urban Stairwell.
Olfactory Experiences of Socialist “Rurbanisation”.
Stephanie Weismann
abstractStephanie Weismann
The smell of cooked diapers, sauerkraut and disinfectants, of lard and moonshine booze – are some of the smells that meandered in the stairwells of the urban apartment block of the 1970s in socialist Poland.
In agrarian countries like Poland, it was mostly peasants encouraged to move to the city to become “proletarians” and industrial workforce. Socialist mass housing projects and their promise of electricity, running water and a gas stove for everyone attracted lots of people from the countryside to move to the cites. Hence, the new apartment block, designed as a symbol of modernity and progress, became a site where modern housing comfort and rural practices intermingled – a phenomenon, sociologist of that time named “rurbanisation”.
This paper explores the olfactory dimensions of this rural–urban transition in socialist Poland, focusing on the stairwell of the apartment block. Odours leaking through apartment doors carried intimate information about the neighbours’ cooking, hygiene practices, weekly routines, and other habits, and, thus, also of class, gender and cultural identities. Rather than peasants straightforwardly becoming proletarians, the persistence of rural practices within the urban context produced hybrid lifeworlds that challenge linear accounts of socialist urbanisation. Smells here offer a unique lens into processes of transition based on everyday practices and experiences.
Looking into sociological studies and questionnaires from the 1970s together with recently conducted oral-history-interviews, smells are here considered both archives as well as agents of lived experience. By reading socialist urbanisation through the smellscapes of the urban apartment block, this contribution highlights the sensory-embodied and emotional dimensions of peasants becoming urbanites in socialist Poland.
Session 68 - From the Margins: Reimagining Urban Networks in Europe and Beyond
This session aims to explore, in a long-term and global perspective, how urban networks have been (re)imagined by marginalized towns and cities through a variety of real and imaginary practices, ranging from conforming to existing networks, to contesting unfair and asymmetrical networks, to proposing and creating alternative networks.
Coordinators: Jaroslav Ira, Matti O. Hannikainen, Elisa-Maria Hiemer
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Coordinators: Jaroslav Ira, Matti O. Hannikainen, Elisa-Maria Hiemer
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Session 68 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Connectivity Strategies from Valencia. "La Semana Gráfica" and the Role of Illustrated Press in Shaping a Cosmopolitan Urban Culture (1926–1932)
Ana Bayo Molina
abstractAna Bayo Molina
Discourses surrounding the city of Valencia during the first third of the twentieth century were marked by a clear sense of unease regarding its level of modernization, both urban and cultural. Contemporary sources frequently expressed the need for the city to be developed “in the European way,” an aspiration justified by references to its position within the Spanish urban hierarchy third-largest city by population and, sometimes, by situating it as the sixtieth most populated city in Europe. The early decades of the century would be shaped by transformations intended to respond these expectations, and it was especially in the 1920s and 1930s that Valencia showed a closer engagement with the urbanistic, architectural, and cultural trends dominating the international landscape.
In this context, the present paper examines the role of the Valencian magazine "La Semana Gráfica" as an active agent in this process, functioning between 1926 and 1932 as a platform that enabled connections with the themes, atmospheres, and fashions of major centers of Western culture. The aim is to show its role not only as a disseminator of global content, but also as a constructor of an image of Valencia as a modern and cosmopolitan city. It did so through two main strategies. On the one hand, the coexistence on its pages of topics associated with key centers of Western modernity, such as Paris or New York, alongside material focused on local affairs, fostered in its readers a sense of connection and belonging to the international network of modern cities. On the other hand, the participation of prominent authors and illustrators from the local cultural scene turned the magazine into an important catalyst for the new aesthetic trends that arrive to the city during these decades.
In this way, this paper seeks to highlight the importance of the press as an extension of urban space and culture, functioning as a key tool in constructing a collective sense of belonging to the cosmopolitan culture associated with the major cities of the period.
Fueling Inequality: How the 1914–1918 Coal Shortage Reshaped Urban Networks and Power Structures in Central Europe
Marcela Hennlichova, Stanislav Holubec
abstractMarcela Hennlichova, Stanislav Holubec
Although World War I has been extensively examined in national and urban contexts, the role of energy crises remains understudied, particularly within the Habsburg Monarchy, which has so far remained at the periphery from this point of view. This paper argues that the wartime energy crisis - i. e. coal shortage - must be understood through the prism of centre–periphery relations and urban networks. Coal scarcity did not affect all cities equally; rather, it reshaped hierarchies between metropolitan centres and provincial towns, privileging key industrial hubs while exposing the vulnerability of secondary urban centres. Drawing on case studies of cities of different size and industrial/administrative importance - Prague, Pilsen, Liberec and Mladá Boleslav— including the location close or far from the major railway routes, the paper shows how energy distribution reflected the monarchy’s political economy of war, where flows of coal linked cities into an uneven but interdependent network. This perspective highlights how urban survival and wartime production were negotiated within asymmetric structures of supply, revealing both the fragility of the system and the ways in which shortages reverberated through interconnected infrastructures. By situating the coal crisis within these urban networks, the study contributes to a broader understanding of how energy scarcity reconfigured relations between centres and peripheries, while shaping the lived experience of war in Central Europe.
CITY POWER AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A BOTTOM-UP APPROACH FROM AN EASTERN-EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE
Réka Horeczki
abstractRéka Horeczki
Various studies have discussed the role of cities as leading actors on the world stage by virtue of their economic, political and symbolic capital, reflecting the diminishing exclusivity of state-centric international relations. Analysis of European and global alliances of cities is essential for understanding their contribution to the realisation of global agendas and the efficient functioning of participatory democracy. Cities have become quasi legitimate actors within the traditionally state-centric system of international relations arena since the 1990s. The New Urban Agenda (NUA), for instance, was the first UN declaration fostering local government action in protecting, respecting and promoting human rights in all fields of local competence (see Da Silva 2018). The United Cities and Local Governments has emerged as the major facilitator of the network of so-called human rights cities from across the globe.
Vanguard cities throughout the world (e.g. Montreal, Gwangju, New York, Mexico City, York) have integrated the human rights framework to guide everyday policy action in their jurisdiction, adopting an essentially bottom-up approach to human rights. Despite the heavily centralised government structure and a general lack of societal awareness of the UN’s SDG goals, some Turkish cities, such as the prosperous and democratic city of Odunpazari, have defined themselves as human rights cities. However, there is a comparatively lower engagement by cities adopting the Swedish model of the human rights based approach within the EU, particularly in the former post-socialist countries where Western-type civil society organisations were often marginalised and discredited. The aim of the presentation is to assess, focusing on the contrasting examples of CEE countries such as Hungary and Poland, the opportunities, constraints and key challenges related to the implementation of human rights cities practices.
Eastern-Galician towns around 1900: peripheral network?
Aleksander Łupienko
abstractAleksander Łupienko
The aim of my paper is to highlight a little-researched array of provincial towns of the Eastern Galicia, part of the Habsburg crown land at the far North-East of the empire, north of Bukovina, and the strategies employed by the urban elites to make their little Heimats visible and modern at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The topic is broad and the sources are sometimes scarce but with the help of the local press, books, guides and the reports of the local associations and some archival sources (less accessible now, but coming through a dynamic process of digitalisation) I will show examples of creating a network - not so much solely between themselves but with a strong connection with the regional capital of Lviv (Lwów/Lemberg). There was no single strategy or coordinated action, it was rather a rhizomatic web of actions undertaken by different communities in these towns, divided by their social and ethnic character, as well as goals. I will try to answer to the question of to what extent these efforts went in the same direction, and how could they actually beef up the brands of these towns. This includes three cases in point: Stanisławów/Stanislau, an important and dynamic centre not far from Lwów/Lemberg; Kołomyja/Kolomea, in fact the second largest in the Eastern Galicia outside the capital, playing the capital of the Hutsuls - mountain folk - and branded as an ethnic haven for Ruthenians/Ukrainians; and Tarnopol to the east, an important outpost of the Poles and the capital of the region of Podilia (all names as in the sources, today they lie in Ukraine). All of these towns had strong cultural and historical potential to be recognisible but suffered the same economic downward spiral until the late nineteenth century. I hope to show how the efforts to narrate the urban history, to make good environment for newcomers and to provide modern social and technical infrastructure to the inhabitants along with the attempts to connect the intellectual elites from the towns in the region and outside it, played out within the framework outlined by the session organisers.
Session 69 - Crossing urban Planning cultures in time of conflict and reconciliation: views on continental Europe
The session proposes to study metropolitan planning in wartime on the European continent, from a transnational perspective covering the period from 1937 to 1945. We will focus on administrative and project contexts, distinguishing between national dynamics and those linked to military and occupation contingencies.
Coordinators: Corinne Jaquand, Olivier Ratouis, Markus Tubbesing, Jannik Noeske
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Coordinators: Corinne Jaquand, Olivier Ratouis, Markus Tubbesing, Jannik Noeske
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Session 69 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Bucharest urban development shaped by military preparations
Bogdan Andrei Fezi
abstractBogdan Andrei Fezi
This paper investigates the fundamental role of military theories and geostrategic imperatives in shaping the urban morphology of Bucharest. It argues that beyond the well-documented reception of French (Haussmannian) and German urban models, the city's development was driven by defensive and logistical requirements, resulting in its distinct radial-concentric structure.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Romanian capital was a barometer for European urban theories. While its "little Paris" adoption of percées highlight a strong French influence, and its 1921 Plan adopted German functional zoning, this paper posits that these models were often determined by strategic military planning.
The analysis demonstrates this "dual-use" planning by tracing the city's concentric development back to military infrastructure. The first major ring road, finalized in 1899, was not a civilian project but the direct result of the vast fortification system designed by the Belgian general Henri Alexis Brialmont. This radial-concentric logic, established for defense, was then institutionalized in subsequent civilian planning. The 1906 General Urbanism Competition - held two years before Berlin's and thirteen before Paris's - solidified this morphology. Bucharest was perfectly synchronized with the internationalization of planning; its winner, Léon Jaussely, later won 2nd prize in the Berlin competition (1908) and planned for Barcelona.
The paper extends into the 1930s, a period of escalating European tensions. Both Bucharest and its surrounding territory engaged in a new program of building internal and external arteries explicitly for defensive justification. Theories concerning rapid troop movement and air defense became fundamental principles for urban and territorial planning, reinforcing the radial system and multiplying circular routes for logistical flexibility.
The paper concludes by stressing the enduring importance of these historical "dual-use" planning approaches in light of the present international context.
Beyond Military Conquest - General Development Plans in Occupied Western Europe
Victoria Grau
abstractVictoria Grau
It remains common practice in research to reduce occupations to military conquests. In the case of World War II, they are thus viewed primarily as manifestations of the German Reich’s violent expansion and resulting territorial shifts. Yet what happened after the military occupation? What long-term aims did it serve? A spatial perspective offers crucial insights into these questions.
While plans for the eastern territories have been extensively studied - particularly with regard to the role of urban development and spatial planning - the plans for the occupied western countries have received far less attention and are rarely examined in relation to one another. Nevertheless, general development plans for Western countries were often initiated immediately after occupation. This paper focuses on the redevelopment plans for the occupied capitals of Western Europe. It analyses general development plans as instruments of power and therefore addresses a series of questions: What spatial development logic underpinned these plans? What similarities or particularities can be identified between the individual redevelopment schemes? To what extent did they already anticipate a reorganization of Europe? Were these plans also intended as approaches to modernizing the existing cities? Finally, the article explores whether the general development plans were inherently transformative or whether they continued pre-existing trajectories of spatial development.
The overarching aim of the article is to provide a more precise, differentiated, and substantiated understanding of terms such as “occupation” and “Germanisation” and the socio-political and cultural objectives associated with them. It also highlights the scope of action that remained open to, or was restricted for, local authorities and national experts.
Stalingrad and Kyiv reconstruction : how the Soviet Union
used urban competitions as a tool of propaganda
and false reconciliation
Fabien Bellat
abstractFabien Bellat
After the initial shock of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, the crucial confrontation took place in Stalingrad, a city strategic for oil supplies, playing also a crucial symbolic role since it bore the name of Stalin. While the Wehrmacht occupied the city in late 1942, its encirclement and fierce fighting in the ruins defeated the invaders, who capitulated there in early 1943. Communist propaganda emphasized the Stalingrad victory, and, barely two weeks after the German surrender, a competition for its reconstruction was announced.
The program rushed drafting, and the lack of any real administrative oversight, encouraged Soviet architects to propose plans that either revived innovative spatial flexibility or displayed masterful majesty. For instance, Alexei Shchusev (Lenin's Mausoleum), Boris Iofan (Palace of the Soviets), Lev Rudnev (Red Army headquarters), wished to enhance the Volga banks with monumental ensembles, transforming the site into a gigantic ideological commemoration. Andrei Burov, a former modern, thought to cover vestiges of the battle with a colossal concrete pyramid. Karo Alabian, head of the Union of Soviet Architects, was declared the winner – thanks to a general plan where highly scenographic urban planning devices accentuated the city propagandistic sanctuarization, while improving its industrial infrastructure on a regional scale. However, Stalingrad's overly free competition displeased Stalin, who soon ordered the creation of an Architectural Committee overseeing the reconstruction plans, reviewed by Arkady Mordvinov. From then on, architects favored by the regime were directly appointed…
However, Kyiv’s liberation in 1944 led to a second competition, by invitation. The objective this time was very different. Behind the seemingly balanced call for Ukrainian and Russian guests, the aim was actually to discredit the Ukrainians proposals – vilified as suspected collaborators of the Nazis during the occupation. So was chosen Aleksandr Vlasov, a Russian architect. He made in Kyiv highly ambiguous use of the neo-Ukrainian style for American-inspired skyscrapers.
In sum, these competitions signal the Stalinist regime's urban culture reactions during the conflict. Between the plans for Stalingrad and Kyiv, the initial uncertainty regarding reconstruction gave way to firmer control. The architects contributions still reflected a search for constructive efficiency, which eventually faded under the spell of a bombastic propaganda.
Interactions between city planning and air defence in Nazi Germany
Carmen Enss
abstractCarmen Enss
Bombs fell on cities during the First World War, instilling a fear of future aerial warfare and leading to the preparation of air defences around the globe. While historians have begun to explore home-front activities during the Second World War in different countries (Garon, 2016), aspects of city and regional planning as part of civil defence remain understudied. While architecture historians have studied air defence structures such as high-rise air-raid shelters, urban historians have yet to examine disaster response planning as part of city and reconstruction planning. Decisions in urban planning were needed to address housing emergencies and the danger of ruins collapsing.
This paper compiles evidence of how the municipal planning activities relating to disaster preparedness and catastrophic response influenced city planning and post-war reconstruction in German cities.
Since air defence (Luftschutz) was first promoted as a political, civil and military activity in Germany in the 1920s, it has been discussed with architects and city planners. From 1929 onwards, architects and planners agreed that densely built urban areas, such as old towns, could not be effectively protected against firebombing. For future quarters, they recommended designing streets and blocks so that fire could not spread from house to house. When the air war against the German Reich intensified with heavy air raids beginning in 1943, German planners suggested demolishing existing buildings in large cities to create fire barriers – empty strips in the built fabric – to contain fires. Although this was never implemented in Germany, Japanese cities attempted to limit destruction by creating fire barriers in 1945. Prior to the air raids, German cities often used destroyed areas to create wider streets, and even destroyed existing buildings for reconstruction planning. These activities were often described as ways of improving car traffic, but were rarely connected to air defence.
Until now, only a few studies of planning history have used maps of war damage to explore how emergency and reconstruction planning responded to such damage. Did changes to urban planning, compared to the pre-war situation, focus on the destroyed areas? Were changes to city plans implemented during the war through air defence and emergency response activities? This paper addresses these questions by presenting new archival research and using map and plan overlays of war and post-war states.
Session 69 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 221 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Versailles under German rule
The urban organisation of passive defence in Versailles during the Occupation (1940-1945)
Blandine Engels
abstractBlandine Engels
During the 1930s, fears of an impending destructive war led by the air force prompted European countries to consider their protection. In France, the subject of passive defence gained in importance and became an increasingly prominent topic in national debates. Its organisation accelerated from 1935 onwards with the enactment of the first law on passive defence. This law made its organisation mandatory throughout the country and provided the first guidelines for urban planning. Passive defence thus also became a matter of architecture and urban planning.
Versailles, the administrative center of the Seine-et-Oise department, appeared to be particularly exposed to the risk of aerial bombardment due to its symbolic significance in the Franco-German wars, but also because its strategic infrastructure made the city a prime target for the enemy army. Furthermore, with its many national treasures (palace, works of art), Versailles is a sensitive city whose protection must be carefully considered.
The city of Versailles began organising its defence in the early 1930s by implementing an Urban Passive Defence Plan aimed at protecting the city, its population and its historical heritage from aerial bombardment and its effects. Gradually, the city was divided into sectors and sub-sectors, shelters were created, evacuation routes were organised, the palace was dismantled, the Grand Canal was drained... Versailles was slowly preparing for war.
However, on 14 June 1940, the Wehrmacht invaded Versailles. From that day on, the lives of the people of Versailles were governed by the German authorities. The organisation of passive defence was strongly influenced by the requirements of the German army. The Wehrmacht also required the French authorities to organise their protection against the threat of air raids. The Urban Passive Defence Plan was therefore modified.
This paper aims to report on the directives issued by the occupying army regarding the organisation of passive defence in Versailles. It draws on archival resources (national, departmental, municipal and military) to understand the strategies deployed to protect both the civilian population of Versailles and German soldiers during the Occupation.
Gaston Bardet's plans for Vichy
Dinh-Luan Pham
abstractDinh-Luan Pham
Gaston Bardet was born in Vichy in 1907. He graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1933 and from the Urbanism Institute of the University of Paris (IUUP) in 1932. He has been described as “one of the most original and prolific French urban theorists of the twentieth century”. He was mainly active in the urbanism field from the 1930s to the 1950s, as a theorist, a teacher and a practitioner. He thus elaborated numerous city plans in France, and in Vichy, his hometown, in particular.
As requested by the Medical Sciences Society of Vichy, Bardet firstly worked on a plan in 1938 for “a series of woodland promenades and parks” organized as a radial concentric system around Vichy, designed as a regional plan. This plan has been published in the magazine “L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui” in 1939, among a collection of city plans (gathered by Bardet) commemorating “20 years of applied urbanism” since the Cornudet Law of 1919. Bardet may also have worked on a regional plan for Vichy and its surrounding since 1936, in the wake of a Law of 1935 leading to the creation of regional projects of urbanism.
Through its reputation, and also because of its previous work on the city, the municipal council instructed Bardet on May 1942 for a masterplan for a Greater Vichy. This masterplan would better suit the new status of Vichy, as new capital of the French State since the armistice of 1940. This masterplan is also related to an ongoing project at the time considering Vichy absorbing the neighbouring cities. A picture shows Bardet presenting his masterplan to Marshal Pétain in 1943.
The masterplan has not been applied, but it may has inspired the vast public works programme of the 50s-60s.
Apart from masterplans for a Greater Paris, this masterplan for a Greater Vichy is one rare example of an intercommunal or regional plan in France before 1945. It could be considered as an outcome of the Nazi occupation of the North of France, including Paris, and consequently Marshal Pétain locating the government of the French State in Vichy.
This research will allow a focus on the plans for Vichy and its region. A plan before the WWII, a plan during WWII, and its alleged consequences ten to twenty years later give the possibility to consider WWII as a point of comparison.
This research will also provide a detailed insight into a prominent actor of the urban field of this history period, Gaston Bardet.
“Beaudouin Plan” for Marseilles (1940-1944): Eugène Beaudouin, an architect and urban planner between national grandeur and international influences
Benoit Satger
abstractBenoit Satger
In 1940, the Vichy government decided to develop a new development plan for Marseilles, a city under state supervision since 1938. Taking refuge in the city, E. Beaudouin, an internationally renowned architect, became the leader of the architectural scene in the South of France. From this still relatively unknown project, I would try to present Beaudouin's proposal by retracing the influences and models which shaped the architect and thereby the plan for Marseilles. The point of view of this intervention seeks to link the presentation of an important actor in urban planning of this period with the exploration of an urban planning project.
Indeed, taking as a working hypothesis Beaudouin's reputation, that of a man with extensive classical culture and open to modernity, I studied the graphic documents and the "mémoire" of the development plan written by the architect. I chose to study only the first version of the “Beaudouin Plan” dating from 1941. A second version, revising only the center, was published in 1943.
The study of this corpus leads to a schematic reading of the town planner’s proposal. The “Beaudouin Plan” is read according to 3 concentric arcs which correspond to 3 spatial scales: the center, the territory to be urbanized and the large landscape. In each scale a compositional vocabulary predominates. The center inserts in the great tradition of classic French urban art. Then, long rectilinear roads of French tradition are hybridized with modern parkways. Finally, the design of the large landscape draws more on an Anglo-Saxon culture.
Ultimately, a design movement is emerging from the center towards the periphery. This movement from exclusion towards openness aligns with the order: exclusive of the French classical register, exclusion of populations from the center... Openness to international influences, openness understood as freedom of design... Beyond the imperative for the monumental center, Beaudouin takes latitudes and engages his modern culture to design this other dimension of the plan. We notice to what extent Vichy France placed itself in a monumental, reactionary and national architectural and urban dynamic, like its European neighbors. However, the categorical requirement of the order highlights the freedom of design of the practitioner. Finally, by giving "carte blanche" to Beaudouin, the government grants him the upheaval of the center but also the possibility of injecting his ideas stemming from a certain modernity.
Session 70 - Sheltering the Displaced: Housing the 'Other' and the Making of the Post-war City
This session explores how post-war population movements reshaped European cities through categorized housing policies targeting newcomers. It examines their socio-political and spatial impacts, and investigates the dynamics of integration, segregation, and urban transformation.
Coordinators: Marilena Kourniati, Athina Vitopoulou
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Coordinators: Marilena Kourniati, Athina Vitopoulou
show/hide introduction
Session 70 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
Rehabilitating the Periphery: Sheltering the Rural Displaced in Postwar Greece (1945-1947)
Maria Anna Kaprara
abstractMaria Anna Kaprara
This paper explores how postwar international humanitarian and welfare actors constructed Greek rural populations as ‘internally displaced subjects’ whose return to the countryside was framed as essential for national economic rehabilitation and for addressing homelessness and overcrowding in the urban centres. Focusing on 1945-47 and examining the operations of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration [UNRRA] Greece Mission in relation to emergency sheltering, the paper analyses how UNRRA and the Greek state jointly shaped housing categories, relief priorities and territorial hierarchies in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Wartime devastation, famine and violent reprisals by the occupying forces had forced many rural inhabitants into urban centres. Upon liberation, civilian relief in Greece, first organised by the Military Liaison and later by UNRRA, centred on relocating populations to their ‘old homes’ (or where those once stood). Driven by the dual aim of relieving urban overcrowding and restoring agricultural workers as a ‘high priority in relief’, this mechanism attempted to stabilise the country and support the global project of postwar recovery. The periphery was reframed as both a productive landscape and the primary site for emergency sheltering. UNRRA’s sheltering strategies relied on repairing and rebuilding vernacular structures due to severe shortages of materials, labour, and tools. Reconstruction work was carried out by rural inhabitants while most of the necessary materials and equipment were supplied by UNRRA, distributed through the Agricultural Bank of Greece, creating a hybrid framework in which government-led, humanitarian-promoted self-help practices coexisted. Drawing on UNRRA shelter policies, Greece Mission reports, and emergency laws (1945-1947), the paper argues that these interventions produced a governable rural subject rendered productive and later reintegrated into state-led reconstruction. By centring internal displacement and rurality, it traces how UNRRA’s provisional sheltering practices may have influenced early Marshal Plan development and housing strategies in Greece, showing that welfare priorities and reconstruction logics emerged through negotiations between national needs, international agendas and humanitarian mandates.
The urban rehabilitation of Neorefugees carried out under United Nations auspices; the case of Thessaloniki, Greece.
Sotiria Alexiadou
abstractSotiria Alexiadou
Refugees under the mandate of the United Nations, who in Greek were called “νεοπρόφυγες = Neorefugees”, emerged after World War II and the signing of the Geneva Convention in 1951. The refugees who arrived in Greece in the late 1950s and early 1960s came from various countries, such as Russia, Romania, and Armenia. Some of them were of Greek nationality, but their nationality was not a criterion for inclusion or exclusion from rehabilitation programs if they met the social and economic criteria.
A special “NeoRefugees Directorate” was established within the Hellenic Ministry of Social Welfare for the rehabilitation of “neorefugees”. Urban rehabilitation programs included housing and professional rehabilitation in urban areas such as Athens, Piraeus, and Thessaloniki. The housing rehabilitation strategies followed for this social group differed from the programs that had been implemented until then and concerned other social groups, such as the refugees of 1922-1925 or those affected by World War II –guerrilla warfare victims, bombing victims, etc. Factors that contributed to the development of different rehabilitation strategies were the number of beneficiaries, their geographical distribution, and, above all, the way in which the programs were financed.
This paper focuses on data concerning the housing rehabilitation of refugees under the mandate of the United Nations in Thessaloniki, presenting the different practices implemented by the Ministry integrating or segregating them in the urban space. It examines the urban planning and architectural identity of the complexes that were rebuilt in the city for the beneficiaries, the “Neorefugees”. At the same time, it compares these programs with housing rehabilitation programs for other social groups implemented during the same period by the Hellenic Ministry of Social Welfare. The research is based on primary material from the archives of the Hellenic Ministry of Social Welfare and press publications from the study period.
Post disaster resettlement models in Greece. The case of New Viniani
Vaso Trova, Nikos Belavilas
abstractVaso Trova, Nikos Belavilas
This paper investigates the model employed for the construction of new settlements in Greece, specifically aimed at relocating mountainous or rural communities affected by seismic events. The case study examined is the relocation of the mountain village of Viniani following a major earthquake in 1966. This case exemplifies a broader planning approach that was applied in similar contexts throughout the country.
The earthquake left the original settlement irreparably damaged, leading state authorities to launch plans for its relocation and rebuilding. The design for New Viniani was undertaken by the Ministry of Public Works in 1969. Construction commenced that same year and was completed in 1973. The protracted construction timeline and substandard living conditions led a significant portion of the population to abandon plans to relocate to the new village, opting instead to move permanently to the regional capital Karpenisi or other urban centers.
Notably, the urban and architectural design of the new settlement bore little resemblance to either the original spatial configuration or the local building traditions. Its spatial organization follows a simplified Hippodamian grid, a model whose use in Greece can be traced to the early rural refugee settlements of the early twentieth century. This planning approach presupposes the availability of flat terrain, and the selection of the relocation site was therefore dictated by the model’s requirements—specifically, land capable of accommodating the regular geometric logic of the imposed plan. Likewise, the architectural typology of the new rural dwellings adhered to a standardized design introduced in 1949 by the Ministry of Reconstruction.
The evolution of urban design theories and planning ideologies from the interwar period through the late 1960s appears to have exerted limited influence on the generic form and implementation of post-disaster resettlement schemes in Greece. These settlements occupy an ambiguous conceptual position between the austerity characteristic of industrial housing projects and the spatial ideals associated with the modern movement. They thus reflect a predominantly pragmatic and utilitarian response to urgent housing needs rather than an engagement with the local culture of the area. As a result, residents struggled to develop a sense of familiarity or belonging within the new settlement, and those with the means to do so soon migrated to other places in the country or abroad.
Post-war Tabula Rasa: Emergency Housing and the Emergence of a New Social Contract in Cyprus
Frixos Petrou, Konstantinos Avramidis
abstractFrixos Petrou, Konstantinos Avramidis
This paper explores how architecture was deployed by the Republic of Cyprus in the aftermath of the 1974 war to both respond to the crisis and, in the same stroke, shape the post-crisis landscape. The state-built housing estates constructed for displaced persons by the Republic of Cyprus offer a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between architecture, subjectivity and class composition.
The tabula rasa approach to housing the internal migrants of the war allows for a clear snapshot of the state’s approach to the (re)production of labour power and the governance of an unsettled population transitioning from agrarian to urban-industrial life. The estates are situated within their historical, legislative and material contexts, framing how the state contemporaneously mediated the urgent needs of displaced and disenfranchised communities, while accommodating agendas of urban growth, social stability and capitalist development.
Our analysis examines the atlas of typologies developed for the estates, as well as architectural and spatial characteristics of the Strovolos II project. A thorough analysis of the various typologies deployed across the Republic of Cyprus’ territories offers insight into the state’s role in mediating social reproduction, both on the field of everyday life as well as in the larger sense of protecting the social relation specific to the capitalist mode of production. The issues of labour and gender in connection to architecture and the role of the state are particularly prominent in the analysis.
The paper draws on archival research as well as a process of re-drawing and dissecting the original designs. Research through teaching further demonstrates critiques, alternatives and contemporary approaches to the decaying estates, developed by our students.
The paper contributes to broader debates about the role of architectural design in processes of social reproduction and capitalist accumulation. It highlights the state’s response to a dramatic socio-political crisis and a staggering housing shortage as a result of an intense wave of (internal) migration, in a historical moment quite different than our own. Nevertheless, the insights gained are relevant not only for Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean, but contribute to wider debates on the relationship between architecture and class composition, as well as issues of housing, displacement, and social reproduction.
The Internal Other: Italian Miners, Labour Displacement and Urban Segregation in Post-war France
Marco Spada
abstractMarco Spada
This proposal investigates the migration of Sicilian and Sardinian miners to France in the aftermath of World War II as a key episode in the social and spatial transformation of post-war Europe. Drawing on exstensive archival research in Italy and France, it reconstructs the trajectories of thousands of southern Italian workers recruited by the Office National d'Immigration between 1947 and 1953 and resettled in the industrial and mining regions of the Gard, Moselle, and Pas-de-Calais. These flows, though presented as responses to labour shortages in reconstruction France, reveal a deeper process of internal European displacement: the relocation of peripheral populations into highly segregated urban and industrial environments.
The miners' settlements - ranging from barracks and temporary housing to purpose-built cités minières - became laboratories of social control and integration. They embodied the contradictions of the French welfare state: conceived as instruments of inclusion through labour, they in fact reproduced spatial hierarchies and cultural marginalization, separating "Southern" Italian migrants from both French workers and other foreign groups. In this sense, these housing forms mirrored the differentiated management of post-war populations described in broader European contexts, where social housing intersected with migration policies and the governance of "foreign" labour.
By comparing Sicilian and Sardinian cases, the proposal highlights contrasting modes of political and union mobilization exported to France: while Sicilian miners, shaped by a culture of cooperation with the CGIL and the Italian Communist Party, found natural allies in the CGT and PCF, Sardinian workers, marked by a tradition of autonomous and radical conflict, developed more independent forms of organization within French mining communities. These political subcultures, carried across borders, decisively shaped the miners' strategies of adaptation, resistance, and solidarity in the host country. Ultimately, this proposal situates the migration of island miners within the broader making of the post-war European city, showing how these communities, positioned at the intersection of labour demand, housing policy, and social marginality, reveal the emergence of a new "internal otherness" within Western Europe and within reconstruction-era France.
The urban transformation of Turin and the arrival of Istrian refugees through the testimonies of the inhabitants of the Vallette-Lucento district from 1945 to 1980.
Boris Pesce
abstractBoris Pesce
The essay is part of the bed of social history and urban history and intends to shed light on the home, the neighborhood, as a place of daily life, social struggle, inclusion and exclusion, in the context of the great urban transformation of Turin connected to the reconstruction of the city after the destruction of the war and the new town plan, through the testimonies of Istrian refugees who arrived in Turin and inhabitants of public housing buildings specially built for them, together with those for immigrants from southern Italy, in the Vallette-Lucento district of Turin from 1945 to 1980. From the interviews emerges the difficult path of entry into the city, from the shacks to the coveted council house, but also the distrust and racism of the people of Turin. There is also criticism of the construction of a district without any urban planning criteria, without adequate services (especially regarding poor connections with the city centre), social and physical isolation, without taking into account differences in geographical origin, social status. The gap also emerges between what was planned by urban planners and politicians, albeit with considerable scientific and economic commitment, and reality. However, there are also positive aspects, the joy of having a new home, the solidarity between immigrants, the union experienced in the struggles to improve housing conditions through neighborhood committees, the occupations of houses, the satisfaction with a new job, the support, but also the emergence of patronage phenomena, by political and trade union associations and organizations.
Urban transformation and social housing: The Nizzoli Associati’s projects for Taranto Nord
Francesca Prelz Galiani
abstractFrancesca Prelz Galiani
The paper aims to analyse some of the projects drawn up for the mediterranean city of Taranto, located in the Ionian province of Apulia region, by the Nizzoli Associati architecture studio of Milan, dated from the second half of the 1960s and due to the establishment of the 4th Italsider Steel Centre, nowadays better known as ‘Ex Ilva’. This study is part of the PhD programme currently being in Polytechnic University of Bari, Dipartimento di Architettura Costruzione e Design (ArCoD).
The Nizzoli Associati’s projects taken into consideration are the houses for Italsider employees in the urban plan for Taranto Nord (1969 – 1971). The two complementary projects have been combined in a new residential quartier developed for over 10.000 people, in which sheltering labour migrants and local groups of individuals who do not necessarily come from urban backgrounds, but who will become part of an urban integration project. In this paper, «Housing the ‘Other’» would mean understand how social housing could be linked to labour migration and to rural-to-urban movement in urbanization’s phenomenon, which was particular and with specific characteristics in this mediterranean city; public role is essential to understand the «Making of Post-war City», in which steel production is part both in the rationalisation of housing buildings and in the industrialisation of construction sites, as well as in economic and demographic effects on the city and province with the arrival of an industrial giant, such as Italsider. After the expansion of the site ended in 1975, the IV steelwork became the most important industrial plant in southern Italy, the second largest in Italy after Turin and FIAT, and the largest steelworks in Europe. In this context, housing policies for working class was adopted by national government authorities and the city of Taranto was aimed at making the leap from being partly agricultural and partly military, because of its Navy Arsenal, to become a modern city, with a welfare urbanism and a cutting-edge infrastructure. The projects of Nizzoli Associati were developed to create a flexible and programmatic urban system that could be expanded over time, presented by architects as possible alternative to the General Town Plan. In this study, urban policy instruments available between 1960 and 1980 in Taranto area are the key to speak about the Nizzoli’s projects for the expansion of the city, as part of a national urban coordination plan.
Session 70 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 1 CSIC-RESA Residència d'Investigadors
Postcolonial Migration and the Dutch-Surinamese Housing Question in 1970s Rotterdam and Amsterdam
Tim Verlaan
abstractTim Verlaan
This paper examines the contested role of housing in the migration and settlement of Surinamese migrants in the Netherlands during the 1970s. While over 300,000 Surinamese migrated to the metropole in the years surrounding their country’s independence in 1975, municipal governments implemented dispersal policies that contradicted Surinamese migrants’ legal status as Dutch citizens. Although framed as efforts to prevent “overconcentration” and promote integration, these housing policies reflected enduring colonial legacies and racialized anxieties within Dutch society. Drawing on archival records, municipal documents, social surveys, press reports, and the activities of Surinamese welfare organisations, this study demonstrates how local policymakers, housing corporations, and grassroots movements clashed over questions of access, equality, and belonging. By centring housing as a site of both discrimination and resistance and taking Amsterdam as a case study, this paper highlights the urban dimension of postcolonial migration and underscores the agency of Surinamese migrants in shaping debates about housing rights, integration, and citizenship.
We are not cattle! Migrant housing policies and boarding houses in Amsterdam, 1970-1985
Ole Lechner
abstractOle Lechner
This paper examines the housing problems faced by recently immigrated minorities in Amsterdam during the 1970s and 1980s, focusing in particular on their overrepresentation in boarding houses ('pensions') - privately run lodging facilities that were often unhygienic, unsafe, and overcrowded. The central question concerns why these groups in particular ended up in such inadequate housing and how the municipality of Amsterdam responded to this situation.
Drawing on newspaper articles and archival materials from municipal departments and social organizations, the paper reconstructs the housing history of migrants who lived in boarding houses. Spatial mapping with QGIS illustrates the geographic distribution and concentration of these boarding houses across the city.
Using an intersectional approach, the research explores how factors such as ethnicity, gender, income, and length of residence restricted migrants’ access to the housing market. This analysis shows that structural barriers and institutional exclusion created and maintained precarious living situations for immigrant communities. The study also demonstrates that meaningful municipal intervention often occurred only after serious or fatal incidents drew public and political attention.
At the same time, the boarding house emerges as an urban phenomenon that reflects broader tensions between migration, housing shortages, and public policy during a period of major spatial and demographic transformation. By situating the boarding house within these intersecting developments, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how urban inequality was formed and contested in late-twentieth-century Amsterdam.
Strangers Among Their Own: Late Resettlers (Spätaussiedler) in the Marzahn-Hellersdorf District of East Berlin from 1990 to the 2020s
Veronika Sharova
abstractVeronika Sharova
The Marzahn-Hellersdorf district in the East Berlin is often referred to as a disadvantaged cluster of outdated concrete prefabricated buildings whose residents support the right-wing “Alternative for Germany” party. However, the district's symbolic landscape is richer than the myths surrounding it. The paper focuses on the spatial dimension of the multiple sociocultural identities of Marzahn's immigrants.
The collapse of the Eastern Bloc brought about a wave of migration, including that caused by cultural factors. A notable phenomenon was the program of late resettlement to Germany: according to it, former USSR citizens of German origin “returned to their roots.” Since 1990s, they have made up a significant part of the migration flow in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, forming an urban community united by the common cultural background, language, specific integration patterns, and dynamics of interaction with the host community. Standardized prefabricated housing — a recognizable feature of the Marzahn-Hellersdorf landscape since the 1970s — was used to house late resettlers (Spätaussiedler). These Plattenbau buildings were also used for “Heims”: temporary accommodation centers for refugees. Heims became a significant element of the symbolic landscape of the district, influencing the perception by both the local community and the late resettlers.
Spätaussiedler found themselves in a situation of multiple identities. Being German by origin, they were forced to integrate into the host community, sometimes facing accusations of “new colonialism.” They also integrated into a unified Germany amid the symbolic conflict between “Ossies” and “Wessies.” The visually Soviet-esque environment turned out to be a place of social crisis and challenge, of conflict interactions, but also of finding solidarity with the host community.
The paper highlights the results of a study on the spatial memory of residents of Marzahn-Hellersdorf district with a migration background: Russian Germans from the Soviet Union and second-wave migrants born in former East Berlin. The study examines how the residents perceive their living environment, which was once considered an example of “architectural socialist utopia” in the GDR and is now known for its negative reputation. It examines the relationship between political/administrative decisions regarding the organization of Spätaussiedler's lives in Marzahn, as well as the grassroots initiatives of the local community and the migrants themselves.
Ethnoscapes and the spatial dynamics of social resilience:
A parallel review on urban landscapes of integration in Nanterre, Paris and Wedding, Berlin, 1970–2015
Eleftheria Gavriilidou
abstractEleftheria Gavriilidou
This paper investigates ethnoscapes, as conceptually introduced by the work of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, as evolving socio-spatial constructs through which shifting regimes of migrant incorporation, urban governance, and social resilience are materially and discursively inscribed. Focusing on Paris and Berlin—two key European metropolises shaped by late-20th-century labor migration from the Global South—the study traces how integration policies, planning paradigms, and spatial practices have reconfigured urban environments between 1970 and 2015. Informed by field engagement, collaborative work with the sociocultural platform Bi’bak in Berlin, Wedding district (2016–17), and insitu in Parisian satellite districts, during a residency at the research hub “Architectures, Milieux et Paysages” (2019), the paper adopts a dialectical approach to the tensions between inclusion, spatial differentiation, and symbolic boundary-making. By juxtaposing the contrasting trajectories of urban integration and segregation in the two contexts, the paper foregrounds the transformation of governing rationalities over recent decades and elucidates how the design, planning, and regulation of ethnoscapes produce long-lasting social and spatial effects, in the different civic contexts, with particular attention to the spatial policies of the 1970s and 1980s and their material imprints on the urban landscape. This paper examines this evolving relationship through a review to two districts of European metropolises, Paris, Nanterre and Berlin, Wedding, between 1970 and 2015, with similar but also different characteristics, focusing on how different forms of population mobility have been translated into urban space and how institutional and community-based responses have shaped experiences of integration and social resilience. Drawing on theories of space, and social dimensions of urban landscape planning, the study considers the integration both as a product of the spatial organization and mixing of populations, and as a result of social, cultural, and political relations produced within urban space.
Session 71 - Making the city differently: urban struggles, circulations and networks after 1945
This session will look at the circulation and transfer of critical discourses, as well as activist practices that challenge the dominant ways of making cities after 1945. From a transnational perspective, the aim is to trace the networks, interrelations and genealogies of critical and alternative urbanism in contemporary Europe and beyond.
Coordinators: Baptiste Colin, Céline Vaz
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Coordinators: Baptiste Colin, Céline Vaz
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Session 71 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 222 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Ideology Critique and the Problem of Mediation. Social Demand, Technique and Praxis in Utopie, 1967–1971
César Saldaña Puerto, Bartomeu Martorell Argemí, Antonio Reboredo Raposo, Andreu Ribes I Villanueva
abstractCésar Saldaña Puerto, Bartomeu Martorell Argemí, Antonio Reboredo Raposo, Andreu Ribes I Villanueva
The French journal and collective Utopie, founded in late 1966, published seventeen issues between 1967 and 1978. Contemporary history of architecture has nevertheless tended to reduce its first years either to experimental pneumatic prototypes or to a subsequent turn towards theoretical negativity. This article instead reconstructs the controversy that structured the collective’s first period—from the publication of Utopie 1 in May 1967 to the group’s rearticulation registered in issue 4 in October 1971—by tracing how its contributors variously conceived ideology critique and the mediations through which it might become action. Overall, the contributors’ differing Marxist positions converged on a negative proposition: architecture, urbanism, and sociology were partial disciplines that, through their forms of professional expertise, both misrepresented and materially organised social relations. Yet the contributors did not share a practice capable of superseding those disciplines. This made the distinction between the concepts of commande sociale and demande sociale decisive within the group: could criticism disclose or activate a social demand not already formatted as commission, need, participation or technical programme? An August 1967 report on Utopie’s working session at Navarrenx, preserved in the Henri Lefebvre archive at IMEC, shows the group identifying technique as a missing hinge between the first issue’s sociology of the urban and “practical means of action.” The 1968 exhibition Structures gonflables brought this problem into material practice. Reading the controversies over participation and technique in the double issue 2–3 as a staged debate, rather than as a list of unconnected articles, reveals a constellation of related but ultimately incompatible conceptions of praxis: the architectural project recast as political intervention; autogestion and institutional analysis as means of transforming institutions; experimentation from within professional practice; and the radicalisation of theory conceived as a critical practice in its own right. Eventually, Utopie did not simply pass from optimistic form-making to theoretical negativity; its common language of ideology critique proved unable to yield a shared criterion for distinguishing critical practice from the ideological reproduction of existing social relations.
From the grands ensembles to Gran San Blas: Mario Gaviria and the Seminario de Sociología Urbana
Bartomeu Martorell
abstractBartomeu Martorell
The Gran San Blas neighbourhood in Madrid, comprising 10,444 dwellings and around 52,500 inhabitants by the late 1960s, was one of the most important public housing developments undertaken under Francoism. It can be considered the flagship project of the 1957 Madrid Social Emergency Plan, promoted largely by the Obra Sindical del Hogar (OSH) under the recently created Ministry of Housing, and clearly reflected the paternalistic ideology of the Franco regime in the field of social housing. In the words of José Luis Arrese, the first Minister of Housing, the “social importance of housing for the stability of nations” was evident, as he was convinced that “the firmest trench from which to win the daily battle against communism is to win the hourly battle against poverty”. He made these remarks in 1959 on the occasion of a visit by his French counterpart, Pierre Sudreau, who had come to see the achievements of the Francoist housing programme.
These statements make one thing clear: urban planning was understood as an instrument of social control and as a means of confronting the radicalisation of the working class and opposition to the regime. The critique of urban ideology would become central to French Marxist urban sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, in the work of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre and Manuel Castells, as well as around the journal Utopie.
One of the pioneers in the introduction and dissemination of French urban sociology in Spain was Mario Gaviria (1938–2018), who had studied under Lefebvre in Strasbourg. This article examines this process of reception through the analysis of Gran San Blas carried out by Gaviria’s Seminario de Sociología Urbana at CEISA and published in Arquitectura in 1968. The study exposed the deficiencies and contradictions of the neighbourhood’s planning and criticised the a priori assumptions of functionalist urbanism. More broadly, it illustrates how urban sociology contributed to opening Spanish architectural and urban culture to new interdisciplinary and critical approaches during the final years of the Franco regime.
ILAUD of the future: a portrait of a counter-school
Beatrice Cavallina
abstractBeatrice Cavallina
The research presented here originates from my Master’s thesis in Architecture at the Iuav University of Venice. The thesis reconstructs and analyses the ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design), founded by Giancarlo De Carlo in 1976, as an innovative model of participatory teaching and project-based engagement with the territory. The research, presented in the form of an unpublished book, is the result of an extensive archival investigation that made it possible to identify—through yearbooks, photographs, and correspondence between De Carlo and the participants—the entire network of teachers and students who took part in the Laboratory between 1976 and 2003.
Divided into two chapters, the research provides, in the first, a critical reconstruction of a little-documented experience, while the second chapter reinterprets that experience in the present through the design proposal for a contemporary ILAUD capable of addressing the challenges of our time. The second chapter highlights the continuing relevance of De Carlo’s method, grounded in cooperation and horizontality. ILAUD represented a counter-school with respect to the traditional academic model: an open, dynamic, and mutable environment in which students and teachers worked side by side, and where the place itself—a square, a garden, a city—became an part of the learning process.
The archival research revealed the wide scope and complexity of the Laboratory, mapping 31 participating universities, over 1400 participants, and 2085 total presences. Among them were the Iuav University of Venice and the Universities of Barcelona, Rome, Zurich, Paris, and Ghent. The analysis also shed light on the structure of the Permanent Activities—local, context-based workshops—and the Residential Courses, annual intensive sessions of collective design held in different cities.
Three main outcomes emerge from the research: The definition of ILAUD as an alternative educational space, capable of merging theory, practice, and the social dimension; the identification of the “tentative” principle as the methodological and political foundation of De Carlo’s pedagogy; the demonstration of how the Laboratory influenced architectural and urban thought (two dimensions that De Carlo regarded as inseparable) thus laying the groundwork for new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration.
The thesis presents ILAUD as a still-relevant experiment promoting an open and collaborative approach to education and design.
The gendered urban experience: Feminist critiques on the city in the Netherlands, 1980s
Nica de Korte
abstractNica de Korte
This paper examines how feminist activists in the Netherlands developed alternative forms of urban knowledge and practice in the 1980s. While the historiography of Dutch urban development, particularly about Amsterdam, has highlighted the crucial role of alternative urban visions that challenged modernist planning, feminist contributions to these debates have largely been neglected. Bringing gender into this history offers new perspectives on the wider field contestation around the making of the city.
During the 1980s, feminist collectives developed approaches to urban space that took women’s everyday experiences as their starting point. Their research, policy critiques, and urban projects foregrounded issues including social safety, physical mobility, childcare, public transport, and the gendered division of labour. I refer to these interconnected developments as spatial feminism.
Drawing on feminist research and reports, project documentation, and archival sources, the paper demonstrates that feminist engagement with urban development in the 1980s constituted a substantial and multifaceted movement. It examines this movement across three overlapping domains: theory and research groups; activism, consciousness-raising, and policy critique, notably through Vrouwen Bouwen & Wonen; and urban projects and interventions, specifically the Burgerziekenhuis voor Vrouwen in Amsterdam. Situating these Dutch initiatives within international examples of feminist spatial thought, the paper argues that spatial feminism should be understood as a full-fledged form of alternative urbanism.
Squatting movements as key indicators of urban issues: struggles around Montparnasse and Kreuzberg in the post-1968 era
Baptiste Colin
abstractBaptiste Colin
Squatting movements challenge urban planners' actions, but they also stand up for the local population. They embody the refusal to be “deported” and instill a spirit of creative resistance (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2008). They reject urban policies considered as oppressive and stigmatizing and they plan new principles of self-management. They sometimes defy bashing and repression and they disclose the doubts and contradictions of their protest discourse. When squatting movements defend a certain image of a neighborhood, expressing their attachment to urban infrastructure, the historical setting of outdated architecture, and a sometimes mythologized structure of neighborhood solidarity and familiarity, they are often developing arguments intended to protect their own interests, which are no less legitimate: preserving a space that squatting offers for creativity—creating a space through appropriation by diverting it from its previous state.
The development projects in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris in the 1970s and, in this context, the proliferation of housing occupations, reveal the violence of urban transformation and the creativity of forms of resistance. In a similar context, the beginnings of gentrification in the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin led, in a turbulent political climate, to the formation of a large-scale housing occupation movement and, in a burst of activism, to the organization of an international festival in the summer of 1981, which brought together the alternative movements that defined an entire era (Colin, 2015).
Session 71 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 222 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Community Wealth Building Network: Circulating Alternative Urban Policies across the Atlantic
Bradley Smith
abstractBradley Smith
Community wealth building (CWB) has circulated since the 2000s as a framework for alternative local economic development, carried across the Atlantic by think tanks and municipal networks. This paper asks under what conditions the circulation of such models supports rather than undermines community empowerment, where local trust in the government introducing them cannot be assumed. It examines Chicago’s Community Wealth Building Initiative, launched in 2020, drawing on policy documents and seventeen semi-structured interviews. Chicago’s actors did not reject external models but localized their authority: through co-production and capacity-building, circulating references became resources for community empowerment rather than templates imposed from outside. Two genealogies of democratic ownership were available to them, one domestic and one transatlantic, yet the initiative’s public account names no external precedents at all, while interviews reveal both. The paper argues that the direction in which models circulate and the direction in which they are authorized are separable, and that legitimacy may accrue from withholding an external reference rather than invoking one.
From Budapest to Miskolc: Knowledge Transfer and Postmodern Urbanism in Late Socialist Hungary
Balázs Papp
abstractBalázs Papp
Late socialist Hungarian urbanism developed within a highly centralised planning and construction system, yet critical positions also emerged inside its professional institutions. This paper examines one strand of this critical urbanism: how postmodern critiques of modernist planning entered Hungarian architectural and urbanist discourse, how they circulated within the country, and how far they became part of planning practice. It uses a qualitative historical case-study approach, combining contemporary documents and secondary literature with five in-person interviews conducted in 2026. The analysis follows one route of professional knowledge transfer from Budapest to Miskolc, centred on Dezső Ekler, the student milieu of Bercsényi 28–30 and the Miskolc Architectural Workshop.
Foreign journals, translations, libraries, fellowships and lectures provided selective access to the urban writings of postmodern thinkers such as Aldo Rossi and the Krier brothers. The relation of the Miskolc projects to these sources appears in recurring concerns with urban morphology, inherited settlement structures and continuity in the built environment. These concerns are most clearly expressed in the context-sensitive rehabilitation of the Hadas district
in Mezőkövesd. The practical reach of these ideas nevertheless remained constrained by the institutions of state socialism. Economic and organisational pressures, rather than postmodern critique, did more to reduce large-panel housing construction during the 1980s. Postmodern thought mattered chiefly because it gave architects a vocabulary and methods for using the greater design freedom created by these changes. Late socialist Hungarian urbanism therefore emerged through selective access, professional mediation and local reinterpretation, rather than as a direct or merely delayed copy of Western models.
Challenging a model from within? Dunkirk at the turn of the 1970s.
Olivier Ratouis
abstractOlivier Ratouis
In the late 1960s, the Dunkirk city area experienced large-scale economic and urban development. The state and big industry support each other in order to continue the growth that began in the mid-1950s. New structures are being created to lead this change locally and to support the decisions imposed from the center, particularly the new ministère de l’Équipement and the commissariat Général au Plan (economic). However, within these new structures, a new generation of economists, engineers and urban planners is coming to support the demands expressed by a part of the local political class for a renewal. The challenge then becomes reforming urban planning methods and giving a more central role to the issue of daily life. Two main perspectives stand out, both fueled by an experimental dimension or in search of new tools to challenge previous practices. The first is that of the multidisciplinary team set up for the launch of the Courghain ZAC operation. The circulation of ideas is important at the regional level : In Dunkirk, urban planners frequently refer to the experiments conducted at Toulouse or Louvain-la-Neuve, one can question the porosity of practices and reflections with Belgium across borders that are still very marked in Europe, but also on a national scale, in particular with the Villeneuve operation in Grenoble. A second approach is more political and oppositional. It comes from academic field when Dunkirk became a site for the buiding of Marxist urban critique, of which Manuel Castells and Francis Godard's book Monopolville. L'entreprise, l'État, l'urbain, is the figurehead. However, this intellectual current, not intended to lead to a government of local planning, engages in dialogue with the new structures. The Dunkirk area thus shows more subtle and complex links than a binary opposition between order and contestation would suggest, and which we propose to examine.
Neighbourhood struggles at the end of the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships: experiences and exchanges for democratic urban planning
Céline Vaz
abstractCéline Vaz
At the end of the 1960s, beyond the differences in the scope and nature of the urban policies implemented, Franco's Spain (1939-1975) and Salazar's Portugal (1933-1974) shared an urban crisis characterised by a shortage of social housing, a lack of infrastructure and facilities of all kinds, and uncontrolled urbanisation marked by socio-spatial segregation. In Spain, faced with this ‘“ no-quality ”' city, neighbourhood associations (asociaciones de vecinos) multiplied, giving rise to a vast urban social movement in the 1970s. A study on the mobilisation of residents in the southern suburbs of Madrid (slums and official housing programmes) highlights the plurality of their social, political and urban issues. The struggles in these neighbourhoods reflect a social appropriation of the issue of living conditions through the demand for a ‘right to the city’, which includes the right to remain in one's home and access to decent housing and urban facilities. The neighbourhoods in which they live became a fundamental setting for establishing a balance of power between the Franco regime and the social and political forces of opposition, allowing the latter to converge. Some architects and urban planners played a major role in these movements, eager to implement new urban planning practices influenced by various schools of thought, experiences and tools from abroad, particularly Italy and France.
In Portugal, it was only after the Carnation Revolution (1974-1976) that significant popular mobilisation took place in urban neighbourhoods, particularly in Lisbon and Porto, around residents' committees (comissão de moradores), which in some cases were accompanied by building occupations, unlike in Spain. However, in the early 1970s, some committed professionals were already attempting to support and stimulate a dynamic of activism in Lisbon's neighbourhoods, drawing inspiration from Spanish and Italian precedents. Thus, the Spanish and Portuguese cases remind us how the exchange of ideas and experiences in the field of housing and urban planning within left-wing urban planning networks, facilitated by certain mediating figures, helped to fuel neighbourhood struggles and quickly forge democratic alternatives in the pattern of urban development in the late 1970s.
Sofiegaarden 1965-69 - squatting and preservationist urban renewal
Jakob Ingemann Parby
abstractJakob Ingemann Parby
In the 1960’s the city of Copenhagen found itself in a strange predicament. On one hand it was the capital of a country experiencing unprecedented economic growth with almost zero unemployment and rising real wages and average wealth. On the other large chunks of inner Copenhagen were falling into disrepair. Since the 1940s the municipality of Copenhagen had adopted a strategy of slum clearances and redevelopment that were both slow and expensive and generated growing public concern and resistance. In the early 1960s another 26,000 dwelling units were condemned and marked for demolition at a time of a rising demand for cheap housing due to a general population increase and a vast influx of younger citizens propelled by the education revolution of the 1960s. Between 1958 and 1968 the number of students at the University of Copenhagen alone rose from 7000 to 21.000.
The young students played a crucial role in the early squatter movements of the mid-1960s. Individually and collectively, they moved into some of the condemned buildings and flats that were often left empty for years due to lack of urban planning and funding for redevelopment projects. Here they not only found an intermediary and affordable home but also developed new ways of living together in the city, that informed and were informed by attempts from architects and other actors to transform the slum clearance policy into a more preservationist urban renewal policy.
The students collective Sofiegaarden, established in a block of condemned 18th century buildings at Christianshavn between 1965 and 1969, was one of the most influential early cases of squatters effecting broader policies of urban renewal and strategies for student housing. One key aspect of the Sofiegaarden-case was the squatters sustained effort to legalize the squat through rent-paying systems, agreements with the private landlord and negotiations with the municipality. At one point they even administered the referral to other condemned properties in Copenhagen used for student housing until demolition modelled after Sofiegaarden.
Based on new archival studies and interviews with some of the key people involved, this paper explores the web of alliances with architects, lawyers, politicians and the local community in the young squatters’ attempt to define a new form of communal living in the historical city center. It also traces the long term legacy in other forms of housing activism in Copenhagen and beyond.
Session 72 - Transcribing Urbanistic Networks in Europe: Standardization and Symbolism in Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
This session explores the transnational networks, urban policies and spatial strategies that shaped the replication of urban models across Europe and beyond during the Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes of the 20th century, focusing on the dissemination of architectural forms, urban layouts, and planning ideologies.
Coordinators: Katerina Chatzikonstantinou, David Martín López
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Coordinators: Katerina Chatzikonstantinou, David Martín López
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Session 72 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Approaches to iconic or everyday legacies of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes: the experience of the ATRIUM Cultural Route
John Patrick Leech
abstractJohn Patrick Leech
The ATRIUM Cultural Route (Architecture of Totalitarian Regimes of the XX century in Europe’s Urban Memory) was certified by the Council of Europe in 2013. It brings together 23 municipalities
in 9 different European countries, all characterized by a built heritage whose origins lie in
totalitarian or authoritarian regimes (see www.atriumroute.eu). Founded on a rejection of all forms
of apologetics for these regimes, its primary interpretative key is that of ‘dissonant’ heritage, identifying as a starting point the complexities and contradictions of the architectural and urban
heritage of these towns with respect to the political and cultural perspectives of today. But this
heritage can vary greatly, from being ‘iconic’, that is, representing openly the ideology and values
of the regimes, or on the contrary ‘everyday’, that is, without any immediately explicit elements
which recall the regimes and, instead, with a strong functional characterization in terms of present
uses. There is a difference, in other words, between a building with mosaics or other artistic celebrations of a regime and a school or residential structure with no such elements whose links to
the regime remain, instead, implicit. Starting from the experience of ATRIUM, this paper will
explore both these types of heritage, and the different challenges they pose with respect to the
construction of a European ‘urban memory’ relating to these regimes.
Roads of Power: A Transnational Perspective on Authoritarian Infrastructures in 1980s Bucharest and Buenos Aires
Gruia Badescu
abstractGruia Badescu
This paper examines how authoritarian regimes mobilised road construction and monumental boulevards as instruments of ideological expression and political control, tracing the transnational circulation of these spatial models in two capital cities belonging to opposing sides of the Cold War. Focusing on Bucharest in the 1980s under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu and Buenos Aires under the last military dictatorship in Argentina, the paper analyses how two specific road construction projects—the Victory of Socialism Boulevard in Bucharest and the 25 de Mayo and Perito Moreno urban highways in Buenos Aires—borrowed forms of urbanism from different Cold War centers of power, while being rooted in shared imaginaries of modernization, domination, and visibility.
In Romania, Ceaușescu’s new civic axis and systematization roads drew simultaneously on Soviet monumental planning, as well as on pre-communist reference points for Romanian urbanism such as Parisian boulevard construction and entanglements with Italian expertise on systematization and sventramento, while reinterpreting them through socialist developmentalism. These ideological infrastructures were conceived as tools for disciplining space, displaying power, and producing a new socialist subject.
In Buenos Aires, Intendant Osvaldo Cacciatore’s highway system, influenced by North American expressway culture, similarly enacted authoritarian spatial control, erasing neighbourhoods in the name of efficiency, circulation, and geopolitical reorientation toward a North American imaginary.
By placing these cases in conversation, the paper shows how transport infrastructure—rather than only monumental buildings—served as a crucial medium through which authoritarian regimes operationalised political ideologies. Roads became vectors of international borrowing, but also of symbolic rewriting: instruments of rupture with the past, yet deeply embedded in transnational genealogies of authoritarian planning.
The paper argues that these infrastructural projects reveal a shared repertoire of authoritarian urban modernism, highlighting both the success and limits of transnational model transfers. It concludes by reflecting on contemporary debates surrounding the contested heritage of these interventions and their place in current decolonizing perspectives on urban planning history.
The Unsettled Legacy of Socialist Mass Housing in the Czech Republic
Karolina Jirkalová
abstractKarolina Jirkalová
The construction of large housing estates, based on standardized designs and prefabricated concrete panels, was one of the key pillars of the legitimacy of state socialism in Czechoslovakia. After the violent suppression of the Prague Spring’s democratic ambitions in 1968 mass housing programme served as a tool for material pacification of the shaken population. However, the drive to build as many flats as quickly and cheaply as possible shifted real power from architects and the state to construction companies and panel plants. Growing criticism of housing estates, gradually spreading throughout society during the 1980s caused the estates to become a source of delegitimization of state socialism instead of supporting the consolidated regime. The criticism was ranging from urbanistic issues such as monofunctionality, through inflexible technologies, standardized layouts and appearances, to the perceived impossibility of identification and community formation. By the late 1980s, political leaders were acutely aware of this threat; yet they stood little chance against the monopoly of construction companies and panel plants. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, panel buildings and housing estates became emblematic of the failures of the former regime. Modernist urbanism was broadly rejected, while traditional urban forms—streets, squares, and perimeter blocks—gained currency, representing the opposite of the existing housing estates, the so-called “non-cities.”
In the meantime, more than 35 years have passed, and several research projects have examined the legacy of prefabricated housing estates from the perspectives of architectural and urban history, urban geography, and anthropology. Although modernist housing estates have many disadvantages when compared with traditional block-based urbanism, they also offer significant advantages valued by their residents: cleaner environments, generous public space and the separation of vehicular traffic from residential zones. Yet the dominant urbanistic discourse continues to echo the mantra of the 1990s: that modernist housing estates should be densified and built up in order to approximate as closely as possible the rigid grid of the nineteenth-century city. The legacy of state-socialist prefabrication thus remains unresolved in the Czech Republic—even though one quarter of the country’s population, and nearly one third of Prague’s residents, live in these housing estates.
A Grammar of Socialist Urbanism: Standardization and Industrialized Housing in the GDR
David Mesa-Cedillo
abstractDavid Mesa-Cedillo
: Formal repetition in the urban landscape of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is often associated with the direct transfer of Soviet models or with the aesthetic consequences of authoritarian rule. This paper approaches repetition instead through the material organisation of serial housing construction, using grammar to describe the relations among dimensions, components, factories, transport and assembly that allowed different buildings to emerge from a shared productive infrastructure. The early large-panel types P1 and P2 established close correspondences between housing type and production, yet their diffusion across the districts also multiplied component assortments and exposed the difficulties of maintaining factory continuity. The critical research undertaken in Plattenbau 69 reformulated this problem by exploring how greater variation might be anticipated within the system itself, a line of development subsequently extended through the Wohnungsbauserie 70 (WBS 70). As serial housing entered the residential complex (Wohnkomplex), these productive relations also affected the arrangement of buildings, collective facilities and open spaces, while other recurrent elements such as public art contributed to the differentiation of particular places. The Housing Construction Programme of 1973 increased the scale at which this apparatus was expected to operate, tying housing targets to productivity, factory capacity and economic planning. Drawing on archival documents, contemporary technical publications and retrospective accounts, the paper argues that urban homogeneity emerged partly from these interdependencies, while the persistent search for variation reveals the limits, adaptations and contradictions of serial production.
About rivalry and exchange - Urban planning as an instrument of power for European dictatorships
Victoria Grau
abstractVictoria Grau
To this day, the history of hegemonic dictatorships in 20th-century Europe is often narrated primarily from national perspectives. Such a limited viewpoint obscures the complex relationships between these regimes and the broader political constellation of the era. These reciprocal interactions become particularly visible at the spatial level. Urban planning served as a crucial instrument for consolidating power and projecting efficiency, modernity, and creative capacity both domestically and internationally.
This article examines urban planning as an expression of mutual influence, competition, and rivalry among European dictatorships. It draws on examples from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the dictatorships of Spain, Portugal, and the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. To illuminate the importance of spatial development for these regimes, the contribution first highlights the broad range of urban planning tasks they engaged in, from housing construction to armaments and transport infrastructure, educational facilities, and air force installations.
Rather than advocating a strictly comparative approach, the article argues for a transnational historiography. The relationships between these countries formed a dynamic and complex network of diverse actors. Through selected case studies, the article demonstrates how dictatorships influenced one another, the role that propaganda and exhibitions played in these exchanges, the extent to which urban planning practices were internationalised, and the significance of professional interaction across borders.
Mechanisms and forms of Nazi influence on public space in Slovak towns between 1939 and 1945
Martin Pekar
abstractMartin Pekar
The paper will focus on the question of how Nazi influences were reflected in the public space of selected towns through the interventions of the undemocratic regime of the Slovak Republic between 1939 and 1945, reflecting Slovakia's position as a periphery to the Nazi cultural, power, and political centre. The paper will examine, in particular, the mechanisms of transmission and forms of local transfer of various forms into everyday practice, and the ways in which urban institutions and residents responded to them. Within the historical framework of the paper, the following aspects are considered: the emergence of county administration, the ideological foundations of the regime, minority policy, social policy, and regulations affecting mobility, assembly, and access to public spaces. Methodologically, the paper will adopt a case study approach, focusing on the concept of space production. An analytical grid comprising four dimensions of public space will be utilised: legal, functional, social, and material-symbolic.
Session 72 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Urban trasformations under Fascism.
Approaches to monuments in Italy’s regional cities
Luigi Paolantonio, Andrea Goti
abstractLuigi Paolantonio, Andrea Goti
Within the broader framework of the urban transformations promoted by the Fascist regime, the isolation and enhancement of monuments assumed a central role. In many cities, the reconfiguration of the urban fabric occurred through selective or extensive demolitions, and these interventions created space for new buildings in which the central government sought to express, through architecture, a clear intention of monumentality and representation.
Particular attention was devoted to ancient and medieval monuments, often subjected to liberation from the surrounding built fabric through the creation of open spaces around them. Such operations aimed to redefine their role within the city and to highlight their symbolic significance, linking them to a past regarded as glorious.
This paper seeks to analyse and compare various experiences of this kind, whether completed or only planned, in several medium-sized cities.
These range from interventions on Roman monuments, such as the rediscovery of the amphitheatre in piazza Sant’Oronzo in Lecce and the clearance of the triumphal arches of Augustus in Rimini and Trajan in Ancona, to the celebration of a central figure of the Italian Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri, through the monumentalisation of his tomb in Ravenna.
In cases involving the wholesale clearance of urban districts, the intervention takes on a radical character: the historic fabric is replaced without regard for the pre-existing urban grid, making way for new buildings that reinterpret classical forms in a monumental key, as in piazza della Vittoria in Brescia.
In contrast to this model stands the practice of “diradamento”, based on a selective approach to demolition. Advocated by Giovannoni, it envisaged targeted interventions of urban renewal, as in Siena, where proposals included the requalification of the area near piazza del Campo and the reconstruction of several towers to restore an image consistent with the city’s medieval profile. In Bolzano, by contrast, Piacentini designed a monument inspired by the Roman triumphal arch and conceived a large monumental area surrounded by new buildings.
Similar approaches also emerge in marginal contexts. In Abruzzo, emblematic cases are L’Aquila, where the plan envisaged the clearance of large portions of the historic centre to open new thoroughfares and erect monumental buildings, and Sulmona, where in 1933 a project was drawn up for the liberation of the medieval aqueduct, completed only in the 1960s.
Modernity and tradition in Italian Colonial architecture in the Mediterranean (1912-1943).
Vassilis Colonas
abstractVassilis Colonas
Italy, due to its late involvement in European colonial expansionism, was unable to follow the same policy as other countries in terms of the architecture of its colonies. It did not attempt to impose the architecture of the metropolis, but sought to incorporate into it, and in this case into the emerging rationalism, elements from the local architectural tradition and, above all, from what it believed to be the local tradition, the "spirit of the place."
In Libya, architects tried to highlight the country's Roman past, as in the Dodecanese they did with the knightly period, and then to dress up this past with what they selectively considered to be local.
After some unsuccessful attempts to revive historical styles, architectural creation in Libya is divided between an "African" and an "Italian" interpretation, the latter being mainly academic. The distinction between African "traditional" and Italian "classical" architecture made it imperative to introduce a new term that would overcome the difference between these opposing categories and create a common field of expression for architects who wanted their designs to be both authentically Italian but also to be close to local forms.
At the same time, Mediterraneanity, as it was directly related to the traditional architecture of the Mediterranean and especially the Greek islands, with their white surfaces, geometric volumes, and purity of form, was what so influenced modernists in their early aesthetic pursuits. Purity, Greekness, and Mediterraneanity are the three key terms of this architecture, and Rome, as the successor to classical Greece and the center of Mare Nostrum, was the necessary unifying element of all these trends.
The way was now open for a new Mediterranean rationalism, enriched with elements of local tradition, at the level of principles rather than forms, which would become the basic design tool in all Italian possessions in the Mediterranean. This architectural spring would not last long, as it would soon be subject to the dictates of monumentality imposed by the shift in fascist colonial policy and the proclamation of the Imperium.
"Monumental": Import and reception of American architectural and urban models in late-1950s Spain. The case of Bosch i Aymerich and Catalunya Square in Barcelona.
Rubén Navarro
abstractRubén Navarro
Spanish architect and engineer Josep Maria Bosch i Aymerich (1917–2015) trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked within the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Industria, co-founded the Instituto de Estudios Norteamericanos and collaborated with AESB (Architects and Engineers Spanish Bases) and Frederic R. Harris Inc. in the construction of the U.S. military bases in Spain (1953–1957). He thus became part of a transnational apparatus that channelled U.S. interests and contributed to the cultural expansion of the American development model in Spain. His proposal for a ‘Monumental Building and a Special Urban Plan’ for Catalunya Square in central Barcelona (1954–1961) coincided with the efforts of General Franco’s authoritarian dictatorship to pursue a diplomatic and economic shift towards international rehabilitation (1950–1959) and with a period of significant cultural modernisation in the city (1956–1962). In Bosch’s proposal, the symbolism employed by the regime in its institutional architecture during the autarkic period (1939–1959) was replaced by the new monumentality of the American skyscraper and an imported version of International Style modernism, symbolically anticipating the corporate character of the developmentalism that followed (1959–1973). However, despite the regime’s support and being awarded with major prizes, the proposal encountered local opposition and triggered a debate on the architectural and urban models that the city should follow in the following decades and finally failed to be implemented. Through the selected case study, this paper aims to (1) show the shift in urban monumentality and symbolic architecture in Barcelona during this period; (2) examine some of the political and corporate networks and mechanisms through which real estate capital was channelled for the dissemination of American architectural and urban models in the city during the Cold War period; (3) to analyse the adaptation strategies required for the geographical translocation of these models; and (4) to relate these processes to the wider political, economic, and cultural local context. To this end, it examines original documentation preserved in the Historical Archive of the Association of Architects of Catalonia and the Fundació Bosch i Aymerich, much of it unpublished and still not catalogued, with particular attention to the successive versions of the project drawn by Bosch over the years.
The Great Hall of the City. Totalitarian Parallels between the Plaza, the Piazza and the Gauforum through the Falangist Plans for Guernica and Salamanca (1937-1939)
Carlos Navas Catalá
abstractCarlos Navas Catalá
In large letters on one of the walls of the hall where the exhibition of the reconstruction plans for Guernica was held in the city of Burgos in December 1937, one could read: “The Caudillo and the Falange, even at war, study for peace.” This slogan, clearly propagandistic, referred to the work that a small group of technicians and architects, attached to the Technical Services of the single party, had discreetly begun during the war.
Falangist architects faced the task of rebuilding the country after the war in accordance with their ideology and the principles of the National Reconstruction Plan, yet their activity had already begun during the conflict. From the first meetings and exchanges of ideas among these professionals emerged two plans representative of the new national urbanism: the reconstruction of Guernica (1937) and the Expansion and Reform Project of the city of Salamanca (1938), the results of which were subsequently displayed to the public in separate exhibitions, such as the one mentioned at the beginning. Through photographs, drawings, and models, the future appearance of both towns was recreated, in which the reconfiguration of urban voids played a fundamental role. The Plaza del Imperio in Guernica and the reform of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca offered two models for the trial of one of the regime’s main stages and its institutions.
Given the intention of Spanish architects to reshape urban form to suit a very specific type of state and society, it is pertinent to consider the contemporary operations that were occurring in a similar manner in Fascist and National Socialist cities, as well as their possible resonances in the Spanish case. At a moment when Franco and the Falange were looking to already consolidated totalitarian experiences in Europe, including in architectural terms, this contribution analyzes the parallels and divergences between the aforementioned Spanish projects and the Italian and German models of the 'piazza' and the 'gauforum', respectively, with the aim of situating the Spanish debate within a broader European framework.
Public space as an arena for democracy: the reshaping of urban scenario in post-Francoist Spain, the case of Barcelona.
Alessandro Scarnato, Antonio Pizza
abstractAlessandro Scarnato, Antonio Pizza
A key element in contemporary Spanish identity has been public space. Furthermore, it is around this theme that the intense relationship between disciplinary culture and institutional practice has often been articulated. This paper offers a reflection on this crucial area of urban developement, considering the turbulent Spanish political climate of the 20th century. It is quite well known that during Francoism squares, promenades, and avenues were the subject of proposals and transformations that, overall, did not coalesce into a reasoned and fully proactive urban planning framework. It was not until the last quarter of the 20th century, under the democratic regime, that disciplinary and administrative attention once again focused on this area. Alongside the necessary infrastructural modernization of the country in the post-Franco era, public space was seen as a convenient opportunity to act quickly and concretely in the city at an affordable cost and with great communicative and symbolic potential. It was in Barcelona that public space acquired the dimension of a constant undercurrent within the diverse chorus of the many architectural, cultural, artistic, and political entities that participated in the city's reconstruction, as Oriol Bohigas defined it in 1985. The examination of Barcelona and its debates, projects, and actions forms the framework of a narrative that explains the different phases through which its strategies for creating public space have passed as a reflection of certain ways of interpreting the city. The enormous impact of the Barcelona projects on disciplinary criticism and public debate resonated, albeit at different times, in other Spanish and European cities. This latter aspect occupies the final part of the paper, offering a retrospective reading of that almost epic period of urban intervention under the sign of democratization.
Session 73 - Global Urban Networks Revisited: Transnational Urban Planning in the Cold War Period
The post-war period marked a profound transformation in urban concepts and practices worldwide. As transnational urban networks expanded, Cold War politics emerged as a defining force in shaping cities. This panel revisits these networks over the lens of East-West encounters, exploring how transnational actors influenced the modernization of cities.
Coordinators: Ana Tostoes, Kengo Hayashi, Luisa Bebiano
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Coordinators: Ana Tostoes, Kengo Hayashi, Luisa Bebiano
show/hide introduction
Session 73 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
The invisible architecture of War
Luisa Bebiano
abstractLuisa Bebiano
"Alongside the peasants' war, there is the war of the technician and the scientist."
From the moment a conflict zone can be overflown, battlefield reconnaissance changes. At this point, the idea of surveillance emerges as an essential tool of war. Built on the premises of a logistics of perception, it was during World War II that the machinery for filming, watching, and recording rapidly developed at the pace of the war machine, merging into one.
Defense began with the advent of electronic arsenals. It largely proceeded through artificial intelligence, via telecommunications detection, optical telemediation, and radio. However, most sound detection already existed with Tucker's acoustic mirrors. The idea of 'military listening' began its course with war trumpets, as machines and extensions of the body. Later, the first radar units emerged as structures that overlaid real architecture and were hidden from the enemy.
The relationship to territory keeps pace with the progress of weapons and the geographic policy of armies, with information, mapping, and speed as the three primary axes. War, which tended to transform the landscape through fortifications, began to transform military objects into projectiles, in an incessant game of armament and listening.
The Control of the airborne object came to dominate part of the war: multiple lines crossed in Europe, through a network of radar systems. It was the sophistication of this equipment that, in 1942, turned pilots into robots.
The process of homogenization of contemporary military structure was under way, with the ability to achieve the highest possible speed. This was the great step toward total war.
With the nuclear bomb, the whole planet becomes defensive. Given the needs of military intelligence, human beings have become servants of energy - that is, of violence. “Science and military intelligence have struck a pact” and the essential is no longer visible, except when the image appears in social space. War has become invisible through speed, energy, and information.
This total visibility that penetrates every obstacle renders space transparent, while time has been reduced to systems of prediction and foresight. What begins is what Virilio calls the “robot era” in which the automation of pursuit triggered the development of data processing and the present-day automated drones, which are disrupting the conduct and politics of war all the way to the present day.
REBUILDING SKOPJE: SOLIDARITY, INTERNATIONALISM, AND URBAN PLANNING
Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Jovan Ivanovski, Vladimir Deskov, Mihajlo Stojanovski, Tea Damjanovska
abstractAna Ivanovska Deskova, Jovan Ivanovski, Vladimir Deskov, Mihajlo Stojanovski, Tea Damjanovska
On July 26, 1963, a devastating earthquake struck Skopje, then the third-largest city in the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia and the capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. The earthquake destroyed or severely damaged 70-80% of the city’s buildings, left around 150.000 of 200.000 residents homeless, and demolished or severely damaged the essential infrastructure – schools, hospitals, administrative and cultural institutions. Vital equipment, documents, books, and personal belongings were lost. The full extent of the damage was never precisely determined; some of it went unrecorded, and many of the consequences were felt much later.
What followed the disaster was an extraordinary international reconstruction effort. Overnight, Skopje became a melting pot of generosity, solidarity, and political interest – an effort led and coordinated by the United Nations, the Yugoslav government and its president Josip Broz Tito. The solidarity for Skopje– seemingly independent of political and ideological positions – or rather, a result of them – was rooted in Yugoslavia’s unique geopolitical stance as a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The disaster, which left much of the city in ruins and rendered thousands homeless, prompted an extraordinary outpouring of international aid that transcended the political and ideological divisions of the Cold War and set in motion one of the most ambitious and comprehensive urban reconstruction efforts in recent history.
Ernest Weissmann, a Croatian architect and head of the UN Housing and Town Planning Section, led the International Consulting Team. Polish urbanist Adolf Ciborowski managed the development of a new Master Plan, working in parallel with Doxiadis Associates (Greece), Polservice (Poland), Wilbur Smith and Associates (UK), and a team of local planners and architects. In 1965, the UN and the Yugoslav government jointly organized an invited international competition for the redevelopment of Skopje’s city center – a segment that was intentionally omitted with the Master plan.
Overnight, previously local and peripheral Skopje was transformed into a site of international collaboration and a testing ground for late-modern urban and architectural paradigms. The trauma of the disaster soon became a catalyst for a new, radical transformation, making the relatively short but intense reconstruction period one of the most significant periods in the city’s recent architectural history.
Cold War Urbanism across the Pacific: The US-South Korea Network and Kyu Sung Woo
Man Joong Kim
abstractMan Joong Kim
This paper demonstrates a transpacific network of architecture and urban planning during the Cold War, focusing on the exchange between South Korea and the U.S., with the case study of Kyu Sung Woo. The purpose of this study is to challenge the transatlantic-centered perspective in current scholarship. Following and tracing the trajectory of transpacific exchange leads to two conclusions: The constitution of U.S. urbanism was an assemblage of cosmopolitan participations that included Asian influences. South Korean architects collaborated in reestablishing the role of an architect as a "social organizer" by seeking publicness in architecture together with the U.S. academic circle, which was resonating with ideas from the East and the West.
Whilst transatlantic exchanges of architecture between Europe and the U.S. have established a substantial body of scholarship, the transpacific perspective has been covered from the limited viewpoint of lingering (post)colonial relationships or completely neglected. It is a valid analysis that the rise of authoritarianism in Europe during interwar and the Cold War exchange program made the U.S. a predominant nation in architecture and urban planning. However, the discourse of architecture and urban planning constantly changed in response to new social demands. Moreover, urban issues were both local and global. In these contexts, South Korea possesses a distinctive feature. It was a postcolonial state but under a non-Western regime. Also, it required reconstruction of its territory not only from postcolonial nation-building but also from the devastation of the Korean War, which was the early hot war of the Cold War.
Conventional narratives have depicted South Korea as a successful beneficiary of the U.S. Cold War exchange program, but not every architect and urban planner from South Korea was limited to being a passive receiver. They were companions of the architectural avant-garde in the U.S., coping with contemporary urban issues from both sides of the Pacific. By discovering and reevaluating the ideas and practices of South Korean architects and urban planners left in both South Korea and the U.S., we can gain better access to the structure of Cold War exchange programs and institutional connections. The recognition of such intellectual genealogy and transpacific networks will provide a critical review of the urban history of both South Korea and the U.S. and provoke reconsiderations of spatial justice.
Session 73 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 1 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
The Architect of Networks: Ernest Weissmann and the Infrastructure of Transnational Planning
Vladimir Kulic
abstractVladimir Kulic
Ernest Weissmann appears at nearly every juncture in the history of modern planning, from CIAM to Habitat, yet remains a shadowy figure, reduced to supporting roles in others' narratives. This paper argues that Weissmann's apparent marginality masks his importance as an architect of institutional networks through which planning knowledge circulated globally during the Cold War. His trajectory from peripheral Yugoslavia to the centers of international planning demonstrates how actors from outside the metropolitan core could work as essential mediators in the emerging global planning apparatus.
This paper traces how Weissmann leveraged his simultaneous embeddedness in Western modernism (via Loos, Le Corbusier, and CIAM), UN technocracy, and Yugoslav socialism to facilitate encounters that shaped postwar urbanism. His matchmaking extended across multiple scales. On the one hand, the international seminars he organized through the UN were crucial venues that facilitated encounters such as that between Constantinos Doxiadis and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt – one of the most influential postwar partnerships. On the other, he connected major state and institutional actors to bridge Cold War divisions, helping establish Yugoslavia as a site of global encounter for experts from across the divided world. The first such project was the post-earthquake reconstruction of Skopje, continuing with the regional projects for the Adriatic coast and the Ford Foundation-funded American-Yugoslav Project, which disseminated US expertise across the divided Europe. Most significantly, Weissmann worked as an institutional entrepreneur, pursuing the establishment of educational centers for planners from developing nations. He continued such activities even after retirement, including his involvement in the planning of Habitat I.
Weissmann's career illuminates how the UN, far from being a monolithic Western institution, could be mobilized by actors from the periphery to serve non-aligned agendas. His ability to navigate between socialist and capitalist planning paradigms while maintaining Yugoslav citizenship suggests that Cold War urban networks were more fluid and multi-directional than conventional narratives acknowledge. The paper argues that understanding figures like Weissmann is essential for grasping how technical expertise circulated in the post-colonial world: not simply from North to South, but through complex networks where peripheral actors could become central nodes.
Planning without Planners: Santo Domingo and the Marginalization of Technical Expertise, 1937-1961
Marcos Prados Martín
abstractMarcos Prados Martín
Santo Domingo has experienced sustained demographic growth since the beginning of the XX Century. As a result, city management and governance became central concerns for both national and local authorities. As in most Latin American countries, architects and engineers sought to position themselves as the professionals capable of proposing solutions to issues such as urban mobility, housing, and infrastructure. However, these professionals, had to contend with limitations imposed by the country’s higher-education system and a lack of government support. Although there was an attempt to introduce a comprehensive urban plan in 1955, it was never implemented, further underscoring the weak institutionalization of technical planning.
Consequently, city governance and planning did not emerge from policies grounded in technical solutions, nor were they carried out through a comprehensive urban plan. Instead, it was informal practice and the application of isolated ordinances and laws that shaped the management of urban expansion, which faced significant challenges, including the massive influx of rural migrants seeking work in a context of industrialization. As a result, professionals who sought recognition for their role as city managers grew frustrated as urban governance was, in most cases, executed without their involvement.
This paper seeks to analyze this set of governmental policies and practices in order to shed light on how urban growth in Santo Domingo was managed. It does so through what we refer to as governmental devices, a concept intended to more broadly capture the logics that shape urban governance and that often exceed the interests of professional groups.
Transnational Pedagogies of Socialist Planning: Hermann Räder, the People’s Commune, and Sino–East German Exchanges, 1950s–1960s
Jie Shen
abstractJie Shen
This paper takes the East German architect and planner Hermann Räder as a lens to re-examine the circulation of planning ideas and the formation of knowledge networks within the socialist world during the Cold War. Focusing on his teaching and exchange activities between China and the German Democratic Republic from 1957 to 1959, it explores how planning pedagogy became a medium through which socialist planning ideas were discussed, translated, and spatialized across national borders.
Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, including Räder’s handwritten lecture manuscripts, correspondence with faculty members at Tongji University, cooperation reports, and related East German publications, this paper reconstructs how Räder, while teaching regional planning in Tongji University, collaborated with Chinese colleagues to design course content and to conduct field visits to cities around Shanghai. Together, they discussed the People’s Commune as a new socio-political experiment that demanded spatial organization and planning interpretation. After returning to East Germany, Räder continued active correspondence with Tongji faculty and students, maintaining the intellectual exchange initiated in China. Subsequent East German planning documents and publications on the People’s Commune reveal the reverse influence of Chinese experience on East German planning thought.
Through close reading of these sources, this paper reconstructs how the concept of the People’s Commune (renmin gongshe), central to socialist planning discourse in China, was jointly debated, translated, and reformulated through interactions between East German planners and Chinese scholars. It argues that this process was not a one-way transfer of technical expertise but rather a reciprocal network of socialist knowledge sustained through teaching, correspondence, and publication. Ultimately, it offers a new understanding of how global urban networks under the Cold War were formed through collaboration, translation, and mutual adaptation, rather than through the one-way ideological transmission.
Session 74 - Shaping Global Urbanization: Expert Networks in the Mid-Twentieth Century [Round Table]
When is it possible to speak of global expertise and a network of experts dealing with global urbanization? This session will examine the importance of the mid-20th-century turning point on this question, based on wartime and postwar, reconstruction, urban crisis and planning, colonial/postcolonial, resource extraction and environmental issues.
Coordinators: Cedric Feriel, Rosemary Wakeman
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Coordinators: Cedric Feriel, Rosemary Wakeman
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Session 74 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 CERC - Centre d'Estudis i Recursos Culturals
Networks of Neutralism: Nordic Architects in the Post-War Global South
Tom Avermaete
abstractTom Avermaete
This paper takes its point of departure in the acclaimed neutralism of the Nordic countries within the charged geopolitical climate of the post-war period. Nation-states like Sweden, Norway, and Denmark attempted to maintain a neutral position vis-à-vis the geopolitics of decolonization and the Cold War. Instead of aligning with the competing models of socialist and capitalist modernity proposed by the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, these Nordic countries chose a third 'non-aligned' path, combining and modifying tenets of both blocs.
The paper argues that this neutralism of the Nordic nation-states and the resulting conceptions of ‘weak nationhood’ also influenced the scope and character of architects' work abroad. Due to the neutral stance of their home countries, Nordic architects could operate in the most politically charged geographies of the Global South. Additionally, the architectural designs of some Nordic architects appeared to embody a 'semantic neutralism' characterized by constructive self-evidence, programmatic indeterminacy, and spatial rudimentariness, which endowed them with the capacity to contribute to constructing an alternative path to modernity for decolonizing nation-states in the Global South.
From this perspective, 'building the nation abroad' involved constructing a third 'neutral' modernity that fostered novel networks between countries in the Global South and the Global North. To illustrate this hypothesis, this text focuses on the practices of the Danish engineering and construction firm Kampsax, which collaborated with the Danish architect Jørn Utzon on projects such as the Melli Bank in Tehran (1959) and the National Assembly Building of Kuwait (1971-1983), as well as on the designs of the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn for the Museum in Leopoldville in the Congo (1958).
CINVA and Its Afterlives
Mark Healey
abstractMark Healey
My presentation to the roundtable will explore the Cold War developmentalist origins and surprising and at times radical trajectory and afterlives of CINVA, the Interamerican Housing and Planning Center, which was founded in Bogotá, Colombia in 1951. Over its twenty years of existence, CINVA was a training center for over 1000 architects, planners, social workers, and housing experts from across the Americas. Though it was founded in significant measure as a transmission mechanism for US thinking on housing and development, staffing by Latin American experts, the inclusion of prior debates, and the extensive commitment to fieldwork and experimentation made it a major center of debate and innovation during the most dramatic years of Latin American urbanization.
International mobility of experts and the development of European campuses in the context of the globalisation of university development (1960s-1990s)
Loic Vadelorge
abstractLoic Vadelorge
The post-Second World War period was characterised by a global movement towards university development. This movement affected Western countries, the Eastern Bloc and the colonial and then decolonised world. It was linked both to the massification of higher education (Ruëgg, 2011) and to economic transitions requiring the training of executives in old and new nations. This movement also had urban planning consequences (Vadelorge, 2025). Too cramped to accommodate the flow of students from the baby boom and often unsuitable to the demands of research (Big Science), the old intramural universities created peripheral subsidiaries that gradually became autonomous. Not only is the number of universities increasing, but it is now common to see the outskirts of major cities hosting a growing number of new universities, some of which are of a new kind (Tsukuba University of Technology and Compiègne University, for example) (Lamard-Lequin, 2005).
These campuses generate new urban forms and sometimes aim to serve as catalysts for new university towns (Marantz, 2016). Because they are of interest to urban planners working on new urban developments, they attract study trips (Vadelorge, 2017) involving various types of experts (university presidents, urban planners, architects). The archives of French new towns, which have been interested in the subject since its inception in 1965-1966 and have followed it on a European scale (North-Western Europe, Eastern Europe) until the 1990s, allow us to address the question of the form and impact of this type of circulation on the creation of university districts that are both similar (because they were created at the same time) and different from one another.
We will start with two different case studies: the study trip funded by the Paris Region District in 1967, which aimed to learn from British campuses in order to plan the campuses of Villeneuve d'Ascq, Evry and Cergy-Pontoise. The study trips to the USSR (1960s-1970s) organised by the IAURP and the one organised by EPAMARNE in Belgium (Louvain la Neuve) during the 1980s-1990s for the creation of the Cité Descartes in Marne-la-Vallée. The aim is to study the trip (sponsor, funding, team composition, reporting of information collected) and its impact on the design of university campuses. This history will also be linked to the international influences on the campuses of new towns with other real or imaginary affiliations (Oxford-sur-Loire, Oxford-sur-Seine, Villetaneuse, Le
Port Boisé: laterite war and battle of experts
Catherine Maumi
abstractCatherine Maumi
The 1960s saw a significant increase in nickel consumption worldwide. New Caledonia, whose soil is particularly rich in this highly sought-after mineral, attracted the interest of major producers, leading to a veritable “nickel boom.” This boom resulted in industrial programs, but also in the construction of new towns to house the families of workers who would come to work at the production sites. These towns were proposed by various competing international companies, some supported by the French government and others by local elected officials.
During this “laterite war,” architect and urban planner Victor Gruen, then based in Vienna (Austria), was contacted in March 1970 by the President of the Société minière et métallurgique de Penarroya as well as by the President of the Le Nickel company, to design the master plan for one or more new towns, based on studies previously prepared by French experts from the Société centrale pour l'équipement du territoire coopération (S.C.E.T. coopération).
Gruen's expertise in regional planning and new towns was sought after, as one of the difficulties pointed out by the president of Le Nickel was the great diversity of the population that these new urban centers would have to accommodate. A collaboration was established over several months between French experts from S.C.E.T. coopération and American experts from the Victor Gruen agency, in close conjunction with the Penarroya and Le Nickel companies, which revealed differences of opinion on the nature of the developments to be proposed over time in these territories which, in addition to their mineral wealth, also constitute invaluable natural reserves.
In 1971, global demand for nickel fell by 20%, putting an end to the vast projects that had been imagined.
This paper explores these differences between the French experts from S.C.E.T. coopération and the Gruen team, as well as the mining companies that commissioned the project. It is based on the analysis of Victor Gruen Papers (Library of Congress) and S.C.E.T. cooperation papers (Archives nationales).
The Export of French Planning Expertise: Between Colonial Legacies and Emerging Markets
Clément Orillard
abstractClément Orillard
During the 1950s and 1960s, the export of French planning expertise underwent a significant transformation: it shifted from a practice largely associated with individual consultants to one increasingly institutionalized within specialized organizations. This evolution was shaped by several converging dynamics, including the global expansion of technical assistance, the widespread diffusion of Keynesian-inspired development policies in the Third World, and the process of French decolonization, which reoriented the country’s foreign policy priorities to new areas such as Latin America.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the French government articulated a dual strategy. On the one hand, it pursued an economic development policy aimed at opening new international markets for national industries—particularly in sectors such as transportation. On the other hand, it developed a “cooperation” policy intended to preserve and extend France’s geopolitical influence in a rapidly changing international context. Numerous organizations emerged to support these objectives, notably through technical assistance programs encompassing a wide range of fields, including urban planning.
Yet, despite extending far beyond the boundaries of the former colonial empire and being often mainly driven in these new markets by the local demand, this cooperation policy remained partially rooted in the French colonial legacy. Several key planning-oriented bodies clearly reflected this continuity, such as the Secrétariat des missions en urbanisme et habitat (SMUH), responsible for coordinating the whole planning and housing studies within the framework of cooperation programs. In other institutions, the role of former members of the colonial administration proved essential—for example, the person who expanded SCET-Coopération’s activities in Latin America, thereby reinforcing the influence of one of France’s principal consultancies specializing in development-oriented technical assistance.
Constantinos A. Doxiadis’s Iraq Diaries (1955–1959): Framing the Visual Canons of Global Expertise
Ines Tolic
abstractInes Tolic
Situated in the formative phase of global expertise, Constantinos A. Doxiadis’s missions in Pakistan, Syria, and Iraq offer a lens through which to interrogate the visual regimes that shaped postwar technical assistance.
Among these early engagements, the mission to Iraq stands out as particularly revealing. Enabled by the Iraqi Development Board—a semi-autonomous agency established in 1950 and funded by oil revenues to oversee the country’s development—the project unfolded at the intersection of national ambitions and Cold War geopolitics. Comprising Iraqi officials alongside British and American representatives, the Board simultaneously articulated local aspirations and channelled broader strategic interests, illustrating the political stakes embedded in mid-century development networks.
Through a close reading of the Iraq Diaries—a rich assemblage of photographs, field notes, and mission reports—this paper examines the expert’s gaze as a constitutive, rather than merely descriptive, practice. Prioritising these preparatory materials over the resulting plans, and situating them within a longer genealogy of visual and documentary techniques, reveals how interwar observational canons were reabsorbed and repurposed within postwar development apparatuses. In doing so, the paper highlights their role in shaping not only planning procedures and development programmes, but also the emerging visual grammar of “global urbanization.”
Session 75 - Negotiating Nature in the Histories of post-World War II Housing: Policies, Discourses and Practices in Europe and Beyond.
Questioning the interrelation between dwelling and nature, the session reconsiders the history of post-WWII housing through the lens of its natural landscape. Crossing landscape, planning, architecture, urban, and environmental histories, it introduces hidden narratives and a new understanding of the times and forms of post-war urban development.
Coordinators: Gaia Caramellino, Nicole De Togni
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Coordinators: Gaia Caramellino, Nicole De Togni
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Session 75 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 309 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Assembling, Governing, Enmeshing: Considering the AGE of Berlin’s Mass Housing Land(scapes)
Robin Hueppe
abstractRobin Hueppe
Although architectural historiography has paid renewed attention to Berlin’s mass housing estates, it has often centralized building design and construction as analytical starting points. This contribution instead foregrounds two landscape features in Berlin’s mass housing estates: retention basins and rubble mounds.
The paper compares two neighborhoods in former East and West Berlin, employing a temporal approach that spans from the terraformation of Berlin’s glacial valley to the present. A tailored, land(scape)-oriented methodology consists of a longue-durée assembling (A) of slow-changing water and landscapes (starting 13,700 BCE), the medium-term governing (G) then focuses on infrastructural aspects and compares how planning and state institutions in the two nation states orchestrated displacement, geo-engineering, and design. Finally, the study addresses the immediate enmeshing (E) of lived and inhabited mass housing landscapes, highlighting the unruly alliances that appropriate water bodies, mounds, and multispecies inhabitants, including humans.
The study highlights how mounds and basins, as geo-climatic and ecological agents, simultaneously shaped and resisted the modernist urbanization of Berlin. While often exploited by state and planning institutions, these features also foster ruderal, multispecies collectives, including human actors, regularly challenging that power. Writing the land back into the history of the housing estates is central to understanding how varying regimes of governance intersect with different temporalities and inhabitants.
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For more information on the methodology, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2025.2514004#abstract
Beautiful Regionalist Housing as Seen through the Cloud of Smog:
Landscape and Territory in the Early Urban Planning of Socialist Yugoslav Zenica
Mejrema Zatrić-Šahović
abstractMejrema Zatrić-Šahović
The city of Zenica, one of the foremost Socialist Yugoslav centers of heavy industry, underwent rapid increase of population already in the first post-WWII years, prompting local authorities to initiate the production of an urban plan already in 1948. Commissioned from Juraj Neidhardt, one of the most prominent Yugoslav proponents of regionalist modernism, the first version of the plan was produced by 1954, requiring dire compromises between the regionalist conceptual framework and relentless industrialization that degraded Zenica’s natural environment.
This paper recounts the unfolding conditions and contents of this compromise, proposing to observe the planning of Zenica’s housing as a case of collision between two distinct modern interpretative frameworks of natural environment - the one of landscape and the one of territory.
While Neidhardt’s architectural-ethnographic and human geographic research led to his conceptualization of architecture as an extension of regional landscape, he was, in his urban planning research, also compelled to understand it as an extension of infrastructure networks that expressed rationalization of Yugoslav territory through its functional organization into economic regions.
Based on previously uninterpreted primary sources, such as internal bureaucratic documentation of Zenica’s urban planning, this research paints the picture of the “beautiful regionalist housing as seen through the cloud of smog” as the emblematic contradiction of post-Second World War urban development.
Taking Charge: the contemporary role of post-war public housing landscapes
Lucia Concetta Vincelli
abstractLucia Concetta Vincelli
The landscape architecture of post-war European housing estates—central to realising the welfare-state ideal—now stands as a site of resistance in the urban organism amid contemporary demolition, regeneration, and privatisation. Focusing on the residential landscape design in England, particularly the work of British landscape architect Janet Jack and her intellectual lineage to figures such as Sylvia Crowe and Brenda Colvin, the research reframes public housing landscapes as politically charged terrains. After the Second World War, landscape design was a central tool in the reconstruction of cities. The environmental and geographical approaches underpinning the Greater London Plan (1943) and the New Towns Act (1946) placed unprecedented attention on the “space between buildings”, envisioning housing estates as collective environments where landform, vegetation, built form, and public life were interdependent.
Although public housing estates often emerged from demolished or war-damaged sites and introduced new, sometimes site-detached construction models, the associated landscape projects markedly took charge of what remained, most notably by reusing rubble to shape new topographies. Alexandra Road and Ainsworth Estate (1968-1878) in London exemplify this shared confrontation with preexistence. Alongside Neave Brown’s reinterpretation of the terrace-house typology, Janet Jack’s landscape (1974-1979)—restored in 2015 —created a network of promenades, terraces for more than 1,600 residents. Alexandra Road Park, featuring a sequenced geometry of playgrounds and outdoor “rooms,” bridges the modern development with the earlier Ainsworth Estate, with a path that spans the entire length of the site and incorporates native plants. An architect, continuously pursuing landscape training throughout her life, Janet Jack, working also for Tower Hamlets Council, foregrounded with her work the idea that landscape is not decorative, but the social and ecological backbone of collective housing.
Today, these landscapes—vegetal corridors, communal greens, playgrounds—have become the most vulnerable parts of large estates, as demolition-led regeneration targets open spaces. Yet they persist as remnants of the welfare-state city, holding ecological value against current privatising pressures. As urbanism shifts from “mass” to “residual” public provision, estate landscapes emerge not only as historical artefacts but as sites of resistance shaping more equitable urban futures.
Parks in the hills. Concrete and nature in post-war Naples
Chiara Chiara Ingrosso
abstractChiara Chiara Ingrosso
The paper investigates the history of the parchi (residential parks), a distinctive form of housing development that shaped the modern expansion of Naples during the post- WWII. The goal is to explore the relationship between architecture and nature during the crucial decades of post-war reconstruction and the economic boom, highlighting the contribution of leading architects, including Stefania Filo Speziale (1905–1988), the first woman architect from Naples.
The Neapolitan parco represents a hybrid residential model, positioned between the private villa, the condominium, and the collective settlement. Characterised by groups of villas or apartment buildings integrated with shared infrastructures - including internal roads, gardens, pedestrian paths, parking areas, recreational facilities, and, in some cases, swimming pools and direct access to the sea - these complexes redefined the relationship between domestic life, collective space, and the exceptional landscape of the city’s hills. The development of the parchi was closely connected to the growth of the “middle city”, the intermediate urban belt between the historic centre and the peripheral areas. From the post-war reconstruction period to the years of the economic boom, the hills of Posillipo, Vomero, and Chiaia became privileged locations for new residential settlements aimed at the emerging Neapolitan middle and upper-middle classes. These areas offered an alternative to the congestion and deterioration of the historic city, proposing a new lifestyle based on proximity to nature, panoramic views, privacy, and social distinction.
The analysis focuses on two case studies: Parco Sud Italia by Carlo Migliardi (1964–1966), and the condominium at Parco Grifeo by Stefania Filo Speziale (1956–1957
A Landscape of Landscapes: Elena Balsari Berrone and the Making of Milan by the Sea
Benedetta Di Donato, Viola Bertini
abstractBenedetta Di Donato, Viola Bertini
This paper examines Elena Balsari Berrone’s contribution to the landscape of Arenzano in the 1960s. During a period of rapid tourism growth along the Ligurian Riviera, Berrone began her professional career. Arenzano represented a crucial testing ground: for the first time, she engaged not only in designing private gardens but also in conceiving outdoor spaces and garden systems for residential developments. The garden, her most recurrent element, mediated the morphology of the Ligurian coastline, interpreting and transforming its distinctive topography.
Born in Milan in 1921, she grew up in a context attuned to garden culture: her mother, Adele Gavazzi, was a passionate botanist and active member of the Società Orticola di Lombardia, while her father, Juan Berrone, an Argentine sculptor, instilled a sensitivity to volume that informed her attention to spatial composition. In 1945 she was among the few women to graduate in Architecture from the Politecnico di Milano, the only Italian landscape designer of her generation to do so. The following year, she attended a course in Landscape Gardening in London, further refining her training.
Despite her contributions, Berrone has been largely overlooked by twentieth-century historiography. She was, however, an integral participant in postwar Italian architectural culture, particularly in Milan. She collaborated with figures such as Vico Magistretti, Gio Ponti, and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, designing parks and gardens of notable spatial and architectural quality. The scarcity of studies on her work may stem from her position as a woman in a nascent professional field and from the overshadowing presence of the architects with whom she collaborated, who inadvertently obscured her authorship of the open spaces accompanying their buildings.
Reconsidering the development of Arenzano, rarely studied from a landscape perspective, illuminates the relationship between domestic space and the broader environment, showing how Berrone’s gardens form a coherent compositional system. This case study invites a reassessment of narratives in the history of the Italian landscape, as well as that of Arenzano itself. The design of the Ligurian territory thus provides a lens to observe the formative years of Balsari Berrone’s career and their intersection with postwar Italy, offering an alternative reading to conventional accounts of the country’s “rush to the sea.”
Shaping the suburban landscapes of Sweden
Catharina Nolin
abstractCatharina Nolin
Sweden saw in the post-World War II years a building boom with an extensive production of new residential areas. At the same time, a new group of landscape architects, of which some were women, established offices specialized in designing gardens and landscapes for residential areas. While many of the architects are well-known characters in the historiography of Swedish architecture, the landscape architects have for a long period been placed in the shadows. The residential areas formed connections between the gardens and the landscape, to open up for informal ways of using the suburbs, blending townscape and landscape. The discourse and the debates concerning landscape planning of the time revolved around tropes on design based upon the interrelation between dwelling and landscapes, nature and garden. Hillocks and spruce trees formed the basis for many residential areas including playground and sports areas for an active urban outdoor life.
This way of designing with nature met critique from Danish landscape architects, who ment that their Swedish colleagues were not interested in design and form. Landscape architect Ulla Bodorff (1913–1982) argued that ‘There is something repellent about inserting overt structures into a landscape composed of beautifully polished granite outcrops, straight pine trunks, and the dense, enclosed silhouette of coniferous woodland’ (Bodorff 1948). On the other hand, she also meant that ‘it is more appropriate to highlight a landscape’s rhythm than to revert to the original natural scenery’ (Bodorff 1950). According to her, landscape planning could be performed with surplus demolition material, creating sweeping lines and free views. Technical developments made it possible for her to turn demolition into new design. From around 1960, landscape architect Sylvia Gibson (1919–74) contributed the debate with questions related to environmental preservation work by arguing in what way landscape architecture could be a key question in the preservation of the landscape. ‘The fact that man is consuming land at a terrific and accelerating rate is rightly a cause of great alarm. If we do not want to turn the whole earth into a desert, we must work in accordance with the laws of nature and not against them’ (Gibson 1964).
Drawing upon theories of gender studies and historiography, this paper explores the relationship between residential buildings, neighbourhoods and the natural landscape. What were the social visions of the landscape
Session 75 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 309 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Housing After Leisure: Tróia and the Landscape of Seasonal Dwelling in Late Twentieth-Century Portugal
Monica Pacheco
abstractMonica Pacheco
This paper examines the Ponta do Adoxe Urban Development Plan for the Tróia Peninsula, developed by the Atelier Conceição Silva from 1970 onwards, as a case for rethinking the relation between housing, nature and leisure in late twentieth-century Portugal. Although usually framed as tourist development, the Torralta operation was conceived as an extensive system of tourist housing, centred on seasonal apartments, collective facilities and designed exterior spaces. The paper focuses on the plan, on Core 1 (Núcleo 1) and on its built first phase, arguing that this fragment should be read as material evidence of a broader urban and landscape hypothesis. In contrast to earlier proposals for Tróia, the Ponta do Adoxe plan did not equate landscape protection with dispersion or low density. It proposed concentration, patios, upper galleries, collective equipment, pedestrian circulation and artificial landscape as instruments for producing seasonal urbanity. Drawing on archival material from the Conceição Silva archive, administrative opinions, project memories, promotional ephemera and contemporary field observation, the paper argues that Tróia transformed private tourist development into a laboratory for a new middle-class culture of dwelling. The seasonal apartment was neither a hotel room nor an ordinary permanent home; it was an autonomous domestic unit whose meaning depended on shared services, leisure infrastructures and designed exterior spaces. Landscape was therefore not scenery or passive natural background, but a medium through which habitation was organised, represented and consumed. By moving Tróia from the history of tourism into the history of housing, the paper contributes to broader debates on post-war housing and nature while clarifying the specificity of the Portuguese context, where tourism, private investment and late Estado Novo developmentalism created alternative fields of architectural experimentation.
Mega Narratives Critique and New Belgrade Integrative Landscape
Marija Milinković, Dragana Ćorović, Dezire Tilinger
abstractMarija Milinković, Dragana Ćorović, Dezire Tilinger
In his seminal book, Tristes Tropiques (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss notices that every landscape offers, at first glance, an immense disorder which may be sorted out however we please. Quite opposite to this general observation, the modern mass-housing landscape, at first glance, offers an exquisite order. Submerged in vast expanses of greenery, architectural objects cluster into comprehensible geometrical and functional units. Only at the second glance, behind the plain logic of urban mega-structures, diverse layers of immense complexity emerge. What serves as an integrating factor is the very massiveness of the enterprise, guided by political and planning narratives, and cohesive power of nature, experienced through the stability of the ground and abundance of greenery.
In an attempt to reexamine the role and scope of the city landscape in the conceptualisation and construction of modern mass-housing settlements, the paper focuses on the case of New Belgrade (Serbia, formerly Yugoslavia). Constructed through the cultivation of the marshy plain after the WWII, New Belgrade was situated in seemingly empty yet culturally and naturally dense space between two historical cities, Belgrade and Zemun. Envisaged as the spatial manifestation of modernist urbanism, it was initially planned, in both social and spatial terms, as a radical discontinuity. More precisely, its urban concept evolved through diverging both from the initially dominant paradigm of socialist realism and from the modernism of the international style. Out of this dialectic the unique urban landscape of New Belgrade emerged, as an embodiment of the non-aligned, self-management socialism in Yugoslavia. The extensive debates regarding general strategies of its development provide valuable insights into the diverse networks of professionals and institutions involved.
Following the notions of architect Nikola Dobrović, one of the key figures in the formative period of the new city, we search for an integral understanding of space that connects architecture, inhabitants and environment through the fine threads of the city landscape. By identifying the diverging perspectives of the key planners in shaping the New Belgrade and by cross-examining of their planning strategies, the paper reconsiders the role of mega narratives in planning of Yugoslav socialist mass-housing, observed through the multiple layers of environment and in relation to internationally acclaimed precedents of modern urban planning.
Negotiated Oases: The Gardens of Postwar Milanese Middle-Class Housing
Natalia Voroshilova
abstractNatalia Voroshilova
This paper examines the street-front garden in post-war Milanese housing developments (1949–1970), a ubiquitous yet under-theorised phenomenon of the city’s landscape. Emerging as a loophole in Milan’s building code, the setback garden mediated between regulatory frameworks, developers’ pursuit of profit, architects’ ambitions, and middle-class ideals of privacy and decorum. Beyond their instrumental role in securing permits and volumetric gains, these gardens became cultural markers: privately owned yet staged for public display, they constituted a shared material language and a performative threshold between individual status and urban public space. They thus exemplify a negotiated form of modernity in Italian urbanism, produced through negotiation among multiple ordinary actors rather than through top-down planning.
Viewed within the broader history of Milan’s reconstruction, these landscaped forecourts reveal the mechanisms through which the city’s post-war growth unfolded. Grafting modern aspirations onto the physically and culturally resilient urban fabric, post-war condominiums expose the specific processes through which Italian urban classes experienced modernisation. In this context, the garden crystallised as a device capable of reconciling divergent demands: it answered the municipality’s call for greenery, offered architects a field of formal experimentation, provided developers with a marketable image of wellbeing in the city centre, and signalled bourgeois decorum at the threshold of the home.
At the same time, these gardens illuminate the professional and cultural networks that shaped Milanese architecture. Typological solutions, decorative details, and landscape elements migrated between elite commissions and ordinary housing through the city’s dense web of media and personal contacts. Landscaping also mediated between technological progress and aesthetic expression, with greenery concealing reinforced-concrete structures housing underground garages and other infrastructural elements. Re-theorised in this light, the street-front garden emerges not as decorative residue but as an operative device through which competing visions of modernity were materialised in everyday space. Its continued presence in Milan today testifies to the lasting imprint of an urban development model in which greenery functioned as an active medium of negotiation, shaping both the appearance and the cultural meaning of the post-war city.
Session 75 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 309 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
FLOREASCA VERDE – a green neighbourhood in Bucharest/ from the 1950s to nowadays
Carmen Popescu, Carmen Popescu
abstractCarmen Popescu, Carmen Popescu
In the mid-1950s, in what was at the time an almost periphery of the Romanian capital, the new neighbourhood of Floreasca was planned according to the then imposed rules of the soviet socialist realism. If the plot of land of the future neighbourhood had been prepared since the mid-1930s to become a residential district for the nearby Ford factory, the empty grid of streets waited for two decades to fulfil their function. Instead of villas and individual houses, the communist regime decided for blocks of flats, the tens of little housing units being designed according to a post-1945 functionalism: small inhabiting surfaces, prefabricated elements, minimalist (non)aesthetic facades. In other words, an economic response to the reinforced housing politics promised by the new regime.
However modest the architectural solutions, the newly planned neighbourhood was meant to be picturesque and joyous. The key approach for achieving this was the landscaping project. Aiming to design the district as a “vast park without closed courtyards”, the chief-architect worked in close collaboration with a team of landscapists: each street was to be differentiated by species of trees, each entrance in the blocks of flats distinguished by varieties of shrubs. The spaces between the buildings were imagined as green squares, with benches, play-ground installations for children and practical devices for the households. In addition, a park was designed in the centre of the neighbourhood, soon to be completed, in later phases of the project, by two other parks, on its west and north sides. What might have looked as an ordinary project turned into a highly appreciated architectural environment, by its inhabitants as well as by the architects and the official instances of the time. This successful image, of an enjoyable life, lasted through the decades even after the political change in 1989, when the former working- and middle-class neighbourhood came to attract also a more affluent category of (young) inhabitants.
My paper aims to demonstrate how the presence of nature (vegetation, two adjoining lakes) was central in shaping the successful image of Floreasca. I am interested to analyse the importance held by nature both in the actual functioning of the district and in its imaginary perception. My analysis will start with the inception of the project to end with the nowadays bottom-up activism, defending Green Floreasca – victim of its own success – against abusive densification
Negotiating Landscape and Housing: Nature, Walkability and Everyday Life in Carmen Portinho and Affonso Reidy’s Mid-Century Urban Units, Rio de Janeiro
Carla Zollinger
abstractCarla Zollinger
This paper examines how engineer Carmen Portinho and architect Affonso Eduardo Reidy negotiated the relationship between landscape and housing through walkable natural–built environments in postwar Rio de Janeiro. Focusing on projects from the Departamento de Habitação Popular (1947–1958), notably Pedregulho, Gávea, and Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, they articulated a modern conception of the “living quarter” as an ecological and gender-aware unit of proximity: an environment that redefined the relations between domestic life, collective facilities, and the urban landscape.
The study reframes their work as a multiscalar interface between the natural and the built, where neighborhood proximity, everyday routines, and ecological performance were conceived together. Portinho and Reidy proposed walkable units strengthening social life that integrated dwelling, education, health, local commerce, sport, together with gardens conceived in collaboration with landscape designer Burle Marx.
By merging modernist principles with local climatic and social conditions, their approach negotiated the boundaries between architecture and nature, planning and lived experience. The design emphasized walkability and accessibility, proposing a network of intermediate spaces -aerial streets, shaded galleries, roof terraces, gardened platforms, and climatic mediators such as brise-soleils and perforated screens- that mediated between the building and the tropical environment while fostering social interaction and collective care.
Portinho’s feminist background and experience in urban administration introduced a unique perspective on domestic labor and women’s mobility, anticipating ecological and gender-sensitive debates that would emerge only decades later. Her collaboration with Reidy materialized a multiscalar ecology of dwelling, integrating architecture, infrastructure, and landscape design into a cohesive social project.
Positioned at the crossroads of architecture, planning, and environmental thought, this paper reconsiders Portinho and Reidy’s work as an early example of postwar ecological modernism in the Global South. It explores how their projects negotiated the relationship between housing and nature, questioning the conventional separation between technical planning and everyday life. In doing so, it contributes to expanding the historiography of postwar housing beyond the European framework, foregrounding the intertwined dimensions of gender, ecology, and urban design.
Dwelling ecologies: producing urban natures through housing in Barcelona’s Tres Turons Park
Andreu Ribes
abstractAndreu Ribes
This article examines the historical co-production of housing typologies and urban nature on the periphery of Barcelona, specifically around the Three Hills Park (Parc dels Tres Turons) during the post-Civil War period and Francoist dictatorship. Grounded in Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and the conceptualization of housing as a process driven by inhabitant agency—following John F.C. Turner—this paper introduces the concept of dwelling ecologies to demonstrate how the configuration of non-human nature was closely dependent on social class, land tenure, and the degree of formality of residential structures.
Using a mixed methodology that integrates demographic data from the 1955 municipal register of inhabitants, building licenses from the Contemporary Municipal Archive of Barcelona (AMCB), and qualitative interviews, the study analyzes the distinct housing solutions that emerged across this topographically fragmented territory during the 1940s and 1950s. This territorial framework showcases a fundamental spatial tension between two contrasting landscapes shaped following the 1953 regional plan: an interior low-rise, heterogeneous urban tissue slated for demolition—comprising modest self-help housing, informal shantytowns, and bourgeois chalets—and an intensive perimeter of high-rise residential blocks.
The analysis demonstrates how these distinct housing models mediated the production, use, and access to flora and fauna, revealing how different dwelling ecologies draw completely divergent city landscapes, everyday life realities, and ecological futures. A clear polarization is highlighted between private and public developments: on one end, ornamental gardens and modern green infrastructure managed externally; on the other, informal cultivation and vegetable gardens deployed as a vital metabolic infrastructure of subsistence driven by domestic labor and material scarcity. By assessing whose interests were promoted in these developments and what human-environmental relationships were shaped by each model, this research argues for building an environmental history of urban peripheries to acknowledge historically invisibilized everyday ecologies prior to implementing contemporary green planning interventions.
A Landmark of Modern Urban Planning in Spain: Huerta del Rey (Valladolid, 1959–2025). Discourses and Tensions About Open Spaces and Landscape
María A. Castrillo Romón, Marina Jiménez Jiménez
abstractMaría A. Castrillo Romón, Marina Jiménez Jiménez
In 1959, the Spanish Ministry of Housing, in collaboration with the Valladolid City Council, launched a national competition for the design of the Huerta del Rey housing estate. The ex aequo winners—Corrales & Molezún and Cortés Pérez—were tasked with developing a joint plan characterized by an open-block layout organized around a parkway, integrating diverse residential typologies.
The morphology of Huerta del Rey was promoted as a national model by the Ministry, which commissioned architect Iglesias Martí to design the landscaping project, completed in 1973. For its time, the degree of urbanization was remarkably high, and the initiative is widely regarded as successful, both for the quality of its urban design and for the strong social acceptance of the neighbourhood.
Supported on municipal archives, Ministry publications, fieldwork, and prior research, this paper offers a historically grounded analysis of three dimensions: first, the concepts embodied in the winning proposals and the urban model disseminated; second, the persistent tensions between local authorities and state entities regarding the intervention’s orientation; and third, the subsequent projects and spatial adaptations implemented over time.
The discussion focuses on three key elements under the hypothesis that their evolution reflects conflicting narratives of diverse actors:
1. Urban morphology emerged from a new concept negociated by the Ministry and the City Council. This process drove to the loose of the radicalism of the original proposals—particularly Corrales & Molezún’s innovative attention payed to the Castilian landscape— although some landscape considerations and choices persisted.
2. Landscaping culture constitutes a significant reference point in both Corrales & Molezún’s design and Iglesias Martí’s project. Landscape project ensured continuity of open spaces and environmental integration.
However, its conceptual quality was later compromised by, in one hand, the insertion of public buildings from the 1980s onward and, in the other hand, the block open spaces reveal how homeowners have progressively challenged or reclaimed these areas through informal adaptations.
Ultimately, Huerta del Rey stands out as an urban laboratory in Spain, notable for its residential morphology and landscape design relationship. Understanding its historical and cultural values remains a challenge today, given the growing need to preserve open spaces and rehabilitate residential structures.
Session 76 - The urban history of socio-ecological trade-offs. Negotiating environmental 'goods' and 'bads'
Since the 1970s, cities and regions are increasingly protecting and developing green spaces through the ecological 'offsetting' of urbanization. This session explores the tools and negotiations linked to such compensation policies, questioning how real estate developers, (urban) governments, and planners negotiate ecological and social trade-offs.
Coordinators: Koenraad Danneels, Wout Saelens
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Coordinators: Koenraad Danneels, Wout Saelens
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Session 76 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Poetics of Care from a Mining Landscape: Contested Environmentalisms at the Martinet Slag Heap
Marine Declève, Geoffrey Grulois
abstractMarine Declève, Geoffrey Grulois
This paper argues for a history of the Martinet slag heap in Charleroi, Belgium, written as a poetics of care attentive both to the successive and contested environmentalisms that have shaped the site and the affective and material forms of attachment and renunciation through which those environmentalisms were composed and disputed. Located at the heart of the former “Black Country,” the Martinet belonged to the dense network of collieries of the Caroloregian coal basin. From the 1970s, it became a site of citizen mobilization against continued extraction. Based on fieldwork walks, interviews, collective workshops, and multi-scalar cartography, the paper resists assembling this history into a single heroic narrative of dispossession followed by ecological redemption. Drawing on the theory of agonistic pluralism, it foregrounds instead the frictions of the environmentalisms through which the site has been cared for: an early-twentieth-century working-class environmentalism concerned with the social and bodily costs of coal extraction; a popular ecology that emerged from the 1970s citizen mobilization and expressed itself through photography, poetry, and theatre; and the practices of ecological reparation and landscape care that followed the site’s protection. Each of these environmentalisms is in tension with the others over what count, on the Martinet, as environmental concern. This paper reads this plurality through place attachment theory not solely in relational lens in which care multiplies bonds between humans and non-humans but in tension with Alexandre Monnin’s theory of renunciation and dismantling: an ecological redirection that starts from a cartography of attachments not to celebrate their proliferation, but to negotiate, democratically and without brutality, what has been, or must still be, renounced. Set against the site’s ongoing redevelopment around a new entrepreneurial ecosystem for sustainable food production, this tension between attachment and renunciation accounts for the site’s ruins and the poetics of care through which residents have decided, and continue to argue over, what of the mining landscape to keep, to repair, or to let go. Poetics of care thus names the repertoire of expressive and cartographic practices giving form to contested environmentalisms. This notion, irreducible to either relational ecology or an ethics of renunciation alone, is what a history of a post-mining landscape like the Martinet should aim to write.
Stories of a Dead Lake. Historicizing the compensation landscape of Lake Orta in the Italian Subalpine District.
Cristina Renzoni
abstractCristina Renzoni
The case of Lake Orta, situated in the Italian subalpine district, offers a profound historical perspective on "socio-ecological trade-offs" and the negotiation between environmental "goods" and "bads" in territorial and industrial development. Drawing on the pioneering studies of limnologist Rina Monti (1920s), this contribution analyzes how industrialization (particularly the establishment of the Bemberg factory in 1926 and the subsequent development of the tapware district in the post-war period) generated severe ecological degradation. This culminated in the lake's acidification and the near-total extinction of aquatic life, making it an emblematic example of a "dead lake" yet also a significant instance of a successful environmental restoration effort.
This history of environmental "bads" (pollution, ecological degradation), generated by an industrialization that provided social "goods" (employment, services, territorial development), allowed for crucial phases of scientific research within the Italian Institute of Hydrobiology of Pallanza, diagnosing the problem and proposing solutions. In particular, it focuses on the "liming" intervention (1989-90), a large-scale environmental mitigation operation based on scientific knowledge and the mobilization of locally embedded resources. This represented an innovative form of "ecological compensation" in the face of consolidated damage, leading to the emergence of new forms of lacustrine and social ecosystems.
The contribution explores the construction of an early compensation landscape through the analysis of negotiation mechanisms involving diverse actors: scientists, industries, local and regional administrations, and civil society. It traces the transition from scientific discovery to large-scale ecological engineering and, more recently, the Contratto di Lago del Cusio (Lake Orta Agreement). The latter represents a model of negotiation and urban redesign and replanning through alliances and a community of care that recognizes the lake as an active ecological subject. The analysis of Lake Orta allows for a re-theorization of forms of governance and territorial alliances as a continuous history of narratives and socio-ecological trade-offs, exploring how the redistribution of environmental goods and bads has been managed and negotiated over time. This offers an historical perspective on current debates concerning rewilding programs and policies, offsetting/net gain, and forms of supra-local participation.
Beyond “terrain vague”? Postindustrial ecologies, wasteland aesthetic and the ambiguous politics of urban design
Maros Krivy
abstractMaros Krivy
What is terrain vague? More than a reference to postindustrial wastelands and urban fringe zones, it is a portable analytic that has allowed protagonists from the arts, architecture and activism to represent and defend ambiguous, interstitial space as inherently valuable. This paper explores a history of terrain vague in the field of urban and landscape design. Drawing on evidence from Barcelona, Berlin and Montreal, the paper offers a comparative perspective on a series of efforts to reconcile neo-romantic Ruinenlust, urban biodiversity and a sense of urgency to challenge mainstream forms of urban redevelopment. Since the 1980s, an emerging consensus in local policy on postindustrial regeneration through private finance and spectacle (“Olympic urbanism”) has provided a context in which many architects and urban designers embraced terrains vagues for their potential to prefigure a more sustainable, environmental-friendly urban development.
Yet even as these and other urban professionals celebrated the potential of postindustrial wastelands to facilitate grassroots innovation and new forms of ecological imagination, the capitalist dynamics of industrialization and deindustrialization—which shaped the very ecology of the built environment they were celebrating—eluded them. It is suggested that terrain vague enabled a form of “soft critique” that produced ignorance about class and race. This paper develops a history of how urban professional and expert groups contributed to marginalizing these perspectives through a kind of circumscribed celebration of postindustrial space. The failure to grasp or engage with the more precise parameters and experiences of neighborhood decline and renewal effectively helped naturalize capitalism. The terrain vague analytic may not be that portable after all: the politics of urban design discussed in this paper points to a different direction relative to how anti-capitalist climate grassroots movements have recently mobilized around this term. Evidence on emerging approaches to public space improvement and urban greening projects from the three discussed cities now reveals a commodified “wasteland aesthetic” following in the footsteps of real estate capital.
Rifts and Shifts in the Industrial City: Coal Smoke and Environmental Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Ghent
Wout Saelens, Martijn Collijs
abstractWout Saelens, Martijn Collijs
When industrialising towns in nineteenth-century Northwest Europe switched from wood to coal, they embraced a cheaper and more powerful source of energy to fuel their factories and homes. Yet, for all the wealth coal may have brought, it also imposed huge costs in return, as its combustion severely contaminated the urban air (Jarrige & Le Roux 2020). The transition to coal sure was a Faustian bargain – and one the burdens of which were distributed unequally. Some urban residents suffered more from the smoke pollution than others, especially since the great rebuilding projects of the nineteenth century, often inspired by Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, started to gradually remove polluting factories – and the labourers who worked in them – from the city centre to separate industrial zones. Scholars have already argued that today’s environmental crisis operates through ‘rifts and shifts’ that displace the ecological problems of economic growth from one region to another, usually socially weaker ones, on a – by now – global scale (Clark & York 2008). This paper wishes to trace that process of spatial displacement back to its ‘original’ setting: the industrial city itself – taking Ghent as a case study. In the nineteenth century, this Belgian city became known as the ‘Manchester of the mainland’, a nickname it earned more for the pollution and social misery that came with industrialisation than for its economic success. Drawing mainly on permits for offensive industries, the paper will map the hotspots of smoke pollution to see how a process of environmental rifts and shifts unfolded in nineteenth-century Ghent, against the backdrop of the city’s changing socio-spatial composition.
References:
Brett Clark & Richard York (2008), ‘Rifts and Shifts: Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises’, Monthly Review 60:6, 13-24.
François Jarrige & Thomas Le Roux (2020), The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Session 77 - Urban movements, participatory spatial practices and the transformation of cities
Urban and grassroots movements are active agents that shape the production of space, including the aspects of reproducing social life on a neighbourhood scale, forms and norms of building and planning, as well as the role and contestation of expertise in architecture and urbanism. The objective of the session is to put in dialogue experiences in different cities to learn how urban movements influence urban politics and what we can learn from the history of participatory architecture practices in the context of sociopolitical divides fostered by spatial relations.
Coordinators: Asuncion Blanco-Romero, Jere Kuzmanic, Albert Recio, Marta Serra-Permanyer
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Coordinators: Asuncion Blanco-Romero, Jere Kuzmanic, Albert Recio, Marta Serra-Permanyer
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Session 77 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
‘Collaborative Technicians’: Jane Drew and Minnette De Silva’s Participatory Practices in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Sri Lanka
Inês Leonor Nunes
abstractInês Leonor Nunes
This paper examines the participatory practices of architects Jane Drew and Minnette De Silva by exploring their roles in two commissions—the Chandigarh Project and the Watapuluwa Housing Scheme—discussing how these pioneering processes shaped the production of space in postcolonial India and Sri Lanka as early as the mid-1950s.
Framed by India’s independence from the British Empire, Chandigarh was built to address a severe housing crisis on a limited budget. Guided by cultural awareness, Drew’s housing designs for the lowest strata are particularly relevant. Within a technocratic framework, she conducted consultations with future users, prioritizing social engagement and adapting domestic spaces to local realities.
Also aiming to bridge government limitations during Sri Lanka’s post-colonial housing crisis, Watapuluwa was designed and built in collaboration between De Silva and a society of public servants based in Kandy. To personalize the cooperative scheme, De Silva used meetings and questionnaires, shaping designs according to residents’ input. The endeavor produced dozens of housing types, challenging the one-design-fits-all approach, and raising questions of authorship in the co-creation process.
Embracing the position of “collaborative technician,” Drew and De Silva shaped urban politics by negotiating grassroots agency and institutional paradigms. As mediators, they blurred the lines between architect-led design and community-driven urban planning, challenging conventional concepts of expertise within top-down modernism.
Methodologically, Chandigarh is examined through the Fry & Drew Papers at the RIBA, the Pierre Jeanneret Fonds at the CCA, complemented by material from the Le Corbusier Foundation, the Punjab, and the Municipality Archives. Watapuluwa is primarily analyzed via De Silva’s autobiography. Archival research was furthered by extensive fieldwork in India and Sri Lanka, while the CIAM records at the gta Archives at the ETH Zürich helped unpack the study’s social dimension.
Overall, this research argues that women architects pioneered participatory practices in mid-1950s South Asia, complicating dominant narratives that tie urban social movements to male European architects in the 1960s and 1970s. By reframing the geography, chronology, and gender of participatory urbanism, the research not only generates alternative urban histories but also offers insights for addressing today’s challenges in fostering more equitable cities.
Ostinato Rigore. An Article by Álvaro Siza in the Seventies
José António Bandeirinha
abstractJosé António Bandeirinha
OSTINATO RIGORE.
AN ARTICLE BY ÁLVARO SIZA IN THE 1070s
It is well known that among the approximately 170 SAAL operations throughout the country, the ones in Porto were of a very different nature. There were several cultural, social and political circumstances, which framed this different context.
Whether on a historical, political and economic, or social and cultural level, there is, indeed, a whole universe of contextual singularities, which make the SAAL Process in Porto unique. This article does not intend to explore all those differences, only to reflect on a particular circumstance, among the many that gave the project a number of specific shades.
It is thought that the possibility of recovering the ilha as a basic element of the urban tissue was also considered. There were both advantages – the closeness of community life – and disadvantages – segregation and isolation. The conclusion was that it might be possible to make the houses denser, by adding another floor, for example, but that it was crucial to open up accesses from the public space as much as possible. In other words, the idea was to place this type of urban structure at the core of the grid, but to make that core unequivocally equal to the other urban elements: the streets, the plazas, and the squares.
The article in Lotus International was not signed by a single author. As was customary at the time, the decision was made to present it as a collective work, under a project team duly listed in the specifications, along with the main statistical data about the residents, the number of houses projected, and funding.
The text tries to elaborate a critical analysis of urban and political consequences, exploring what might happen if the project had been completed. Not from a deterministic perspective, but rather from the one of potential intervention of architectural practices and urban design on the political spheres.
Barcelona: Social Movements in Urban Transformation (1970-2015)
Albert Recio, Asuncion Blanco-Romero, Jose Mansilla, Jordi Mir
abstractAlbert Recio, Asuncion Blanco-Romero, Jose Mansilla, Jordi Mir
Urban policies are typically dominated by the interest of capital and the technocratic visions of politicians and technicians. But in many cities, social movements seek to intervene in these policies for the benefit of neighbors and working classes. Barcelona is a relevant case in this field, because it has a long tradition of neighborhood movements that has repeatedly influenced local public policies, and without which it is impossible to understand crucial aspects of the city. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics and key circumstances of this neighborhood movement, its structure and its dynamics. We begin with the last Franco era, where it played a pivotal role in democratic mobilization and in setting an agenda for civic reforms. We also specifically analyze two key conjunctures: the 1992 Olympics and the 2008-12 crisis, as well as the response to the neoliberal management of the crisis. We also extend our analysis to the formation of new urban movements and their relation with the traditional neighborhood movement, as well as their relationship with the development of a new political party that won local election in 2015. The paper also addresses two key issues. On the one hand, the relationship between grassroots social movements and technical and scientific production helps improve proposals. It analyzes the forms and processes of this cooperation. On the other, the relationship between the struggle for political participation and the democratization of policies’s elaboration as part of this dynamic. And, in particular, the experience of a popular candidacy that owns elections. Finally, an assessment is made of this experience, including the potential to influence local politics and their limitations.
Urban narratives from below: neighborhood advising in urban transformation processes in Barcelona (FAVB, 2016–2023)
Lisa Marrani
abstractLisa Marrani
This study reflects on the role of the urban planner in supporting social movements during urban transformation processes. Based on the experience of urban advising to neighborhood associations carried out by the Urban Planning Commission of the Federació d’Associacions Veïnals de Barcelona (FAVB), it presents examples of collaboration between citizens and urban planners that challenge institutional paradigms, generating alternative narratives about urban history and making visible issues that often remain outside conventional official frameworks.
The study focuses on two significant experiences that emerged in response to neighborhood demands: the defense of the casetas at Turó de la Font de la Guatlla in Sants-Montjuïc (2016-2018) and the diagnosis and rehabilitation process of the Can Peguera neighborhood in Nou Barris (2017-2023). In both cases, a technical support methodology was developed based on active listening to the territory, observation of space production, collection of everyday knowledge, and the collective construction of urban proposals. These experiences illustrate the integration of interdisciplinary tools -combining urban planning, oral history, collaborative mapping, and spatial analysis- to build participatory practices that legitimize the capacity of social movements to influence urban planning.
The importance of establishing a horizontal relationship between professionals and residents is evident, where expert knowledge serves the community to strengthen and complement local knowledge. In this sense, the urban planner ceases to be an external agent and becomes an “active listener,” translating neighborhood demands into technical proposals and working to enhance the proposal-making capacity of associations, not merely their capacity for criticism regarding the issues in their neighborhoods.
These processes also explore how to involve those who are not on the front lines of activism but are essential to everyday urban life -such as women, older adults, children, and youth -thereby expanding the concept of participation and democratizing the production of urban space.
These experiences allow us to rethink the role of accompaniment urbanism as a situated, politically engaged, and community-oriented practice, contributing to the construction of an urban history from below that challenges dominant narratives and opens horizons toward cities that consider these legacies.
Participation and Co-production in Vulnerable Neighbourhoods: Lessons from Barcelona’s Pla de Barris
Mar Esteve-Güell, Oriol Nel·lo Colom
abstractMar Esteve-Güell, Oriol Nel·lo Colom
Area-based initiatives (ABIs) have become an important instrument for addressing urban inequalities and improving living conditions in disadvantaged neighbourhoods across Europe. Citizen participation is considered a key component of these policies, as it can incorporate residents’ situated knowledge, enhance the legitimacy of interventions and contribute to community empowerment. However, moving beyond consultation towards genuine co-production and shared governance remains challenging, particularly in neighbourhoods characterised by social vulnerability and unequal levels of social capital.
This article examines citizen participation in Barcelona’s Pla de Barris, a comprehensive urban renewal programme implemented since 2016 in the city’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. More specifically, it assesses the extent to which the programme has moved beyond consultative participation towards deeper forms of co-production and shared governance, and the main challenges and conditions shaping these participatory processes. The research adopts a qualitative multi-method approach combining the analysis of official documents and previous evaluations with 14 semi-structured interviews with programme professionals, community representatives and evaluation experts. The analysis focuses on the first two editions of the programme, covering the period 2016–2024.
The findings are structured around five challenges: reaching disadvantaged groups, ensuring the representativeness, communicating the programme, extending the actual power of participation and strengthening collective action. The results show that Pla de Barris has introduced targeted mechanisms to broaden participation and has contributed to strengthening both collaboration among local community organisations and its dialogue with local institutions. It has also enabled the joint definition and co-management of numerous interventions and, to a lesser extent, experimented with forms of shared governance. Nevertheless, significant limitations remain. Young people and residents of migrant origin continue to be comparatively underrepresented in formal participatory spaces, while differences in neighbourhood social capital strongly condition both representativeness and the capacity for co-production. The programme’s cross-cutting nature also creates communication difficulties, while more intensive forms of co-production require considerable time, resources and institutional commitment.
Multi-Roles as Organisational Infrastructure: How Grassroots Organisations Sustain Openness
Hanna Noller, Ayat Tarik
abstractHanna Noller, Ayat Tarik
Participatory urban development and urban grassroots organisations are widely regarded as spaces of collective self-organisation, experimental collaboration, and democratic innovation. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the question of how these organisations sustain their openness and capacity to act over extended periods of time. Precisely because responsibilities are rarely fixed and new tasks continually emerge, individuals often assume multiple functions simultaneously—for example, as activists, organisers, researchers, facilitators, or neighbours. To date, such multi-roles have primarily been understood as overlapping individual roles or hybrid identities.
This paper argues that multi-roles should be understood not only as characteristics of individuals but also as an organisational response to the structural demands of open grassroots organisations. Building on our previous work on multi-roles and code-switching in living labs, the study shifts the focus from individual competencies to the organisational function of multi-roles. It asks how multi-roles emerge and how they contribute to the long-term capacity of participatory organisations to remain operational and resilient.
Theoretically, the paper draws on feminist epistemologies and Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledge, connecting these perspectives with contemporary debates on infrastructure, care, and informal power. Empirically, the study is based on qualitative peer interviews with long-standing members of the Floating University Berlin and HALLO e. V. Hamburg.
The findings demonstrate that multi-roles emerge wherever organisational openness continuously generates new demands for coordination, translation, and mediation. By filling these organisational gaps, individuals sustain flows of knowledge, maintain relationships, and enable collective action. Rather than representing exceptional or purely individual phenomena, multi-roles function as an infrastructural practice through which grassroots organisations continuously reproduce their openness. At the same time, they give rise to distinctive forms of situated judgement and informal power, as knowledge, responsibility, and relationships increasingly converge around those who carry this organisational infrastructure. The paper therefore proposes understanding multi-roles as an analytical category for explaining the everyday reproduction of collective capacity in participatory urban development.
Session 77 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Fighting neoliberal outsourcing in urban public transport – a trade union struggle
Paula Mulinari, Andrea Iossa, Pål Brunnström, Ola Brunnström
abstractPaula Mulinari, Andrea Iossa, Pål Brunnström, Ola Brunnström
During the 2000s, in Sweden as in other European countries, the transport sector that once was public owned has been subjected to neoliberal privatisation. The involvement of private actors in public transport has entailed changes in industrial relations and in many cases a deterioration in both working conditions and transport services. In this paper, though a power recourse lens, we explore and analyse a multifaceted labour dispute that occurred across three years (2018 to 2021) between Arriva, the private company that at the time of the dispute ran the train service in the Swedish southern region of Skåne including the city of Malmö (Sweden’s third largest), and the local trade union chapter Klubb Pågatåg, affiliated with the blue-collar trade union Seko (Service- och Kommunikationsfacket).
Inspired by De la Porta, Chesta and Cini (2022), through the lens of an analysis of a locale trade union struggle, we argue that social movement theory has tended to overlook labour and workplace struggles as central social movements, influencing and influenced by the urban context and the transformation of cities. Our study emphases the need to explore trade unions that both shape and are shaped by other social movements and urban contexts. Support for the local trade union comes from other trade union actors, but also – as our material illustrates – from actors and social movements located in the city. In this sense, local trade unions are embedded in broader social movements, where issues of solidarity, precarity, migration, labour rights, and temporality are fundamental. We argue for the need to more thoroughly explore the intersection between social movement and labour unions, or to see trade unions as part of social movements.
Based on interviews, observations, online material and legal analysis, we discuss the capacity of a local trade union to successfully engage in a dispute by mobilising a broad range of power resources, including mustering solidarity among the general public and social movements both locally and nationally. This struggle had ramifications beyond the local workplace and mitigated the effects of neoliberal outsourcing strategies in public transport.
Della Porta, D., Chesta, R.E., Cini, L., 2022. Mobilizing against the odds. Solidarity in action in the platform economy. Berlin J. Soziol. 32, 213–241
Housing movements and the Italian Communist Party in Napoli (1975-1983)
Antonio Ciccone
abstractAntonio Ciccone
This article delineates the history of housing movements in Napoli and their interaction with the municipal government from 1975 to 1983.
During this period, Napoli was governed by a "red council," a leftist administration led by Maurizio Valenzi, the mayor from the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
The main aim is to analyze the interaction between the PCI and housing movements, examining the dynamics of collaboration, competition, and conflict between these entities and their impact on the PCI's governmental actions and urban planning policies in Napoli.
Following World War II, the city of Napoli saw a significant housing problem, intensified by property speculation. The poorer classes bore the burden, eventually relegated to the periphery of the city, confined to a suburb that provided little more than shelter.
Napoli has experienced a gradual and imperfect process of gentrification, which persists to this day, altering the social composition of the city.
A city historically marked by great promiscuity within social classes, this practice has ultimately resulted in the division and segregation of the city into distinct neighborhoods and sections.
The population did not accept this process in a passive manner; instead, beginning in 1964, Naples saw a number of movements for housing and housing rights campaigns, some of the most significant in Italy.
In an effort to address the housing situation institutionally, the Red government under Maurizio Valenzi created the so-called "Suburbs Plan." However, the city was hit by a devastating earthquake on November 23, 1980, which made the housing situation worse and left hundreds of thousands of people without a place to live.
A new phase had begun. Relocating displaced people to the Domitian coast, more than sixty kilometers from Naples' center, was denounced by the movements as a "deportation of the proletariat." Home occupations became increasingly frequent as the conflicts grew more intense.
The relationship between the city government and the movements became tense, but ultimately the protesting residents managed to obtain housing and requisition vacant homes.
Although it was a difficult time, cooperation between the movements and the local government was essential to comprehending how to handle the crisis and satisfy the demands of the population.
Urban movements, participatory spatial practices and the transformation of cities : an exercise of political imagination
Silvana Segapeli
abstractSilvana Segapeli
This paper explores the relationship between urban movements, participatory spatial practices and the transformation of cities, starting from a question that is rarely placed at the center of urban planning: how can the political dimensions of urban life contribute to changing the quality of everyday life in urban neighborhoods?
The paper proposes to reconsider urban movements and grassroots initiatives not simply as actors who contest urban policies or participate in established planning processes, but as active agents of spatial transformation, capable of producing alternative practices, forms of knowledge, values and modes of governance. To develop this hypothesis, the paper draws on the commons and, more specifically, on the notion of patterns of commoning developed by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich. Commoning is understood here not simply as a way of managing shared resources, but as a process through which communities organize relationships of use, care and cooperation while inventing or transforming institutional arrangements.
From this perspective, commoning can be understood as an exercise of political imagination: it creates the conditions for imagining and experimenting with other ways of producing, governing and inhabiting the city. The paper identifies four interconnected values – creativity, dialogue, openness and agency – as an analytical framework for observing how collaborative urban practices challenge predetermined forms, closed systems of expertise and conventional modes of decision-making. These values make it possible to move from a participatory approach, in which inhabitants are invited to contribute to an existing project, towards collaboration, in which different actors can contribute to defining the process itself, its objectives, knowledge, rules and possible outcomes.
The argument is developed through the case of Turin, where new approaches to urban regeneration and governance have progressively created conditions for experimenting with collaborative forms of urban transformation. Particular attention is given to the development of co-governance tools for urban commons, especially the Pact of Collaboration. This case illustrates how a long process of listening, dialogue and co-design can transform not only a physical space but also the relationships between actors, the forms of knowledge that are recognized, the responsibilities that are shared and the institutional arrangements through which urban space is governed.
Participatory Knowledge and Urban Resistance: Grassroots Movements and Critical Urbanists Challenging Neoliberal Urbanism in Florence
Francesca Conti
abstractFrancesca Conti
In Florence, urban policies foster a "tourism monoculture" aimed at attracting affluent visitors and residents, alongside large-scale real estate investment in "urban regeneration" projects. This approach is facilitated by a shift in governance, where major urban transformations operate through negotiated planning, tax incentives, and the delegation of planning functions to private actors. Since 2010, the sale of approximately 300,000 square meters of public properties in the city center to real estate firms, converted into luxury residences and hotels, has driven up property values, prioritizing shareholder returns over community needs.
Grassroot groups have emerged, bringing together residents, students, and precarious workers affected by displacement and the housing crisis. These movements have developed collaborative relationships with critical urbanists, architects, jindependent journalists and researchers, who have provided technical support through counter-analyses of urban plans, participatory mapping, and the co-production of alternative proposals.
Through public assemblies, neighborhood workshops, and the systematic deconstruction of "regeneration" rhetoric, this alliance between neighbors and technicians has challenged technocratic narratives. Using tools of militant journalism and counter-expertise, these movements have revealed the networks of investors, their real estate portfolios, and transnational strategies, while producing viable alternative projects that reframe urban development as a collective right.
The "Salviamo Firenze" (Let's Save Florence) popular referendum campaign against exclusive private student housing exemplifies how this organized resistance transformed technical questions into vehicles for political pedagogy. The signature collection process became an act of collective learning about the right to the city, giving citizens the lexicon to understand class-based urban policies, oppose dispossession, and imagine other possible futures.
By examining the Florentine case, this paper contributes to showing how contemporary Southern European movements develop forms of urban resistance that interweave technical knowledge, popular mobilization, and the construction of alternative urban imaginaries. It demonstrates how grassroots movements, when allied with collaborative professionals, can challenge institutional paradigms and influence, or at least contest, the urban agenda of local governments captured by real estate interests.
Session 77 - Slot III
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 307 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Battling the Nascent Neoliberal Hegemony: Urban Movements in Post-1989 Prague
Jan Mikeš, Marta Edith Holečková
abstractJan Mikeš, Marta Edith Holečková
In the final years of Communist rule, Prague witnessed a surge of local initiatives challenging state technocracy. Urban issues such as environmental degradation and the construction of vast concrete-panel housing estates—famously dubbed “rabbit hutches” by Václav Havel—stood at the center of public criticism of the ancien régime. By 1989, ideas of human-scale housing and greener surroundings had become commonplace.
In our contribution, we would like to present how the milieu of grassroots activism evolved in the new democratic era, which claimed to give voice to its citizens. Many of the old issues persisted: the new regime continued with unfinished megaprojects such as highway circuits or a large waste incinerator. At the same time, phenomena already familiar in Western Europe—such as squatting in derelict industrial buildings—appeared for the first time, while new civic associations emerged to defend local communities from a novel threat: powerful private developers and corporations.
In the time of the early neoliberal transformation, the certainties of the welfare state quickly eroded. Whether in protests against commercial projects threatening the humane character of neighbourhoods or in struggles over the closure of local facilities providing jobs and services, activists often found their bargaining position weaker than it had been under state socialism. In several cases, which we will discuss in our presentation, communities were forced to defend themselves against the privatisation of their entire districts – made possible by the legal chaos of the transformation period. Some of these conflicts continue to this day.
The diversity of these initiatives is remarkable in itself and allows for a comparison in terms of social background, and the sophistication of the discourse they use. Yet perhaps even more striking is the shifting position these groups occupied within the society. While pre-1989 activists could capitalize on widespread public discontent with the ruling party, their post-1989 successors soon faced accusations of NIMBYism or naïveté (in the case of environmentalists), or even of violating private property and public order (in the case of squatters). Despite their fragile position, these groups reveal how the transition to democracy and market economy reshaped the very meanings, practices, and legitimacy of urban social movements in post-socialist Europe.
Building a city together. Citizen participation, urban development, and architecture in Graz (Austria), 1973-2003
Wolfram Dornik
abstractWolfram Dornik
Graz, the capital of the province of Styria (Austria), slipped behind the Iron Curtain after the end of World War II. The new geopolitical division of Central and Eastern Europe changed the orientation of the historic trading center to an industrial city and transportation hub. The city's progress-oriented political elite enthusiastically turned its attention to transforming into a car-friendly city and creating social housing. Entire rows of houses and green spaces were to make way for housing projects or road infrastructure. The residents were managed rather than involved. The result: a
wave of civil movements emerged in the late 1960s. In 1970, the plans to route a motorway through the city triggered one of the largest protest movements in the city's history. Then, in 1973, a political earthquake led to the resignation of the long-serving mayor, Gustav Scherbaum.
The citizens' initiatives that emerged in the following years dealt with a wide variety of issues: the protection of the historic old town, which fortunately had survived the heavy air raids of the Second World War relatively well. But there were also initiatives to protect green spaces, to calm traffic in the city center or on residential streets. At the same time, a counter-movement also formed: initiatives to preserve inner-city parking spaces or oppose pedestrian zones emerged. Out if these milieus small local political parties were founded, some of which developed into parties that were successful at the federal level, appearing en masse and fundamentally changing the post-war political system.
The proposed paper traces the key stages in the development of participation in urban planning and housing projects. The events in Graz are embedded in the broader national and international
discourse. Above all, it examines the international influences of the individuals involved. This brings us to the end of our reflections: 2003, when Graz was European Capital of Culture. Here, too, there were heated debates in the run-up to the event about the construction of new infrastructure and landmarks.
Filling the void: participatory urbanism in Croatian cities
Tea Truta
abstractTea Truta
This contribution presents the work of Društvo i prostor as a continuation—and a transformation—of the participatory and activist urban practices that have shaped the Croatian context since the early 2000s. Building on the legacy of initiatives such as Platforma 9,81, Pravo na grad, and local architectural associations, which mobilised critical, often reactive interventions against privatisation and spatial injustices, our collective advances a more proactive model of community-engaged spatial practice. We operate in a context marked by the continuous dismantling of Croatia’s spatial planning system since the 1990s, where institutional frameworks for democratic and strategic urban development have been weakened to the point of functional absence. This systemic erosion has created a structural void in which collaborative technicians—architects, planners, researchers—must assume roles that public institutions no longer fulfil.
Our work responds to this vacuum by developing participatory methodologies that allow communities to articulate spatial problems, co-produce knowledge, and formulate alternatives. Through the School of Participatory Urbanism and collaborations with initiatives across coastal cities undergoing tourism-driven transformation, we link situated community struggles to broader structural processes of deregulation, displacement, and peripheralisation. These practices challenge dominant narratives of urban development by exposing how speculative interests reshape everyday life and by constructing forms of legitimacy outside formal planning institutions.
Positioning ourselves within, yet also beyond, the historical trajectories of Croatian participatory movements allows us to reflect on the conditions that enable such practices to emerge today. Importantly, this approach also generates a parallel educational dimension: working directly with diverse communities provides our collective and collaborators with a rare form of grounded urbanistic training—an experiential learning process that formal planning institutions in Croatia are no longer capable of providing. In doing so, our practice contributes not only to counter-histories of urban transformation but also to building capacities for more just, situated, and democratic urban futures.
From Streets to Statutes: Strategic Plan Amendments in Zagreb and Podgorica
Sonja Dragovic
abstractSonja Dragovic
In late summer 2025, Zagreb and Podgorica adopted amendments to their strategic plans - the General Urban Plan (GUP) and the Spatial-Urban Plan (PUP), respectively. Treating these plans as political artefacts, the paper asks under what conditions urban social movements shape urban politics and planning norms in post-Yugoslav capitals marked by decades of privatisation, financialisation, and technocratic governance.
The comparison is instructive because the amendments emerged from processes marked by opposing political goals and movement trajectories. In Zagreb, a long arc of organising around the right to the city and spatial justice fed into a municipalist breakthrough after 2021. The new administration made a political choice to open spatial planning for participation: architect-activists and other collaborative technicians worked with neighbourhood councils and city districts to translate community demands into plan parameters. The 2025 GUP amendments protected green areas, promoted public services, and introduced instruments to address housing affordability. Yet the path to adoption was turbulent: after sustained ministerial pressure and procedural bargaining, the final text included provisions that might weaken plan safeguards and create room for investor circumvention. The case shows how infrastructures built over years of community work could underpin a participatory planning process once political opportunity structures opened, as well as the limits to such openings.
Podgorica’s 2025 PUP tells a different story. Passed via expedited electronic session during wildfire emergencies and despite procedural breaches, the amendments facilitate private-interest spot-upzoning and heighten risks to basic infrastructure. Civic actors assembled counter-expertise and public critique, yet without enabling political alignments or participatory venues, their influence was easily ignored. The procedure served not as a forum to decide on a plan advancing public interest but as a device to consolidate private gain.
Based on interviews (activists, organisers, elected officials), municipal records, and media reports, the comparison raises three questions: 1) how institutionalisation occurs, and where it meets limits when movement agendas enter office; 2) which devices of counter-expertise (plan analysis, legal support, professional critique) travel across political cycles; and 3) what conditions enable broad mobilisations around public interest in urban development.
Session 78 - Ecological Postmodern - Architecture and Urban Design after the Oil Shock
This session seeks to take stock of ecological architecture and urban design that emerged in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It will look in particular at the connections between postmodernism and ecological approaches during this period, from large government-financed programmes to counter-cultural initiatives.
Coordinators: Janina Gosseye, Florian Urban
show/hide introduction
Coordinators: Janina Gosseye, Florian Urban
show/hide introduction
Session 78 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 213 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
The Beginnings of Ecological Architecture in the Czech Republic
Petr Kratochvíl
abstractPetr Kratochvíl
At the time of the publication of "Limits to Growth", the then ČSSR was fully supplied with oil from the USSR. The shock of the lack of energy resources did not reach here, and the problems of the West were declared a manifestation of the crisis of capitalism. In the 1970s and 1980s mining of brown coal peaked in northern Bohemia - the victim of it was the demolished historic town of Most, damaged landscape, air pollution. Rather than the oil crisis, it was primarily this damage to the natural environment and the threat to human health that drew public attention to environmental problems.
Later, albeit timidly, architecture began to respond to them. It could build on earlier ideas – already in 1947 the architect Ladislav Žák published the book Inhabitable Landscape on integration of buildings into the landscape – respect for the natural context is no doubt one of the features of the environmental architecture. This also applied to the exceptional TVtransmitter and hotel on the Ještěd hill (1974) by architect Karel Hubáček, which combines a sensitive connection to the mountain silhouette and an original technical solution of the construction in extreme natural conditions. It is these two positions – nature as an inspiration for architectural creativity and technological solutions of environmental problems – that form different, although often intertwining, lines of development of environmental architecture in the Czech Republic in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper will analyse them on the examples of architects from the SIAL studio in Liberec, (J. Suchomel: Cultural House in Česká lípa; Z. Zavřel – D. Vokáč: Cable car station to Sněžka hill, etc.), as well as on a series of swimming pools using solar energy (arch. E. Schleger – L. Liesler) and other examples of lone pioneers who often carried out their buildings with their own hands. It was very difficult to apply alternative approaches within the rigid construction production of the time, projects often ended up as unrealized visions, or their completion dragged on until the beginning of the 1990s. Although it was a minority trend, it was part of a broader effort, especially by the young generation of architects, to revise the principles of late modern architecture of the time. It took place in parallel with the re-evaluation of history, whether it manifested itself in a postmodern return in architecture or in fights against the insensitive demolition of 19th-century city districts in the field of urbanism.
Raw Earth Architecture as Ecological Postmodernism: the Emergence of a Decolonized Moroccan Architecture
Nadya Rouizem
abstractNadya Rouizem
By the late 1970s, the two oil crises led to the emergence of ecological postmodernism, which reinterpreted vernacular traditions, drawing inspiration particularly valuing its materiality and sustainable approaches. This led for example to the creation of the CRAterre association in France in 1979 by students at the Grenoble School of Architecture, and the Pompidou Center hosting the famous exhibition “Des architectures de terre” in 1981, curated by Jean Dethier.
This era also coincided with the early decades of independence for many nations, during which artists and intellectuals actively sought ways to assert their identity and break free from colonial narratives, sometimes through neo-vernacular architecture (Lu, 2010). In Morocco, beginning in the 1970s, artist Farid Belkahia—one of the pioneers of Moroccan artistic modernity—embraced materials deeply tied to local craftsmanship, such as copper and goatskin, to establish a "decolonized Moroccan art." This sensitivity to vernacular traditions influenced a small group of Moroccan architects during the 1980s, including Abderrahim Sijlemassi, a close friend of Belkahia, for whom he designed a raw earth house in Marrakech in 1980. The construction of this project was carried out by Elie Mouyal, a young Moroccan architect who later earned his degree in Paris in 1987. Mouyal continued exploring raw earth as a construction material in a series of villas he designed in Marrakech throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
In contrast to most local architects who embraced concrete as a symbol of modernization (Williford, 2025), the work of Sijelmassi and Mouyal stood out as a pioneering yet minority effort. Their approach highlighted both cultural identity and ecological benefits, though these innovations failed to spark a broader shift toward low-energy architectural practices in Morocco.
This study examines these raw earth projects within their postmodern and postcolonial contexts to explore how this ecological architecture represented an avant-garde in the Moroccan architectural landscape. However, it also analyzes why these efforts ultimately fell short of inspiring a widespread adoption of sustainable architectural principles.
The research will draw on the unpublished archives of Abderrahim Sijelmassi, donated to the Moroccan archives in 2020, and on interviews with Elie Mouyal, cross-referenced with a study of his projects, which continue to serve as examples for the younger generation of African architects.
Between Technological Utopias and Holistic Ecologies: Flore Stuby in Swiss Eco-Architecture
Jana Von Wyl
abstractJana Von Wyl
This paper examines the work of Flore Stuby (†2023), a francophone Swiss architect whose ex-periments with passive-solar design in the late 1970s and 1980s exemplify the early development of ecological architecture in Switzerland. Her projects, including maison solaire passive in Begnins (1977), Pompaples (1980), and Genolier (1982), belong to the first generation of pas-sive-solar dwellings in the country. Despite their innovative character, they remain largely absent from architectural historiography, reflecting both the marginalisation of early ecological design and of women’s contributions to it. The paper situates Stuby’s work within the contradictory landscape following the 1973 oil crisis, which reshaped debates on energy and resources while the belief in economic growth persisted. In this context, the modernist paradigm of obsolescence be-gan to be questioned, and experiments ranging from autonomous houses to self-built structures emerged as countertactics. Stuby’s Atelier de Recherche en Architecture Solaire (ARAS) com-bined passive-solar strategies with a holistic understanding of ecology that addressed domestic health, materials and everyday experience. In some projects she employed ideas from building biology, illustrating how ecological design intersected with broader cultural imaginaries. These approaches later came to be labelled as “alternative,” contributing to their exclusion from canoni-cal narratives of postmodern architecture. At the same time, Stuby’s buildings participated in sci-entific evaluation frameworks. Studies by the Groupe de recherche en énergie solaire at EPFL measured heat-gain, thermal storage and user comfort, revealing the coexistence of empirical test-ing and holistic ecological imagination within a single practice. Methodologically, the paper re-constructs Stuby’s dispersed oeuvre through building records, performance studies, project visits and oral history interviews. It asks how Stuby translated emerging ecological paradigms into built form and how different frameworks shaped the interpretation of her projects. Considering Stuby’s contribution enables a re-evaluation of early eco-architecture as a field shaped by multiple, often conflicting knowledge systems whose richness remains insufficiently accounted for in contempo-rary narratives of sustainability and postmodernism.
The Structure Plan of Bruges and the Re-visioning of the Historic City as Human Environment
Wouter Van Acker, Warre Onnockx, Maarten Liefooghe
abstractWouter Van Acker, Warre Onnockx, Maarten Liefooghe
The Structure Plan of Bruges (1972–76), developed by Groep Planning, was both a research project and a planning model designed to reconcile the antagonistic forces of urban conservation and urban renewal. The integration of architectural policy, urban planning, heritage conservation, traffic management, and environmental engineering was at the core of its methodology. This multidisciplinary approach reflected the idea that the revitalization of the historic city could only be successful if the city was understood as an organic whole of interrelated spatial and functional aspects. Characteristic of postmodern urbanism, the Structure Plan sought to counteract the pervasive negative effects of modernization, decentralization, and globalization by restoring a sense of place through the conservation and rehabilitation of the old city centre, combined with context-sensitive new interventions. This paper investigates the distinctive environmental approach of this urbanistic pilot project. The Structure Plan proposed a range of environmental interventions, including an innovative circulation system that redirected cars, looping them out of the medieval core, prioritizing walkability and public space; the adaptive reuse of historic buildings led by the Marcus Gerards Foundation; the restoration and purification of the city's canals with a regional vision of water infrastructure management. More fundamental—indeed, central—to the project, however, this paper argues, was the re-envisioning of the historic city as a shared human environment, rooted in a collective psycho-environmental identification with nature, community, and heritage.
Session 79 - Post-Socialist Deindustrialization and Urban Transformation: Resilience, Adaptation, and Global Comparative Perspectives.
This session explores the long-term implications of deindustrialization and economic transformation in urban and industrial regions. Focusing on post-1989 changes in former socialist states, it also welcomes comparative perspectives, including earlier waves of deindustrialization and industrial cities' evolving global economic ties.
Coordinators: Vítězslav Sommer, Andrea Pokludová, Martin Jemelka
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Coordinators: Vítězslav Sommer, Andrea Pokludová, Martin Jemelka
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Session 79 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Sustainable integration of industrial heritage in a post-communist city (Iasi, Romania)
Marinela Istrate
abstractMarinela Istrate
Adaptive reuse is essential for heritage buildings, including those old industrial areas. The implementation of urban regeneration projects can make a real difference in the vitality and sustainable development of cities. This is all the more important in Romania, where the deindustrialization of the last three decades has been a fundamental social and economic challenge, with industrial areas experiencing a rapid and extensive process of destruction, while the legislative vacuum has led to irreparable losses of industrial architecture.
This study aims to analyze the industrial heritage and its role as an engine of urban revitalization, using the city of Iasi, Romania's second-largest urban center, as a case study. The research is based on official statistical data from 1912-2024, supplemented by qualitative data from our investigations, press information, and images from Google Earth. We also propose a critical assessment of the economically viable uses and the degree of culturally acceptable adaptation to avoid turning these spaces into sterile museums. The results highlighted the predominant use of former industrial areas for real estate purposes, with little regard for preserving buildings of architectural value. However, there are also some successful examples, in which former factories dating back more than 100 years have been rehabilitated and integrated into the urban landscape.
The conclusions are generally valid for many cities in Eastern Europe: industrial architectural heritage must be used in creating new functional cores with a catalytic role, as the rehabilitation of these spaces contributes to redefining cultural identity. In this regard, we demonstrated that in Romania (with a few notable exceptions) and especially in the city of Iasi, there is no clear trend toward preserving the urban industrial heritage, but rather a rapid and profitable financial capitalization.
From Industrial Legacy to Post-Socialist Transformation: Deindustrialisation, Labour, and the New Economic Order in the Zlín Region
Ondřej Ševeček, Vítězslav Sommer
abstractOndřej Ševeček, Vítězslav Sommer
This paper examines the deindustrialisation and post-socialist transformation of the Zlín region—an emblematic industrial district built around the Baťa and later Svit shoe conglomerate—as a case study of regional adaptation to the collapse of the planned economy after 1989. The decline of Svit, one of Czechoslovakia’s largest industrial employers and a globally connected enterprise, illustrates how post-socialist deindustrialisation reshaped urban economies, labour relations, and regional identities. It analyses how privatisation, market liberalisation, and integration into global production networks transformed the regional economy and the nature of work. Particular attention is paid to the transformation of labour: the erosion of traditional industrial employment, the gendered consequences of industrial decline, and the social impacts on workers—especially women and foreign labour migrants from the Global South—who had formed the backbone of the socialist workforce. These developments show that deindustrialisation was not merely an economic process but also a profound social and cultural shift, challenging established notions of work, community, and industrial citizenship.
Methodologically, the study combines regional economic history with social analysis, drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and local press materials to reconstruct the dynamics of change at multiple levels—from enterprise restructuring and privatisation to the everyday experiences of industrial workers. The regional perspective links local developments to broader patterns of post-socialist transformation and to global deindustrialisation trajectories observed not only in heavy-industrial regions, but also in light-industry centres like Northampton, Verviers, and Weißenfels—whose decline coincided with the rise of new footwear production hubs in East and Southeast Asia, notably in China after the late 1970s.
By situating the Zlín case within this global comparative framework, the paper contributes to understanding how post-socialist industrial regions negotiated the transition from state socialism to capitalism. It highlights the interlinked nature of deindustrialisation, labour transformation, and global economic integration, showing that the collapse of the old industrial order also generated new economic actors, continuities, and forms of resilience that continue to shape the urban and social landscape of post-socialist Central Europe.
Enterprise Welfare and the Origins of Deindustrialization in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia. The Case of the Svit Footwear Enterprise
Magdalena Grešová
abstractMagdalena Grešová
Deindustrialization is a process whose effects are clearly visible in industrial regions and cities, where industry is often embodied by a single enterprise serving as the main driver of working, social, political and urban life.
This paper does not focus on the impacts of deindustrialization after 1989, but rather seeks to trace its roots, underlying connections, and continuous elements from the perspective of enterprise social care for workers during the 1980s. These elements are explored through a case study of the footwear factory Svit situated in the South Moravian town of Gottwaldov (today Zlín), one of the largest enterprises in socialist Czechoslovakia.
During the period of Normalization (the 1970´s and 1980´s), the importance of the state social policy in Czechoslovakia became more pronounced as one of the methods by which the communist garniture sough to legitimize their rule after Prague Spring of 1968. Thus, the welfare state became a key instrument of political consolidation. Social welfare was provided primarily through state enterprises, which guaranteed and financed housing, collective vacations, childcare, education and other social security benefits for their employees.
The research of the social security system and its decomposition after 1989 could expose specific regional long-term aspects of the post-socialist development and the regional process of deindustrialization.
The research focuses on the forms and levels of social care provided by the Svit enterprise to its employees – most of whom were women. The forms of the social welfare are examined in the context of social policy changes during the economic restructuring and transformation of Czechoslovak state enterprises in the late 1980s.
The paper focuses on the questions concerning the company’s political influence in the city and the impact of its social programs on development and urban planning. Another key focus represents the analysis of assumptions embedded in the rich social policy of late socialism, which may help explain the challenges associated with the deindustrialization of cities after 1989.
The paper presents preliminary findings based on ongoing PhD research.
A Historian in the Post-Industrial City: Challenges in Studying Ostrava’s Economic Transformation after 1989
Andrea Pokludová, Andrea Pokludová
abstractAndrea Pokludová, Andrea Pokludová
The fall of the Iron Curtain and the Velvet Revolution of 1989 profoundly reshaped industrial cities in Central Europe, particularly regions dependent on heavy industries such as mining, metallurgy, and chemical production. Ostrava—once celebrated as the “first city of socialism” and the “steel heart of the republic”—provides a telling example of these transformations. At first glance, the city has succeeded in addressing the ecological burdens of its industrial past, and many brownfield sites have been converted into new functional spaces that today stand both as monuments to industrialization and as illustrations of successful economic restructuring.
For historical scholarship, and urban history in particular, the post-1989 economic transformation represents a distinctive and methodologically demanding period. Research into key issues such as labour market change, deepening social inequalities, the end of coal mining, and the decline of steel production encounters significant obstacles. Historians face a marked absence of traditional source material: company archives were often destroyed during the privatization processes of the 1990s, surviving records remain unprocessed and inaccessible, and the use of oral history is restricted by current legislation, including data-protection regulations. Moreover, the actors of the so-called “wild privatization” remain legally protected.
This study aims to outline these methodological challenges and to demonstrate how historians can nonetheless contribute to a deeper understanding of Ostrava’s economic and urban transformation after 1989, as well as the extent to which existing research can be further advanced.
Session 80 - Images and narratives of post-industrial urban spaces
This session explores post-industrial urban spaces as sites of memory, transformation, and potential. Moving beyond functionalist and speculative paradigms, it invites critical reflections on visual methodologies and identity to rethink urban imaginaries, design approaches, and urban strategies, engaging both scholarly and design-based research.
Coordinators: Leeke Reinders, Patricia Tamayo Perez, Antoni Vilanova Omedas
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Coordinators: Leeke Reinders, Patricia Tamayo Perez, Antoni Vilanova Omedas
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Session 80 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 1 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
GROUNDING CONCERN: FIGURING BRUSSELS’ POST-INDUSTRIAL SOILS
Nadia Casabella, Ananda Kohlbrenner
abstractNadia Casabella, Ananda Kohlbrenner
What if we approached soil no longer as an inert surface or vacant space, but as a thick and dynamic milieu within which multiple forms of existence unfold and intertwine? How might such a shift change the way we perceive, value, and inhabit urban environments? These questions lie at the heart of Super terram, an exploratory research project conducted in Brussels between 2021 and 2023 and funded by Innoviris through its Co-Create programme.
The project focused on the Schaerbeek Formation railway platform, a partially decommissioned site on the northern edge of the Brussels-Capital Region whose soils bear the traces of successive agricultural, industrial, and infrastructural transformations. To cultivate public engagement with soils long withdrawn from urban attention, Super terram combined scientific and artistic approaches to explore how visual practices might foster new forms of attention, imagination, and attachment.
Drawing on two public experiments, A (W)Hole New World and a Dérive through the Schaerbeek Formation wasteland, the paper examines how collective acts of excavation, storytelling, observation, and drawing enabled participants to engage with soils differently. These practices, rather than merely raising awareness by communicating scientific knowledge, wished to awaken citizens to the ecological, historical, and affective dimensions of urban soils. In doing so, they helped developing a form of attention towards environments commonly perceived as polluted, peripheral, or wrecked, opening new possibilities for their care and public mobilisation.
Reimagining the Industrial Riversides of Ave and Leça (Portugal): Landscape, Memory, and Urban Regeneration
Sara Sucena
abstractSara Sucena
The valleys of the Ave and Leça rivers, in the Porto Metropolitan Area (PMA), Portugal, were privileged sites for the establishment of heavy textile industry from the late 19th century onwards. This industry peaked in the mid-20th century and gradually declined, disappearing almost entirely by the century’s end. From that past, these valleys – particularly their middle stretches – remain its most visible testimony. Two major aspects stand as evident traces of that industrial presence: the large manufacturing buildings still marking the landscape, and the persistent (though now reduced) pollution of the watercourses which, having served as their main driving force and energy resource, also became the preferred outlet for industrial waste.
In the context of the ‘diffuse city’ of NW Portugal and in light of a new territorial design paradigm supported by ecological/landscape-based and infrastructural urbanism – in which public space is understood as a network of systems – these areas hold significant potential for urban renewal, particularly in view of escalating climate challenges. In the PMA, the presence of these elements – rivers and buildings – has been selectively harnessed as a response to the need for greater environmental and social balance, and as a design opportunity to reposition these traditionally undervalued areas within a qualified, multi-scalar urban framework. This spatial requalification has operated on multiple levels, also encompassing the immaterial dimensions of memory, heritage, and narratives, offering themselves as material for “urban speculation”.
This set of public-space interventions and architectural conversions – materialised since the first decade of this century along the Ave and Leça rivers, and signalling a shift in the ways of thinking and making the ‘city’ – constitutes the focus of the present paper’s critical reflection. The study draws on cartographic and planning analysis, the authors' design solutions, specific/local bibliography, and in-situ interpretation, situating itself within national and international reference frameworks. It aims to contribute to the discussion on principles of intervention “in the urban voids left by processes of deindustrialization”, with relevance beyond that specific scope; within this argument, the role of “images of memory and identity” in processes of urban/territorial reconversion will be brought to the fore.
Looking back from the outside of Malmö-Limhamn railway.
Fredrik Linander
abstractFredrik Linander
I am writing this abstract sitting in a late 19th century bathing house, at the end of a 150-meter pier. In the cafeteria, with coffee in hand, I am looking back at the coastline I am currently doing my thesis on. Working title: Poetics of an urban beach. From here I see the old railway embankment, visible as a green straight row of dense bushes and trees, and I see the sandy beach landscape in front. I am imagining how it would be, when looking back in history, to see the movements of time and space from out here. What could be seen from this position outside the city, and outside the railway? What is visible from out here that is hidden from the inside? From this outside position, this text, will unfold an early history of the beach, beginning with the construction of the Malmö Limhamn Railway.
In 1889, when the growing cement industry in Limhamn was working to connect its production to the network of railways in Sweden, they built a railway at the water’s edge, partly in the shallow water, in an almost straight line from the factory in Limhamn to central Malmö. What they seemingly didn’t consider was that the railway construction also resulted in a new coastline on the outside of the embankment. Unwelcoming and inaccessible, made of leftover shards and stone from the limestone quarry. Eventually, beginning in 1926, this outside was turned into a sandy beach which is now one of Malmö’s most popular recreational areas.
I will in this essay look at the early history of the beach and the making of this spatial outside. How it went from being an embankment of the industrial railway to the living beach landscape it is today. Focusing on some historical situations, guided by maps, photographs and newspaper articles, following human and non-human actors, I will present how the transformation of the railway played out. In my thesis I look at the formation of Ribersborg beach through everyday space and time, with a focus on its spatio-temporal excessiveness and openness. Through this historical account of the railway, I hope to shed some light on what this outside is, how it came to be, and if and how it is still active today in framing the life on the beach.
This text particularly builds on Architecture from the outside (Grosz 2001), The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure (Larkin 2013), and also furthers the work by Per-Markku Ristilammi (2003) on this very same beach.
Session 80 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
The steel remains in Lorraine, between opportunity and abandonment (1984-2012)
Jade Berger
abstractJade Berger
The Lorraine region, located in north-eastern France, experienced the development, from the late nineteenth century onwards, of an industry devoted to processing the local iron ore known as Minette. For a century, the steelworks formed the economic lifeblood of the region, underpinning the urban development of the Lorraine valleys and the emergence of various factory towns. From the 1960s onwards, however, the region underwent a major process of deindustrialisation, leading to the closure and abandonment of these imposing industrial complexes. In 1966, industrial companies initiated a policy of tabula rasa, resulting in the disappearance of production sites and the creation of vast steelmaking brownfields scattered with a variety of industrial remains. While priority was given to managing the economic and social crisis, public authorities also began addressing the redevelopment of this new type of brownfield, marking an unprecedented turning point in the history of spatial planning in France.
This article examines the landscape treatment policy implemented across Lorraine from 1986 onwards. These greening projects sought to create a new image for deindustrialised factory towns by erasing their industrial heritage, whose presence evoked job losses and the ongoing crisis. Yet, on each brownfield site, industrial remains that proved difficult to redevelop persisted after the departure of the industrial companies.
Through the study of three emblematic sites, this article analyses the debates surrounding the redevelopment of steelmaking brownfields and the meanings attributed to industrial remains by the actors involved in spatial planning and by local residents. Drawing on recent doctoral research in the history of contemporary architecture, it argues that these remains were perceived ambivalently: at times as waste to be removed, and at times as resources and supports for redevelopment projects. It further argues that the gradual disappearance of the steelworks was a necessary condition for the emergence, in France, of a recognition of the heritage value of steelworks remains and the development of policies aimed at their protection. Finally, it demonstrates that these remains have since become an important network of landscape landmarks.
Image, transformation and memory option of a ‘motor town’.
Rossella Maspoli, Carla Paschetta
abstractRossella Maspoli, Carla Paschetta
The emergence of new architectural types – factories, garages, showrooms, service stations – and infrastructures – tunnels, flyovers, motorway junctions – characterized the change in mobility landscape from Western cities to global automobile model. The shift is evident in productive “motor towns”, as Detroit, Coventry, Stuttgart, Wolfsburg, Gothenburg and Turin.
Turin’s industrial image and architectural profile gradually shaped different areas of the city for over 120 years. The automotive industry still has visible traces in urban image – factories, representative buildings, archaeological remains in post-industrial parks – that can reconstruct collective memory and identity while promoting industrial tourism, supporting a renewed interpretation of the city, rethinking post-industrial sites while addressing contemporary social needs.
Isolated vestiges – chimneys, remnants of factories, vertical-to-horizontal models, large production sectors – coexist with partially active sites, as Mirafiori in Turin or Torsland in Gothenburg, which fostered “company towns” and real estate growth with sports, social services, residences. Testimonial elements – façades, decorative, structural parts – are often preserved, through Urban Development Plan or by the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape in Italy, such as government heritage preservation agencies in other countries.
Overall, the approach to preserve industrial heritage gained recognition only after the 1980s, following extensive industrial decline and loss of potential industrial monuments. This cultural and social process was reflected in the initial appreciation of tangible and intangible dimensions of industrial material culture, as in reinterpretation of abandoned industrial sites.
Turin’s excursus begins with the 1984 research commissioned by the Municipality to the Polytechnic University and studies for the 1995 Municipal Master Plan, that introduced criteria for economic, architectural, feasibility evaluation. The aim is to assess, after forty years, the effects of these directives on conservation and transformation of industrial heritage, in relation to urban planning and marketing.
Large historic vertical factories emerge in town as landmarks and industrial monuments -Lingotto, Microtecnica, OGR, Lancia Carrozzerie- with different outcomes in terms of gentrification, post-industrial speculation, multifunctional regeneration, enhancement of creative, research and innovation districts.
Post-industrial Železný Brod: Empty Buildings, Living Memories and New Forms of Urban Space
Michaela Emanovská
abstractMichaela Emanovská
Železnobrodské sklo (ŽBS) was a glassmaking company that left a strong mark on the town — on how it looked and on how people there lived their everyday lives. It was established in 1948, after the nationalisation of local glassworks and small workshops that had been active in Železný Brod since the 1920s. A significant change came in the 1960s, when a new production plant was built on the edge of town (the foundation stone was laid in 1961 and production began in 1966). People who remember this period describe it in different ways: the new factory brought modern facilities for its time, but moving out of the small workshops also meant breaking long-standing working habits and the close ties people had built there. The company’s role went far beyond employment. Entire families — often several generations — worked at ŽBS, and the factory shaped daily routines as well as the town’s broader development, including new housing and the arrival of new residents.
After 1989, the company was hit by major economic and political changes connected with the end of the communist regime and the wave of privatisation. ŽBS was removed from the commercial register in 2005, and the last remaining production in the town ended in 2009. The former industrial area still shows this complicated history very clearly. Some buildings have found new owners or tenants. A local glassmaking firm now works in the former corporate directorate. Other parts remain empty.
Interviews with former employees suggest that many people view these empty areas as a break in continuity. Some still feel that “ŽBS could have continued,” even though they acknowledge the economic and technological problems the company faced. A sense of nostalgia is still present — strengthened by the annual Glass Town event and by the nearby exhibition spaces devoted to glass art. For many residents, the closure of the factory also meant losing a shared point of reference that had shaped local identity for decades.
The study draws on historical photographs from the time when the plant was built, as well as recent images of the now-empty buildings. Through them, it follows how the town’s surroundings changed from the era of socialist modernisation to today’s post-industrial condition. Železný Brod appears here as a “wounded place,” where memories, traces of decline and the first attempts at renewal come together and continue to shape how the area is understood.
Another treasure unfolds here_ The case of Rochebelle, Alès, France
Flavia Pertuso
abstractFlavia Pertuso
Once the economic hub of the mining industry, Rochebelle (Alès, France) is now a district that has been ‘emptied of its essence since the mines closed,’ according to Marylin. It is a place where ‘you don't go, miss,’ Dominique tells me from the bridge, because ‘there's nothing there and it's dangerous!’ he warns me.
In stories that hover between myth and contempt, the Rochebelle neighbourhood suddenly died out when the mine closed, leaving behind the living traces of an overwhelming past. We therefore decided to observe it not as the negative of something, but from what is there: actions, practices and alliances taking place on a daily basis. Ethnography of the ordinary and dense description, chosen as our preferred epistemological tools, enabled us to reveal the extraordinary capacity of small things to shape and invent our relationship to the world. Removing Rochebelle from the category of invisible peri-city, representing it – in the primary sense of making it present – through an inside view is the research objective.
In an effort to understand and grasp the multiple dimensions that make up this neighbourhood today, and therefore the many possible narratives, we asked researchers from our laboratory (Laboratoire Architecture et Anthropologie) to co-organise a residency.
‘What can we learn from Rochebelle?’ was therefore the title of the collective adventure which, in one week, set itself the ambition of conducting a micro-survey to understand what lessons Rochebelle can teach the city.
The research experience was structurally collective, and this multiplicity of perspectives and sensibilities fundamentally contributed to the richness of the data produced. The results of the research are formalised in a set of twenty postcards based on situations encountered in the field. Each one features a photo on the front and a text and title on the back. The text is taken from the field notes: a description of one or more scenes, or the transcription of a dialogue or the words of a resident. Each of the texts and photos aims to suggest and illustrate a fragment of The Rochebelles.
Seen from above, Rochebelle appears flattened, wedged between schematic categories of public action, urban policy and urban planning. Seen from below, it is an impressionistic explosion, which these colourful postcards attempt to capture in all their nuances.
Session 80 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 1 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Reimagining Post-Industrial Fabrics: Identity and Design-Led Urban Laboratories
Carles Crosas Armengol, Enric Villavieja-Martinez
abstractCarles Crosas Armengol, Enric Villavieja-Martinez
The coastal area of Badalona constitutes a paradigmatic case study for the transformation of industrial spaces in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Beyond the uniqueness of the Tres Xemeneies site in Sant Adrià del Besòs and some notable examples of adaptive reuse of industrial buildings, this paper offers a broader reflection on the potential of reusing industrial fabrics in the ongoing development of the contemporary city. The research combines a historical retrospective of the productive fabrics in the northern part of the Barcelona metropolitan area with a prospective pedagogical approach based on ‘research by design’ in two specific urban sectors. In both cases, the aim is to decipher the keys to understanding and promoting a complex and integrative urbanism that avoids the tabula rasa approach in these areas and proposes strategies for the upcycling of the pre-existing urban fabric. Within the framework of the Urban Design studios at ETSAB, a rich
body of ideas and proposals has been developed over the years, analysing the potential of various industrial estates to be transformed into new mixed-use neighbourhoods. In this specific case, the industrial estates of South Badalona (Sector Industrial Sud and Gorg) and North Badalona (Sector Canyadó, Guixeres and Manresà) are analysed and explored, looking at their potential for transformation according to new conditions of connectivity, accessibility, multimodality, centrality, mixed-use intensity, diversity, and eco-efficiency. Through a strategic approach combining systemic interventions with more site-specific ones, the paper discusses alternatives for rethinking the future of current monofunctional spaces and transforming them into mixed-use environments. The general goal is to envision the spaces associated with the socalled third industrial revolution, shaped by new forms of work and energy production that go beyond the hierarchical structures of previous
centuries and foster more horizontal socio-economic models. Aware of the importance of maintaining economic activity within the city, the paper argues that some of these spaces may become the cradle of new innovative urban ecosystems: areas with density and a mix of uses, where new and old economic activities come into contact alongside spaces for housing, creativity, and innovation in the urban laboratories of the twenty-first century.
Filling a Double Void: A critical mnemonic reading of the New City of Santo André (1971–2021)
Giulia Strippoli, Paulo Catrica, Andrea Vacha
abstractGiulia Strippoli, Paulo Catrica, Andrea Vacha
This paper is the result of research carried out as part of the IN2PAST project Preencher um Duplo Vazio: Uma leitura crítica mnemónica da Cidade Nova de Santo André (1971-2021) – Filling a Double Void: A critical mnemonic reading of the New City of Santo André (1971–2021) coordinated by Paulo Catrica, with contributions from a team of visual anthropologists, historians, architects and photographers.
Our paper aims to stimulate a critical and mnemonic reading of the city of Vila Nova de Santo André, in Alentejo, Portugal by crossing history, the ideological matrix of architecture and urbanism with oral history, photography and anthropology. The comprehensive territory of the Sines industrial project, conceived by Marcelo Caetano's government in the years leading up to 25 April 1974 (the day of the military coup that ended fascism and inaugurated a revolutionary process) was largely implemented after the revolution, with its construction suffering constant setbacks and hesitations in economic and political guidelines.
A unique case in Portugal as an urban project for a new city, fifty years after the start of the construction of Santo André, there is a lack of academic research promoting critical reading and discussion of this work. This led us to consider the potential of the unfinished as a decisive argument for considering Santo André as the subject of multidisciplinary academic research.
Based on research combining photography, architecture, anthropology and an oral history project, we aim to demonstrate how the history of the industrial complex has become embedded in the social and cultural practices of the population. We also aim to highlight the transformation of the notion of heritage as a concept that operates at the level of public policy, collective imagination and individual perception.
Echoes of Italian domestic design production. Post-Industrial palimpsests in a former Household Goods Capital
Cristina Renzoni, Mattia Tettoni
abstractCristina Renzoni, Mattia Tettoni
This paper investigates the complex “images and narratives” emerging from the post-industrial urban spaces of Omegna, in the Italian western subalpine district, as a microcosm for wider European challenges. Omegna, once a thriving hub, the capital of its household goods district, home to iconic brands like Bialetti, Alessi, Lagostina, and Girmi, profoundly shaped national and international domestic environments. However, deindustrialization has transformed this legacy into a rich but contested palimpsest. Here, past industrial activity—from active sites to monumental derelict structures—coexists, embodying the “wounded places” discussed in this session. This palimpsest is particularly significant in polycentric, low-density intermediate territories, where district economies profoundly shaped urbanization across economy, territory, and society.
The paper explores the multiplicity of trajectories these spaces have taken, spanning adaptive reuse to prolonged abandonment, addressing intervention challenges. An interdisciplinary methodological framework combining urban history, photography, grounded mapping, and research by design explores material traces and socio-cultural meanings. Photography captures visual narratives; mapping reveals spatial configurations; design research envisions future trajectories, generating context-specific proposals.
Analyzing key sites, the contribution highlights diverse responses to the disappearance of industrial landmarks and the need to reinvent them. It examines still-active factories, demonstrating continuity, nostalgia, and innovation; the redeveloped industrial site, now transformed into a cultural forum showcasing new civic centralities; and the culturally reactivated, grassroots-born abandoned factory. Conversely, colossal abandoned factories bear witness to decay and the absence of a cohesive public plan. Across this variety of conditions, this study explores three themes: first, visual methodologies for deciphering space memory and potential; second, how industrial remnants shape memory, identity, and local initiatives; and third, the tension between bottom-up and strategic, supra-local planning to foster “collaborative post-district imaginaries”. Ultimately, this analysis offers empirical insights into the continuous negotiation between memory, economic pressures, and future urban scenarios, contributing to a nuanced understanding of industrial districts' legacies and perspectives.
Competing Visions: Erasure versus Resistance in Florence's Post-Industrial Landscape
Francesca Conti
abstractFrancesca Conti
Florence's post-industrial condition reveals a stark divide in how memory, identity, and future trajectories are constructed around former industrial sites. Two emblematic cases, the ex-FIAT area in Viale Belfiore and the ex-GKN plant in Campi Bisenzio, illustrate conflicting approaches to deindustrialization: one driven by financial speculation and tourist gentrification, the other by workers' self-organization and community solidarity.
The Viale Belfiore site was acquired by the Dutch hospitality chain The Social Hub. The municipal-approved retrofit project erases industrial memory entirely, replacing it with 21,000 square meters of luxury hotel facilities, private pools, and commercial spaces. The rhetorical framework of "urban regeneration" legitimizes this transformation, while local administration celebrates the closure of an "urban void" previously dismissed as "degradation"—despite the site's spontaneous renaturalization. This narrative of post-industrial renewal masks a broader strategy of city grabbing: since 2010, approximately 300,000 square meters of public buildings in Florence's historic center have been sold to real estate and financial companies, fueling displacement and the consolidation of a tourism monoculture.
In sharp contrast, the ex-GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio, opened after FIAT's relocation from the Novoli district, represents an alternative trajectory. Following the 2021 collective dismissal announcement by financial fund Melrose, workers developed an autonomous reindustrialization plan currently awaiting implementation. The worker-led cooperative stewards this project, reframing the post-industrial site not as a speculative opportunity but as a terrain for climate justice and labor rights convergence.
These divergent cases reveal post-industrial spaces as contested territories. Using visual methodologies, urban activism deconstructs regeneration rhetoric, exposing transnational speculative networks. Counter-narratives from militant journalism and worker-led planning challenge the inevitability of neoliberal urbanism.
This paper examines how design-based approaches and planning strategies either perpetuate or resist the erasure of industrial memory and working-class identity. The Florence case demonstrates that post-industrial sites oscillate between becoming stages for financial accumulation or platforms for radical democratic experimentation, revealing that space, far from neutral, remains a site of profound political struggle
Session 81 - Downtown Revisited: Neoliberal Urban Planning in Historical Perspective Across Europe and Beyond
This session examines three decades of neoliberal urban planning through the lens of new understanding of city centers in Europe. It invites comparisons between post-socialist and Western contexts, reflecting on the role of global capital, public interest, and the shifting nature of democratic urban governance.
Coordinators: Henrieta Moravcikova, Petr Roubal, Matěj Spurný
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Coordinators: Henrieta Moravcikova, Petr Roubal, Matěj Spurný
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Session 81 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 2 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
The Noise of Capital: Reimagining Tallinn City Centre in the early 1990s
Andres Kurg
abstractAndres Kurg
In 1989, the Soviet Estonian Ministry of Light Industries commissioned the recently established architecture office Okas and Lõoke to design a business centre on Lenin boulevard in Tallinn, not far from one of the city’s main squares. Named Astlanda and comprising conference spaces, a bank, a hotel, and facilities for the Tallinn House of Fashion (including special runways for fashion shows), the building’s most spectacular feature was to be a 30-storey office tower with a top-floor restaurant, a viewing platform and circular helipad ready to receive VIP visitors.
The Ministry had made considerable profits through its corporate sales unit during the years of perestroika, which had introduced semi-autonomous business ventures across the Soviet Union and joint enterprises with foreign countries. However, the attempt to re-direct this income, held in roubles, into a new profit cycle in real-estate ultimetely failed: the Ministry’s finances in the Bank for Foreign Economic Affairs of the USSR in Moscow were frozen after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the project was halted.
Taking the case of Astlanda as my starting point, I will examine the agents and imaginaries that redefined Tallinn’s city centre in the early 1990s, following the shift from late Soviet centralised planning and organisational structures to the newly introduced neoliberal business models of the independent republic. In this, I am interested in the transformative ways late Soviet institutions introduced new economic practices and spatial forms that became dominant in the later years of the 1990s. Rather than postulating the dominance of neoliberalism introduced by Western investors, or an overnight withdrawal from top-down planning, this paper explores the hybridities of the moment, looking how weak socialist principles coexisted with emerging capitalist promises and how these dynamics played out in urban space.
Mediating Power, Profit and the Public:
Architectural Agency in Zagreb's Downtown Transformations, 2000–2025
Jana Horvat, Karin Šerman, Hana Dašić
abstractJana Horvat, Karin Šerman, Hana Dašić
Over the past two decades, the historic urban core of Zagreb has undergone redevelopments that reflect broader patterns of neoliberal urbanism in post-socialist Europe. The analysis of these urban transformations reveals recurring dynamics that may offer insight into how architectural agency can mediate between political power, private capital, and public interest. The paper examines three groups of projects that elucidate the changing role of architecture in reshaping the image of Zagreb's downtown.
The first group includes privately led developments in the city core, met with varying degrees of civic resistance and professional support. A crucial common thread across these cases is the successful inclusion of privately owned public spaces (POPS) that ensure public permeability within otherwise privately developed mixed-use complexes. Mediated by their authors, architects, these subtractive gestures – carving out new pedestrian paths rather than simply adding built volumes – have had a lasting impact on the spatial logic of the city center.
The second approach focuses on an unrealized proposal for a “new downtown”: the so-called “Zagreb Manhattan” project. This large-scale riverfront development, initiated by private developers, was met with strong professional opposition that ultimately led to its cancellation. The case reveals how the architectural and planning community can function as a counterweight to political and investor interests when those interests conflict with the public good.
The third group focuses on planned brownfield redevelopments on the downtown fringe. These sites at the edges of Zagreb's historic center are expected to undergo mixed-use transformations involving public-private partnerships. Their future development will test the capacity of professional advocacy and the mechanism of architectural competitions to safeguard public interest within an increasingly privatized urban environment.
Across these examples, the paper examines how architectural actors and institutions navigate the interplay of state power, market forces, and citizens, shaping urban outcomes under neoliberal pressures. It highlights their potential as mediators of public interest and argues that architectural competitions, together with professional resistance and negotiation, can help preserve or expand public space in privatized developments. Zagreb’s trajectory offers a lens to rethink architectural agency in neoliberal downtowns across post-socialist Europe.
Uncertainty and obsolescence: influence of international trends in developing & transforming urban centres in the Global South
Cornelius Van Der Westhuizen
abstractCornelius Van Der Westhuizen
The zeitgeist of many post-colonial Global South social contexts is perhaps best articulated as the focused challenge issued to the monuments and symbols of its former oppressive regimes or mono-cultural institutions. However, this phenomenon was often interrupted as the allure of capitalism intensified, with its promise of untethered economic progress and individual and social freedoms after the fall of Communism. Hence, the free market concept encouraged the spatial transformation of urban centres in these newly emerging economies and countries, so that the city may reflect its newfound economic aspirations. Arguably the most visceral effect of this development strategy was the intensified privatisation of former public urban spaces, which came about with the importing of multi-national corporations and international investors often at the cost of excluding local citizen participation in planning and spatial development policies. In the capital city of South Africa, Pretoria, the ruling party and its Pan-Africanist supporting organisations aggressively pursue a course of “transformation”. This term is deliberately left vague and purposefully undefined by the state so as to allow for narrative flexibility in the constantly changing the socio-political currents. Activist groups and its allied revolutionaries are often more direct in articulating their explicit demands. The new government aims to revitalise the image of the city through progressive policies and encouraging international investment in the city, which used to be the administrative centre and testing grounds of the former Apartheid government’s segregationist policies. Simultaneously, there has been an increased demand for greater inclusionary development policies aimed at creating a more diverse urban social fabric. Accordingly, the Pretoria central area currently exists in a tenuous state of uncertainty and low investor confidence, often resulting in a loss of publicly accessible social spaces in favour of security by private investors. The postmodernist city is a collage of singular things that cannot disappear or prevail. By tracing the history and evolution of the cultural precinct, which represents an important social centre, this paper investigates the erosion of the city’s social core in relation to the influences of the global postmodernist trends, and through the conflict between the public's needs, the demands of private ownership, and the limitations of state-sponsored investments.
Session 81 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 2 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Pedestrianship: Jan Gehl, Consultocracy and Cities For (Some) People
Mira Samonig, Maros Krivy
abstractMira Samonig, Maros Krivy
The globe-trotting Danish architect Jan Gehl has established himself a leading champion of “cities for people” associated with pedestrianization programs, livability rankings and the Copenhagen brand. This paper charts methodologies developed by Gehl to study human behavior. We show how Denmark's capital dowtown regeneration facilitated the rise of Jan Gehl Architects as a leading urban design consultancy proselytizing municipalities worldwide. The concept of pedestrianship reveals a narrowly conceived public space user at the centre of a construct marked by restrictive citizenship policies, neoliberal urban regeneration and narratives of failed public housing. We argue that Gehl Architects are implicated in the hollowing out of public realm when they consult in and thus legitimize the corporate provisioning of public-friendly space as an adjunct to luxury housing enclaves. As a multi-sited study of urban design expertise this history engages with sites including from Denmark, Italy, Slovakia, and the US.
Extracting Terrain Vague. A comparative history of large-scale private developments in postsocialist metropolis
Maria Topolcanska, Lynda Zein
abstractMaria Topolcanska, Lynda Zein
We propose to revisit historically recent XXL urbanizations in central and strategic areas of postsocialist cities that have been heavily and rapidly transformed after 2000. We investigate model cases of inward urban growth of central commercial districts especially those adjacent to public transport infrastructure and central river banks in Prague and Bratislava.
We aim to bring insights in the invisible state-corporate complex in these urban developments and to critically analyse the trans-national evidence of systemic patterns of transformation of whole territories that take place in asynchronous way at various European cities of former east like Beograd or Zagreb. We map where both anti-gentrification citizen resistance and academic critique offered strong evidence that these processes have common ground in postsocialism as a cultural, legal and economic phenomena in the neoliberal past and present.
Since 1990s refered to as ambiguous and undefined "terrain vague"– a term, coined by architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales, who theorized a unique value and potential of these territories for reflecting the future of (un)built environment in contemporary cities anew – many of these areas on potentially strategic land along infrastructural „wasteland“ of vacant postindustrial brownfields, and along public infrastructure of bus and train stations and river banks have been an object of big state-corporate transactions of gradual privatization. We follow the public policies as applied in inner city zones under the tension of high private profit. The potential of public profit and public interest from retaining the land in public sector for cities to have agency towards being moderators of an alternative, community driven and inclusive urbanism was not evaluated sufficiently in previous decades. Also, the so called developmental “delay“, the “vacancy“ of disused buildings and general „underdevelopment“ in the postsocialist urban infrastructures were buzzwords historically weaponized to open the way to privatization from public hands without serving public interest and public profit in long term.
We trace how the state, the city and EU institutions allowed and promoted accelerated foreign investment creating a so-called “smooth city”, often socially and racially homogenised districts (e.g. Karlín in Prague) of “new centers” of what a postsocialist metropolis is today.
Neoliberal urbanism and public space in a city in transition: Skopje 2014 and beyond
Jasna Mariotti
abstractJasna Mariotti
This paper explores the radical transformation of Skopje’s urban center over the last three decades, situating it as a paradigmatic case study city in complex transition. Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991, Skopje shifted away from its postwar modernist vision toward a market-driven neoliberal urban development, shaped by evolving investor-state relations, weakened public institutions and local politics. This shift resulted with a fragmented urban space, positioning the city centre of Skopje as a contested site of symbolic and material construction.
The “Skopje 2014” project exemplifies this transformation. Launched in 2010, in the following years and resulting from this project, it radically remade the city centre of Skopje into a curated spectacle of neoclassical and baroque inspired architecture, funded through state and private partnerships. Rapidly implemented and often bypassing public transparency, “Skopje 2014” reimagined Skopje through monumental buildings, new civic spaces, facades and over seventy monuments. This project embodies the intersection of neoliberal urbanism and politics, illustrating how they converge in reshaping the urban core of the city.
Positioned within wider neoliberal urban transformations, this paper critically examines how local governance structures, politics and global capital flows have shaped Skopje’s form and public realm. It also critically examines the erosion of publicness, democratic planning and civic participation in Skopje, while uncovering emergent spaces of resistance, contestation and alternative spatial practices that emerge amidst top-down projects that dominate the transformation of Skopje in the last three decades.
By adopting historical and spatial perspectives, this study contributes to broader comparative dialogues on the ideological and material remaking of city centres in post-socialist Europe and beyond. It highlights both continuities and divergences of neoliberal governance and urban form, presenting Skopje as a contested city still negotiating its identity amid the ongoing political and economic transition.
The Neoliberal Acropolis: Manufacturing Crisis in New Belgrade and the Neoliberal Turn in Yugoslavia’s Urban Planning
Jelica Jovanovic
abstractJelica Jovanovic
The neoliberal restructuring of urban planning in late- and post-socialist Yugoslavia was preconditioned by a deliberate and multifaceted discursive campaign that pathologized socialist collective housing. Using the New Belgrade’s Central Zone as a primary case study, I will trace the contestation from the 1970s to the present day, demonstrating how the heritage of socialist modernism was systematically framed as a failure. I would argue that this process was not an organic public sentiment but a constructed crisis, engineered through a synergy of imported Western sociological critiques, sensationalist media narratives, and a strategic shift within architectural scholarship itself. Through a close reading of projects like "Lessons of the Past," I would like to demonstrate how the critique of functionalist urbanism served as a "dog whistle" to dismantle the existing housing economy and justify a new, investor-driven paradigm of small-scale, profitable lots.
The deliberate and protracted remaking of New Belgrade’s heart into the current urban form of a "neoliberal acropolis" is the material outcome of a decades-long project that began not after socialism's fall, but within its late period. This project first required a discursive campaign to manufacture the "dissonance" of socialist modernism. The existing collective housing and planning paradigms were pathologized as social and aesthetic failures, a trend that continues until the present day, clearing the ideological ground. The voided Central Zone was systematically filled with a new constellation of authority: corporate headquarters embodying economic power, the Belgrade Arena symbolizing the contemporary panem et circenses politics, and new religious structures asserting ideological presence. The case of New Belgrade demonstrates that neoliberal urbanism is not a spontaneous market force but a conscious spatial and political project, which the post-modernist architectural scholarship directly facilitated. Thus, global neoliberal capitalism, an elusive system often void of a tangible address, finds its concrete expression within the Zone: a corporate acropolis materializing its power while obscuring its source.
The paper challenges the notion of neoliberal urban planning as a purely economic or post-1990s phenomenon. Instead, it reveals a deeply cultural project, requiring active and protracted dismantling of a previous planning paradigm by manufacturing a consensus around its inherent "dissonance".
Governed by the Left, Reshaped by Neoliberalism? Urban Fragmentation in Major Swiss Cities
Mountazar Jaffar
abstractMountazar Jaffar
Despite their longstanding left-wing governments and strong local autonomy, Switzerland’s five largest cities—Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lausanne, and Bern—have not escaped the socio-spatial consequences of urban neoliberalism. This paper examines how rising inequalities, segregation, and gentrification are reshaping their urban fabric, questioning the capacity of progressive municipal regimes to resist global market pressures, financialized housing systems (Aalbers, 2018), and interurban competition. It engages with critical urban scholarship on neoliberal restructuring (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Pinson, 2020), socio-economic segregation (Musterd, 2020; Tammaru et al., 2016), and gentrification (Lees et al., 2013; Clerval, 2013). Methodologically, the study adopts a longitudinal and comparative design, analysing neighbourhood-level income data spanning 13 to 30 years in each city, complemented by Gini coefficients, welfare rates, housing tenure, and socio-demographic indicators. This spatialised approach identifies both long-term polarisation and more localised patterns of gentrification. Findings reveal a clear intensification of income disparities in most cities—especially Basel, Zurich, and Geneva—while Bern and, to a lesser extent, Lausanne show more stable trajectories. Wealthier districts have become increasingly cohesive and homogeneous, while lower-income households are confined to peripheral or residual areas, eroding social cohesion and equal opportunities. Gentrification emerges as a selective, uneven process: emblematic in Zurich and Bern, moderate in Lausanne, and indirect in Geneva through market filtering and housing scarcity. Ultimately, the paper highlights the growing tension between inclusive housing ambitions and exclusionary outcomes, as Swiss cities become simultaneously wealthier, more competitive, and more socially segmented.
Session 83 - Urban Healthcare Architecture: Networks and Exchanges in the 20th Century
New ways of approaching illness from the mid-19th century impacted 20th-century healthcare spaces. Transnational exchanges that informed European urban healthcare architecture in this period reflect formal and informal city networks, within and beyond the continent, which further enlighten related socio-economic contexts and scientific advances.
This session (Slots I and II) is supported by COST Action CA22159 National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist)
Coordinators: Barry Doyle, Christina Malathouni, Alfons Zarzoso
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This session (Slots I and II) is supported by COST Action CA22159 National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist)
Coordinators: Barry Doyle, Christina Malathouni, Alfons Zarzoso
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Session 83 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
(Czecho)slovak hospital 1958-1989: Building a network of hospitals and its specifics in the context of international developments
Laura Krišteková
abstractLaura Krišteková
Hospital complexes built in the second half of the 20th century forms a substantial part of the current building stock of healthcare architecture in Slovakia. Moreover, the works built after 1958 also represent an important phase in the history of Slovak architecture, which, after a short period of adopting Soviet models in the form of historicizing socialist realism, sought its new form, reflecting international developments and at the same time creating its own, locally specific variant of modernism. This extensive construction was based on plans of a nationwide hospital network construction, which had already been formed in the 1940s. It was intended to ensure the even provision of healthcare throughout the country and to define the location and size of buildings according to the number of inhabitants. Its concept was based on four basic size types of healthcare facilities, which were divided into categories according to the number of inhabitants. The first category was represented by a district healthcare facility, followed by smaller regional hospitals of a Type I with a capacity of 130-240 beds, regional or district hospitals of a Type II with a capacity of 200-400 beds, and finally large regional, specialized, or university hospitals with a capacity of around 1,000 beds. Their architectural design should be based on unified plans and guidelines, as well as the results of a design competition for a Type II hospital with a polyclinic from 1947.
Nevertheless, larger and more significant hospitals applied these plans only to a very limited extent. This was mainly due to the individual urban context, the complexity of the local program, and the constantly changing trends in the design and construction of healthcare facilities. Their authors incorporated not only their own individual style into their work, but also knowledge gained from foreign realisations. This study will therefore focus on analyzing the emergence, development, and scope of the Czechoslovak hospital network, with an emphasis on the Slovak part of the country, as well as researching the international transfer of knowledge and the extent of its application. Using selected examples of buildings constructed across Europe, it will attempt to identify their most significant adopted characteristics and, conversely, to name the local specifics of the domestic architectural scene.
Habitats of Concealment: Transnational Strategies in Dementia Care from Alt-Scherbitz to De Hogeweyk
Rose Zhang
abstractRose Zhang
This paper examines the transnational adaptation of concealment strategies in dementia care, tracing how institutions mask clinical and custodial functions behind the appearance of “normal” domestic life. Through a comparative analysis of the German colony asylum Alt-Scherbitz (1876) and the Dutch dementia village De Hogeweyk (2009), the paper argues that De Hogeweyk’s celebrated innovation belongs to a longer lineage of institutional concealment, rather than representing a wholly novel approach. Utilizing the dual lenses of transnational diffusion and institutional translation, the study explores how these care models circulate internationally and how their success depends on ongoing cultural adaptation rather than rigid replication. Drawing on global case studies, the paper reveals that the efficacy of the “dementia village” model hinges on its ability to resonate with local ideas of home, normalcy, and cultural rituals. The paper concludes that transnational transfers of dementia care models require critical adjustments to local cultural, socio-political, and regulatory conditions, rather than the straightforward export of architectural forms or organizational practices.
Displaced Twice: The Bombing of Italian Psychiatric Hospitals and the Urban Politics of Sheltering the “Other” (1940s–1980s)
Elisa Boeri, Renate Karjavcenko, Marta Colombi
abstractElisa Boeri, Renate Karjavcenko, Marta Colombi
During the Second World War, Italian psychiatric hospitals became unexpectedly vulnerable to the military transformation of the urban and territorial landscape. Originally established on the margins of cities to isolate and contain psychiatric patients, many institutions were progressively surrounded by railway infrastructure, industrial and military facilities, and other strategic targets. Despite their formal protection under international humanitarian law, psychiatric hospitals were extensively damaged or destroyed, forcing approximately 8000 patients to leave their institutions and relocate to schools, convents, and other improvised facilities. This paper examines wartime psychiatric displacement as a form of “double displacement”: patients who had already been spatially removed from ordinary urban life through institutionalisation were subsequently displaced again when their hospitals became unsafe. It focuses on the psychiatric hospital of San Lazzaro in Reggio Emilia and the territorial psychiatric system of the province of Mantua. The evacuation of San Lazzaro in 1944 is examined in particular as a process through which a large, centralised institution was temporarily transformed into a dispersed network of branches distributed across several towns, while the Mantua case demonstrates how psychiatric care had long depended upon a wider territorial system extending beyond the boundaries of individual hospitals and provinces. The paper argues that wartime displacement was not merely an emergency response to military destruction. By temporarily dismantling the spatial concentration of psychiatric patients, it exposed both the vulnerability and the organisational limitations of the large asylum and provided an unintended experience of territorially dispersed care. Although post-war psychiatric policy initially prioritised the reconstruction of damaged institutions, the spatial reorganisation of psychiatric assistance gradually became part of broader debates concerning the future of institutional psychiatry. From the emergence of community-oriented approaches to the reforms culminating in the 1978 Basaglia Law, psychiatric care increasingly shifted from the centralised asylum towards a territorial network. The paper therefore situates wartime displacement within the longer transformation of Italian psychiatric space, arguing that the geography of war could have contributed to the rethinking of how psychiatric care could be organised across territories.
From Welfare Apparatus to Development Prototype: The Soroka Hospital and the Transnational Circulation of Israeli Health Planning, 1956–1970
Martin Hershenzon
abstractMartin Hershenzon
This paper examines the planning of the Soroka regional hospital campus in Be’er Sheva (1956–1960s) as a case of urban healthcare architecture produced through transnational expert circulation, and as a model whose transferability depended on its embeddedness in an internal colonial regime. Designed by Arieh Sharon and Benjamin Eidelsohn in the wake of Israeli independence and the Nakba, Soroka became a laboratory where welfare-state medical planning and settler-colonial spatial containment were co-produced. It thus exposes a core tension in postwar healthcare urbanism: between internationalising design as development expertise and reproducing ethnic inequalities corresponding internal national governance.
The paper advances two intertwined arguments. First, through archival reconstruction of the 1956 study tour undertaken across Europe and the United States by Moshe Soroka and a team of Israeli architects, it traces the precedents they examined and shows how the final design was shaped by Sharon’s engagement with UN development forums and health-planning discourse at the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture in London. These entangled influences materialised in an open-system pavilion hospital, linked by pergolas and encircled by a vegetative dust belt — a climatic apparatus and simultaneously an architectural insulation of political volatility, pacifying and containing Jewish–Palestinian inequalities during Israel’s military rule (1948–1966). Soroka thus operated as both welfare infrastructure and colonial technology.
Second, the paper demonstrates how this planning experiment was reframed as an exportable model for the Global South — particularly through Sharon and Eidelsohn’s unrealised Ife, Nigeria hospital (1963–1970), and Sharon’s subsequent publications and lectures from 1967 onward. By translating an internally coercive design logic into climatic realism and anti-unrest development rationality, Sharon positioned Israel as a humanitarian mediator while disavowing the settler-colonial conditions from which that expertise arose.
Soroka thereby exemplifies how postwar welfare health planning became a transferable geopolitical instrument — not despite, but because of, its grounding in colonial techniques of urban management. The case illuminates how welfare rationalities, colonial spatial politics, and Cold War developmentalism were co-produced in architectural form.
Session 83 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 304 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
From City Centre to Urban Periphery: The Teaching Hospitals of Lisbon and Porto in the 20th century
Alexandra Esteves, Maria João Pires, Monique Palma, Isabel Amaral
abstractAlexandra Esteves, Maria João Pires, Monique Palma, Isabel Amaral
The nineteenth century marked a turning point in the history of European hospital architecture: former institutions for the reception of pilgrims, the poor and chronically ill were gradually redefined as organised public facilities oriented towards cure and articulated with university clinical teaching, where clinical practice, teaching and research became closely intertwined (Granshaw & Porter 1989; Waszczyszyn 2015; Kisacky 2017). New hospital units emerged that combined the didactic function of medical faculties with the care function of general hospitals and consolidated a new architectural language based on the rationalisation of circulation routes, the separation of patients and pathologies, and improved ventilation, lighting and hygienic control of spaces, etc. (Waszczyszyn 2015; Kisacky 2017).
In Portugal, cities such as Lisbon and Porto, whose hospitals were rooted in the charitable and welfare traditions of the Ancien Régime, such as the hospitals of S. José and Santo António, retained their central urban location and inherited institutional logics well into the twentieth century (Esteves 2024; Palma 2024; Amaral 2024). By contrast, the model of the teaching hospital and medical campus, which in other European contexts was already taking shape in the nineteenth century, only materialised on a large scale with the construction of the hospitals of Santa Maria in Lisbon and São João in Porto, on the urban periphery, from the mid-twentieth century onwards (Pinto 2015; Amaral 2024).
In dialogue with European hospital history, this paper seeks to understand the ways in which transnational networks – study missions, congresses and contacts with experts – helped to shape a shared architectural narrative (monoblock construction, separation of flows, technical platforms, sites dedicated to medical training) and how these networks intersected with national health-policy agendas (Gorsky 2008; Pinto 2015).
Our aims are: (1) to identify how partners and reference models were selected (professional and institutional networks, building commissions, etc.); (2) to demonstrate the urban and architectural impact of these choices (relocation to expansion fronts, integrated campuses, new lines of accessibility within the urban fabric); and (3) to analyse how imported models coexisted with local resistances and translations (typological adjustments, technical and financial constraints, political choices) in the specific cases of Santa Maria and São João Hospitals.
Transnational Exchanges for Maternal and Infant Healthcare Architecture: Designing the Júlio Dinis Maternity Hospital in Porto (1927–1938)
Carolina Brasileiro
abstractCarolina Brasileiro
During the first half of the 20th century, Portugal faced a severe national issue: high infant mortality, mainly due to insufficient care for pregnant women and children. Within the eugenic framework of the fascist-inspired dictatorship, the State promoted the construction of large maternity hospitals as key components of emerging urban healthcare systems in the country’s main cities, notably the Dr. Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital (Lisbon, 1913–1932) and the Júlio Dinis Maternity Hospital (Porto, 1927–1938). These projects involved complex negotiations between medical and architectural knowledge, while political instability and economic constraints delayed their completion.
This paper focuses on the Júlio Dinis Maternity Hospital in Porto as a revealing example of transnational exchanges shaping maternal and infant healthcare architecture within an evolving urban network of public health facilities. At the request of the Minister of Public Instruction, Alfredo de Magalhães, Portuguese physician Alberto Saavedra visited Swiss maternity hospitals in 1927 to study their organisation. The Lausanne Maternity Hospital — designed by Georges Épitaux and already used as a reference for a project in Athens — was considered the best model for Porto’s new institution, leading to Épitaux’s direct involvement and establishing professional links between the two cities.
Although a few studies have addressed this object, it remains largely unexplored in Portuguese and Swiss architectural historiography. Drawing on around eighty letters exchanged between Saavedra, Épitaux and Magalhães (1927–1931), this study reconstructs the process that shaped the building’s conception, the transfer of models between different contexts, and the adaptations required by Portuguese political, clinical, and financial realities.
By analysing these correspondences, the research reveals how professional networks were formed, how knowledge circulated, and how imported models encountered local resistance. It argues that the interplay between medical authorities, architects, and the State was decisive in defining both the building’s architectural solutions and the institutionalisation of modern maternal and infant care. Ultimately, the case demonstrates how transnational exchanges left a tangible imprint on urban healthcare architecture, contributing to the modernisation of maternal and infant care in Portugal, while also reinforcing the regime’s control of women’s bodies.
A journey through the U.S.: the construction of the Spanish National Plan for Health Facilities and the model of the North American Public Health System (1943-1960)
Dolores Ruiz-Berdún
abstractDolores Ruiz-Berdún
Between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War took place, a conflict that not only caused high mortality among the population but also left the country in a catastrophic sanitary and economic situation. Many of the healthcare facilities that existed before the war suffered the consequences of this widespread destruction. I.e., the Hospital Clínico de Madrid, which was about to be inaugurated, was destroyed as it was located on one of the battlefronts. After the war, the dictatorship of Francisco Franco Bahamonde was established in Spain, consolidating his power by granting privileges to the elites of the time.
During the Second Spanish Republic, crucial advances had been made towards a social insurance system, which depended on the National Institute of Social Security. Compulsory Maternity Insurance, a pilot scheme for what would become the Compulsory Health Insurance (SOE), had been instituted in 1931. The planning for what was to become the SOE was already quite advanced, but the outbreak of the war prevented its implementation. When the conflict ended, the only thing the new leaders had to do was to slightly revise the plan and set it in motion in 1944. The Compulsory Health Insurance included the construction of an extensive Plan of Healthcare Facilities.
Eduardo de Garay y de Garay (1901-1985), Count of Suchil, was appointed head of the Architecture Service of the Compulsory Health Insurance. Eduardo de Garay and the physician Juan Pedro de la Cámara, head of the Installations Department of the Insurance Fund, travelled in October 1945 to the United States to study the American public hospital system. The timing of this trip was no coincidence—September of that same year saw the end of World War II, with an outcome unfavourable for the Spanish dictatorship, which had relied on the victory of the Axis powers. In addition to the goal of studying American healthcare facilities, the Spanish regime sought to create ties with the protagonists of the new world order.
This presentation will demonstrate how these North American influences materialised in the construction of the Spanish hospital system. It was a way to show, both nationally and internationally, that Spain was a modern country and that its hospital system could be compared with the most avant-garde systems, despite the prevailing political regime in the country.
Fonts: primary archival sources from the former INP, the local press and technical architecture journals will be used.
Healthcare architecture at a metropolitan scale: Barcelona’s network of public and private hospitals and clinics, 1939-1975
Paolo Sustersic
abstractPaolo Sustersic
From the 1950s onwards, the Spanish health system underwent a reorganization and adaptation to new health demands, especially evident in large cities such as Madrid and Barcelona, which were also becoming large metropolitan areas due to the reactivation of the Spanish economy and the increase in migratory flows.
Barcelona had to provide itself with a network of new public and private health centres to meet an unprecedented demand in the urban core and in the metropolitan area, which produced a worrying deficit, estimated in 1973 at 29,600 beds for the period 1970-80.
This paper aims to examine several study cases in which architects engaged with international healthcare leaders and responded to the demands of various institutions operating in this sector: the healthcare complexes of the National Institute of Social Security (expansion of the Francisco Franco Residence in Montbau, Bellvitge Metropolitan Hospital), the new university-level clinical centres planned on the campuses of the University of Barcelona and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the centres planned by large private foundations such as the Catalan Oncology Foundation and the Spanish Association Against Cancer, the prestigious private clinics linked to prominent Catalan medical families (Barraquer, Dexeus, Corachán, among others), the clinics of mutual insurance companies that offered medical and rehabilitation services to victims of accidents and occupational diseases, and also the headquarters of the Official College of Physicians, which provided visibility and institutional prestige to the profession.
During the period 1960-1976, several architects designed outstanding buildings for the aforementioned entities, resulting in a diverse catalogue of architecture that shaped a new health map, which largely survives to this day. The paper will discuss some cases of large public and private health facilities, designed according to criteria comparable with the international context, such as the Bellvitge Health City (1969-72, Martín José Marcide Odriozola, Fernando Flórez Plaza and Miguel Ángel Tapia-Ruano Rodrigáñez), the Oncology Hospital (1972-2008, Guillermo Giráldez Dávila, Pedro López Íñigo, Xavier Subías Fages), the not built project of the new Clinical Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine that was planned near the University Zone (1971-74, Leopoldo Gil Nebot) and the Mutua Metalúrgica rehabilitation centre in Cabrils (1970-80, Antonio Bonet Castellana), among others.
Session 84 - Spatializing Popular Music: urban networks of creativity in Europe and Beyond, c. 1930-2000
The following session seeks to spatialise popular music through so-called 'networks of creativity'. We question how musical innovation and styles are to be explained not so much through national identities, schools, and traditions, but mainly by looking at differences in the urban places under consideration.
Coordinators: Simon Gunn, Stijn Oosterlynck, Ilja Van Damme
show/hide introduction
Coordinators: Simon Gunn, Stijn Oosterlynck, Ilja Van Damme
show/hide introduction
Session 84 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 305 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Rethinking Kinshasa’s networks of creativity: “Tradition”, class, and space in Congolese popular music
Margot Luyckfasseel
abstractMargot Luyckfasseel
Kinshasa’s popular music – one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most important cultural exports – has typically been framed as “modern,” set against an imagined realm of the “traditional” because of amplified instrumentation (notably electric guitar) and its association with urbanity due to the predominance of Lingala, the language of the capital. In this paper, I complexify the relation between modern and traditional music by tracing how migratory fluxes towards the capital had a significant impact on the development of Kinshasa’s music scene, from the colonial period through Mobutu’s Authenticité to the current presidency of Félix Tshisekedi. In line with Lindholm’s Culture and Authenticity (2007), I argue that a shift in attention from the history of the genre to the character of the artist offers a fruitful avenue to rethink the evolution of networks of creativity in the Congolese capital. Class – which can be read into Kinshasa’s spatial layout – is an essential parameter to understand the position of musicians in Congolese society, not least in relation to shifting cultural politics and patronage systems. The paper thus rethinks “modern” Congolese music not as a break with “tradition,” but as a city-making practice forged at the intersection of migration, class formation, and urban space.
Making rock in Madrid in the late 70s: underground networks and difficulties
Blanca Algaba Pérez
abstractBlanca Algaba Pérez
In the 1970s, Madrid was undergoing an urban crisis, marked by cyclical problems such as economic downturns and structural issues like spatial segregation and the persistence of shanty towns on the urban periphery. This crisis also created opportunities to transform the city and to develop new uses for urban space. Young people, particularly affected by unemployment, found new ways to express themselves and participate in public life through culture. As in other contexts, this cultural participation was channelled through musical practices and, together with the explosion of fanzines, consolidated an underground scene by the late 1970s. The broader context of Spain’s transition to democracy further fuelled the enthusiasm and determination of many young people to create their own artistic circuits. This paper explores the development of these marginal networks, which enabled many to form small rock bands in their pursuit of musical success. Thanks to a competition promoted by public institutions, it has been possible to access documentation from more than one hundred musical groups that applied to compete for the trophy of the I Concurso Provincia Rock de Madrid (1st Madrid Provincial Rock Competition). These documents include the groups’ biographies, in which they recount their trajectories, experiences, and difficulties. The revitalisation of Spain’s rock music scene underwent major changes during the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, with Madrid becoming one of its main centres. However, most studies have approached this scene focusing on the few groups that achieved media and commercial success. Access to the sources of the I Provincia Rock offers an opportunity to examine the creative fabric that underpinned the emergence of a successful music scene. It also helps explain cultural innovation from the bottom up and trace the spread of cultural phenomena throughout the city, rather than reducing them to selected personalities, mythologised places, and biased narratives. The cultural effervescence led by young people in late-1970s Madrid was born in small concerts held in schools, universities, and popular festivals in suburban neighbourhoods, before filling the pages of music magazines. In sum, this paper sheds light on the formation of underground creative networks in Madrid. It does so by mapping the specific context of these transformations and showing how young people appropriated urban space to forge new cultural practices and meanings.
From Country Music to “Polish Nashville”: Re-Imagining America in Mrągowo
Anna Duda
abstractAnna Duda
The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of a re-imagined America through Polish festival heritage inspired by American culture – especially as it functioned during the communist time as a symbol of longing for freedom. Over the past few decades – and especially nowadays – the image of America has undergone a profound transformation, making it important to revisit how these meanings were created, used, and renegotiated. The research will be based mainly on a case study of the city of Mrągowo and the International Country & Folk Music Festival organised since 1982. The festival, through references to the creations of American culture was supposed to be an escape from the communist reality. What’s interesting, in the 1980s, it was not only country music that reigned, but American/English music in general. Characteristic were references to Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, songs that also could be heard in the interpretation of Polish performers. The initially loose references to American culture – the American flag, the Confederate flag, jeans, plaid shirts, cowboy hats – over time flowed into the city's urban space – shop windows, restaurant names and signboards and even resulted in the construction of a thematic XIX-century Wild West village – the town of Mrongoville. Although today it no longer plays such a significant role, it has left a great legacy, which the Country festival goers, for whom the first editions were mainly memories of youth and a completely different Polish reality, still try to show through their annual presence. A semiotic analysis of the space of Mrągowo will answer the questions: to what extent is there a kind of cultural transfer in this city, and to what extent has a completely new system of meanings been created through the festival and the subculture of the Country festival goers. In addition, narrative-biographical interviews was conducted, so that it will be possible to better understand:
- How does the interpretation of the Picnic Country change depend on the historical, social and political context?
– To what extent does the changing global geopolitical order, along with the shifting role of America, influence the perception of the Mrągowo festival and its heritage?
– What is the significance of ‘imagined America’ in shaping the local identity of Mrągowo?
The research project will be framed within a theoretical framework of anthropology of tourism and critical heritage studies.
Session 84 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 305 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Everybody Get Together: Hippies, Urban Spaces, and Community, 1966-1969
Jill Silos
abstractJill Silos
Everybody Get Together: Hippies, Urban Spaces, and Community, 1966-1969
Jill Silos, Ph.D.
The counterculture of the 1960s in the United States claimed to live by the psychedelic mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” but the urban presence and activities of American hippies in the late 1960s shows that they were anything but politically disengaged or neutral. Behind every Be-In, rock concert in a park or street, or even a simple gathering of hippies in urban public spaces, was a challenge to city laws and regulations as well as prevailing social mores. To hold public events such as concerts, members of the counterculture frequently engaged in extended legal battles with city authorities, including Parks departments, police forces, and the court system. Evidence shows that counterculture groups in both San Francisco and Boston formed a nucleus of engaged citizens who redefined the uses of public spaces—and the kinds of people allowed access to public spaces—by questioning the definition of “public” and who held power over those spaces. Collectively, members of the 1960s counterculture in the United States, by engaging in local politics, expanded access to the nation’s public parks and streets to build a more democratic expression of civic participation.
Nothing left to lose? Music networks in 1980s Liverpool
Krista Cowman
abstractKrista Cowman
The city of Liverpool is frequently framed as exceptional [Belchem, 2006]. While this was originally described through the lens of its political or social history, more recent scholarship has addressed the peculiarities of its cultural heritage. Music has been central to this work with Paul du Noyer [2007] arguing that the city’s ‘three graces’ (the distinctive buildings that dominate Liverpool’s skyline) had a parallel in the Cavern, Erics and Cream, three key venues of the local music scene in the 1960s, 80s and 90s.
Of the three decades identified by du Noyer as the peaks of a distinctive Liverpool music scene, the 1980s was the most unexpected as for much of that decade Liverpool appeared to be in terminal decline. Between 1972 and 1982 over 80,000 jobs were lost leaving the city with the highest unemployment rate in the UK – as high as 40% in some post codes – and a population of 500,000, half of that of the 1960s. The majority of job losses were on the docks or in industries linked to shipping as Liverpool slipped from being the second to the sixth largest port in Britain. Events such as the Toxteth Riots (1981) the Heysel disaster (1985) added to the city’s reputation for social unruliness complicating any attempts to generate new investment and encouraging the government in its covert plans for ‘managed decline’ in the city.
This paper explores how the material and social consequences of its economic collapse produced Liverpool’s burgeoning music scene from the late 1970s into the early 1990s. The empty and unwanted warehouses in the city centre, available at peppercorn rents, transformed into venues and rehearsal spaces, the physical hubs of this scene, often helped by local authority grants. A combination of unemployment benefits (much more freely available than today) and student grants offered some support for aspiring young musicians and various FE colleges provided access courses in music and music production to combat youth unemployment. Another important spatial change was the shift of more affluent residents from the city centre to the suburbs, leaving behind large houses to be converted into flats. The availability of affordable housing encouraged creative networks placing many of the scene’s key figures within walking distance of each other and of city-centre music venues (Simpson, 2023; Sergeant, 2022). Using archival sources and recent autobiographies the paper will consider Liverpool’s flourishing 1980s music scene as an
A Place Called Bliss: Tracing the distribution and consumption of “rave” music and culture through the urban spaces of Leicester city centre (1988-1996)
Rory Booth
abstractRory Booth
This paper will consider the importance of urban networks to the creation, production, distribution, and consumption of “rave” music in Leicester between 1987 and 1996. Between these dates, rave culture and its music, a mixture of hardcore, breakbeat, techno, and house, transformed from a loose collection of underground movements to a prominent and hugely influential force in popular music and culture in the UK and internationally. The emergence of this movement was intimately linked with a wide variety of urban cultural exchanges. Specifically in Leicester, dance music cultures, particularly those associated with musical imports such as hip hop, reggae, house and techno served as focal points for the breakdown of social barriers between migrant groups and existing populations.
By examining how Leicester’s grassroots networks of record stores, clothing shops, bars, clubs, and studios facilitated the creation, dissemination, and popularisation of these musical styles and cultures, I aim to spatialise the understanding of how rave culture was developed and sustained in the UK. The paper will pay particular attention to locations, such Leicester’s Silver Arcade and 5HQ, which became culturally significant hubs of activity. I will also explore how local urban scenes interacted with wider national and international networks of cultural exchange, particularly regarding fashion and music.
Leicester is an important case study not because the city is an outlier in its development of an urban network centred around “rave” culture. Instead, it is representative of a trend that occurred across the UK in urban centres that were not traditionally considered focal points of culture. This decentralisation of rave has been overlooked or undervalued in London centric accounts of the culture’s history.
This paper will utilize qualitative data from interviews conducted by the researcher with ravers, DJs, and business proprietors involved in Leicester’s scene. These interviews, conducted between 2023 and 2025 are inflected with nostalgia and a keen sense of the broader technological and social context which enabled the scene to exist in the forms it did. I will also consider the rich material culture of the era such as the flyers, tapes, tickets, records, equipment, and clothes that were exchanged throughout these local networks.
Wot Do U Call It? Grime, Surveillance and Cultural Exchange Through Changing Urban and Digital Spaces.
Beth Hayden, Samia Amao
abstractBeth Hayden, Samia Amao
This paper examines grime as an urban cultural practice through which changing relationships between music, technology and the city can be traced. Emerging in East London in the early 2000s, grime originated from local networks in council estates and informal venues, drawing on wider sonic Caribbean influences. These networks developed under various forms of surveillance. Technological change subsequently reshaped these conditions, through advances in production software and social media. We present grime within an extensive history of urban creativity, as a product of, and response to, changing technological, social and spatial conditions.
Beats from the Port: The Emergence of Hip-Hop Culture in Rotterdam, 1980–2000
Jelena Beocanin, Maarten Van Dijck
abstractJelena Beocanin, Maarten Van Dijck
This paper examines the emergence and development of Hip Hop in the postcolonial port city of Rotterdam during the first two decades of its spread across Europe (1980–2000). While Hip Hop has often been recognized for its socially conscious and resistant character in response to the racialised urban politics of the Reagan era, this study asks how such sensibilities were rearticulated within the specific social, cultural, and political landscapes of postcolonial Rotterdam. The city occupies a symbolic space in the history of Dutch Hip Hop because community narratives foreground diversity, creativity and street-level authenticity which is central to Rotterdam’s identity as ‘Hip Hop stad' ('Hip Hop city'). Yet this history is entangled with politicised migration debates, the shortcomings of multicultural policy, and post-industrial urban polarisation, all of which shaped how Hip Hop communities claimed visibility, produced counter-narratives, and negotiated belonging in the city.
Theoretically, the paper builds on Charles Taylor’s distinction between topical and meta-topical common spaces to examine how Hip Hop in Rotterdam generated both local and mediated publics. The topical dimension refers to the concrete, embodied spaces of Hip Hop activity – concert venues, youth centres, nightclubs, and open-air events – where artists and audiences came together. The meta-topical dimension captures the mediated public sphere in which Hip Hop’s meanings circulated through newspaper coverage, reviews, event listings, and cultural commentary. By tracing the interaction between these two levels, the paper explores how Hip Hop in Rotterdam moved between physical performance sites and discursive representation, transforming the city into a dense network of creative and oppositional spaces.
Empirically, the research draws on a systematic analysis of newspaper archives documenting Hip Hop concerts and events in Rotterdam, supplemented by demographic and socio-economic data on neighbourhoods where these events took place. By comparing areas with differing income levels and migrant compositions, the study reveals how patterns of inequality, segregation, and postcolonial diversity shaped the geography of Hip Hop’s emergence. In doing so, it highlights how the port city’s ethos of circulation and contestation conditioned new forms of spatial and cultural resistance. Ultimately, the paper argues that Hip Hop in Rotterdam produced alternative urban imaginations.
Session 85 - Jewish City Biographies: Issues, Themes, and the Definition of a Genre
This session will question how we can arrive at a critical genre of the Jewish city biography, which combines the strengths of Jewish urban history and those of the genre of urban biographies.
Coordinators: Susanne Korbel, Sietske Van Der Veen, Bart Wallet
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Coordinators: Susanne Korbel, Sietske Van Der Veen, Bart Wallet
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Session 85 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Whose Jewish City Biography Are We Writing?
Maja Hultman
abstractMaja Hultman
While many academic studies have yet to account for the full history of each city’s Jewish past, monographs and articles have explored numerous and diverse chapters of Jewish life in modern urban environments for almost thirty years. Yet, the Jewish city biography often takes interest in literary imaginations, purpose-built institutions, and cultural and economic contributions to modernity. Championing textual evidence, studies of modern European Jewries in, for example, Kiev, Lodz, Paris, Salonica, Tel Aviv and Wroclaw more often than not relate the views of lay leaderships and the middle-classes. What about the poor and the migrants, who constituted the majority of urban Jewry and, in the words of Rose and Fitzgerald (2022:23), should be understood as modern urbanites epitomised? How do we write these Jewish people’s city biography?
In this paper, I aim to scrutinise the scholarly narrative produced by the ever-growing pool of Jewish city biographies of modern Europe. Based on a literature review of studies published since Schlör’s ground-breaking Tel Aviv: From Dream to City (translated to English in 1999), including, for example, Mann (2006), Meir (2010), Naar (2016) and Underwood (2022), I will evaluate the Jewish urban narrative produced and disseminated. I will pay particular emphasis to sources, methods and theories, and argue that while the city biography achieves a powerful analysis on the integral relationship between Jews and cities, it lacks a comprehensive approach as to how to write a bottom-up urban history.
As a next step, this paper will offer suggestions on how to write a Jewish city biography from the perspective of poor Jews and Jewish migrants. Looking for alternative and inclusive approaches in Jewish history and beyond, I will present theoretical perspectives and hands-on methodological tools, such as liminal spaces, urban contextualisation and HGIS, as already existent opportunities for a bottom-up historical writing. Showing that the Jewish city biography that emerges from such approaches offers a more relational, intimate view of Jewish life in the modern city, I will argue that Jewish historians need to become more conscious of their choice of sources and more experimental in terms of theory and method. To encapsule every shade of the Jewish modern urban experience, the Jewish city biography needs to look beyond texts, beyond lay leaders, and beyond the Jewish middle-class.
Jewish Cities in the Habsburg Empire: Toward a Networked Genre of Jewish City Biography
Scott Spector
abstractScott Spector
As a contribution to our discussion of the emerging genre of Jewish city biographies, and in the context of the conference theme, my presentation focuses on the historical development of mutual connections and reflexive identities in Jewish culture and society across several Habsburg cities between 1867 and 1914. Cities such as Lemberg, Kraków, Czernowitz, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste did not simply coexist or relate hierarchically. They formed a dynamic network: not only of migration and institutional exchange, but of fantasy, aspiration, and mutual projection. A schema of the individual Jewish city biographies of these cities and their mutual imbrications illustrates my methodological program: a framework for thinking about Jewish city biographies relationally, reflecting on Jewish city biography within a networked imperial space.
Among both contemporary observers and later historians, Habsburg Jewry has most often been framed through a persistent East–West binary: Jews in the empire’s eastern provinces were cast as impoverished, Orthodox or Hasidic, and traditional—in the early 20th century encapsulated by the neologism “Ostjuden”—while those in cities like Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Trieste were seen as assimilated, bourgeois/“cultivated,” and culturally “Western.” This binary operated not only as an external typology but also as an internalized structure of feeling within Jewish communities. These fantasy figures of Jewish East and West—coexisting within the same empire—enabled both identification and disidentification, rejection and longing. The historical background of these fantasies is linked to cultural historical developments in Europe more broadly, but they impacted Central European Jewish cities in very particular ways. This Austro-Jewish dialectic, as I have discussed it, generated new forms of cultural production and self-understanding.
The lives of the Jews in these cities were networked in material ways pertaining to education and professionalization, migration patterns, and economic links. They very significantly shared a “Habsburg imaginary,” a symbolic system in which Jews across the empire navigated their subjectivities through myths of origin, notions of cultural authenticity, anxieties about decline, and visions of civilizational promise. These cities cannot be understood in isolation or as containers of fixed cultural types. Rather, they formed a constellation in which identity was shaped through interurban processes.
Building an American Jewish City
Deborah Dash Moore, Matthew Lasner
abstractDeborah Dash Moore, Matthew Lasner
In 1967 a 35-year-old Jewish builder, Don Soffer, eyed a large parcel of mangrove swamp north of Miami Beach, near the ocean. Sparsely populated, the area south of the border between Dade and Broward counties featured Australian pines and mosquitoes, some tourist cabins and the modest Point East retirement community at 183rd and Biscayne Boulevard. To understand what he saw there, beyond the mangroves and swamp, and how it became Aventura, a 23,900-unit condominium project subsequently incorporated into a city with a majority Jewish population, it is helpful to recall several intersecting contexts: that moment in time in the late 1960s, the history of condominium development in the United States, post-World War II American Jewish history especially as it unfolded in Florida, the role of international and internal Jewish migration within the US, and some of Soffer’s own personal story as well as that of several other key figures who helped to make Aventura happen.
This paper explores the creation of Jewish majority city, Aventura, different from Miami Beach, America’s first Jewish city with a majority Jewish population. It looks at the role of Jewish builders and architects, their imagination of how to craft community, the public services that they largely ignored, and their vision of leisure living that combined urban and Southern suburban features. Aventura possesses similarities to Miami Beach but without any antisemitic discrimination. It has a similar mode of segregation by age, reflecting the power of peer group sociability among American Jews. Yet it has also continued to reinvent itself Jewishly—in part through migration of Jewish immigrants from Latin America, Israel, and France—and to develop new modes of communal institutions that draw upon Latin Sephardic Jews originating in Turkey, Morocco, Syria, and other MENA areas and migrating from Cuba, Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela and other Latin American countries. But the features of desirable urban living among one’s peers and the opportunities for community it affords endure.
Many of the questions asked in this session could be fruitfully asked of Aventura, a small city of 36,000 in southern Florida.
Session 85 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Space as an (im)material commodity in 16th-century Venetian Ghetto
Rachele Scuro
abstractRachele Scuro
The history of Venice has been indissolubly linked to that of its Jewish minority since 1516, the year the Ghetto gates opened. This distinct space became an anticipatory model of the new, simultaneously admitted and enclosed, configuration of the Jewish presence in early modern Europe; a potent model that transcended the linguistic barrier.
It was a process of urban and social re-elaboration covering the community’s first century. Prior to 1516, the Republic excluded a stable Jewish presence in its capital city. With the subsequent settlement, the configuration of enclosed ghetto spaces had to be redefined as “the city of the Jews”. The government established formal boundaries, dividing the Ashkenazi/Italian minorities from the Sephardim, creating a complex community of diverse, often conflicting nationes, yet forced into cohabitation.
This paper analyses the period 1516–1630s through the lens of space as a socio-economic asset and an (im)material commodity, defined by internal Jewish dynamics and relations with the Venetian majority. This will use a microhistorical approach, analysing thousands of notarial contracts from the Venice State Archives. The aim is to define how Jewish inhabitants lived in mutual exchange with non-Jewish counterparts, thereby re-shaping the intersections of economic and physical spatiality.
It uses a two-tiered approach. Firstly, it investigates the progression of the physical spatiality of the Ghetto’s construction, focusing on the tension between cramped spaces and demographic growth. It draws on contracts stipulated between Jews, neighbours, and Christian builders that detail the Ghetto’s development. Starting from the original quarter, the Ghetto Novo, documents trace the rapid infilling of the Ghetto Vecchio following the Serenissima’s authorisation for Levantine Jews to reside in 1541.
Secondly, the focus is on the economic role of space as a commodity: saleable, exchangeable, transferable, and inheritable. The relationship between majority and minority is examined, given that Jews were legally prohibited from owning real estate. Ownership remained with the Venetian elite proprietors who exploited it as income, and the Italo-Ashkenazi component acted as a commercial intermediary in the purchase and sale of rights of use. This later intersected with Jewish marital law, establishing the custom of passing these rights via dowry, making brides the bearers of a fundamental asset negotiable in marriage and business networks.
The Paradox of the Cosmopolitan Ghetto: A Speculative Urban Biography of the East End and the Lower East Side as Jewish Cities, 1870s-1920s
Mark Steinberg
abstractMark Steinberg
As part of an emerging study of the experiences and encounters of Jewish migrants from eastern European small towns (shtetls) into cosmopolitan cities during the years of mass migration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this paper focuses on the “ghettos” of London and New York in the 1890s, the East End and Lower East Side—indeed on the ubiquitous and ambiguous idea of “ghetto” as an urban biographical trope. The discussion is conceptual/interpretive, methodological, and experimental. Conceptual/interpretive: a brief examination of this widespread contemporary use of “ghetto” as a category of analysis of the Jewish urban landscape and the Jewish encounter with self and others, with diversity and modernity, and, as it was often viewed at the time, with “temptation” and possibility: i.e. “the ghetto” as a space, both physical and imagined, where lived experiences and aspirations were played out in all their biographical complexity and pathos. The paper explores the “paradox of the cosmopolitan ghetto”: a social space and a critical metaphor where parochial experiences and mentalities intersected, in no way easily, with urban life. Methodological: how to recover the depths of this experience for subjects who left little or no historical record—to recover the history of “minor lives,” to hear the “subaltern speak”? The paper proposes methods of speculative history, of speculative urban biography. Experimental: the final section considers the methodology of informed invention, of making a plausible archive out of the known archive. As illustration, the paper seeks the voice, absent from the archive, of a one typical Yiddish-speaking working-class migrant about whom we know little more than her name, Rivka Rinetskaia, and the path of her migrations from the 1890s to the 1930s: Łosice (Russian Poland), London, New York, Ohio, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Hers was a typical story, including, as for so many working-class migrant women (and not only women), that no record exists of her voice, words, thoughts, emotions.
Session 85 - Slot III
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 306 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
A Year in the Life of a Plagued City: Jews and Christians in the Prague Epidemic of 1713
Joshua Teplitsky
abstractJoshua Teplitsky
Can an episode in the life of a city contribute to its “biography?” This paper explores the use of a single episode in the “life story” of a city, and contends that the dynamism of urban life is in many ways best suited for focusing on episodes that capture aspects of an ever-evolving cityscape and the social relations it comprises. It draws upon an outbreak of the bubonic plague in the city of Prague in the late summer of 1713. The plage claimed the life of a third of the city’s inhabitants. But it was also among the last outbreaks of the social called “Second Pandemic Period” that spanned the early modern era, and both city dwellers and political administrators were equipped with a variety of means to confront contagion—some more efficacious than others. One genre of plague writing has long been related to biographies and life stories, the “Diary” or “Journal” of a plague year (famously by Defoe) takes such outbreaks as episodes for seeing a city in its fullness. Using the rich array of sources generated by this single episode—spanning from administrative orders to penitential prayers to medical regimens—this paper explores the specific experiences of Jewish life in the city of Prague within the larger Catholic urban context, and examines that urban experience in comparison with super-urban (ie regional) and sub-urban (villages and countryside) spaces. It thus explores urban experience and relations between dominant and minority societies, and shows the textures of a single temporal moment across different neighborhoods, communities, and constituencies.
Jewish Charitable City
Celine Leglaive
abstractCeline Leglaive
In this presentation, I would like to take a fresh look at the ‘Jewish’ city by focusing on the aspects of charity and philanthropy. Taking as an example Paris in the 19th century, I would like to explore the role that Jewish charity played in the city. When and how did Jewish Charity emerge in the city? What was the impact on the city itself? What did it reveal about the place of the Jewish group within the larger society? Can we take this example to construct a new genre based on the concept of the ‘charitable Jewish city’?
During the 19th century, charity was closely tied to the history of urbanization. In the context of industrialization, the city was the space where modern poverty developed. To help these needy populations, charitable institutions flourished in the city: social housing, soup kitchens, hospitals... Most of this charitable effort relied on private institutions founded and financed by private philanthropists.
Some of these charitable donors were Jewish and Jewish charity will be the object of my communication.
There are two ways of understanding this concept: On one hand, it refers to the Jewish communal charity, which was established in the city to assist poor Jews. This charity was based to fulfil a religious obligation (Tsedaka) but also aimed at protecting the Jewish poor and helping them to stay religious.
On the other hand, another level of analysis raises the question of Jewish charity for all Parisians, without distinction. In France, Jewish elites began practising non-denominational philanthropy at the end of the 19th century: this movement was part of a process of acculturation, imitation of bourgeois practices and secularisation.
Based on these two forms of charity, I will attempt to map out the Jewish charitable city. Where were the Jewish charitable institutions in Paris? Near the places of worship, in the traditional Jewish neighbourhood, or in places where philanthropic pools were concentrated? What did it reveal about the history of Jews in Paris (emigration, exclusion or integration, acculturation…)?
Based on a large corpus of photos and postcards, I will also address the question of memory: what traces remain today of this charity, which was once very strong but became obsolete with the development of the welfare state?
By asking all these questions, my objective will be to construct a model of questions that could be applied to other cities with Jewish communities, and to establish a new ‘genre’.
“Little Jerusalem”: Jewish Economic Space and Entrepreneurship at the Periphery of the Dublin Port
Rosa Reicher
abstractRosa Reicher
According to the question what the role of private enterprise and economic interest in the shaping of new spaces in the nineteenth century is, this paper intends to analyse how the Jewish migrants to Dublin could embody a powerful economic principle. One thesis is, beside of culture, religion, tradition and education the Irish Jews played an important role in the formation and operation of economic space.
While ‘economic’ variables are profit, economic growth and development shown to have mattered, there remain the social circumstances and conditions like standard of lives, education and equal opportunity and a large ‘cultural’ component to the distinctive demography of Jewish households. The question is whether the city of Dublin and its port was itself sustainable as a coherent concept or as a category of acculturation for the Jewish migrants. To support this assumption this paper deals with the urban phenomenon of minority clusters, which are invariably referred to as ‘ghettos’. The clustering of identifiable minorities in ‘ghettos’ is commonly associated with segregation – be it physical, economic, social or linguistic – although it is the physical segregation which tends to be most frequently noticed.
Dublin offered the opportunity to build contacts to powerful Irish bankers and businessmen. Many migrants clustered around Clanbrassil Street in Dublin, (called “Little Jerusalem”), where they soon had a small synagogue and school, kosher butcher shops, bakeries, wineries and grocery stores; and another business, such as watchmakers and tailor’s shops.
Through studying Jewish settlement in Dublin, three key questions are addressed in this paper. First, whether there is a link between spatial clustering and spatial segregation, second, whether spatial clustering is linked to other forms of segregation, such as economic, occupation and social and third, how the Irish national question has developed among the Jewish minorities.during the war of independence creating the Irish Free State, which became increasingly sovereign over the following decades.
The techniques and theories of ‘Space Syntax’ are used here to enable a multi-level-socio-spatial comparison to be made between Jewish families and their immediate neighbours, between Jewish families and the population of Dublin as a whole, between Jewish businessmen and entrepreneurs and their Irish partners and between the initial and secondary stages of Jewish settlement in Ireland. In this context the pap
Learning from Representing Alterity In and Of Novi Sad: Literary and Urban Mediation of Jewish Experience and a Possibility of Alternative Histories
Aleksandar Vujkov
abstractAleksandar Vujkov
Representing Jewish alterity has been extensively discussed by published scholarship. However, this paper, by analyzing representation of Novi Sad, and Jevrejska ulica (Jewish street) in particular, in literary production after World War II, will adumbrate possible alternatives to dominant scholarly treatment of a Jewish individual and collective experience so far. At the same time, it will develop a microhistory of an element of urban morphology, a biography of a street, as lived, built, and imagined, by discussing its transformation that has been significantly affected by a change of an urban matrix of this city in a long historical span. This extended episode ultimately testifies to the erasure of a variety of historical layers and traces of Jewish presence in the social, cultural, and urban landscape of this area. Novi Sad, as a city that occupies a position of geographical and cultural ambiguity in-between Central Europe and the Balkans, was a site of constant migration, and as such provided particularly fertile ground for investigating various ways Jewish experience was mediated and negotiated by a number of social and cultural agents. More specifically, this paper will discuss ways Novi Sad and other relevant instances were rendered in the work of Danilo Kiš, Aleksandar Tišma, and Laslo Vegel. By proposing to investigate Kiš’s "Pslam 44," "Pešanik" ("Hourglass"), "Enciklopedija mrtvih" ("The Encyclopedia of the Dead"), and "Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča" ("A Tomb for Boris Davidovich"), Tišma’s "Knjiga o Blamu" ("The Book of Blam") and Vegel’s "Neoplanta ili obećana zemlja" ("Neoplanta or Promised Land"), this paper will develop a research approach that utilizes the fragmentary to illustrate complexity of a human condition while lending agency to the individual subject amid mechanisms and instruments of biopolitics. Literary production of Novi Sad in consulted instances seems to reconcile textuality of the city and complexity of everyday experience and individual and collective memory. By discussing changes in material aspects of the urban form, but also urban form’s literary treatment, this paper will show continuity of erasure within a variety of ideological and cultural guises, yet stubborn refusal of Jewish presence to be completely forgotten and obliterated.
Session 86 - Networked Emotions: Exploring the Felt Experiences of Urban Places
How we feel in/about places is an individual and collective experience that is nested within layers of different networks: personal, professional, and spatial. This session will explore this networked aspect by examining the ways in which our emotions are shaped by the flows of information that exist within/between networks of people and places.
Coordinators: Nicolas Kenny, Rebecca Madgin
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Coordinators: Nicolas Kenny, Rebecca Madgin
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Session 86 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
“… what a jewel he has taken away from the world!”: Cities and emotions in the writings of Libanius
Prolet Decheva
abstractProlet Decheva
The late antique orator Libanius is known for his strong emotions towards the cities he lived in and was shaped by. Born in Antioch in the early fourth century AD, a major metropolis in the late antique Roman Empire, he returned there in 354 CE after his study of rhetoric in Athens in 336-340 CE and his subsequent work as a rhetoric teacher in the newly founded Constantinople as well as in Nicaea and Nicomedia. His vast body of work, including orations, his autobiography and ca. 500 letters to his connections across the Empire, documents his emotions and experiences towards these cities: his disappointment of Athens, his hatred of Constantinople, whose citizens he considered uncultivated and overly materialistic, and his love towards his native Antioch and the city of Nicomedia.
For example, his Monody for Nicomedia (Or. 61), written after an earthquake destroyed the city in 358 CE, demonstrates the deep feelings of loss, grief and unfairness as well as the strong personal bond that Libanius felt towards the city. This was due both to his professional success in Nicomedia, where he thought for five years between 344 and 349 CE, and to the friendships he developed there. As opposed to the panegyric in praise of Antioch (Or. 11), which he presented in one of the city’s public theatres on the occasion of the Olympic games in Antioch, the Monody for Nicomedia was read only to a very limited audience of four close friends, attesting to its deeply personal nature. Libanius laments both the loss of the city’s beautiful architecture as well as of its people. His grief would have been particularly strong as a close friend of his, Aristaenetus, to whom he dedicated a separate oration, died in the calamity.
The present paper explores the strong feelings and experiences towards these cities attested in Libanius’ writings, the reasons behind them thus discussing Libanius’ networks, and the ways in which these feelings were expressed, both addressing the urban fabric of a city as well as it’s citizens. It also sheds light on the way cities could shape a person’s identity in the late antique Roman Empire, a phenomenon also attested in late antique visual culture, for example in floor mosaics in Madaba and Halicarnassus referring to specific cities that were connected to the mosaic’s patrons.
SPACES OF DIVISION: THE AFTERLIVES OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN DELFT, 1787-1789
Nelleke Tanis
abstractNelleke Tanis
This paper explores how political polarization and the disintegration of social networks shaped emotional experience within the urban community of Delft in the late 18th century. During this period, the Dutch Republic had become divided between supporters of the existing regime (orangists) and those envisioning a more democratic society based on enlightenment values (patriots). This resulted in a tumultuous period including a failed revolution by the patriots, an orangist counter-revolution, and a successful revolution in 1795, which established the Batavian Republic. Delft was one of the hotbeds of the revolution.
The paper draws on a collection of ca. 500 petitions submitted to the local revolutionary authorities between 1795 and 1798 by (lower) middle class men and women, seeking compensation for losses incurred during revolutionary upheaval. The extensive and very personal petition letters reflect on the turbulent years between 1787 and 1795 when revolutionary and counter-revolutionary regimes alternated in power, leading to recurring outbreaks of violence between citizens on both sides.
By examining the emotional vocabulary in these petitions, the paper traces how individuals in an urban environment articulated the emotional impact of ongoing and widespread conflict within formerly close-knit urban communities, including neighborhoods, workplaces and even families. The sources give us an insight in the emotional value that people attributed to different networks, as well as the emotional language used to describe their experiences when these networks were disrupted. Moreover, the petitioners’ descriptions of their material surroundings reveal how urban space structured their experience of conflict. These spatial references allow us to examine the role of urban space in memory construction. Correlating these descriptions with data on socioeconomic status and residence patterns of the petitioners allows us to compare emotional expression across social groups.
The paper connects to the session’s focus on networked emotional life by showing how trauma and memory were articulated within the social and spatial networks that bound and divided the revolutionary city.
Experiencing Locality Before Translocality: A Case of Mid-1800s Finland
Heikki Kokko
abstractHeikki Kokko
This article explores the historical transformation of locality as an experiential condition in the mid-nineteenth-century Finnish countryside. While modern spatial experience is often attributed to physical urbanization, this study argues that the emergence of translocal mediated communication altered how people perceived and emotionally attached to their surroundings. In mid-1800s Finland, a dispersed agrarian society experienced a rupture in spatial awareness not through urban growth, but through the nationwide circulation of the Finnish-language press.
Prior to this connectivity, the experience of locality was grounded primarily in face-to-face interaction. Lacking continuous comparative horizons, rural communities were shaped by internal dynamics rather than external benchmarks. However, the rise of grassroots local correspondence (paikalliskirjeet) in the 1850s marked a cognitive and emotional adjustment. Analyzing texts from the Translocalis database, this paper demonstrates how ordinary rural inhabitants began to externalize their lived environment, adopting specific linguistic markers to render the felt experience of their locality intelligible to an unseen, translocal public.
Through these letters, locality came to be experienced less as a bounded condition and more as a relational one. The press generated a virtual public space connecting disparate regions, which rapidly became emotionally networked. By measuring local conditions against narratives from other communities, rural inhabitants developed a shared emotional vocabulary of pride, moral expectation, and translocal shame, frequently bypassing local patriarchal hierarchies through pseudonymous publication.
Methodologically adopting the socio-cultural history of experience, the study integrates Berger and Luckmann’s social constructionism with Koselleck’s theories of historical time. Utilizing conceptual tools like "sediments," "layers," and "scenes of experience," the paper bridges macro-level networks with micro-level agency. Ultimately, the Finnish case broadens the analytical frame of urban history by illustrating that the modern, networked experience of place emerged alongside or outside conventional urban modernity. Networked awareness, mediated comparison, and public visibility were not confined to urban settings, but also emerged through translocal communication among dispersed rural communities.
Sensing the Eixample: Atmospheric Landscapes in Cerdà’s Grid of Barcelona
Cristian Suau Ibanez, Monika Levan
abstractCristian Suau Ibanez, Monika Levan
This paper investigates how emotional and atmospheric geographies shaped Barcelona’s transition into a model of “networked ambiences” through Ildefons Cerdà’s Pla d’Eixample (1867) and his environmental planning of urban atmosphere. It argues that the project functioned not only as a hygienist and infrastructural form of grand urbanism but also as an emotional and sensory system that transformed micro-urban experience, social interaction and environmental perception. Rather than producing a homogeneous urban field, Cerdà’s grid operates as an atmospheric mediator between pre-existing urban fabrics and new spatial logics, generating differentiated conditions of relational intensity across the city.
Atmospheres are understood as emerging from the interaction between urban morphology, environmental mediation (light, heat, humidity and vegetation) and social practices of everyday life. The study asks how the orthogonal grid reshaped urban experience, how its interfaces with pre-existing fabrics generated distinct affective environments and how ambience theories can reinterpret the Eixample as a relational atmospheric system. This analysis adopts a multiscalar framework linking edge conditions (macro scale), interface zones (intermediate scale) and liminal encounter spaces (micro scale), allowing atmospheric formation to be read across structural, transitional and street-level spatial conditions.
Drawing on Georg Simmel’s reflections on metropolitan perception, the Eixample and its surrounding districts are conceptualised as interconnected atmospheric fields where form, climate and social relations co-produce everyday experience. A comparative reading of Ciutat Vella, Gràcia and Sants shows how the grid intersects with heterogeneous fabrics, producing contrasting conditions of openness, enclosure, porosity and transition. These interface zones are understood as liminal encounter spaces where morphological discontinuities, environmental gradients and social practices converge to generate differentiated ambience qualities.
Methodologically, the research combines archival material, historical cartography, photography, observational records and analytical drawing. It applies the AMELIE ambience quality tiers framework to integrate morphology (grid–fabric relations), environment (light, heat, humidity and vegetation) and social life (mobility and encounter), allowing systematic comparison of interface conditions.
Bonaventure Station: Travel and Emotion in Montreal, 1840s-1940s
Nicolas Kenny, Nicolas Kenny
abstractNicolas Kenny, Nicolas Kenny
Delving into newspaper accounts, professional journals, literary sources, and visual
representations, this paper will examine the emotional language through which Montreal’s
Bonaventure Station was represented, experienced, and imagined during the hundred
years of its existence. From dreams of metropolitan grandeur to complaints of cold,
miserable, and overcrowded waiting rooms, the various physical incarnations of this
central hub the city’s transportation infrastructure, along with the array of experiences
associated with railway travel, with waiting for a train, with greeting someone or seeing
them off, encapsulated the complex emotional dynamics of the metropolis.
Urban Discourse on Fatigue: Narratives of Depression Symptoms and Behaviors in Vienna and Graz, 1918 to 1928
Eva Tamara Asboth
abstractEva Tamara Asboth
Definitions and understandings of psychological illnesses such as melancholy, madness, and dementia are shaped by communication and negotiation processes among various societal actors. Similarly, the discourse on fatigue and its related symptoms is deeply embedded in the political, social, and gender systems of its time, as well as in the communication infrastructures that mediate these discussions. This study investigates the historical roots of narratives surrounding fatigue and depression during the interwar period in Austria, a time when the term “depression” was increasingly adopted in medical diagnostics. Notably, the term also carried economic connotations, reflecting the widespread financial instability of the era.
Focusing on Vienna and Graz, Austria’s two largest cities, this research explores the interplay between urban mental healthcare institutions and women’s magazines as platforms for discussing emotions and mental health. Women’s magazines are analyzed as urban communication networks that mediated and shaped public understandings of depression and fatigue. Patient records from the psychiatric institution in Graz serve as supplementary sources, offering insights into how depression was understood and treated in medical contexts. The central research question is: How did urbanity, with its dense communication networks and mental healthcare facilities, shape the concept of depression?
The study employs the concept of mediatization to examine how media practices and infrastructures influenced societal and individual perceptions of mental health. Women’s magazines are treated as key mediators in this process, functioning as platforms where private concerns intersected with public discourse. These magazines provided a space for women to articulate their struggles, seek advice, and engage in collective meaning-making, particularly in the face of economic instability, housing shortages, and shifting family dynamics. Patient records from Feldhof reveal that depression was often linked to poverty, personal tragedies, and gendered expectations.
By examining the interplay between urbanity, media, and mental healthcare, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how depression was shaped during the interwar period. It highlights the importance of viewing depression as a historically and culturally situated condition, shaped by the unique challenges of its time. This paper represents a work-in-progress, with further analysis required.
Session 86 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Shaping the Contested – Architects Framing Experiences of Urban Space associated with Russians in Vyborg 1918-1939
Sini Väisänen
abstractSini Väisänen
The paper explores how the agency of architects affected the way Russian-related urban space was experienced in a Finnish city Vyborg. What kind of viewpoints did the architects themselves bring to public discussion? What discourses did the architects support or help to shape through their actions?
Finland’s position as a grand duchy of the Russian Empire shaped its urban spaces. The history of Vyborg as a former Russian garrison city dates back to the 18th century. In urban space this past materialized in the garrisons and Orthodox churches and in street names referencing Romanov rulers. During the inter-war years, after the country’s independence, the political atmosphere in Finland was generally against anything associated with Russians, which was largely due to former russification periods in early 1900s and the turbulent years of 1917 and 1918, including the Finnish Civil War. Buildings that had been built or previously used by Russians became contested parts of urban space. The buildings contradicted nationalist discourses and evoked negative responses and emotions. Architects had ways of influencing how these places were experienced through architectural practices and urban planning. The work of architects is most visible in their designs that removed the features Finns associated with Russians. In addition, the architects participated in the public discussion negotiating the role of Russian remnants in urban space.
The paper is part of my doctoral thesis, which explores how Finns experienced built heritage of Russian origin and the derussification of space in Finnish cities in the inter-war period. The main body of the source material consists of newspaper articles from which I analyze discourses and different meanings given to spaces and built heritage. Many local opinions echoed voices from widely shared national discourses. In addition, the sources include archival documents from the archive of “Central Department of Spoils of War” from 1918, held in the National Archives, municipal minutes, maps and photographs.
In analyzing the urban space and architecture of the 1920s and 30s, I employ the concept of contested heritage. Contested heritage refers to sites or objects that evoke difficult feelings and memories. It might also be questioned and challenged. With my research, I take part in broader discussions and research focusing on the experiences, acceptance, use and fate of Russian and Soviet heritage in their former territories.
Hope and Heimat: Imagining and Organising a Jewish Home in East Asia
Anna Brady
abstractAnna Brady
Bombay, Calcutta, Harbin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kobe, Rangoon, Manila – Jewish populations could be found across major Asian cities during the 1930s. Whilst many of these communities had longstanding relationships of trade and settlement with their host cities, the decade preceding World War II also saw new influxes of Jewish refugees from Europe.
Amid scholarship on Bundist and Zionist debates, central and east Asian cities stand as a relatively unrecognised alternative to European assimilation and colonisation in Palestine. However, journalism circulating across these central and east Asian cities in the 1930s considered the region as a viable alternative for permanent Jewish resettlement. Taking one publication, Israel’s Messenger, as source base, this paper asks how transnational flows of ideas were able to foster new emotional attachments to place in this moment of great upheaval.
Established in 1904 as the official organ of the Shanghai Zionist Association, Israel’s Messenger nonetheless found a readership across Asia and considered itself more broadly “devoted to the interests of Jews and Judaism in the Far East.” Through local and international news, advertisements and ‘Personal & Social’ pages, the paper reinforced familial and business relationships across Jewish communities in Asia. As conditions in Europe worsened and plans for Palestine foundered, its editorials and letters reflected disillusionment, desperation and fear. However, they also imagined Asian cities as the basis for a new centre of Jewish life in east Asia and drew upon pan-Asian representations of Asia to locate hope, peace and safety here.
This paper asks how Israel’s Messenger functioned as an arena of emotional practice community to reshape felt experiences of east Asian cities. It explores how the newspaper mobilised readers' conceptual and emotional knowledge to build new attachments and examines planned community infrastructure as spatial expressions of this emotional shift. It questions how spatial imaginaries at odds with the built environment were sustained and, ultimately, reflects on how transnational networks shape how we feel and act in place – including how we dream of the future.
“With deep sadness, we announce the passing of the city”: Activist networks and the fight for urban liveability, 1960s-1970s.
Bart Tritsmans
abstractBart Tritsmans
In 1970, the assembled action groups and neighbourhood committees in Antwerp published an obituary in which they announced the death of the city. ‘With deep sadness’, they declared that the city had been ‘painfully run over, gassed and demolished’. In the decades after the Second World War, drastic interventions changed the urban environment and the quality of life, with the late 1960s as a culmination point. The urban population responded to the changes in the perception and the daily experience of the city by organising protests and forming networks in the fight against the efficiency-oriented thinking of policymakers. The 1960s and 1970s marked a heroic period for the action groups: the young protesting citizen became an idealised figure in society and the media paid much attention to their (usually playful) protests. This was an international phenomenon, as reflected in activist groups such as the Provo- and Kabouter-movement in the Netherlands and Alternativ Stad in Sweden. With their struggle for the improvement of the liveability of the city and their appeal for public participation, the activists claimed their right the city.
This session explores how emotions, feelings, and experiences - expressed across diverse sources - shed new light on the social and cultural significance of urban networks. My paper examines how action groups and environmental movements, in their fight for liveable cities, forged alliances and knowledge networks both locally and transnationally. I analyse how their narratives reveal the emotions underpinning their engagement, which sources capture these experiences, and how city councils often dismissed their demands as overly emotional and insufficiently rational.
A telling example is the transformation of Conscience Square into Antwerp’s first pedestrian zone. The square became a powerful symbol not only of safeguarding urban liveability but also of citizen participation in urban decision-making, reinforcing activists’ right to the city. This local case both highlights the importance of individual actors within networks (as the square was redesigned by Dries Jageneau who was an activist, urban planner and civil servant), and demonstrates the impact of emotions and perceptions on urban planning and policy.
Emotions, Feelings, and Experiences in Urban History: Prospect and Retrospect
Rebecca Madgin
abstractRebecca Madgin
The urban history of the emotions is an emerging and exciting field of inquiry but how does it help us to understand historical processes and how could this understanding help shape contemporary debates about the city? This paper will focus on an urban history of the emotions in retrospect and prospect. More specifically it will open up a discussion concerning the possibilities and limits of 'emotions' as an analytical tool and introduce 'felt experiences' as a way to explore a richer account of urban life.
Session 86 - Slot III
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
All the Feels: Towards an Everyday Urban History of Emotions
Anneleen Arnout, Maja Hultman
abstractAnneleen Arnout, Maja Hultman
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the modern metropolis was a place of heightened emotionality. Columns, novels and scholarly essays published around the turn of the century all represented the modern city as a site that elicited emotions and assaulted senses. But what did the city feel like for those outside of the dominant, bourgeois networks that prescribed its emotional qualities to the masses? This paper will present two methods that allow for a more inclusive urban history of emotions that turns our attention from the city’s powerful networks to the city at large.
The first method builds upon Marie van Haaster’s conceptualization of the ‘affective niche’ (Van Haaster 2024) which it will apply to the history of modern Amsterdam. Zooming in on a specific type of material environment – the asphalted street – it conceptualizes urban space as an environment which afforded (specific groups of) urban dwellers and visitors specific (types of) experiences. Using archival sources, photographs and newspapers, this method sets out to examine what experiences were culturally possible for whom, and which experiences were sought after and denounced (by whom).
The second method, based in the concept of ‘urban atmosphere’, also starts with a specific location, namely a Pietist, girl orphanage in Stockholm. It explores the possibilities to excavate the feelings of the girls who lived there, whose voices are not saved in any archival source. By turning from emotions, mainly discovered in textual sources, to affects and visual sources, and by employing tools from the postcolonial approach to black studies, such as ‘critical fabulation’ (Hartman 2008) and urban contextualisation (Fuentes 2016), the ’urban atmosphere’ method analyses architectural designs and photographs in order to reconstruct spatial characteristics of the orphanage’s immediate urban milieu. This way, it helps us to propose from-below sensations of the orphanage.
In turning to urban space as it was lived in, both methods premiere an historical excavation of experiences, specifically affects and sensory sensations. In so doing, we are not accepting the emotional discourses prescribed by the bourgeoisie, neither are we looking for the big feelings that defined public discussions. Instead, we are turning to everyday, even marginalised, people and their mundane feelings, in the hopes of rewriting the history of the modern metropolis from the vantage point of what it was like for most people.
How to Talk About a City in the Second World War in Today’s World
Blaž Vurnik
abstractBlaž Vurnik
In 2025, we commemorate eighty years since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of post-war Europe. At the City Museum of Ljubljana, we had long been preparing a major exhibition on this topic — but first, we had to answer essential questions.
Ljubljana holds a special place in the memory of the war. It was the centre of the Slovenian resistance movement and the rear base of the Partisan army, surrounded by barbed wire and bunkers — and at the same time, a centre of collaboration. The city was liberated on May 9, 1945.
During the socialist period, the school system and political framework continuously reinforced the stories of resistance. After socialism ended, however, narratives from the defeated side of the Slovenian conflict also began to emerge — stories of families forced to silence their experiences, remembering only in private. Emotional reactions from both sides have persisted, even intensified, over the past three decades.
The museum therefore faced a demanding task: to create an exhibition that would not divide, that would be professionally grounded and respectful to all. The conceptual basis was simple yet powerful — equating war with violence. This became the core of the narrative, which unfolds in a dramatic arc leading to the exhibition’s final section.
Each thematic focus is told through a personal story — a lived wartime experience. Visitors are invited to share reflections by attaching notes to an imagined barbed wire installation. Many express gratitude for the exhibition’s approach and its balanced presentation of Ljubljana’s wartime past.
Emotional responses extend beyond the museum walls: people contact the curator to share family memories, photographs, and objects, wanting their stories to remain alive. The exhibition has thus acquired a therapeutic dimension, allowing second- and third-generation descendants to express emotions and experiences shaped by the war.
In this spirit, the museum developed accompanying programmes such as workshops on non-violent communication, conflict resolution, and bibliotherapy reading sessions — all encouraging dialogue, empathy, and reflection on the legacy of war and peace.
Mapping Gendered Street Interactions and Emotional Geographies of Urban Space in Medellín, Colombia
Samantha Joeck
abstractSamantha Joeck
This paper examines women’s emotional experiences of the city and access to public space by adopting a spatial approach to analyze gendered street interactions, understood as encounters between strangers in public places that are directly influenced by the perceived gender of one or more participants. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Medellín, Colombia in 2018-19 that included walking interviews and sensory mapping workshops, I explore how variations in residents’ habitual spatial environments and the social and physical organization of the urban landscape affect the interactions they participate in and the emotions they provoke.
The paper analyses a continuum of gendered interactions including greetings, pleasantries, comments on appearance, sales interactions, flirtation, insults, and moments of explicit threat or violence. Considering these interactions together, and expanding on Kelly’s notion of the continuum of sexual violence (1987), I posit that a range of everyday encounters experienced both positively and negatively contribute to women’s feelings of safety, discomfort, belonging, or exclusion.
Analyzing gendered street interactions as spatial processes, I examine how their interpretation is shaped by three spatial and relational markers: symmetry, familiarity, and distance. I draw on a corpus of 99 co-created drawings of specific interaction examples to analyze these markers across different spatial scales of the interaction: the neighbourhood where it takes place, the physical positioning of each participant, and its sensory content, thus shedding light on the concrete mechanisms through which boundaries between private and public, feminine and masculine, and safe and unsafe spaces are constructed, upheld, or contested.
Finally, I adopt an intersectional perspective to show that the meaning and salience of the aforementioned spatial markers are contingent on the spatial and social environments that residents habitually inhabit, which in Medellín are deeply structured by class-based segregation. Neighbourhood boundaries, mobility patterns, and classed perceptions of insecurity influence how women interpret and respond to the interactions that are directed at them in different parts of the city. In this way, the paper analyzes how gendered street interactions and their perception reflect, reinforce, or challenge intertwined power structures that shape the social and physical structure of the city.
Body in the City
Emily Huang
abstractEmily Huang
Body and the City is an exploration and observation of the human experiences of environmental design through the lens of dance.
Dance and environmental design are two disciplines of creativity that share a special relationship- space. Both disciplines use space as the main medium for creative interpretation. Dance is movement of the human body through space. Environmental design and its sequential spaces are experienced by the human body as movement through in the city. Thinking about spaces created for and by the body as the common linkage between dance and environmental design, I utilized human movement through the city to investigate experiential urban design. Spatial design ideas defined by dance and choreography can inform the design of urban places. Inspiring environmental design can be optimized through the exchange of ideas from the human body and the physical city.
Cityscape includes but is not limited to architecture and buildings, parks and gardens, plazas and open spaces, streetscapes and infrastructure, natural elements, dominant visible and sensory features. Environmental design is a creative process that develops over time with the built environment and the people who inhabit the place. The result is a city- its cityscape and its citizens- their lives defined by their urban environmental experiences.
The instrument of dance is the human body. The premise of this thesis is to address dance simply as human thought and behavior performed by the human body for human purposes.
The intent of this project is to identify and record environmental design episodes that inform the users of dance and allow the movement of bodies to inform the definition of urban spaces. In this reciprocal dialogue, I hope to expand the vision and interpretation of both environmental design and dance, specifically in Barcelona, looking at the experience of moving the human body from Ciutat Vella, the Old City, through the Rambla de Catalunya.
Our experience with our urban environment is shaped through our sensorial body and our movement through the cityscape. The cityscape influences our emotions and creates our memories of places. Whether our experiences are positive and inspiring or negative and disparaging, our emotions and our experiences are quantifiable. How we think about the future of our cities and urban design can benefit from our experience of moving through Barcelona- our dance through a city of exceptional urban environments.
Everyone Becomes a Traveler: Norm Suspension and Affective Dynamics in Station Design
Liviu Gabriel Baicu
abstractLiviu Gabriel Baicu
Railway stations are not neutral transit facilities but affective infrastructures in which movement, waiting, information, memory, and social interaction converge. This research examines the station as a liminal environment where everyday distinctions of class, profession, and social status temporarily recede—not because inequality disappears, but because diverse individuals are reorganized around the shared operational identity of the traveler. Within this condition of norm suspension, information systems—including signage, announcements, clocks, digital displays, route markings, and staff guidance—become the dominant social script, organizing behavior while mediating stress, comfort, trust, and cognitive load across successive stages of the journey. The study asks: how does the station environment temporarily equalize social status, and how does this reclassification affect behavioral norms and interpersonal interaction?Its objectives are to map the station’s emotional landscape as a networked environment in which personal, professional, and spatial layers intersect; to assess how information flows influence orientation, safety, belonging, comfort, and confidence; and to formulate design principles capable of improving experience through targeted signal-layer interventions rather than costly structural transformation. Methodologically, the research combines neuroarchitectural and biometric analysis with ethnographic observation. Eye-tracking, electrodermal activity, heart-rate monitoring, and responses to visual stimuli are triangulated with behavioral mapping, micro-interviews, and social surveys. Rather than treating any single physiological signal as direct evidence of emotion, the framework identifies affective bottlenecks where converging biometric, behavioral, and self-reported indicators reveal hesitation, heightened arousal, confusion, or loss of trust. The study reframes station design as the design of affective and behavioral conditions. Its contribution lies in moving beyond operational efficiency toward care-centred evaluation based on clarity, comfort, confidence, dignity, accessibility and trust. By identifying moments at which information systems either amplify uncertainty or restore orientation, the research establishes a practical basis for designing stations that support a coherent, humane, and dignified passage through uncertainty so that becoming a traveler constitutes not a loss of identity, but participation in a shared journey.
Session 87 - Beyond Transcendence. Understanding Networks of Religious Belonging between Local Urban Parishes and Global Institutions since the Turn of the 20th Century.
The panel understands religious bodies and their networks as essential for the resilience of both their social and built environment of modern multi-religious cities. It aims to combine the different disciplinary approaches to the study of urban religion in order to analyse the scales, patterns and mechanisms of their glocal networks.
Coordinators: Beate Loeffler, Veronika Eufinger
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Coordinators: Beate Loeffler, Veronika Eufinger
show/hide introduction
Session 87 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Manifesting National and Cultural Identity of Ukrainian Religious Communities in Halychyna through Church Architecture in the Late 19th Century - First Half of the 20th Century
Vasyl Petryk, Khristina Lew, Nataliya Filevych
abstractVasyl Petryk, Khristina Lew, Nataliya Filevych
Halychyna is a region north of the Carpathian Mountains, on the lands of the Principality of Halych and the Kingdom of Rus’ of the 12th–14th centuries. The modern population of Halychyna is predominantly Ukrainian—descendants of the ancient Slavic people known as Rusyns, who adopted Christianity in the Byzantine Eastern Rite in 988 AD. Over the course of a millennium, Ukrainians developed their own national architectural type of Christian temple (church), known as a "tserkva." Today, eight Ukrainian wooden churches from the 15th–19th centuries are included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
From the late 13th century, other ethnic groups began to settle in Halychyna: Germans, Poles, Armenians and Jews. They brought with them new types of religious buildings: Catholic churches (koscioły, in Polish) and Jewish synagogues. The architecture of these structures was clearly different from that of Ukrainian churches. The silhouettes of the tserkva, koscioł and synagogue became familiar elements of the urban landscape of Halychyna, marking sacred and spatial zones in the urban fabric.
In 1772, Halychyna became part of the Austrian Empire. Until the mid-19th century, the empire’s construction policy aimed at standardizing church building, which led to a diminishing of traditional architectural features.
However, from the mid-19th century until 1914, following several years of national revolutions among the empire’s peoples, there was a surge in industrial development and construction. This coincided with a rise in national movements and the development of national cultures. This revival was most evident in the construction of new churches, designed by Ukrainian and European architects.
From the late 19th century, in the urban landscapes in Halychyna, a new architectural dominant began to emerge—cross-shaped churches with domes, with original portals under triangular pediments, with decorative friezes of small arches running along the upper perimeter of walls. Their distinctive silhouette and characteristic décor indicate that these churches were designed by Ukrainian architect Vasyl Nahirny. Over 200 stone and wooden churches were built based on his designs. These buildings represented an attempt to create a new style of Ukrainian church architecture at a professional level.
The silhouette of tall single-domed, three-domed or five-domed ukrainian churches in the first half of the 20th century became an inseparable element of Halychyna’s urban landscape.
The evolution of the infrastructure of the Catholic parish in Ireland, 1790s-1900
Niamh Nicghabhann Coleman
abstractNiamh Nicghabhann Coleman
This paper will focus on the evolution of urban parishes in the Catholic dioceses from the initial Catholic Relief Acts in the late eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century. This paper identifies the evolution of parochial infrastructure through, with, and against existing urban structures and dynamics. In this paper, particular attention will be paid to the impact of social class in organising the space of the city, of the diocese, and of the parish. Building on work which explores the importance of ritual and procession in the formation of the parish, and in ‘claiming’ the space of the city for Catholics (NicGhabhann, 2019), this paper examines the routes taken by parishioners between and across the space of the urban parish, and the interrelationship between places of worship, education, charitable provision, and healthcare.
Floating identity, shifting living place: the impact of Karaite national identity on the formation of their living space in 20th-century Vilnius/Vilna
Dovile Troskovaite
abstractDovile Troskovaite
Dr. Dovilė Troskovaitė, “Floating identity, shifting living place: the impact of Karaite national identity on the formation of their living space in 20th-century Vilnius/Vilna
The beginning of the 20th century marked a rapid shift in the Karaite self-perception from Jewish to Turkish. The process intensified after the end of World War I, making Vilna a central place in the formation of Karaite national self-identity, and at the same time, the place, associated with this process by Karaites in Poland, to which the city belonged at that time. The proposed paper will show how the Karaites’ national identity ideology was reflected in Vilnius’/Vilna urban spaces, and which objects were understood and regarded by the Karaites as being representative of their national collective identity. It will argue that in the first half of the 20th century, Vilnius/Vilna was ideologically territorialized as a center of the national Karaite identity ideology, while religious leaders were pushed into the peripheries of community life. At the same time, whis shift was obviuos in the formation of Karaite living space in the town. Being ideologically and physically removed from the Jewish quarter, in the 20th century, a Karaite city space started being formed in the suburb of Žvėrynas, which represented the national Karaite identity ideology. At the epicenter of this space was a prayer house, which not only became a symbol of religious life but of national identity, and together with the community house and the Karaite museum formed a Karaite place of memory in Vilnius/Vilna.
Session 87 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 308 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Grave Networks: Exploring the Religious Dimensions of German War Cemeteries in Finland
Olga Juutistenaho
abstractOlga Juutistenaho
War cemeteries are often perceived as memory sites connected to collective national narratives. Through this secular lens, the focus has been on their role at the intersection of different, sometimes conflicting remembrance traditions, especially when located on foreign ground. However, as burial sites of the dead, war cemeteries also possess less highlighted religious aspects related to Christian tradition. Furthermore, the symbolism and aesthetics used in the sites often make use of religious imagery, ranging from obvious biblical references to more subtle implications. How are these religious dimensions connected to other memory discourses conveyed by these sites?
My paper examines two German war cemeteries located in Finland, focusing on their construction time between 1959 and 1963. During this time, around 3,000 dead German soldiers from World War II were relocated to two new designated sites constructed by Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, a German private humanitarian organization. Prior to this move, German war graves had coexisted as curiosities in Finnish memory landscape where military graves are usually integrated with local civilian cemeteries maintained by Lutheran parishes. The construction process of the designated cemeteries, a complicated international collaboration between Finland and West Germany, also included the involvement of religious actors.
In my contribution, I analyse the religious aspects of German war cemeteries in Finland to better understand their multifaceted and complex layers. While Finnish war cemeteries can be read as a national network of sites closely combining patriotism with religion, the German sites are not connected to this local typology. Instead, they are a part of an international network of officially irreligious sites, while also seeking distance from uncomfortable national connotations. Despite not being explicitly portrayed as religious sites, German war cemeteries include strong Christian symbolism. In the context of Finnish cemetery landscape, the chosen case sites represent an unusual dynamic between the secular and the religious.
Nodes of Faith, Nodes of City: Mapping Barcelona Through Its Parishes
Alba Arboix-Alió, Josep Maria Pons-Poblet
abstractAlba Arboix-Alió, Josep Maria Pons-Poblet
This article proposes a reading of Barcelona through its network of Catholic parish churches. Based on the analysis of the 130 parishes within the municipal boundaries, from those with medieval origins to the most recent contemporary constructions, it demonstrates how the city has been configured around parish churches, which have acted as urban and social nodes of the first order. Their territorial distribution makes it possible to understand Barcelona’s growth, the formation of new neighborhoods, and the consolidation of an urban structure marked by the presence of these religious landmarks.
Beyond their liturgical function, Catholic parishes have historically served as spaces of cohesion and identity, articulating networks that connect the most local realities with global structures. This “glocal” dimension is particularly evident in cases such as Sant Sebastià del Verdum, which exemplifies the ability of parish churches to strengthen community ties in contexts of peripheral growth and urban precariousness, while maintaining close connections with diocesan institutions and the universal Church. Built in the 1960s by the renowned Catalan architects Josep Maria Martorell, Oriol Bohigas, and David Mackay (MBM Arquitectes), the church is also a reference in European post-conciliar architecture.
Overall, the article argues that Barcelona’s Catholic parish cartography constitutes a key interpretive layer for understanding the city in its complexity: its social and urban transformations, the mechanisms of resilience embedded in its neighborhoods, and the interaction between religious networks, urban fabric, and civic culture.
Weak pastoral care as a useless presence in a fluid network
Bernd Hillebrand
abstractBernd Hillebrand
Weak pastoral care as a useless presence in a fluid network
Promoting engagement in Cologne as an example of networking in the urban social space
Cities are undergoing a radical transformation process. They are becoming less and less populated and are playing a changed role as shopping destinations. In addition, metropolitan regions are experiencing a phenomenon of liquification of strong and supportive life structures and corresponding orientations. (cf. Zygnumt Baumann, Liquid Modernity). Churches in cities are exposed to this sociological structure.
The communicative logic of liquid modernity in the city is the fluid network that forms and dissolves again based on events. The network is characterised by flat hierarchies and has weak bonds with uncertain boundaries. In this network, one can only act relationally and not integralistically or institutionally.
This epochal transformation in communication and the secular decline of church membership in society are challenging churches in cities to become more transient and relinquish their positions of supremacy. In doing so, they must return to their original mission of caring for all people (cf. Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes 1). Churches must orient themselves towards urban spaces and work together with all stakeholders to promote a humane and climate-friendly culture (cf. Hillebrand, Social Work and Pastoral Care – Newly Connected). This idea ties in with the concept of social space orientation.
In order to contribute their own expertise to a pluralistic network, churches need to rethink their own attitude and mission. The genuine attitude of the Christian faith is based on a theology of incarnation, in which God takes the risk of becoming human. This risk lies in the unconditional recognition of others, without expecting anything in return or a return on investment. This is a weak relationship in which lies the paradox of strength. A weak relationship based on the incarnation in Jesus Christ is expressed in a useless presence as a weak pastoral care. It becomes interesting when the church brings this Christian attitude of a weak relationship into the urban network.
A quantitative and qualitative case study on the promotion of engagement in the Archdiocese of Cologne 2023, Germany, examined how it enabled innovation and cooperation with other stakeholders between the internal space of the Church and the social space with the attitude of a weak presence. (cf. Hillebrand, Engagement 2024)
Session 88 - Urban Heritage and Mental Well-being: Memory, Belonging and City Networks in Modern and Contemporary Cities
This session explores how urban heritage has supported mental well-being, identity, and care in modern and contemporary cities, highlighting how such practices have circulated through city networks conceived not only as infrastructural systems, but as circuits of memory, emotion, and belonging.
Coordinators: Giulia Mezzalama, Aude Naud
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Coordinators: Giulia Mezzalama, Aude Naud
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Session 88 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 220 - Facultat d'Història, Universitat de Barcelona
Lived Geographies of Toponymic Change: Memory, Place Attachment and Belonging in Žižkov
Lýdie Kárníková
abstractLýdie Kárníková
The paper examines lived geographies following the 2023 renaming of a major road in Žižkov (Prague, Czechia), where the name Koněvova – commemorating a Soviet marshal since 1946 – was dropped in a revision of the district’s symbolic landscape induced by the war in Ukraine. Situated between critical toponymy, memory studies, and human geography, the paper explores how this act has affected residents’ sense of belonging and place attachment, as well as the interaction between communicative and cultural memory shaped both by the major geopolitical rupture and by its entanglement with a wider mnemonic agenda of “coming to terms” with the communist past through the marginalization of Soviet/socialist heritage. In everyday spatial experience, the street name change generates moments of disorientation, friction, and affective adjustment to the imposed discontinuity, while simultaneously revealing the persistence of toponymic continuity in daily urban life. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation in the streetscape, the study points to a spectrum of political, generational, and cultural tensions in response to the change. It demonstrates how seemingly mundane alterations in urban toponymy can exert wide-ranging effects on community well-being, everyday practices, and the texture of local place identities. Beyond these spatial and experiential frictions, the study shows how the street renaming reverberates through residents’ narratives and emotional landscapes, including expressions of (re)sentiment linked to divergent interpretations of the communist period and its urban legacies.
Healthy cities network – Hungarian heritage in the Carpathian Basin urban network
Réka Horeczki
abstractRéka Horeczki
The prominent role of cities in the economy and society is beyond dispute. In the political arena and in diplomatic relations, cities, especially city networks, are increasingly playing a decisively important role. The emergence of power factors alongside nation states has resulted in the vertical fragmentation of national foreign policy, and international organizations are seeking to gain a seat at the table of global diplomacy (Bäckstrand et al. 2017; Dzebo et al. 2019). In our research, we examine transnational thematic networks that use city diplomacy based on the practice of so-called soft power to address global challenges more effectively (at the local level, yet on the global stage). In our previous studies, we focused on human rights cities (Egyed & Horeczki 2024) and the role of cities in the global economy (Egyed et al. 2024).
In this study, we present in detail the challenge that is constantly present on the political and social agenda of cities: health awareness and the issue of healthy cities. Actions aimed at addressing health determinants promote cross-sectoral cooperation (by improving urban liveability), participatory governance, and can reduce regional inequalities. The Healthy Cities approach recognizes the determinants of health and the need for cooperation between organizations in the public, private, voluntary, and community sectors. This approach involves engaging local residents in decision-making, requires political commitment, organizational and community development, and recognizes that the process is as important as the results.
Projects that focus on the natural and built heritage and the activation of local communities are becoming increasingly important in the efforts of Eastern European cities. A typical example of healthy cities in the Carpathian Basin* are the spa towns, which represent a slice of the urban network that can be found across the macro-region, with broadly similar liveability criteria. The study focuses on the heritage factors that are specific to each towns and that have allowed the town to continue to develop and maintain its population.
*I use the term Carpathian Basin to refer to the neighbouring parts of the territory of the historical Hungarian settlements outside Hungary; Austria: Burgenland, Slovakia: Felvidék, Ukraine: Kárpátalja, Romania: Transylvania and Partium, Serbia: Vajdaság, Croatia: Drávaszög, South-Baranja-Slavonia, Slovenia: Muravian region.
Espai Txema: Collective Self-Build and Transversal Belonging in Barcelona’s Historic Core (2013–2014)
Valentina Maini
abstractValentina Maini
The Espai Txema project represents a collective self-build experience developed in the Raval district, at the heart of Barcelona’s historic centre, within the framework of the municipal programme Pla de Buits (2013–2014). Initiated by the association BaM – BioArquitectura Mediterrània, it transformed a vacant plot into a community space for encounter, learning, and shared creation. Beyond its physical outcome, Espai Txema emerged as a material and social metaphor of the right to belong—to a place, a collective, and a shared urban transformation process.
Located in one of the city’s most culturally diverse and socio-economically fragile areas, the project addressed the need to generate spaces of connection between inhabitants, artisans, students, architects, and local organisations who rarely interacted within the same framework. This transversality of actors and knowledges defined the project’s core identity: a participatory space of “belonging” where the act of building together—using natural materials and low-impact techniques such as rammed earth, hemp-lime and vegetables structures—became an exercise of collective rooting and mutual recognition.
Developed over fifteen months, the process relied on open digital tools to coordinate more than 230 participants through workshops, assemblies, and on-site activities. The resulting environment combined ephemeral architecture, environmental pedagogy, and community management, operating under conditions of economic austerity and institutional uncertainty.
Methodologically, the project tested new relationships between community governance, self-organisation and collective learning, where the construction process itself became an infrastructure of care and negotiation. The extensive documentation produced—work diaries, minutes, videos, and self-build protocols—constitutes a valuable archive on the material, social, and emotional dimensions of bottom-up urban regeneration.
The paper analyses the experience through three interrelated lenses:
1. The site as an active agent: how the Raval’s dense and multicultural fabric shaped both the spatial and symbolic configuration of the project.
2. Construction as belonging: how the material act of building together operates as a process of attachment, identity formation, and mutual trust.
3. Intangible legacy: how the project, though temporary in form, generated a persistent community of practice that continues to influence local urban policies and participatory design
HERITAGE AND EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF RECONSTRUCTED CONTINUITY: THE LUMINARA DI SAN RANIERI IN HISTORIC PISA
Homa Habibian, Michela Lazzeroni
abstractHoma Habibian, Michela Lazzeroni
Urban heritage is sustained not only through the preservation of material fabric but also through recurrent practices that renew the emotional and mnemonic relationship between people and place. This paper examines this process through the Luminara di San Ranieri, a devotional illumination repeatedly performed along the Lungarni of Pisa. Unlike contemporary curated light-art festivals, the Luminara is historically embedded in a specific urban morphology, civic practice and ritual calendar. The study combines four bodies of evidence: comparative analysis of co-registered municipal cartographic sections between 1834 and 1996, including the war-damage survey; historical-documentary sources, including itemised lamp counts for 1785 and the 1952 municipal reconstruction instructions; systematic visual coding of a photographic corpus of biancherie; and thematic analysis of an exploratory corpus of publicly accessible online accounts. Three findings are advanced. First, the riverfront persisted as a legible spatial framework through urban expansion, wartime destruction and reconstruction. Second, the illumination operates primarily through architectural re-articulation: in 92.5 per cent of coded photographs it follows an existing architectural line, while independent invention occurs in only 12.5 per cent; historical evidence also shows that the river parapets received the largest documented allocation of lamps in 1785. Third, the continuity of the ritual was repeatedly reconstructed after abolition, war and flood rather than maintained through uninterrupted repetition. The paper conceptualises this process as reconstructed continuity: the re-establishment of a meaningful relation between a material urban framework and a recurrent cultural practice after rupture. The case shows how urban heritage can sustain conditions for recognition, collective memory, intergenerational continuity and place-based belonging. It further argues that the Luminara defamiliarises the nocturnal city by intensifying the familiar rather than by displacing it
Empathy and Movement: Asplund and Lewerentz's Emotional Architecture in Nordic Cemetery Design (1914–1940)
Guillem Oró Grau
abstractGuillem Oró Grau
By the late nineteenth century, a convergence of disciplines in Europe began to redefine how space, movement, and human emotion interrelate. Advances in the psychology of perception, particularly Theodor Lipps’ formulation of empathy in 1897, opened new perspectives on how architectural and urban spaces affect their observers. For Lipps, aesthetic pleasure arises not from the object itself but from the empathetic relationship between subject and form. This dynamic was further developed by August Schmarsow, whose theory of spatial composition (1893) emphasized the central role of bodily movement in generating spatial emotional understanding.
These perceptual theories found early architectural application in the Nordic countries during the reform of cemetery design prompted by demographic pressures of the era. The rise of cremation as a socially and hygienically progressive practice enabled a redefinition of funerary rituals as immersive, emotionally supportive experiences. In Sweden, Gustav Schlyter, secretary of the national Cremation Society, collaborated with symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck to translate empathy and perception into spaces designed to accompany mourners through grief. Light, rhythm, spatial progression, and the omnipresence of nature, core element of Nordic identity, were used to produce a calming, therapeutic effect, easing the psychological burden of loss.
Sigurd Lewerentz and Torsten Stubelius first gave architectural form to this approach with their 1914 design for the Helsingborg Crematorium. The project choreographed a ritual procession from darkness to light, from enclosure to landscape, guiding visitors through a carefully sequenced emotional journey. Nature, light, and movement were orchestrated to foster reflection, acceptance, and reconciliation, framing death as a passage within the continuum of life rather than a finality.
Although unbuilt, the Helsingborg project provided the conceptual foundation for Lewerentz’s collaboration with Erik Gunnar Asplund in the 1915 competition for the South Cemetery of Stockholm. Their winning proposal, Tallum, exemplified an empathetic integration with the forest and processional paths designed according to psychophysical and perceptual principles. The resulting Woodland Cemetery became a landscape of emotional and therapeutic architecture, where walking itself became an act of healing which, through symbolism, light, and nature collectively mediated the psychological experience of loss.
SYMVIOSIS
Children Cemetery
Eleni Giapoutzidi Karra
abstractEleni Giapoutzidi Karra
From Infrastructures of Fear to Infrastructures of Mental Health: Reimagining Cemeteries as Hybrid Public Space
This research-design project explores how infrastructures historically associated with fear and mourning, like cemeteries, can be reimagined as crucial public spaces that support mental health, education, and social cohesion. In a world experiencing environmental collapse, war, displacement, and social isolation, urban infrastructure must evolve to reflect not only functional but emotional and psychological needs.
Cemeteries, as part of a city’s spatial syntax, are often marginalized despite their symbolic and social value. This project investigates their potential as hybrid civic spaces that integrate grief into everyday urban life. It regards a thematic park based on the experience of death revolving around two main aspects: a symbolic playground and a children cemetery, using intercultural symbols of death transformed into playful, pedagogical elements. These aim a wider reflection on ways of familiarising children with loss, considering the negative impact it can have on their mental health causing them psychosomatic, post-traumatic problems, due to lack of preparation & educational background. The future is intertwined with children, who are the main axis of this project.
Inspired by personal trauma experience and informed by psychiatric interviews and ethnographic research including case studies from Greece, the Netherlands, and Manila’s North Cemetery where children live among graves, the project addresses how spatial strategies can prepare younger generations for experiences of mourning, often excluded from formal education.
Framed through urban-architectural, anthropological, and psychoanalytical lenses, the project aligns with the conference theme by proposing new models of urban healthcare architecture. It expands the concept of care beyond clinical institutions to include emotionally restorative public space. By transforming cemeteries into infrastructures for mental well-being, the project offers an alternative paradigm of spatial healing where memory, play, and loss coexist to strengthen community resilience and cultural dialogue.
Heritage and Well-being in Urban History: Towards a Historical and Interdisciplinary Framework
Giulia Mezzalama, Aude Naud
abstractGiulia Mezzalama, Aude Naud
How have urban environments historically supported forms of well-being, belonging, and emotional resilience? While recent research has increasingly explored the relationship between heritage and well-being, its historical dimensions within urban contexts remain under-theorised. Since the late twentieth century, the emergence of biopsychosocial and salutogenic approaches has progressively broadened the understanding of health, recognising cultural, spatial, and relational factors as key determinants of well-being. Building on this paradigm shift, this paper explores how such approaches can be traced in urban history, suggesting that contemporary understandings of heritage and well-being can be understood as rearticulations of practices that have long been embedded in urban life.
Historical examples indicate that the relationship between culture, space, and care has deep roots in urban contexts. They also show how urban heritage has contributed to processes of place attachment, the construction of shared socio-cultural and political identities, and the development of a sense of belonging and continuity over time, by embedding cultural meanings, social memories, and affective experiences within urban spaces and everyday practices.
Drawing on the literature on cultural heritage and well-being, the paper identifies key mechanisms linking heritage and well-being, particularly through perspectives from environmental psychology. These perspectives highlight both the influence of place characteristics on health and well-being and the ways in which places embody memories, identities, affects, and practices. Interpreted from a historical perspective, these mechanisms can be traced in the spatial and cultural organisation of cities, where cultural practices, symbolic environments, and built forms have long functioned as adaptive resources supporting care, recovery, and emotional stability.
By bridging urban history, heritage studies, and environmental psychology, this paper proposes a historically grounded and interdisciplinary framework for interpreting the relationship between heritage and well-being, offering new perspectives on how cities have fostered belonging, resilience, and collective care across time.
Session 89 - Activist knowledge(s) and the city: engaged research and its significance for urban history
This session explores the relationship between knowledge production and urban dynamics, positioning it as a subject that contributes to a critical understanding of urban history. It explores the various forms of engagement between scholarship and activism in cities throughout the 20th century. It focuses on the transnational dimensions of the nexus and networks of activists-scholars in and between cities, with a decolonial perspective
Coordinators: Agustí Nieto Galan, Giusy Pappalardo, Damir Arsenijevic
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Coordinators: Agustí Nieto Galan, Giusy Pappalardo, Damir Arsenijevic
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Session 89 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 3 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
Spatial Practices of the Urban Humanities: Toward an Engaged, Activist, and Public Scholarship
Robert Nilsson Mohammadi, Ana Betancour, Erling Björgvinsson, Myrto Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Julie Goodrich, Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, Adam Lundberg, Saba Moini
abstractRobert Nilsson Mohammadi, Ana Betancour, Erling Björgvinsson, Myrto Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Julie Goodrich, Heidi Svenningsen Kajita, Adam Lundberg, Saba Moini
How can humanities and spatial disciplines be brought into relation for urban knowledge-making without extracting activist and community work? We approach this question from the development of urban humanities in a context where community organising, popular education, cultural production, and movement-based knowledge-making are already established. Rather than assuming that scholars bring knowledge or engagement into the city from outside, we ask how academic actors can participate in existing urban ecologies of knowledge while reorganising their own practices.
We compare two influential precedents: the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley and its successor, the Future Histories Lab, and the Urban Room in Castlegate, Sheffield, within the UK Urban Rooms Network. Drawing on archives, publications, and interviews with Susan Moffat and Carolyn Butterworth, we analyse how these initiatives organise encounters across social, institutional, and disciplinary difference. Bringing Michael Frisch’s shared authority into dialogue with Jane Rendell’s critical spatial practice, we argue that room-making is constitutive of shared authority: spatial practices create conditions in which differently situated and partly incommensurable forms of expertise can contribute to the authorship of urban knowledge and meaning.
The cases offer contrasting configurations of engaged scholarship. Berkeley organises encounters pedagogically through experimental teaching; the Urban Room does so civically through mediation and spaces for collective inquiry. Both reveal the spatial, organisational, relational, and temporal labour required to sustain collaboration. Shared authorship depends on relationships that precede individual encounters, reciprocal and multidirectional learning, and openness for questions and practices to change through encounter. What remains available for subsequent encounters makes shared authorship temporal as well as spatial.
Archiving Radical Movements: Knowledge Co-Production and Urban Struggles in Malmö
Fredrik Egefur
abstractFredrik Egefur
Many archives established within the labor movement during the 20th century are currently grappling with the challenge of staying relevant in a political landscape defined by new, rapidly shifting forms of urban activism. This presentation, based on a project at The Labour Movement Archives of Malmö (Sweden), examines how a historically institutional archive can adapt to activist knowledge production and participatory forms of historical engagement in the contemporary city.
Traditionally, this archive collected material almost exclusively from the reformist social-democratic party and the trade unions. In recent years, however, we have broadened our mission substantially, documenting feminist, anti-racist, queer, and more radical left-wing movements, as well as informal political networks working outside the conventional parliamentary arena. This transition has required not only new collecting strategies but also new methodological approaches.
A key component has been the use of participatory and co-creative research methods. In these three major projects, I have collaborated with activists through interviews, documenting practices, interpreting histories, and shaping research questions collaboratively: the Winter Palace (active 1987–89), an anarchist/DIY social centre; the Feminist Festival (2014–19), a major grassroots feminist event; and Refugees Welcome Malmö (2015), where volunteers and municipal staff documented the large-scale refugee mobilization.
A further dimension concerns the tension between activist engagement and academic neutrality. As both a political activist, researcher at the University, and head of the Labour Movement Archives of Skåne, balancing these roles has been a central concern in my work. While archives are not political actors, they are never fully neutral: choices about what to preserve inevitably shape future understandings of the labor movement. A reflective approach is therefore necessary to avoid marginalizing alternative voices.
These cases highlight how archives can act as sites of knowledge co-production, where historians and urban activists collaboratively document and interpret political action. By tracing the interplay between grassroots mobilization and archival practice, the presentation illuminates the role of activist knowledge in shaping understandings of urban social struggles. It also invites reflection on how engaged research can influence future urban policy, planning, and collective memory.
Reconstructing Urban Environmental Mobilization: A Participatory Archival Approach to Brussels’ Citizen Movements (1970s-1980s)
Eline Inghelbrecht
abstractEline Inghelbrecht
This paper reflects on a series of methodological experiments conducted as part of a PhD project that
investigates urban environmental activism in Brussels between the 1970s and the mid-1990s. Drawing on debates in public history and participatory historical geography, the research examines how activist organizations produced alternative socio-ecological understandings of the city and how these histories can be studied collaboratively with the communities involved. Rather than treating activist organizations solely as objects of historical inquiry, the project engages them as interlocutors in the interpretation and production of historical knowledge. The paper focuses on three forms of participatory research practice: collaborative archival interpretation, participatory knowledge production through workshops, and participation in public dissemination and contemporary activism. These methodological experiments were developed in response to the limitations of archival sources, in which environmental concerns often remain fragmented or implicit, and to the recognition that activist organizations possess situated forms of historical knowledge that are essential for interpreting their own histories. Rather than evaluating participatory methods solely in terms of research outcomes, the paper examines how they reshape the position of the researcher. It argues that research position is not a fixed characteristic but is continuously negotiated through interactions with different interlocutors, including activists, archivists, citizen organizations, and public institutions. These encounters generate shifting expectations concerning expertise, authorship, representation, reciprocity and accountability. By reflecting on participatory research methods as moments of collaboration, tension, and discomfort, the paper identifies three overlapping positions that emerge within participatory historical research: the ethical researcher, the strategic researcher, and the political researcher.
Situated Knowledge and Territorial Heritage: The Italian Territorialist School and the Historical Roots of Co-produced Urban Knowledge
Maddalena Rossi
abstractMaddalena Rossi
This paper explores the historical and theoretical foundations of co-produced urban knowledge through the lens of the Italian Territorialist School (Scuola territorialista italiana), a research and activist movement that, since the late twentieth century, has proposed a radical rethinking of the relationship between expert and indigenous knowledge in urban and regional transformation. The paper situates this intellectual trajectory within broader transnational debates on participatory and activist epistemologies, examining how the territorialist approach has anticipated many contemporary discourses on knowledge co-production, environmental humanities, and decolonial urban theory.
Emerging from the encounter between urban planning, geography, anthropology, and ecological thought, the Italian Territorialist School—founded on the works of Alberto Magnaghi, and enriched by a network of local laboratories and civic practices—conceives the territory not as a neutral container of development, but as a living palimpsest of collective knowledge, memory, and identity. Within this framework, the production of knowledge becomes a transformative and situated process, where the saperi esperti (expert knowledge) and saperi locali o popolari (local or indigenous knowledge) intertwine in the construction of the progetto locale—a vision of self-sustainable territorial development grounded in the principles of civic responsibility, ecological balance, and cultural continuity.
From a historical perspective, the paper reconstructs how these ideas were formed through the long genealogy of participatory practices and social mobilizations in Italian cities and regions—from the experiences of urban and regional workshops in Tuscany to more recent co-design projects such as I CARE in the Florentine metropolitan area. By tracing these experiences, the study highlights how the territorialist epistemology embodies a prefigurative politics that challenges capitalist and neoliberal urban paradigms, while offering a framework for rethinking the role of the university, the planner, and the citizen in the co-production of spatial justice.
Methodologically, the contribution engages with public history and participatory action research to explore the ways in which the territorialist notion of heritage as commons redefines the temporal and social bo
Activist Knowledge(s) from a Mediterranean Periphery: The Xylella Controversy in Salento (Italy)
Christian Colella
abstractChristian Colella
This chapter examines the controversy that followed the detection of Xylella fastidiosa subsp. pauca in Salento, southern Italy, in 2013, and its association with Olive Quick Decline Syndrome. Rather than treating the conflict as a simple opposition between scientific expertise and local resistance, the chapter analyses it as a struggle over how plant disease should be known, governed and treated.
The case is situated within a longer and wider history of Xylella fastidiosa, a plant pathogen that has moved across different agricultural systems and scientific contexts, from Pierce’s Disease in California to Citrus Variegated Chlorosis in Brazil and Olive Quick Decline Syndrome in Europe. This historical perspective helps to show how local outbreaks are shaped not only by ecological conditions, but also by global circulations of plants, pathogens, scientific expertise and biosecurity regulations.
In Salento, EU and national emergency measures promoted zoning, vector control and the eradication of infected and potentially infected olive trees. These measures were contested by farmers, activists, agronomists and civic associations, who converged in 2015 into Il Popolo degli Ulivi. The movement challenged the institutional framing of Xylella as the primary cause of olive decline and promoted a broader, multi-causal interpretation centred on fungi, insects, soil degradation, agrochemical pollution and the long-term effects of modern agricultural practices.
The chapter focuses on this production of activist knowledge: public seminars, field experiments, legal strategies and collaborations with sympathetic scientists through which the movement tried to reopen research questions that emergency governance had marginalized. At the same time, the chapter asks what this activist science made visible and what it left aside. While the movement’s emphasis on local ecological complexity challenged dominant etiologies, it also risked underplaying the global infrastructures of plant trade, ornamental markets and agro-industrial capitalism that made the arrival of Xylella possible in the first place. The Salento case therefore reveals both the epistemic force and the political ambivalence of activist knowledge in environmental controversies.
Session 89 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 3 Institut d'Estudis Catalans
From Urban Gardens to Logistic Networks: Genealogies and Configurations of Madrid’s Agroecology (2000–2025)
Estefania Berengan Mendaña
abstractEstefania Berengan Mendaña
Over the past decades, Madrid has established itself as a laboratory of urban agroecological experimentation (Houde-Tremblay, Cloutier, McClintock, Audet & Olivier, 2023). Self-managed initiatives emerging in the early 2000s—such as Bajo el Asfalto está la Huerta (BAH!)—along with networks of community urban gardens (Fernández Casadevante, 2025; Del Viso, Fernández Casadevante & Morán, 2017), consumer groups, and cooperative projects such as La Osa or La Ecomarca (Mata Olmo & Yacamán Ochoa, 2015; Rojo & Morán Alonso, 2014), have shaped a diverse assemblage of practices that combine political activism, collective management, and the co-production of knowledge.
These experiences seek to rebuild food production and distribution in the city according to the principles of social justice and food sovereignty. Drawing on the cases of BAH!, the Red de Huertos Urbanos, and Ecomarca, this paper traces the genealogy of Madrid’s agroecology movement from a historical-ethnographic and comparative perspective, with special attention to the logistical, institutional, and affective infrastructures that have enabled or constrained its development (Corsín Jiménez, 2024; Minuchin & Maino, 2023).
To do so, we analyze their origins, areas of influence, and relational networks, examining both their connections with processes of institutionalisation as municipal public policy (Houde-Tremblay, Cloutier, McClintock & Olivier, 2025; Roth, Russell & Thompson, 2023) and the creation of cooperative distribution networks and circuits (Sanz Cañada & Yacamán Ochoa, 2022). This approach allows us to explore dimensions such as autonomy and institutionalisation, as well as the economic sustainability and political nature of their interventions.
From the perspective of logistical geographies, we assess whether these ways of organising, distributing, and sustaining the commons rehearse prefigurative logics capable of projecting themselves or transforming their scales (Nicol, 2020). Through this lens, we examine the balance and possible future trajectories of Madrid’s agroecology movement.
Shaping the streets by bike: Cyclists and mobility futures in Lisbon during the 1970s political turmoil
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, Luísa Sousa
abstractJaume Valentines-Álvarez, Luísa Sousa
Activists have not only transformed the social life, cultural background and neighbours’ networks of the cities: they have also shaped their very streets and urban materiality. Among them, cycling activists have played a key role in planning socio-technical landscapes in more eco-social justice ways, experiencing, imagining and designing the city through specific “situated-in-motion knowledge” standpoints (also structured by gender, race and class).
In this paper, we focus on the revolutionary period of 1974-76 Portugal to unveil the vigorous debate about urban planning and modes of mobility. In midst of the national political changes, social struggles and the international oil crisis, an intense environmental movement popped up. One of its first targets was urban noise, air pollution and the car-centered mobility. At that time, professional associations and the car lobby employed strong rhetoric to defend the alleged liberating role of the automobile as a door to European modernity. In contrast, bicycles (and public transport) were often presented by activists as “technologies of protest”, that is, as an alternative to private automobility towards environment, safety, and what Edward Soja has called “spatial justice”. Many of their proposals only materialized decades later. The paper draws on the results of the projects “Hi-BicLab: History Lab for Sustainable Urban Mobilities: Lisbon's cycling policies” and “Exchange Zones of Epistemic Resistance and Alternative Innovation: Activism, Grassroots Movements and Expertise, 1970s-1990s”.
Reclamation through Narration: Activist Knowledge(s) along the Matanza-Riachuelo River, Buenos Aires (1994-2024)
Giusy Pappalardo, Marco Armiero
abstractGiusy Pappalardo, Marco Armiero
The Matanza-Riachuelo River, flowing through Buenos Aires into the Río de la Plata, has long been a site of displacement, contamination, and injustice. Its very name, La Matanza (“The Massacre”), recalls colonial violence against Indigenous communities. Subsequent waves of migration led to the creation of informal settlements (villas) along its banks, where land was cheaper but highly vulnerable to flooding. Industrial expansion and military dictatorships further deepened marginalization. By the mid-twentieth century, slaughterhouses, tanneries, and petrochemical plants had turned the river into one of the most polluted in Latin America. The consequences profoundly affected Indigenous, migrant, and working-class communities, but also generated forms of resistance and reclamation of both physical and narrative spaces.
In 2004, residents of the most contaminated settlements organized their knowledge and launched the lawsuit Fallo Mendoza, denouncing decades of toxicity and securing the creation of a new institution charged with decontaminating the river. This legal achievement marked a rare recognition of grassroots expertise in shaping environmental governance and a turning point in the visibility of subaltern struggles. Yet despite the victory, the river and its poorest settlements remain polluted, and subaltern voices continue to be silenced.
This paper investigates how activist knowledge has emerged, been organized, and reshaped riverbank settlements between 2004 and 2024, and how it has been reorganized under shifting political conditions. It draws on activists’ perspectives in a long struggle for socio-environmental and epistemic justice, one that foregrounds the power of narratives to disrupt what Armiero et al. (2019) call “toxic narrative infrastructures,” systems of dominant accounts that silence and normalize injustices.
Evoking Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession, the paper explores the epistemic implications of narrating the city’s history from below and the transformative potential such acts carry. We argue that activist knowledge is both a tool of resistance and a means of producing new urban trajectories, enabling communities to articulate claims to justice and recognition. The study relies on three sources: archival research (institutional and activist archives), oral history, and an ongoing experiment in collective mapping and knowledge co-production, developed through a university–community partnership with local actors.
Session 90 - Writing City Monographs in the 21st Century: Challenges in a Multifaceted World [Round Table]
The roundtable provides a forum for exchange on thematic, methodological and practical challenges
of writing comprehensive histories of individual cities with a primary focus on the 19th and 20th
centuries.
Coordinators: Christoph Strupp, Erika Szívós
show/hide introduction
of writing comprehensive histories of individual cities with a primary focus on the 19th and 20th
centuries.
Coordinators: Christoph Strupp, Erika Szívós
show/hide introduction
Session 90 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Reinventing City Monographs in the Age of Planetary Urbanism
Jaroslav Ira
abstractJaroslav Ira
The last few decades saw a fundamental change of the urban world, as well as radical theoretical and methodological propositions how to reflect it, such as thinking beyond the “methodological cityism”, addressing multiple, complex and overlapping geographies, and so forth. These trends put even more stress on the city monographs, a popular yet old practice of urban history writing, and a genre that is mostly blind to theoretical shifts and insights. How to reconcile recent urban theorizing with the genre of city monographs? How to reinvent city monographs from replicas of the increasingly outdated notion of the city to vanguard tools of urban pedagogy in the era of “planetary urbanism”? In this paper, I explore the ways the city monographs can address this challenge, while scrutinizing some of the recent approaches that can be instructive here, such as global history, comparative urbanism, subaltern urbanism and geocriticism. It will be argued that these approaches, while originally developed for different purposes, can be adopted for the genre of city monographs as perspectives that help address the particular cities and their histories in a decentered way, approaching them from “outside in” rather than “inside out” view, see them as parts of broader and even global relations and structures, and as radically open and changing phenomena that are also subject to multiple readings.
City History Beyond the Human: Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Moscow
Anna Mazanik
abstractAnna Mazanik
My proposed contribution to the roundtable draws on my book "Sanitizing Moscow: Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia," published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October 2025 as part of the History of the Urban Environment series. "Sanitizing Moscow" offers an environmental history of public health reforms in late imperial Moscow between 1870 and 1917. It examines the entanglements between Russia’s urban modernization and the more-than-human environment amid the major social and political transformations sparked by the liberal reforms of the 1860s and 1870s and the transnational rise of scientific medicine and sanitary technologies.
One of the challenges in writing the urban history of imperial Moscow is that the city has already been the subject of substantial scholarship; shaped by a strong Marxist tradition, much of this work has focused on the urban poor, migration, social conflict, and inequality. How, then, can one write an innovative history of imperial Moscow that has a sharp critical edge while also making it a “usable past” that resonates with contemporary social concerns?
In my talk, I will focus on two methodological strategies drawn from the environmental humanities that informed my book. The first is expanding the analytical focus beyond the human and tracing broader environmental impacts of medicalization and urban infrastructural development, at the same time revealing unexpected parallels between the human and the animal experience. The second involves using the perspective of environmental justice to illuminate forms of inequality—both among different social groups within the city, and between the city and its rural hinterlands.
Do we need a new urban biography of Rotterdam’s modern port city in the 19th and 20th centuries
Paul Van de Laar
abstractPaul Van de Laar
My urban biography of Rotterdam, Stad van Formaat (The City of Stature), published in 2000, examines the city’s development throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis is grounded in the model of logistical revolutions formulated by the Swedish regional economist Å. E. Andersson in 1986. Andersson contends that economic restructuring is driven by the gradual evolution of both material and immaterial infrastructures that support production, exchange, and consumption—most notably the built environment, transport networks, and formal and informal institutions. He further argues that major expansions in trade and commerce typically occur when substantial investments are made in centrally and strategically positioned global nodes. Such nodes facilitate market enlargement and enhance the possibilities for the division of labour, specialization, and sustained economic growth. Ports, as critical gateways of globalization, have played a decisive role in these transformations, particularly during the nineteenth century, the era of the port city (Osterhammel, 2014).
Within this framework, my synthesis explains Rotterdam’s urban development through an examination of local responses to two pivotal logistical revolutions. The first, occurring around 1870, reorganized the transnational Rhine connection with the German hinterland and unfolded after 1945 in the industrial “petroleumscape” that underwrote Rotterdam’s emergence as a leading world port. Around 1970, the second logistical revolution experienced yet another profound transformation with the introduction of containerization and the progressive adoption of new information and communication technologies. This shift coincided with a broader reorientation within Western Europe’s industrial economies and globalization. These logistical revolutions and their associated spatial adaptations were interpreted through a set of “ideal-typical” port characteristics—the waterfront merchant city, the transitpolis, and the welfare city—which served as heuristic instruments for analysing human agency.
In the round table discussion, I consider my Rotterdam research from two vantage points:
To what extent might a revised edition of my urban biography profit from recent debates concerning path dependency, narratives of modernization, and the challenges posed by new materialist approaches to the study of port infrastructures?
How might an urban biography of Rotterdam contribute—as Charles Tilly urged in his 199
Session 90 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Experiences with compiling a “History of Vienna” and comments on academic “city histories” for Austria
Ferdinand Opll
abstractFerdinand Opll
Why Vienna? 1. The Austrian capital as centre not only of the actual Republic but as core of the duchy and the monarchy is of utmost importance, not only, but also with regard to its history. 2.The two editors are Archivists at the “Vienna Municipal and Provincial Archives”. 3. The initiative of the Böhlau publishing house to publish a multi-volume history of Vienna. The core-team of two editors conceived a division into three volumes: Vol. 1 = From the origins up to the First Ottoman Siege of Vienna (1529); Vol. 2 = from 1529 up to the Josephine reform of the Vienna Magistrate (1783); Vol. 3 = the last period up to Austria's accession to the European Union (1995). For the realisation the editors decided to bring in specialists for the respective epochs and subject areas, thus to organise the project on a team-basis. The three volumes were published from 2001 to 2006, and its reception in academic circles and by a wider audience was more than satisfactory.
Obviously, the capitals of the Austrian federal states (“Bundesländer”) also have a wealth of academic urban histories, not only because of their size and their well-developed central functions for the surrounding area and region, but also because of their importance for the identity and self-image of their own inhabitants and the associated state. Of course, the general phenomenon of the “city” is represented by significantly more cities than only Vienna and the provincial capitals. It is also to note that the process of urbanisation in Austria covers a quite diverse complex, including not only medieval towns but also towns elevated to city-status much later – the most recent example being Lenzing an der Ager in Upper Austria (2025). Two overview works help a lot in dealing with Urban History for Austria: the “Österreichisches Städtebuch” (Austrian Town Book) and the “Österreichischer Städteatlas” (Historical Atlas of Austrian Towns). Alas, none of them covers the whole range of Austrian Towns. What exists for a good portion of the cities, however, are scholarly city monographs. Characterizing these and drawing attention to the inequalities of the respective “city histories” fits in perfectly with the theme of Section 90 of the Congress in Barcelona.
Session 91 - Public history at city history museums
Public history denotes a broad range of methods to make use of history in and for the public. The city museums perceive public history as a means to address the public in order to frame the contemporary city in its historical formation. The session intends to discuss the role of public history in times of ever more politicized history work.
Coordinators: Heiko Droste, Lisa Kosok
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Coordinators: Heiko Droste, Lisa Kosok
show/hide introduction
Session 91 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
The House of Bakić: Reimagining Public History through Art, Memory, and Participatory Museology in the City of Bjelovar
Marijana Dragičević
abstractMarijana Dragičević
The House of Bakić project in Bjelovar, Croatia, reimagines the city history museum by connecting public history, modern art, and community participation. Developed in the birthplace of sculptor Vojin Bakić (1915–1992), the project transforms his former home into a living museum dedicated not only to the artist, but also to the social, emotional, and cultural histories of a small Central European city.
Conceived as a memory topos - or memotopia - the House of Bakić functions as an archive, a laboratory, and a participatory platform. It invites citizens to contribute objects, stories, and micro-histories, while drawing on new museology, narrative museology, public history, and affect theory. The project argues that emotion and storytelling are central tools through which museums create historical meaning, civic recognition, and cultural regeneration.
Mapping a heterogeneous field: Praxeological Perspectives on Transmedial History Cultures
Janina Kriszio
abstractJanina Kriszio
In Germany, public history can be considered an emerging field. Since 2008, numerous steps have been taken to establish it as an autonomous subdiscipline of history. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon context, public history in Germany does not focus solely on employability. Instead it has developed a set of theories and methods rooted in cultural and media studies, turning it into a transdisciplinary field of historical-cultural research. This breadth is reflected in the wide range of formats, materialities, and acteurs concerning the processes of production, distribution, exhibition and reception of history which constitute the subject of public history research.
The Hamburg-based project “Doing History: Praxeological Perspectives on Transmedial History Cultures” is currently preparing a grant application for a large interdisciplinary research network. It aims to map this emerging field from a praxeological perspective based on the idea that “history” is not a fixed past but a performative, continually renewed process shaped in the present. During this application phase, the project‘s goal is to better understand the various methods, materialities, modes of communication, and agendas in order to connect different history producers and strengthen the general infrastructure for a diverse and critical historiography. On the long run the project also aims to support networks between academic and non-academic contexts and to contribute to the development of a shared research terminology.
In my presentation I will report on the ongoing work of the project from a coordination perspective. Following an open call for proposals, which had attracted a wide range of history producers, I will describe the challenges arising from the heterogeneity of the field at the intersections of historical research, education and entertainment. City museums – acting simultaneously as local memory institutions, social forums, and cultural laboratories – offer ideal conditions for making these diverse practices of doing history visible and open to critical reflection. In the context of the panel I would therefore like to discuss whether and how city museums can play a crucial role in the research on doing history in transmedial history cultures and what impulses they might provide for a more interconnected, methodologically diverse, and socially engaged public history.
Virovitica City Museum, permanent exhibition Wood Age - The use of public history in the
branding of the City through the activities of the municipal museum in the local environment
Mihaela Kulej
abstractMihaela Kulej
The new permanent exhibition of the Virovitica City Museum represents a significant step forward
in the presentation and interpretation of the historical, cultural, and natural heritage of the wider
Virovitica region.
This shift in museum practice is rooted in a fresh approach to presenting the history of Virovitica City
through a thematically conceived interpretation of the permanent display—wood. Within this
framework, a diverse range of artefacts and documents, not only of historical or artistic, traditional and archeological, but also aesthetic and symbolic value, and originating from various periods, are brought together to form narratives that illuminate the past and present of Virovitica in a universally relevant and accessible way. Our guiding intention was to connect local history with a universal theme and to create an experience that allows each visitor to engage with their own sense of identity, regardless of their background or place of origin. In doing so, we shaped a more comprehensive and immersive story of the material (tangible) and intangible cultural heritage of the broader Virovitica area. The years of research and preparation for the renovation and "rejuvenation" project preceded the definition of the new permanent exhibition. Careful research by museum staff in the fields of ethnology, crafts, archaeology, traditional and folk beliefs, official religions, and cultural, artistic, and traditional history led to the definition of each subtheme within the exhibition, as well as the process of selecting materials that are not all related to wood as a material, but rather complement the presentation process through storytelling. With its entire project and work, the museum became a meeting place for all generations, as well as visitors of different interests. For the end of this presentation, it should be noted that the museum has won a number of national and international awards for the interdisciplinary work of curators on the thematically presented exhibition, as well as for professional and scientific work during cultural-historical, ethnographic and archaeological research on the topics presented in the permanent exhibition. As a result, the town of Virovitica has become a place recognizable for its Museum that tells a unique story about its city and of all its inhabitants through the centuries and through its tangible or intangible heritage material,
but on a universal level that all museum visitors enjoy: local or not.
Between Imperial, Soviet, and National:
Contested Memories at the Museum of the Battle of Poltava (1709)
Viktoriia Serhiienko
abstractViktoriia Serhiienko
The Battle of Poltava was one of the most significant land battles between Sweden and the Tsardom of Muscovy during the Great Northern War, fought for dominance in the Baltic region and Eastern Europe. This battle cannot be removed from Russian history without seriously undermining the established historical narrative. Poltava (1709) serves as a “foundational myth” in Russian historiography. On the basis of this myth, Peter I’s empire was consolidated—at the expense of potential Ukrainian statehood. For Ukraine, the battle marks Russia as the political “other” and as an enemy, while also creating the opportunity to elevate Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa to the status of a national hero and a symbol of violent resistance to Russian imperialism and of Ukrainian self-assertion. The eminent Ukrainian-American linguist Yuriy Shevelov went so far as to describe the Battle of Poltava as a catastrophe and a tragedy for Ukrainians, comparable in significance to the Battle of White Mountain (1620) for the Czech people.
Moreover, Poltava, a medium-sized city in central Ukraine, which was rebuilt by the Tsarist governors in the early 19th century to glorify the Russian imperial military victory, is often described in literature as one large monument to this battle. In this paper, I would like to discuss the commemorative strategies of the Museum of the Battle of Poltava from its foundation in 1909 to the present day. Accordingly, my presentation will be divided into three parts, corresponding to the Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods of this place of memory (lieu de mémoire by Pierre Hora). First and foremost, I am interested in how the city’s history—of which the Battle of Poltava in 1709 is an integral and important part—has been conceptualized, for instance through the museum’s exhibitions and guided tours, both historically and in the present day. How have the Russian imperial, Soviet, and Ukrainian national historical discourses influenced the museum’s rethinking of means to address the public? In particular, how does the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war and the associated cancel-culture controversies relate to visions of this place of memory by the museum, grassroots organizations, and local governance?
Elsinore Remains a Shipyard Town! Urban Identities and Narratives around the Former Shipyard
Iben Vyff
abstractIben Vyff
Although more than forty years have passed since the shipyard whistle last echoed across Elsinore, the town’s identity as a shipyard community continues to hold a strong presence in the collective consciousness of its inhabitants—including those who moved there after the yard’s closure.
This persistence is understandable. For over a century, shipyards formed the backbone of Danish industry—economically, politically, socially, and culturally—and Elsinore’s yard was no exception. At its peak, it employed thousands, and almost every family was connected to it. Yet while shipyards relied on a wide range of professions, collective memory often reduces this diversity to a masculine imaginary of sweat, steel, and soot.
The identity of Elsinore as a shipyard town is sustained both mentally and physically. It is preserved through narratives and memories as well as through the urban landscape itself. A substantial number of former shipyard buildings remain intact today. While some have fallen into disrepair, others have been repurposed for new functions. One of these repurposed buildings now houses the Shipyard Museum, which has been integrated into the local museum infrastructure.
Over the past decade, the museum has interviewed former employees. However, these conversations often reproduce collective narratives, yielding repetitive accounts. Personal memories are overshadowed by fixed anecdotes, while other experiences remain unspoken. This paper explores how memory work may be stimulated through varied triggers—local, visual, and material—to open space for alternative and more personal recollections. It also considers how entrenched collective memories shape what is remembered, negotiated, or silenced, and what this reveals about the emotional and identity-related dimensions of remembrance. Finally, it discusses the potential for co-creating new, plural narratives through such encounters.
The paper is informed by museum studies, memory studies, and oral and public history. It draws on research emphasizing the situated and contextual nature of memory (e.g., Welzer 2007; Bjerg & Rosén Rasmussen 2012; Ekelund 2015) and engages with the concept of composure (Dawson 1994; Thomson 1994; Summerfield 2015).
Engaging public history in contemporary debates on urban agriculture: reflections on the Ghent’s Land exhibition
Esther Beeckaert
abstractEsther Beeckaert
This paper examines the role of Ghent City Museum’s (STAM) 2024 exhibition Ghent’s Land in contemporary urban debates on agriculture and food production. The exhibition presented the long-term history of the extensive farmland holdings of Ghent’s Public Centre for Social Welfare (PCSW). Drawing on historical research, illustrations, objects, and video portraits, Ghent’s Land aimed to substantiate, inform, and inspire stakeholders and citizens in discussions about the future of Ghent’s farmland. This paper reflects on the possibilities and limitations of using historical perspectives to enrich such contemporary debates.
The Ghent’s Land project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between historian Esther Beeckaert (STAM; PhD, Ghent University) and the urban planner Hans Vandermaelen of the Flemish Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (ILVO). Their research traced the origins of Ghent’s PCSW landownership – today around 1,800 hectares, but historically more than 5,000 hectares – to the thirteenth century, when charitable institutions providing healthcare and poor relief acquired agricultural estates outside the city walls. For centuries, these lands generated stable lease income to finance care, but just as importantly, they ensured direct access to food and fuel for the city’s poor and sick. Despite a structural loss of this public patrimony since 1960, the PCSW of Ghent remains the largest public landowner in Flanders.
The paper argues that public history, as researched and narrated by city museums, can meaningfully enrich contemporary societal debates. By narrating 800 years of history, the Ghent’s Land exhibition provided crucial knowledge and established a safe environment in which the debate on its future use could settle. Its illustrations, objects and video’s sparked curiosity and engagement among museum visitors for whom the topic and debate had previously seemed too abstract or too far removed from their (urban) livelihood. The exhibition particularly stimulated constructive dialogue among stakeholders – including city authorities and farmers. Understanding how urban landowners such as the Ghent PCSW historically were strongly tied to rural land holdings and tenant-farmers invites renewed reflection on how urban farmland might again contribute to sustainable urban food systems in the twenty-first century.
Session 91 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Musealization of Vernacular Architecture as Public History: Between Idealization and Critical Memory
Simita Fernández
abstractSimita Fernández
The official history of architecture is the history of academic and monumental buildings, ignoring ordinary people’s life narratives. However, there have been moments when the intellectual world—linked to political and economic issues, or artistic avant-gardes—has turned its gaze toward what vernacular architecture is and represents. These moments have activated dynamics for disseminating knowledge of popular culture in order to redefine concepts and construct discourses on identity, tradition and belonging. As a result of these recovery processes, this architecture has reached us as a cultural construct that has been defined, classified and reinterpreted over time, shaped by social, academic and political strains. This make the development of museum exhibitions a key tool for modifying the perception of the past.
This paper examines the musealization of vernacular architecture by understanding museums as active spaces where narratives about popular culture are defined. Their choices shape our understanding of an architecture that, beyond the construction itself, speaks of ways of life, social relations and attachments to the land. The analysis asks whether these practices of reinterpretation operate as mechanisms for transmitting knowledge or whether they generate a romantic vision that dominates the narrative of what is meant to be preserved.
The analysis of various examples shows that the musealization of Spanish vernacular architecture in the 20th century developed in three stages: an initial phase marked by ethnographic collecting prior to the Civil War; second, the instrumentalization carried out during Francoism; and a late 20th century phase characterized by more critical and contextualized local initiatives. In these three phases, despite corresponding to opposing discursive moments, the process of preserving vernacular culture remained constantly caught between the desire to conserve and the risk of idealizing.
This research project redefines museums not only as spaces of conservation, but also as places of ideological debate. The architectural forms they show us, how they are contextualized, and the narratives that accompany them construct a specific image of vernacular architecture and a specific idea of collective identity. The contribution of this paper is to open a discussion on the role museums play in the production of public history and in their capacity to contribute to the future preservation of vernacular architecture.
Faire une histoire publique de la ville sans musée de la ville ? L’exemple de Dijon et d'Albi
Sandrine Victor, Jérôme Loiseau
abstractSandrine Victor, Jérôme Loiseau
La communication se propose d'interroger les cas limites de deux villes françaises, Dijon et Albi qui, riches d'un fort patrimoine bâti et d'une intense histoire locale, n'ont pour autant pas de musée d'histoire de ville dédié. Les cas se complètent et interrogent différents aspects du sujet. Peut-on faire une histoire publique dans des cités qui ne disposent pas du centre névralgique que peut représenter un musée de ville ? Dans le cas dijonnais, on fait face à un récit historique décousu, atomisé entre cinq musées de ville et un centre municipal d’interprétation de l’architecture et du patrimoine – le 1204 comme la date de fondation du premier hôpital urbain – lié à l’obtention en 2008 du label « ville d’art et d’histoire ». La question ici serait de savoir si l'Histoire publique peut être l'outil de mise en cohérence de l'histoire pour un public élargi. Dans le cas d'Albi, le patrimoine bâti, hérité d'une période médiévale très dense dans cette cité, est enregistré au patrimoine mondial de l'Unesco : cette labellisation suffit-elle à donner une trame à l'histoire locale ? L'absence d'un musée de ville ne traduit-elle pas une préoccupation d’attractivité touristique plus que de mise en valeur historique d'un patrimoine ? Dans le cas dijonnais, les musées cherchent à donner à voir, chacun dans son domaine, les mutations spatiales, esthétiques, historiques et socio-économiques d’une cité invariablement pensée comme la capitale des ducs de Bourgogne. Avec le service municipal du patrimoine, ils jouent un rôle clé de diffusion d’une culture historique au service des publics qui enferme bien souvent la ville dans son histoire ducale. Mais l’histoire publique peut-elle se limiter à soutenir les ambitions politiques et économiques d’une ville . Dans les deux cas, il s'agira d'évaluer les apports de l'histoire publique dans la prise de possession des citoyens de leur histoire locale.
A museum site for the housing history of Barcelona at El Bon Pastor
Paolo Sustersic, Joan Roca
abstractPaolo Sustersic, Joan Roca
The Museu d’Història de Barcelona (Barcelona History Museum, known until 2024 as MUHBA), is an institution that covers from the Roman times to the present day. In 2023 it celebrated its 80th anniversary converted into a citizens’ museum, with a polycentric network of heritage sites conceived from historical research carried out with academic rigor and citizen’s commitment.
One of the most relevant projects of the Museum has been the River Besòs Heritage and Museum Trail, which explores the 20th century metropolis, from water supply and industrial production to housing and urbanism in different locations.
Inaugurated in March 2023, the MUHBA Bon Pastor-Cases Barates was the culmination of a research project that stemmed in 2010 from the interest of the residents’ association in preserving a part of the first social housing model in Barcelona (Cases Barates), and in historicizing the working-class as a part of the city history. The close collaboration between residents and the museum made it possible to move away from approaches focused in community anthropology or urban planning.
The museum has two main sections: the first discusses social housing in Barcelona and the second reconstructs 4 cheap houses, each of them depicting one of the key periods in the estate’s history.
The project had 3 core museological principles: urban history as a basic paradigm, the housing issue on the scales of Europe, Barcelona and the neighbourhood, and the insertion in a city portray from the periphery to the centre.
The works carried out included architectural restititution, documentary research, archaeological survey, implementation of a historic narrative, creating a collection with donations from neighbours, restoration work and museographic conception to approach social housing from a multidisciplinary and critical perspective.
The Cases Barates del Bon Pastor Museum is rather unique in Southern Europe includuing, to summarize:
A public history proposal ─underpinned by research into urban history drawing on written, oral, graphic, photographic, film and archaeological sources, involving academics and scholars─ in which the multiple scale approach is crucial, with a comparative look at the history of working-class housing in Europe.
A new model of organisation in which heritage, museum and public are intertwined in a research site jointly managed by the Museum, the S. Andreu district and the Vilabesòs Research and Archive Association as the resident organisation.
Session 92 - New challenges in reading the city through city museums [Round Table]
Recent forms of city museums have been under consistent growth and development, matching the increasing complexity of cities across Europe and beyond. This round table aims at exploring the paradox that city museums face, between research and communication of urban history, and the engagement in challenges of the contemporary changing city.
Coordinators: Xavier De La Selle, Joana Sousa Monteiro
The session will be chaired by Carles García Hermosilla, Director of the Barcelona History Museum
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Coordinators: Xavier De La Selle, Joana Sousa Monteiro
The session will be chaired by Carles García Hermosilla, Director of the Barcelona History Museum
show/hide introduction
Session 92 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Reconfiguring the City Museum: Indigenous Collaborations and Citizen Narratives in Two Montréal Institutions
Andréa Cristina Delaplace
abstractAndréa Cristina Delaplace
This paper offers an analysis of the recent transformations of two Montréal museum institutions, the McCord Stewart Museum and the MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises, in order to examine how city museums are redefining their relationships to urban history, heritage, and communities today. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together social museology, urban studies, and decolonial approaches, this analysis highlights contemporary strategies of citizen participation, shared authority, and the recognition of marginalized memories.
Founded in 1921, the McCord Stewart Museum stands out for its explicit decolonial shift, grounded in sustained collaborations with Indigenous communities. The curatorial practices developed by Jonathan Lainey, a member of the Huron-Wendat Nation, rely on participatory methodologies formulated notably by Élisabeth Kaine and La Boîte Rouge Vif. By privileging co-creation, community consultation, and the valorization of oral traditions, the McCord Stewart Museum reinscribes Indigenous collections within dynamics of diplomacy, cultural transmission, and living knowledge, as exemplified by the exhibition Wampum: Beads of Diplomacy (2023).
Reopened in 2023, the MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises proposes a renewed model of an urban museum based on oral histories, popular culture objects, and citizen participation. It conceives the city as a mosaic of individual and collective experiences. Its entrance forum, a free and accessible public space, embodies its democratic vocation by fostering the circulation of multiple narratives and making historically marginalized communities visible.
In a context marked by memory tensions, growing political pressures, and contested heritage legitimacy, this paper argues that these two Montréal institutions illustrate the potential of city museums as spaces for public debate, the recognition of diversity, and the construction of living together. Montréal thus emerges as a true laboratory for rethinking the urban museums of the twenty-first century.
The Urban Fabric of Football in Ghent, 1875–2025
Brecht Dewilde, Wouter de Klerk
abstractBrecht Dewilde, Wouter de Klerk
This paper presents the findings of a two-year research project conducted by the Ghent City Museum STAM in preparation for the exhibition Offside – Football in the City (28 November 2025 – 2 August 2026). Marking three major anniversaries—150 years of football in Ghent, 125 years of KAA Gent, and 100 years of women’s football—the project aimed to chart the full historical breadth and social depth of the sport in the city. The resulting dataset exceeded all expectations: since 1875, more than 1,400 football clubs have existed in Ghent, covering field football, five-a-side, and futsal. Together, they form a dense social-sporting fabric and the shared history of well over a million residents across generations.
The research shows that football in Ghent has never been the story of a single elite tradition but of a broad urban ecosystem. Clubs emerged from parishes, factories, companies, schools, cafés, associations, and neighbourhood initiatives. Only a minority ever reached the national top level, yet every club—whether richly documented or known only from a brief newspaper mention—was shaped by the city’s socio-economic dynamics.
A central part of the project was the systematic identification of surviving football heritage: shirts, photographs, trophies, balls, pins, pennants, and other artefacts held in hundreds of (mostly) private collections. This is the first attempt to locate and document this material comprehensively with a view to its long-term preservation.
The paper highlights several thematic lines explored in the exhibition: factory football; pioneering Moroccan and Turkish neighbourhood teams; the city’s first deaf club (1921); LGBTQ+ teams; the Flemish origins of five-a-side football; and the resilient history of women’s football, which endured despite an official Belgian FA ban (1923–1971).
Spatial analysis of all 1,400 clubs and their pitches reveals football’s significant imprint on Ghent’s urban landscape. Football proves a valuable lens onto urban history, exposing links with industrialisation, neighbourhood development, and spatial planning, especially from the 1960s onwards.
The paper ultimately argues for recognising football history as integral urban history. When the full sporting fabric is mapped, football becomes a powerful perspective on city life, community organisation, identity, and urban transformation from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
Reframing Urban Narratives: Rethinking the Museography of Suresnes in the Parisian Periphery
Laurent Coudroy de Lille, David Coelho
abstractLaurent Coudroy de Lille, David Coelho
For nearly a century, the city of Suresnes has developed a distinctive museological identity within the Parisian periphery. Emerging from the 1926 display Au vieux Suresnes and reformulated in the 1970s under George-Henri Rivière’s influence, the MUS – Musée d’Histoire Urbaine et Sociale de Suresnes – became a territorial museum intertwining local history, social urbanism, and collective memory. Its 2013 permanent exhibition, set in the former Suresnes-Longchamp railway station, focused on Henri Sellier’s interwar garden city through documentary museography based on iconography, archives, and multimedia. While this strengthened institutional identity, it also created an imbalance by foregrounding one aspect of urban history and marginalizing others, especially links to broader national dynamics.
The new Scientific and Cultural Project (2026–2036) aims to reframe this museography through an in-depth assessment of collections, audiences, and curatorial practices. Current limitations include the underrepresentation of major holdings (Géo le Campion, Granoux, archaeology, industrial heritage), limited social perspectives, and a narrow chronological scope. Outdated digital tools and evolving building uses further call for renewed attention to visitor experience and spatial adaptability.
The forthcoming museographic reconfiguration proposes a more encyclopaedic approach, structured around three thematic axes: “Working in Suresnes” (territories, skills, industrial transformations); “Moving and Connecting: From Quays to Stations” (mobility and networks); and “Living in Suresnes” (representations, ideals, and social practices). This renewed emphasis on social history supports a strategic shift: positioning the MUS as a conversational territorial museum at the crossroads of history, society, and art.
Prioritizing sustainable and flexible displays, enhanced materiality of collections, and diversified narrative devices including off-site components, the project seeks to construct a more inclusive and polyphonic territorial narrative. Through the Suresnes case, this paper will examine how a suburban museum can evolve within a transforming metropolitan context marked by shifting civic expectations, urban dynamics, and cultural reorientation.
Session 92 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Catalysts of Democracy: Transforming the City Museum in Times of Societal Change
Sibylle Dienesch
abstractSibylle Dienesch
Profound societal transformations emerging from multiple crises demand new trajectories for institutional development. Museums are increasingly expected to contribute to democratic culture, social cohesion, and civic engagement. For city museums in particular, this development presents both a challenge and an opportunity. As institutions that connect urban history with contemporary realities, they are uniquely positioned to facilitate dialogue about the social, political, and cultural issues shaping city life. This paper examines how Graz Museum has responded to these challenges through a democratisation process initiated in 2023. The process seeks to align organisational development, museum practice, and the city residents lived realities through a shared vision of a democratic museum.
Drawing on perspectives from new museology, democratic theory, organisational learning, systemic organisational theory, and participatory governance, the paper develops a transdisciplinary framework for understanding city museums as catalysts of democracy. Influenced by Nora Sternfeld’s radical democratic museum, Kirsten Drotner’s notion of museums as catalysts of democratic practice, and Peter Senge’s learning organisation, the approach is that museums can only foster democratic culture externally if they critically reflect on and transform their own internal structures and practices.
The paper presents the design of Graz Museum’s transformation process, focusing on the alignment of organisational development and daily museum work. Central elements are the creation of a dedicated development layer alongside operational activities, participatory decision-making structures, role-based working, organisational transparency, and democratic competencies.
Reflecting on the first three years of the process, achievements include stronger internal participation, enhanced organisational learning, new partnerships with civic actors, and increased relevance for urban residents. Challenges include resources, complexity, representation, and the balance between participation and accountability. The central conclusion is that democratisation is not a predefined organisational model but an ongoing process of learning and adaptation. City museums can become meaningful actors in democratic urban life when organisational development, museum practice, and community engagement are systematically aligned through a shared vision. As such, they can fulfil their potential as catalysts of democracy.
Towards a City Museum of Rome
Pietro Fenici
abstractPietro Fenici
The case of Rome, both emblematic and particularly complex, offers a privileged vantage point for analyzing the role of urban heritage and how a city museum might narrate it. The long-standing debate on creating a possible Museum of the City of Rome, initiated in the 1930s and still ongoing, allows exploration of strategies through which the city’s history and cultural resources can be enhanced and used to recount its development. The evolution of the “city museum,” progressively redefined from a place of display to a center of interpretation, opens the possibility of experimenting with narrative tools connecting historical knowledge, territorial research, and citizen engagement.
Within this framework, the present contribution proposes thematic devices conceived as operational tools for narrating the city, capable of interpreting and communicating its complexity. These devices, articulated in two complementary scenarios, aim to interpret the city of the past and give voice to the contemporary city. The first scenario concerns the physical city and investigates themes such as orography, settlement principles, the evolution of the urban fabric, structural and material aspects, infrastructures, building types, construction traditions, and architectural typologies. The second scenario concerns the immaterial city, aiming to convey its cultural and perceptual fabric through the study of language, toponymy, the soundscape, and social dynamics. Integrating these levels allows constructing a narrative beyond a strictly chronological approach, offering a polycentric and relational vision of the urban context. The first device involves developing digital representations of selected sections of the historic city up to its contemporary form, based on archaeological literature, in collaboration with SITAR (Sistema Informativo Territoriale Archeologico di Roma) of the Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma, with technical support from REGESTA.exe srl. The second device, focused on immaterial aspects, aims to give voice to the social reality of the contemporary city and represent its challenges and prospects.
Both devices, to be investigated as selected case studies, lend themselves to defining a possible identity for a future Museum of the City of Rome: an active device fostering understanding of the stratified city and its critical interpretation, a museum of gazes, contextualizations, and research, permanently updated and at the service of 21st-century citizens.
Changes in the UK city museums landscape – some history since the 1990s
Tim Marshall
abstractTim Marshall
There is an extensive literature on the transformation of city museums in Europe over the last 20 years or more (for example Lanz 2019, Marshall and Roca eds 2023, Roca 2019). There remains much scope for reflecting on the progress made and the challenges being experienced, across numerous cities and states. Here just one country is surveyed.
The UK could have been seen as a leader in the 1990s, within Europe and perhaps globally, in addressing the challenges facing urban history museums. The Museum of London was a convenor of a meeting on the topic in the early 1990s. Other cities joined in the exploration to renew and reinvent ways of addressing city histories, including completely new museums in Liverpool and Bristol and some work in recreating existing museums on a more modest scale. This period can be seen as lasting during the “years of plenty” under governments up to 2010.
After 2010, major new projects were rarely begun, and in general the agenda was dominated by the fight for survival, with budgets cut back year after year, visiting times reduced, and desperate efforts made to invent revenue raising forms of museum management. However a few places were able to buck this trend. London decided in the mid 2010s that a new museum site was desirable for the Museum of London, and after long planning, this project for the new museum at Smithfield has been under construction since 2023. The work on the new content is ongoing, reflecting a range of ideas and challenges. The planned reopening date of the main building is 2026. The survey will also look at some provincial cities.
The aim of this presentation is simply to explore this particular national experience. Examples are drawn from England, but experience in the rest of the UK would not be so different. Some reflections follow on the conditioning factors that allow new museum agendas to come to fruition, or not.
References
F Lanz, 2019, City museums: reflections on a missing definition, CAMOC Review, September 2029.
T Marshall and J Roca eds, 2023, European City Museums, MUHBA, Barcelona.
J Roca i Albert, 2019, At the crossroads of cultural and urban policies. Rethinking the city and the city museum, in J Savic, ed The Future of Museums of Cities, CAMOC conference Frankfurt 2018.
Session 93 - City museums and decolonising networks [Round Table]
In recent years, city museums play a role in the study and presentation of colonial history. Three of them, from Amsterdam, Lisbon and Berlin, will present their contributions on this theme, some of which are set up with decolonising networks with activist backgrounds. The session will focus on lessons learned from these collaborations.
Coordinators: Paul Spies, Paulo Fernandes, Imara Limon
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Coordinators: Paul Spies, Paulo Fernandes, Imara Limon
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Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
The future of the Dutch colonial past
Raul Balai
abstractRaul Balai
Raul Balai is a designer, exhibition-maker, artist and curator whose practice deals with the historiography of colonial power, such as heritage institutions and their structures of representation. His interventions engage with how museums, archives and visual culture reproduce colonial logics, and how the task of decolonising cultural institutions must go beyond surface change to interrogate foundational infrastructures. For this panel on “City museums and decolonising networks”, Balai will offer a critical view on how city-based museums and heritage organisations are implicated in colonial legacies, and how decolonial practice might impact institutions.
Balai’s approach emphasises that decolonisation is not merely a matter of repatriation or diversity, but a structural transformation of how museums operate, who controls the narratives, and how collections are embedded in networks of power.
Balai has a hybrid practice of inside/outside critique. He has extensively worked with cultural institutions: from grassroots institutions such as The Black Archives, to museums such as the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam Museum, as curator, advisor and designer.
With his graphic design for The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past (a publication by the Amsterdam Museum, 2024), he inverted typical reading directions and incorporated colonial‐landscape imagery to disrupt familiar aesthetics. Balai hereby demonstrates how design and form themselves can perform acts of decolonisation (or resist colonial form).
Balai’s perspective invites reflection on: how urban heritage institutions were complicit in colonial accumulation (through collection, exhibition, narrative control); how they continue to mediate visibility and erasure of colonial histories; and how alternative networks (community-based, diasporic, transnational) might reconfigure museum practice beyond the centre-periphery model. In this panel he proposes to discuss how museum networks can be decolonised by rethinking governance, exhibition strategies, audience participation and design language.
Museum objects from colonial contexts
Lorraine Bluche
abstractLorraine Bluche
Lorraine Bluche is a collection curator at the Stadtmuseum Berlin, focusing on decolonization. Previously, she co-directed the bureau Miera I Bluche with Frauke Miera, which was dedicated to the vision of an Inclusive Museum and the diversification of museum-based urban history. At the Stadtmuseum, she is also jointly responsible for the Decolonization Competence Center, which tests formats of decolonial museum work in dialogue with civil society and other interested museums in Berlin and beyond. She speaks from a white position.
For the panel "City Museums and Decolonizing Networks," Bluche will provide insights into her work with the Stadtmuseum Berlin collection, which she understands as a hegemonic colonial archive. Questions that interest her in this context include: How have "objects from colonial contexts" been recorded and described in the Stadtmuseum's collection so far? How do we deal with racist language? How do we find and implement a new, anti-racist language? Which objects should we display and how? And for what purpose? And what about the gaps? The inadequate representation of BIPoC presences in Berlin could at least partially be improved by re-collecting relevant objects. But is the Stadtmuseum the right place for this?
Collection work with a decolonial aspiration at the Stadtmuseum Berlin moves between the tension between the logics of a predominantly white institution on the one hand and the beginnings of a practice of collaboration with decolonial activists on the other. In order to at least partially fulfill the institution's stated claim to decolonize the museum's collection work, Bluche argues, it requires both internal and external opening. From an internal perspective, this means, not least of all, the training of white employees in concepts of critical whiteness and holding the institution accountable for its historical-political responsibility. From an external perspective, this means the sustainable establishment of networks and collaborations with a decolonial civil society in Berlin and beyond.
Based on concrete examples from her professional practice, Bluche invites participants to reflect on the interaction between institutions and civil society in working with urban history collections.
Dekoloniale, a cooperation of activist, decolonizing civic organizations with the Berlin City History Museum
Anna Yeboah
abstractAnna Yeboah
Over the past two decades, the history of German and European colonialism has moved from the margins to the center of public debate in Germany. This shift—largely initiated and sustained by Black, Afro-diasporic, and other racialized communities—has prompted a growing number of cultural institutions, archives, and particularly city museums to critically examine their own colonial entanglements and, in some cases, to embark on processes of institutional decolonization. These developments are embedded in broader struggles over global inequalities and neo-colonial continuities that persist despite the formal end of colonial rule. Decolonization signifies a move away from binary understandings of the world structured by hierarchies of center and periphery, toward pluriversal and multi-centered perspectives that foreground the knowledge, experiences and resistance of colonized and marginalized communities.
Between 2020 and 2024, the pilot project Dekoloniale Memory Culture in the City (Dekoloniale) sought to explore new ways of engaging with colonial history and its lasting effects in Berlin’s cultural and urban landscape. Conceived and implemented by Berlin Postkolonial e.V., Each One Teach One e.V., the Initiative of Black People in Germany, and the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Dekoloniale represented a pioneering collaboration between civil society, institutions, and public administration. The project was shaped by actors who have long been at the forefront of demanding a critical confrontation with Germany’s colonial legacy. Each project year focused on a different area of the city. The project scope covered historical and artistic exhibitions, conferences, workshops, event series, festivals, city tours, artistic interventions in public space, as well as the ongoing digital mapping of (post)colonial history.
For city museums, Dekoloniale demonstrated how collaborations with civic initiatives can open up new curatorial and participatory practices. Museums were not only spaces of reflection but also active agents in reshaping the urban memory landscape. In Berlin’s cityscape, Dekoloniale and other civic initiatives have made visible the entangled histories of colonialism, racism, and resistance through numerous commemorative interventions.
Colonialism is not a closed chapter of history but a structure whose effects continues to shape social inequalities, structural racism, and global hierarchies of power.
Deconstructing the past; shaping the future. Two examples from the Museum of Lisbon
Paulo Fernandes
abstractPaulo Fernandes
The session ‘City museums and decolonising networks’ provides an opportunity to briefly present the results of two recent projects held at the Lisbon Museum.
When renovating the museum’s long-term exhibition (2021–2024), we realised that there were themes not covered by the traditional narrative approach: The Inquisition, the Colonial War (1969–1974), Slavery and Decolonisation were gaps in that narrative, mostly because the items in the collection did not adequately meet the requirements for representation and explanation. However, the right questions had not yet been asked to those very same objects. Today, with the same collection and in collaboration with external experts, the Museum of Lisbon has a room dedicated to the Inquisition, a section devoted to Slavery, and the port of Lisbon is explained as a major embarkation point for the war in Africa (the Colonial War).
The second project is even more collective. For the past decade, the Museum has been working collaboratively with civil society organisations with the aim of decolonising the narrative, not only within the museum’s physical space, but also in the public sphere. We organise city tours with the Batoto Yetu Association focusing on invisible sites of Slavery, and we have opened the museum’s doors to an exhibition interpretation programme run by Tributo aos Ancestrais, an informal group based in Lisbon that aims to honour the enslaved African ancestors who lost their lives during the transatlantic slave trade in Portugal. And we have taken on the website ‘Remapping Memories’ project (a collaborative initiative between racialised communities, artists and researchers dedicated to identifying aspects of the city’s colonial past).
These two projects form the basis of a major temporary exhibition to be held next year, entitled ‘African Lisbon (15th–19th centuries)’, curated by historians Francisco Bethencourt (Portuguese based in London) and Vanicleia Silva Santos (Brazilian based in Philadelphia), and I hope they will also serve as starting points for the discussion at our round-table this afternoon.
Session 94 - Heritagisation of urban landscapes
The session aims is to understand how the concept of (historic) urban landscape is used in global and local discourses to overcome the division of culture/nature in urban settings and to pin down the spatial specificities of a historic city. Its key questions are about the practices and reinterpretations of heritage cities as urban landscapes.
Coordinators: Gabor Sonkoly, Rosa Tamborrino, Joan Ganau
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Coordinators: Gabor Sonkoly, Rosa Tamborrino, Joan Ganau
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Session 94 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 13:45-15:15 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
World Heritage Convention – New Challenges for Historic Cities
Jacek Purchla
abstractJacek Purchla
‘World Heritage’ designation is less and less considered a “beauty label” but is becoming more and more meaningful in terms of conservation management and protection. Heritage is people – its creators, interpreters, and users.
The historic cities on the UNESCO World Heritage List are a particular arena for the game between heritage and society as central to the debate on human inheritance and its preservation. Historic towns make up a special category of our heritage, where the past determines present-day development. It is no coincidence that almost every other cultural place on the UNESCO WHL is an urban site. The city is not only an idea and form, but also a function and process.
The rapid transformation of our cultural cityscape often leads to its degradation: the consequences of a the market liberalisation and decentralisation, rapidly progressing since the 1970s. The transition from a passive, static thinking about heritage, understood as a pious approach to relics of the past, to a new urban conservation approach, required to protect heritage in the current realities – an inescapable processes of the privatisation and commercialisation of public spaces – requires fundamental changes in the management of heritage potential, especially as it applies to the cultural landscape conservation of historic towns.
The international UNESCO community has long recognised the need to develop a strategy for the effective protection of the most valuable historic urban sites. We can speak of real achievement in terms of success of the World Heritage Convention, one of the few almost universally ratified normative instruments. But today UNESCO should not just be perceived as what is known as “authorised heritage discourse”.
Contemporary discourse on the conservation of historic cities is based on the concept of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL). This is not a new category of protection, but a tool for managing the urban historic resources, in a time of rapid civilisational change. In November 2011, the UNESCO General Conference in Paris adopted the text of the Recommendation on the HUL.
The idea of HUL does not only imply a revision of the Washington Charter of 1987, but provokes a reflection on the complex issue of the conservation of historic cities in times of rapid civilisational change. The management of heritage potential in historic towns today requires an interdisciplinary and integrated approach, not only from decision-makers but also from inhabitants.
Entrepreneurs on the Moon: private actors in the heritagization of Bordeaux’s urban landscape
Gábor Oláh
abstractGábor Oláh
The World Heritage Site "Bordeaux, Port of the Moon" represents one of the most emblematic cases in contemporary urban heritage discourse. Distinguished by its relatively large area, it also stands out for its conceptual broadness, as it “extends everything” (Ricca & Luo, 2019), encompassing nearly all the key ideas and paradigms that have shaped international heritage theory and policy over the past fifty years. Its 2007 inscription coincided with the development and debate surrounding the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach, which promotes a holistic understanding of the urban fabric by integrating historic centres within their broader territorial, social and economic contexts (Bandarin & van Oers, 2012; Turner & Singer, 2015).
The management of Bordeaux’s extended historic landscape mobilises a complex network of actors, generating a dynamic ecosystem of governance (Giliberto & Appendino, 2022). Although the “mille-feuille” of heritage regulations ensure the protection of its Outstanding Universal Value, the preservation of this landscape increasingly transcends the traditional boundaries and financial capacities of public administration (Baarveld et al., 2013). The growing reliance on private investment and entrepreneurial initiatives transforms the urban landscape into a site of co-construction between public institutions and private actors. This evolving interdependence, acknowledged and incorporated into the actors’ course of action (Coulondre, 2017; Pollard, 2024), leads to constant negotiation over what should be preserved and how, resulting in a continuous redefinition of heritage itself.
This paper examines the entanglement of regulatory frameworks and private development within the Bordeaux WHS since its inscription. Through an analysis of rehabilitation projects undertaken by selected private developers, drawing on project documentation and building permits, this paper explores how entrepreneurial practices and investment strategies influence the interpretation and are integrated into the implementation of the HUL approach. The study argues that Bordeaux’s heritage management exemplifies a broader shift toward collaborative, market-influenced models of urban preservation, in which the heritage city emerges simultaneously as a site of economic opportunity and a space defined by complex constraints for developers. It sheds light on how public-private interdependencies are reconfiguring the meanings, values and boundaries of heritage.
Walking the Hidden City: Co-Creating and Communicating Small Popular Heritage
Marie-Paule Jungblut
abstractMarie-Paule Jungblut
Urban heritage is often defined by monuments and official narratives, yet a city’s identity is equally shaped by small popular heritage – the ordinary spaces, practices, and memories of daily life. These traces, such as a neighbourhood football field or a small shop, carry the emotional imprints of diverse communities and show how people inhabit and continually produce the city through their presence and stories.
This paper presents a transdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning and the Department of History at the University of Luxembourg, developed within “Unveiling Local Cultural Heritage: From Co-Creative Investigation to Digital Representation.” Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space, the project views space as a social construct shaped by everyday practices and power relations. Using critical walking, auto-ethnographic observation, and collaborative storytelling, participants explore how local spaces gain meaning and how heritage emerges through social interaction rather than institutional designation.
Luxembourg City offers an ideal setting: over 70% of its residents are foreign-born, with more than 160 nationalities represented. Alongside large EU communities, refugees from Ukraine and Syria contribute to a diverse urban fabric where multiple perceptions of place coexist. The project aims to bridge indigenous-born and immigrant communities by encouraging shared reflection on neighbourhood spaces, fostering dialogue and belonging.
The cooperation between geography and public history benefits both fields: geographers access the narrative and emotional dimensions of urban space, while historians engage with spatial and participatory heritage-making. Grounded in Lefebvre’s theory, this co-creative approach conceives heritage as a living process through which communities shape and reinterpret their environments.
A key element is the communication of small popular heritage through digital tools, notably the izi.travel platform, which hosts free interactive tours. These digital narratives make co-produced heritage accessible to wider audiences, linking academic inquiry and local engagement.
Ultimately, "Walking the Hidden City" shows how participatory approaches to small popular heritage reveal the networks of memory, identity, and interaction that form the lived city – an approach resonating with the conference theme, "City Networks in Europe and Beyond."
Rethinking the Urban Landscape of Isfahan: From Safavid Cityscape to Pahlavi Heritagization
Amir Abbas Mansoori Mehr
abstractAmir Abbas Mansoori Mehr
Isfahan exemplifies the concept of the historic urban landscape a long time before that term was standardized in international heritage discourse. In the early seventeenth century, Isfahan was transformed by Safavid policy to an exceptional cityscape: anchored by the Naqsh-e Jahan Square along the Chahar Bagh axis, amazing bridges across the Zayandeh-Rud river, and the integration of gardens and architecture forged an unparalleled fusion between nature and the built environment. This wide urban landscape complex moved beyond usual dichotomies between the historic core and peripheral center, creating an integrated view of urban and natural spaces. Simultaneously, Isfahan embodies the idea of the urban palimpsest: successive layers picture a fabric, where yielding a complex and multi-temporal cityscape that challenges linear or reductive readings.
In the mid-twentieth century, Isfahan experienced a conscious process of heritagisation, which was mainly done by international campaigns by support of the central government, shaped both by global frameworks and local policies. The activities of IsMEO under leadership of Eugenio Galdieri in the 1960s and 1970s in the restoration framework, exemplify the linkage of international preservation principles with local and traditional approaches. Through the documentation and restoration of prominent monuments Isfahan was reframed as a “historic urban landscape” on the international level. This case shows that the UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape idea (later codified in the 2011 Recommendation) was already taking shape in Safavid views of the city and in Pahlavi-era heritage policy shaped by ICOMOS, the 1964 Venice Charter, and UNESCO discourses.
However, Isfahan’s urban landscape was never been static: unregulated post-revolutionary construction acts as a contributing factor to human-caused risks, while contemporary pressures like the ecological crisis of the drying Zayandeh-Rud threaten the integrity of Isfahan’s landscape. These address the main questions: the balancing between global and local discourses, the resilience of historic urban landscapes against natural and social crises, and the reinterpretation of heritage cities as ecosystems with historical layers. Ultimately, the Isfahan case provides a critical comparative view that shows how a non-European city at once prefigured, adapted, and questioned the very notion of the Historic Urban Landscape now central to global heritage governance.
From “Heritage” to “Historic Urban Landscape”: Toward an Analytical, Heritage-Making, and Awareness-Raising Framework for the Neoclassical Historic City of Brussels
Christophe Loir
abstractChristophe Loir
This paper examines the relevance of the “historic urban landscape” (HUL) concept for the study, heritage designation, and valorization of the neoclassical historic city of Brussels, shaped during the urban embellishment campaigns of the long nineteenth century. Compared with the narrower notion of “heritage,” the HUL framework offers a more comprehensive interpretive tool capable of accounting for the complexity of these areas and the diverse components that define them—architectural fabric, street layouts, vegetation, statuary, panoramas, and visual perspectives. It also provides a means to integrate the dynamic nature of urban landscapes, their multiple historical strata, and the contemporary challenges they face. In this respect, it constitutes the most appropriate category for safeguarding districts currently threatened by redevelopment initiatives.
Drawing on this case study, the paper analyses how, over roughly the past decade, the HUL concept has been mobilized in academic research and university teaching (notably at the Université libre de Bruxelles and within the CRéA-Patrimoine research laboratory), by heritage institutions (in particular the Royal Commission for Monuments and Sites and its protection instruments - CRMS), and in broader heritage-awareness initiatives aimed at both stakeholders and the public (including publications by urban.brussels, the creation of a “Neoclassical Biennial,” field-based activities, and training for urban planning and public-space departments).
Bibliography
Le paysage urbain néoclassique à Bruxelles Pentagone Un patrimoine urbanistique remarquable dans la ville contemporaine, rapport de recherche, CRMS - CRéA-Patrimoine, 2019.
Christophe LOIR, Ixelles et ses paysages néoclassiques, Ixelles, Ixelles Editions, 2021.
Aurélie AUTENNE, Christophe LOIR, Thomas SCHLESSER, Stefaan VAN ACKER, « La prise en compte patrimoniale de la voirie historique dans la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale : les initiatives de la Commission Royale des Monuments et des Site », In Situ. Revue des Patrimoines, à paraître.
Christophe LOIR, Bruxelles néoclassique : mutation de l’espace urbain (1775-1840), Bruxelles, CFC-Editions, nouvelle édition, 2017.
Open letter by the CRMS: https://crms.brussels/sites/default/files/avis/728/BXL60123_728_CORR_LETTRE_OUVERTE_paysages_urbains_historiques.pdf
Resilient Heritagisation. The Therme Project as a Model Regenerating Inland Territories at Risk
Elena Manzo
abstractElena Manzo
This contribution is based on the concept of Historic Urban Landscape to present the results of a methodological protocol aimed at the regeneration of vulnerable territories subject to degradation. The objective is to overcome the traditional dichotomy between nature and culture in historic urban contexts through an integrated approach developed starting from the THERME-Thermal Heritage for Ecosustainable Regeneration, Mobility and Economy project, promoted by a research group from the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli.
The research focuses on the inner areas of Campania, with particular attention to the cultural landscape between the spa centers of Telese Terme (BN) and Montesano sulla Marcellana (SA). In this scenario, the THERME project represents an emblematic case for comparing the global debate on urban regeneration processes with a specifically local declination. The thermal spa facilities are conceived not as isolated architecture, but as territorial “activators” capable of triggering virtuous dynamics of urban redevelopment and encouraging slow and sustainable tourism.
The proposed model aims at the reconfiguration of spa sites as strategic nodes of an integrated rest and wellness network, interconnected through a system of "green cultural routes". This network is configured as an ecological infrastructure, capable of connecting urban centers, natural resources and tangible and intangible cultural heritage with the surrounding landscape. A further qualifying element of the protocol is the integration of participatory approaches oriented towards strengthening territorial governance and social cohesion.
The contribution, therefore, intends to demonstrate how the application of this integrated reuse model allows a rereading of the history and identity of these places, transforming thermal spa facilities into dynamic cultural heritage. These become instruments of urban and territorial regeneration, able to enhance local identity and use the practice of thermal well-being as a lever for environmental sustainability and community cohesion. In doing so, the project offers a concrete and locally contextualised response to the challenges posed by the evolving global context.
Session 94 - Slot II
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
Porto Maravilha project and landscape changes in the central area of Rio de Janeiro
Denise Pinheiro-Machado
abstractDenise Pinheiro-Machado
The Porto Maravilha project in the central and historical area of Rio de Janeiro has transformed the landscape of the port area, one of its principles being to value local culture in its various aspects.
It is a long-term project, initiated in 2009, that has caused structural and land-use changes, resulting in a significant transformation of the local landscape.
This work aims to analyze the implementation process of this project, focusing on the impacts on the landscape in a historically and culturally significant area of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Debating contributions to the cultural landscape of Rio de Janeiro
Maria Cristina Cabral, Rodrigo Cury Paraizo
abstractMaria Cristina Cabral, Rodrigo Cury Paraizo
The city of Rio de Janeiro was recognized in 2012 as a Cultural Landscape by UNESCO, based on five elements: Tijuca National Park, the Botanical Garden, Flamengo Park, the entrance to Guanabara Bay, and Copacabana Beach. It was the first city to receive this designation, highlighting the integration between natural landscape and human intervention.
Historically, as Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro has always received a large influx of foreigners. Between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the city’s modernization brought significant contributions from professionals linked to civil construction.
This study seeks to analyze the contribution of foreign professionals to the development and recognition of the elements that supported Rio’s candidacy, acknowledging cultural exchange as a fundamental and defining aspect of the city’s cosmopolitan character. The Copacabana Palace, built in 1923 by French architect Joseph Gire (1873–1933), was essential in establishing the neighborhood as a seaside resort and clearly illustrates this process. The area around Praça do Lido, adjacent to the hotel, became more vertical during this period, with the rise of apartment buildings in the modern Art Deco style, as seen in projects by Scottish architect Robert Prentice (1883–1960) and Austrian Anton Floderer (1884–1972), among others.
Much earlier, Tijuca National Park (1861), the Botanical Garden (1808), and the entrance to Guanabara Bay (from the 16th century onward) were environments and institutions shaped by Eurocentric visions. Their designs and transformations created layers of landscape and narrative meaning that helped shape ideas of both Rio’s and Brazil’s identity, through social appropriations in each historical moment.
This research proposal critically examines the concept of cultural landscape in one of Latin America’s major cities, focusing on the relationship between local worldviews and European urban ideals. The architecture of Europeans in Rio de Janeiro is understood as a central value in shaping the idea of Rio’s cultural landscape across different periods, which, layered over time, ultimately defined the city as a Cultural Landscape nearly a century later.
Urban Landscape and Cultural Heritage in Rio de Janeiro: The Case of Serra da Misericórdia Protection Area
Maria Paula Albernaz, Carolina Contarato, Marina Alves
abstractMaria Paula Albernaz, Carolina Contarato, Marina Alves
This article examines the link between cultural heritage and the concept of urban landscape through the analysis of environmental protection units created in Rio de Janeiro city. It investigates the motivations and decisions of actors, the dynamics produced and urban repercussions, searching to understand the connection between local heritage practices and the historical debate on the urban landscape on a global scale. The concept of urban landscape has a holistic approach, integrating aesthetic, sociocultural, and natural aspects, alongside the articulation of interdisciplinary fields and heritage, environmental, and territorial management, framing protected assets within a systemic landscape perspective.
The focus is on Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, historically neglected in urban and cultural policies, emphasizing the Serra da Misericórdia Protection Area on the slopes of the city’s fourth largest rock massif amid railway suburbs. Its heritage institutionalization involves territorial disputes to preserve remaining vegetation and create an urban park in an area of mineral exploitation and self-built settlement expansion.
The origin of the protected area, along with others, links to the city’s 1992 Ten-Year Master Plan, the main legal instrument of urban policy, which proposed the creation of cultural heritage policies, identifying areas of outstanding landscape value where urban occupation was restricted. In 2000, along with other Protection Areas, the Serra da Misericórdia Urban Recovery Area was established, and later reclassified as a Municipal Urban Park, allowing public use.
In the process of heritage listing of the area, amid tensions between preserving ecological attributes and allowing collective practices, crucial components of the historical concept of urban landscape have been lost. From the geographical tradition view, the lack of engagement of local actors weakened the socio-spatial link between population and landscape, reducing possibilities to give it meanings to reinterpret the heritage asset and diminish environmental risks. From the artistic tradition view, the absence of concern with urban densification and verticalisation along North Zone corridors by legal norms, threatens its panoramic values. Greater menaces for scenographic losses may occur by further densification regulation from the 2024 revision of Rio’s Master Plan, increasing the fragmentation of this Protection Area from more valued parts of the city recently UNESCO-listed.
Urban Landscape, Heritage in Motion
Andréa Borde, Maria Cristina Coelho Duarte, Leonardo Rodrigues M. Dos Santos
abstractAndréa Borde, Maria Cristina Coelho Duarte, Leonardo Rodrigues M. Dos Santos
The concept of landscape historically evokes mountains, wooded areas, and valleys crossed by rivers, punctuated by buildings and other artefacts that shaped pre-industrial cities. Landscape thus referred to the gaze and pictorial space, as Anne Couquelin pointed out. The acceleration of the industrialization process in European cities, which began in the 19th century, left its mark on this landscape. The physical elements that compose it changed in form, function, scale, and meaning. Urbanism and heritage emerged as fields of knowledge that focused on these transformations and continuities. Distinct temporalities and spatialities added value and meaning to cities and heritage, giving them a polysemic character, as analyzed by Françoise Choay. The concept of landscape began to incorporate categories of analysis related to the spaces of everyday life. That is the theoretical and methodological context in which Rio de Janeiro's designation as the first city recognized by UNESCO as a cultural landscape, for its "Carioca landscapes between the mountain and the sea," is situated. The natural and built elements of this metropolitan city, which compose an urban landscape of great symbolic value, include, in addition to sites recognized for their exceptional universal value, buffer zones subject to multiple layers of protection. What may seem, at first glance, recognized and safeguarded, fades when we consider the city as a place of differences and, therefore, of conflicts; and legislation as a mediating instance of these conflicts. Recognizing them and wanting to overcome them should be the first step towards achieving the necessary effectiveness of the legal apparatus. However, neither the municipal urban planning legislation nor the heritage protection bodies recognize the concept of landscape as an expression of the interaction between natural, social, and cultural elements in the urban spatial configuration. How, then, can we safeguard the landscape if the dynamics of its appropriation are not consensual among urban planning and heritage protection bodies? Valuing urban history as an essential reference point for the inhabitants’ cultural identity, and Historic Urban Landscape as an analytical category, could improve regulations for the protection and management of the urban landscape. This would help overcome the culture-nature dichotomy still present in urban management and planning.
Some reflections on the idea of historic urban landscape in Brazil: architecture, nature and social practices
Claudia Damasceno Fonseca
abstractClaudia Damasceno Fonseca
The aim of this paper is to analyze the vocabulary used in different contexts and documentary sources related to Brazilian colonial cities classified as cultural heritage, and to identify its links with the concept of (historic) urban landscape forged in Europe. It will address both the classifications and selection criteria adopted in Brazil by the country's heritage institutions, as well as the conceptions of “landscape” used by academics who have analyzed these urban spaces from other perspectives. The presentation will take as case studies various “historic centers” and “architectural, natural and urban ensembles” classified during the 20th and 21st centuries (at the municipal, regional, national, and international levels) : mining towns in Minas Gerais (Ouro Preto, Mariana, Diamantina), cities around the Bay of Todos os Santos (Salvador da Bahia, Cachoeira), as well as Rio de Janeiro. The analysis will take into account legislative and technical texts relating to the processes of classification and heritage designation, as well as academic works, in order to contribute to the understanding of the evolution of the concept of cultural landscape in Brazil.
Crossing glances between José Estelita's pier and the Pina peninsula in Recife, Βrazil.
Fivos de Brito Karagiorgas
abstractFivos de Brito Karagiorgas
Three frames-landscapes of the coastal city of Recife are undergoing transformation as contemporary urban developments appear to be disrupting the city’s older social “equilibriums”. The “Twin Towers” (2009) and the “Novo Recife” (2012) project, under construction since 2019 next to the historic districts of São José and Santo Antônio are set to permanently change the city’s landscape. So, while the historic core appears to be well protected by legislation, the “Novo Recife” project is located on landfills situated around the center perimeter. Those landfills belonging to the former railway network of the city's port, were not designated as zones with height restrictions. Given that Novo Recife is part of a broader sequence of renovations related to the historical core, it reinforces something that seems paradoxical: it urbanizes a former industrial area through the irreversible transformation of the surrounding «horizontal» landscape. Developed on Ilha Antônio Vaz and having been decharacterized through a series of historic interventions, this center has more of a fragmented character than that of a homogeneous historical core. Nevertheless, «Novo Recife» met with strong opposition in 2010-2020 that obliged the construction companies to a partial compromise: lower the tower heights that are nearest to the historical core. These movements articulating people from other areas of the city and from nearby favelas led to the near cancellation of the investment, until the restart of its slow construction starting from 2019.
Through the analysis of the three frames we propose, we will attempt analyse how they constitute representations related to identity, political consensus, popularized narratives with the nature-culture dichotomy being articulated in different ways. A constant pole of this distinction is an idea of progress, which continuously and materially produces the image of the «new» that enters as uncanny buildings into the everyday images of the city and functions as an allegory of power. However, apart from a spatial logic that takes more account of the preservation of buildings and urban spaces within specific boundaries, the landscape is “something” that’s equals more than the sum of the facades of the buildings that an inhabitant observes through a specific frame. We will explore the surplus value of these landscapes by examining the conditions and conventions that make the images of the city (non) acceptable by different social agents.
Session 94 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
From Alterity to Heritage: The Architectural Transformations of Barcelona’s Air-Raid Shelters
Ana Laura Bertero
abstractAna Laura Bertero
This essay examines Barcelona's air-raid shelters as a new form of subterranean metropolitan architecture that emerged from the convergence of industrial technologies, civilian underground practices and military knowledge during the Spanish Civil War. Rather than understanding the shelters simply as wartime infrastructures, it argues that their architectural condition was fundamentally liminal and transitory: materially permanent, yet operationally activated only during the exceptional event of aerial bombardment. This condition established a particular relationship between the surface city and its subsoil, transforming an underground historically associated with alterity into a controlled but temporary service space for civilian protection.
The essay then examines the consequences of the disappearance of this function. The same characteristics that enabled the shelters to operate as a distributed subterranean infrastructure—depth, invisibility, networked condition, thresholds and difficult accessibility—also conditioned their subsequent abandonment, fragmentation and disconnection from the functional city. Their survival was consequently shaped by a series of transformations: from a space of alterity, to liminal service architecture, to absence, and finally to heritage. Through the analysis of inaccessible, partially preserved and reopened shelters, the essay examines how this former infrastructure is reinterpreted through memory, commemoration and new cultural functions.
It argues that the heritage of Barcelona's shelters does not depend on the recovery of a complete underground network. Rather, it emerges through different relationships between presence and absence, physical access and imagination, through which surviving subterranean remains remain connected to the contemporary urban landscape.
Bridging Symbolic, Sensory, and Scientific Dimensions in Heritage Landscapes: A Layered Comparison of Feng Shui, Geobiology, and Environmental Measurements
Liangyu Li
abstractLiangyu Li
In the context of heritagisation, the preservation of historic urban landscapes faces new environmental and health challenges. Growing concern about air pollution and the impact of construction materials has reinforced the idea that architecture should promote health and comfort. This study addresses these challenges through a comparative framework integrating symbolic (feng shui), sensory (geobiology) and scientific dimensions, bridging cultural perceptions and natural processes in the assessment of spatial health. The methodology translates these three systems into comparable spatial layers, enabling cartographic comparison and situated interpretation. The first perspective is feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice interpreting the forms of mountains, the flow of water and the orientation of buildings to achieve harmony between humans and their surroundings. Five classical concepts, including dragon, vital point, surrounding hills, water and energy flow, are translated into measurable criteria such as slope and orientation. The second is geobiology, developed in Europe in the mid-twentieth century by Ernst Hartmann and Manfred Curry, studying geomagnetic grids, underground water veins and electromagnetic fields that influence well-being. The research uses instruments such as the Lécher antenna to detect telluric grids running parallel to the feng shui “dragon”. The third dimension applies international scientific standards, using CO₂, particulate, TVOC and sound-level measurements aligned with ISO and WHO guidelines, providing a third, instrument-based reading alongside the two perceptual approaches. The framework is applied to three historic villages in southern Anhui Province: Hongcun, Xidi and Chengkan, the first two listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Planned according to feng shui principles, these settlements have been gradually transformed through renovation and tourism. The analysis distinguishes a structural level related to terrain and spatial composition and a symbolic level linked to collective representations. Their perception evokes emotions shaping an ambiance felt as favourable or unfavourable, expressing good or bad feng shui; when shared, these sensations create a collective sense of place that may be called a genius loci oriental, offering new criteria for studying ambiance and the ongoing heritagisation of historic landscapes within a European and trans-regional academic context.
Session 94 - Slot IV
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
From Monument to Living Heritage: Reinterpreting the Seoul City Wall
Bokyung Jo, Yurim Jeong
abstractBokyung Jo, Yurim Jeong
The Seoul City Wall (Hanyangdoseong) once defined the boundary of Hanyang, the capital of the Joseon dynasty, and now lies at the heart of Seoul, which has long expanded beyond its original boundaries. Since the early 21st century, the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach has evolved into a global framework that integrates heritage conservation into broader urban development and community participation. This paper examines how the HUL framework has been localized in Seoul, focusing on the Seoul City Wall as a lens through which the city’s historical layers and contemporary urban life overlap.
Drawing on discourse analysis of policy documents and master plans, together with a case study of the City Wall and its surrounding districts, this paper reveals that the restoration of the Seoul City Wall has shifted from the reproduction of the past to the creation of a complex landscape where historical forms and present life coexist. Following the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for Villages Surrounding the Seoul City Wall (2014), adjacent communities have been reframed as living heritage rather than regulated zones. This transformation represents a temporal integration of Seoul’s evolving urban identity and illustrates how non-European cities reinterpret global heritage paradigms through local contexts and urban practices.
Amalfi Coast: Constructions and Narratives of the Historic Urban Landscape
Maria Rosaria Cocozza
abstractMaria Rosaria Cocozza
Starting from the concept of the historic urban landscape, this contribution proposes an interpretation of the Amalfi Coast as a deeply stratified territory, where global discourses on the historic urban landscape intersect with local interpretations rooted in the architectural and social history of individual settlements. Far from being reduced to a mere scenographic image, the coast emerges as a city–territory continuum shaped by vertical settlements, vernacular architectures, and agricultural terracing, all of which have moulded its identity and spatial structure. Recognized as a UNESCO Cultural Landscape in 1997, it offers a privileged vantage point from which to examine the evolution and dissemination of the historic urban landscape concept within contemporary processes of heritage-making.
Within this system, the various coastal towns express differentiated—at times divergent—modes of constructing the historic urban landscape. Amalfi, with its medieval legacy and polycentric structure linked to its maritime tradition; Ravello, where the monumentality of aristocratic residences and the role of historic gardens function as landscape devices; Atrani, an emblematic example of extreme settlement density and morphological persistence; and Maiori, shaped by the extensive post–1954 flood reconstruction that introduced a marked morphological discontinuity within a context of vernacular and infrastructural continuities, offering an exemplary case for understanding the interaction among modern ruptures, typological adaptations, and historical continuities. Together, these cases reveal the variety of narratives through which the coastal landscape is perceived, represented, and reinterpreted.
The comparative analysis of these towns highlights the dialogic nature of the historic urban landscape of the Amalfi Coast: on the one hand, local narratives expressing sedimented memories; on the other, global discourses and UNESCO categories that select and orient the perception of heritage. The coast thus emerges as a privileged laboratory for understanding how continuities and discontinuities intertwine in the construction of the urban landscape, and how architectural history can offer critical tools for interpreting processes of heritagisation in complex, stratified territories.
Session 95 - Colonial legacies in public space: commemoralisation, conflict and artistic interventions
This session explores how cities confront colonial legacies in public space through removal, reinterpretation, and artistic intervention. It invites interdisciplinary perspectives on memory, identity, and decolonial strategies in urban space, fostering transnational dialogue on contested commemorations.
Coordinators: Annemarie De Wildt, Tim Cole, Markus Balkenhol, Jakob Ingemann Parby
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Coordinators: Annemarie De Wildt, Tim Cole, Markus Balkenhol, Jakob Ingemann Parby
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Session 95 - Slot I
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Public Art Against Hegemony: Agonistic memory culture unsettling Canada’s commemorative public art
Louis-Thomas Kelly
abstractLouis-Thomas Kelly
The specific focus of this article is on commemorative public art as a realm for conflicting views to surface, interact, and adapt. Three important lessons from Chantal Mouffe’s writings on agonism are identified. There is a 1) tendency in deliberative democratic, consensus-oriented approaches to abnegate and suppress conflict. Then, Mouffe’s formulation of 2) ‘critical art’ proves a valuable method for publicly creating new subjectivities and pluralizing the terrain of artistic intervention. Moreover, Mouffe reminds us to 3) be suspicious of commemorative art. Even with critical intent, singular agonistic interventions can undermine democracy if the art settles mnemonic debates instead of opening them. For example, in Canada, despite the presence of a remarkably resilient hybrid-nationalist narrative, movements in recognition of collective trauma, healing, and Indingenous perspectives are changing the way Canadians relate to the past through public art. It is argued that states—such as Canada—reckoning with colonial legacies in commemorative public art ought to follow unsettling strategies like ‘permanent temporariness’ to agonistically resist closure in mnemonic contests. The central claim is that an agonistic memory culture is taking shape in Canadian commemorative public art and it disrupts hegemony, but it is fragile if not sustained by recurring critical engagements.
Re-signifying colonial traces in public space. The Dogali monument in Rome and the project “Echoes from ዶግዓሊ/Dogali. Weaving memories, intertwining stories.”
Giulia Grechi, Tezeta Association
abstractGiulia Grechi, Tezeta Association
The many tangible and intangible traces of colonialism, from museums to streets to public and private archives, express the colonizer's point of view and language, establishing an aesthetic and interpretative canon of this traumatic heritage that is difficult to dismantle (Kilomba 2021). The project I will present acts by reversing this point of view, through a logic of redistribution of spaces and authority of speech towards those who have been made invisible and silenced in the narrative of colonial history and its legacy.
With this sensitivity, we have created the first project for the permanent reinterpretation of a colonial monument in Italy. "Echoes from ዶግዓሊ/Dogali. Weaving memories, intertwining stories" is a project curated by Giulia Grechi (with the cultural association Attitudes_spazio alle arti, which has been researching and taking action on colonial legacies for many years) and the Tezeta Association (which has been working with Eritrean people on the colonial street names of the city of Rome for years), both part of the anti-colonial network Yekatit12-19febbraio (see CV). The project was carried out in collaboration with the Special Superintendence for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape of Rome of the Ministry of Culture, the Capitoline Superintendence and the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Rome.
The Dogali monument (1887) in Rome, restored in 2025 with a conservative and uncritical approach, has been reinterpreted in three ways: a podcast on the history of the monument, to bring out the points of view and stories obscured by its colonial rhetoric; an original work of art by artist Gea Casolaro, created from two archival photographs of the monument; the renaming of the monument's garden after Zerai Deres, a symbol of anti-colonial resistance.
The project implements methodologies that challenge the monolithicity, aphasia, rhetoric, and blindness of the institutional gaze and its cultural policies (Deliss2020): co-design, re-subjectivation, reparation and re-mediation, subversion of the aesthetic canons through which colonial culture has continued to reproduce itself. “Echi da Dogali” is an example of how it is possible to learn to unlearn coloniality (Azoulay2019), to implement a policy of recognition, with a view to intercultural mediation and awareness-raising among citizens, in a participatory and transdisciplinary dimension, with particular attention to subjects who have been historically delegitimized and made invisible.
Session 95 - Slot II
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Demise of Imperialistic Presence: Queen Victoria's Monuments Undone
Maria Grever
abstractMaria Grever
Collective memories and commemorative practices often transcend national boundaries. Hence, researchers of public memorials and monuments need to consider the 'border-transcending dimensions of remembering and forgetting' (Erll 2011) and the transformation of public spaces as transnational sites of memory (Wüstenberg 2019). This is certainly the case with the imperialistic monuments and statues of Queen Victoria.
Following her Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897, Victoria's monumental presence increased in numerous cities around the world: from London, Georgetown, Cape Town to Calcutta, Rangoon, and Brisbane. To confirm and strengthen British rule over the empire, she was often sculpted as the dignified Great White Mother, holding the crown, sceptre and orb. Depicting the Queen in this way was a deliberate choice, as it was considered inappropriate for a woman's body to radiate political power, as well as femininity (Grever 2025). The image of an ageing Queen seem to solve this problem. Visible lines in the aged face of Victoria's statues are said to convey the message that her 'body is weighed down by the sacrifices of duty in exchange for the people's love' (Hatt 2022).
This paper interprets the ubiquity of public monuments to Queen Victoria as acts of violence in themselves, and their demise as part of decolonization. Iconoclastic activists strove to ensure that 'what is dead has no chance of revival, either bodily or spiritual', as proof that the image does not possess powers beyond the material (Freedberg 2016). This goal was not always easy to achieve. Sometimes an effective solution was to leave a damaged statue standing as a silent but clear protest against former colonialism. A striking example is the 'repaired' statue of Queen Victoria in Georgetown, Guyana.
Freedom: Interventions in the memoryscapes of Copenhagen, Denmark and Charlotte Amalie, USVI
Rikke Lie Halberg, Karen Sivebæk Munk
abstractRikke Lie Halberg, Karen Sivebæk Munk
This paper explores the transatlantic itineraries of Freedom—a bronze statue by Ghanaian-American artist Bright Bimpong—and examines how its changing spatial positions in Denmark and the US Virgin Islands (USVI) have altered the commemorative landscape of colonial memory. Originally created in 1998 to mark the 150th anniversary of emancipation in the former Danish West Indies, the statue depicts a muscular male torso holding a cane knife and blowing a conch shell. While widely known as The Conchblower in the Caribbean, its official title, Freedom, gestures toward the entangled themes of resistance, emancipation, and historical justice.
In 2017, a copy of the statue was gifted from the USVI to Denmark through a grassroots initiative. After temporary displays in cultural institutions, it was installed in 2019 at Asiatisk Plads in Copenhagen, which was once the administrative heart of Danish colonial trade. This relocation inserted a symbol of Black Caribbean resistance into the metropolitan centre, challenging long-standing national narratives of Danish benevolence. Meanwhile, in Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the USVI, the original version of Freedom was relocated in 2022 from the periphery of Emancipation Garden to the park’s central position, replacing a bust of Danish King Christian IX. This act redefined the visual hierarchy of the space and foregrounded Afro-Caribbean agency in the politics of remembrance.
We interpret these spatial transformations through a memory studies framework that draws on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s theory of historical silencing, bell hooks’ concept of radical visibility, and Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton’s idea of “monumental interventions.” By tracing Freedom’s journey across oceans and into the heart of symbolic cityscapes, the paper argues that monuments are not inert objects but dynamic participants in contested fields of memory. Through local activism and transnational collaboration, Freedom has become a material and conceptual pivot for reimagining colonial legacies in public space.
Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone: Heritagization in the Wake of Protests, Interventions and Transformations
Terne Thorsen
abstractTerne Thorsen
In recent years, statues, memorials and monuments have become the focal point of discussions of collective history, memory and identity as well as sites of activism and protests. The discussions began to gain more widespread ground after the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa in 2015 and the debate on the use of Confederate symbols following an attack on a Black church by a white supremacist the same year. Following the global Black Lives Matter protest, the debate reached Denmark in 2020 and while both old and new monuments were (and still are) hotly debated, it resulted in fairly few protests and even fewer changes – at least in the existing monuments and how they are presented.
Considering this, this paper examines how communities, artists, heritage professionals and politicians in Denmark have (or have not) responded to contested public monuments. Focusing on some of the most discussed cases – e.g. the graffitiing of statues of Hans Egede in Copenhagen and Nuuk, and the rematerialization of a bust of Frederik V – the paper pays special attention to how transformations can act, not only as enforcers of change, but also vehicles for upholding status quo.
Interventions and transformations have often been highlighted as ways to make the ‘invisible monuments’ visible (Shanken 2022). However, while interventions can call the intervened into question, it can also have the opposite effect, making statues that many had never noticed, something to fight for. Here, the concept of heritage is often invoked in defence of the monument: Although it was a modern plaster replica of Jacques-François-Joseph Saly’s 1754 bust – and not an original – the bust of Frederik V was termed “shared cultural heritage” by its owners, the Academy Council, and the happening was described as a ‘symbolic attack on Danish cultural heritage’ by its critics (Messerschmidt 2020).
Following Laurajane Smith’s ideas on heritage practices and discourses (2006; 2021), the paper examines the role of transformations, including damage and destruction, in the heritagization of public monuments. Smith views heritage as a cultural and social performative process, where values, meanings, and identities are created and re-created, highlighting the affective and political consequences of heritage-making. Considering this, the paper seeks to explore how this type of heritage-making has shaped not only the public space in Denmark, but also the view on what is considered its ‘cultural heritage’.
Session 96 - Heritage conflicts and urban identity [Round Table]
Heritage has a great potential regarding the construction of a shared identity, above all in an international perspective. Nevertheless, it also constitutes a sort of battlefield for controversies generated by the clash of narratives, in social, technical and cultural sense. Massive tourism, globalisation, wars and architectural debate can set a difficult scenario for the stakeholders. The proposed round table aims to gather relevant representants of the up-to-date expertise in the field in order to nurture an interdisciplinary discussion.
Coordinators: Alessandro Scarnato, Francesc Muñoz
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Coordinators: Alessandro Scarnato, Francesc Muñoz
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Session 96 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
Contested heritage: Francoist monuments and the contemporary politics of urban space in Spain.
Katerina Chatzikonstantinou, David Martin Lopez
abstractKaterina Chatzikonstantinou, David Martin Lopez
The paper examines the complexities of preserving, reinterpreting, and resignifying uncomfortable heritage linked to European dictatorships, focusing on Spain. The Spanish case provides a lens to analyze how urban spaces marked by authoritarian symbolism are reconfigured—physically, politically, and symbolically—during and after democratic transition. Despite legislative efforts such as the 2007 Historical Memory Law, interventions on Francoist monuments continue to produce ambiguities in heritage management, urban identity, and collective memory.
The study centers on two emblematic examples. The first is the Monument and Cross of the Fallen in Plaza de España, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, renovated between 1998 and 2008 by Herzog & de Meuron. Although the redesign sought to dilute the spatial hegemony of the Francoist symbol, the landmark Cross-lighthouse remained intact. Its integration into public life has desacralized some of its fascist meaning, yet the monument still dominates the square visually and symbolically, revealing the limits of design interventions in transforming deeply rooted authoritarian heritage.
The second case examines the resignification of the former Valle de los Caídos, now Cuelgamuros Valley. The winning proposal, “The Base and the Cross,” removes the grand staircase and introduces a horizontal portico that reshapes access to the basilica through architectural subtraction. Yet the monumental cross is preserved, ensuring its continued visual dominance even after the planned reinterpretation for 2027. This underscores the tension between dismantling symbolic authority and maintaining structures with national and landscape visibility.
Together, these cases show how resignifying authoritarian monuments remains fraught with contradictions: explicit fascist elements can be removed, but the enduring urban dominance of these structures continues to spark conflict—sometimes muted, sometimes revived by renewed historical consciousness. The contrast between the projected demolition of the Franco Monument in Santa Cruz and the celebrated redesign of Cuelgamuros highlights divergent strategies and political sensitivities in confronting uncomfortable heritage in contemporary Spain.
Beyond Discomfort: Offensive Heritage
Jordi Rabassa Massons
abstractJordi Rabassa Massons
In recent years, various critical approaches to urban heritage have used the term “uncomfortable heritage” to refer to commemorative elements of public art that honor events or individuals who are now questioned for various reasons. This is heritage that has historically been fraught with tension because it represents and reinforces power, conveying didactic messages to the population as a whole. This public art, often ostentatious and shaped by the artistic fashions of the moment in which it was erected, positions itself in a stance of superiority that reveals a hierarchical role over those who observe it.
Although public art has traditionally been the object of iconoclasm by subordinate classes—who have questioned or ignored its supposed artistic value—there is an increasing number of academic perspectives that analyze it as a true totem of power. This reading heightens the tension surrounding its preservation and calls into question the durability of heritage that, far from being neutral, actively participates in the construction of hegemonic narratives.
Nonetheless, the concept of uncomfortable heritage may prove insufficient. It is more accurate to speak of offensive heritage: heritage that offends. Discomfort is a privilege; only those who have enough room to feel it can inhabit it. The most precarious social classes and marginalized groups—often the objects or victims of the narratives these monuments reproduce—have no space for mere discomfort, but rather for offense and for an unavoidable critical gaze.
Thus, the central question is: what do we do with this offensive heritage? Should offense prevail over artistic value, or can that value justify its permanence despite the grievance—not merely the discomfort—it generates?
To add nuance to the analysis and highlight the complexity of this debate, some of the places surrounding these elements of public art—such as squares or avenues—have also become cherished spaces for broad sectors of the population, who have often overlooked interpretations that are now more common. The emotional cartography of a city also deserves careful consideration. How should an administration act when offensive heritage has become a beloved place for the public?
Perspectives, interpretations, and uses intersect and intermingle continuously.
In Barcelona, over the past eight years, the City Council has worked with a critical perspective on both existing heritage and the heritage of the future. Regarding pre-existing he
Future and past identities in cities’ reconstruction after contemporary warfare
Inés Aquilué Junyent, Carlos Bitrián Varea
abstractInés Aquilué Junyent, Carlos Bitrián Varea
The material destruction of a city is a traumatic process that generates periods of uncer-tainty, especially when it results from political violence. Subsequent reconstruction en-tails far-reaching changes that affect both the form and the function of the city, enabling reconstruction actors to redefine collective identity by choosing among various options. This occurs in a context in which the population affected by trauma tends to refrain from opposing the pro-reconstruction narrative –whatever that narrative may be.
After war, consequently, reconstruction often becomes an apparatus for homogenizing the dominant discourse, and each decision contributes to building a reality that either reproduces or eradicates parts of the city. These material actions constitute a process of identification with a specific memory, which in turn communicates a vision for the city’s future. Although the imprint of identity in space is often associated solely with symbolic elements –monuments, memorials, statues– the role of urban form is frequently over-looked, even though reconstruction also shapes post-war discourse. Space thus becomes a political weapon that can favor one identity or another, looking to the past in order to craft a narrative about the future based on the elements preserved and the forms select-ed. In this way, the trauma of the post-war period opens a temporal window in which the narrative can be fixed through reconstruction –a phase that involves either reproduc-ing or replacing the forms of the city that has been destroyed.
Drawing on documentation of various processes of destruction and reconstruction caused by contemporary wars, this research traces patterns that link the identity embed-ded in post-war discourse with the memory or erasure of the city’s form. We examine how continuities are broken and how spaces that align with the discourse of power are elevated. Through an exploration of cities affected by war in the first quarter of the 21st century, we observe the emergence of a distinct identity-based dichotomy: from the construction of new neighborhoods built atop the rubble of pre-war identities to the mi-metic reproduction of a specific past. We illustrate these dynamics by examining Maroto City in Damascus (Syria), Shahrak Aria City in Kabul (Afghanistan), the replaced neighborhoods in the Kurdish cities of Nusaybin, Diyarbakır, and Cizre (Turkey), and the reconstruction of Mosul (Iraq).
Session 96 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 1 Centre Excursionista de Catalunya
Architectural heritage of socialism and its role in defining contemporary urban identity: nostalgia, social media and political conflict
Jelena Prokopljevic
abstractJelena Prokopljevic
At the time that Belgrade is repeatedly announced in social media as the “European capital of Brutalism”, some of its important landmarks from 1960s and 1970s are being either demolished or in a critical state due to long lack of maintenance. This condition especially applies to the vast residential blocks that defined the urban structure of New Belgrade, a socialist city built on Le Corbusian model, radically opposed to the historic centre. Important architectural works, symbols of the socialist state have been demolished or significantly altered in recent years under the pressure of speculative real-estate investment. This pressure concentrates on the river waterfronts, Belgrade’s most attractive locations and in the historic centre.
Heritage catalogue for architecture from socialist period is limited and subject to the fluctuating political decisions. As I write, the protection on the building of Army General Headquarters of Belgrade (N. Dobrović, 1956-1965) has been cleared to favour the new construction of hotel complex financed by Trump enterprises. Hotel Yugoslavia (L. Horvat, 1947-1969) was demolished last spring and is currently being replaced by a similar high-standard complex financed by a company connected with Serbian political elite. Several other examples of landmarks of socialist modernism are under threat, despite being thoroughly analysed in academic publications, exhibited internationally and published on multiple websites. Specialized tourist tours are organized through brutalist residential zone whose architecture have marked the urban identity of so many generations. This introduces the element of nostalgia of the socialist period, both positive connotations of the open country with extended social protection and of anti-socialist dissidence and popular critique of its architecture.
Svetlana Boym (2001) writes: “Nostalgia works as a double-edged sword: it seems to be an emotional antidote to politics, and thus remains the best political tool.” In this sense, my proposal examines the Belgrade’s socialist architectural heritage from this double lens: of the investment resource and of the preservation through the revaluation of original ideas and their impact on urban culture. It looks into different media publications and official discussions on the question of socialist architecture heritage in order to broaden the understanding its role in the creation of contemporary city, through preservation, activism, decay and destruction.
FROM PRIVATE CITY TO URBAN HERITAGE: POST-WAR HOUSING IN NAPLES
Chiara Chiara Ingrosso
abstractChiara Chiara Ingrosso
The cultural dimension of urban space has traditionally been associated with recognised heritage: historic centres, monuments and exceptional buildings. However, contemporary cities are largely composed of ordinary residential landscapes produced after the Second World War, often excluded from heritage narratives.
Post-war housing represents one of the largest transformations of European urban space. Built in response to demographic growth, industrialisation and the aspirations of an expanding middle class, it embodies profound social, architectural and cultural changes. Yet it is still frequently interpreted through the categories of decay and speculation rather than as a component of contemporary urban identity.
Naples provides a significant case study. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the city underwent a radical transformation. In the intermediate areas between the historic centre and the outskirts, the so-called “middle city” became the physical expression of the emerging middle class, representing aspirations for modernity, comfort and social recognition.
For decades, this transformation was mainly associated with building speculation, reinforced by the political events of the Lauro administration and by Francesco Rosi’s film Le mani sulla città (1963). This interpretation contributed to the marginalisation of post-war private architecture, considered almost exclusively as the result of uncontrolled growth.
The paper proposes a different reading of the “private city”, understood as an urban cultural landscape shaped by social aspirations, economic policies, architectural experimentation and the morphology of Naples. The condominium and the palazzina are analysed not only as products of rapid urbanisation, but also as spaces that generated new forms of domestic life and urban identity.
Particular attention is devoted to Stefania Filo Speziale, the first woman architect from Naples and one of the most significant figures of post-war Neapolitan architecture. Her residential works reveal how private housing could become a field of innovation, where architecture, landscape and domestic culture were closely interconnected.
Considering post-war middle-class housing as contemporary heritage requires an expanded notion of urban heritage, including ordinary residential environments and collective experiences. Recognising this heritage means developing regeneration strategies capable of transforming existing resources into future urban laboratories.
The plots of a landscape: the meanings of conflicts in the construction of industrial heritage in the Mooca district, São Paulo city.
Veronica Sales Pereira
abstractVeronica Sales Pereira
This district, cradle of industrialization in São Paulo and Brazil, becomes a "strategic" location in the city's reconfiguration. In one hand, there was expanded credit for real estate and increase of workers' income (2003-2014). On the other, the 1988 Constitution guided a new urban policy, regulated in the City Statute (2001) and operationalized in the Steering Plans (2001, 2004).
This led to a real estate boom at Mooca, while it demanded the patrimonialization of its industrial legacy, what involved the civil society participation. Disputes arose between the State, the real estate, and social classes, involving demolitions for the construction of residential condominiums (2004 and 2009) and refunctionalization into hypermarkets (2004), but also total preservations (2007); emergency listings of risk areas (2007); and occupations by "homeless" people (2010). They reflect the heritage expansion but are not reduced to an unlimited “cult of historical heritage”, turned into a commodity, or a variant of the “culture of memory”, reflecting the threat of loss of sense of identity in postmodern times.
Cultural heritage is not a "finished" product, a univocal identity resource, as it reflects a "value of dissent": their values do not repress the social and political disputes of the past, and are also subject to negotiation due to the recent inclusion of new actors, beyond the State and the dominant classes, expanding the political public sphere. Thus, the concept of "excess of heritage" overlooks unrecognized types of heritage, such as those of the popular classes, subject to invisibility.
Understanding the processes of symbolic appropriation of buildings and urban space involves articulating their multiple temporalities, occurring through the modes of "presentification" of the past, the relationships between architectural forms and their uses, and the "spatial marking", articulating preservation, demolition/destruction, and remembrance/commemoration.
We will discuss how these processes revealed the construction of a non-homogeneous industrial landscape, expressed in the clash between heritage and urban regulatory frameworks; in the blurring of boundaries between specialized knowledge and common sense; in the distinct modes of restoration and aestheticization; and in the reconstruction of the identity of the middle classes, ranging from instrumentalization of the past working-class memory to the dispute over the industrial spaces with the present working class.
Session 97 - Mapping Urban Complexity: Unveiling Invisible Narratives
This session invites creative cartographic explorations that embrace the complexity of urban histories. We welcome contributions that experiment with radical mapping methodologies-whether through digital technologies, artistic interpretations, or interdisciplinary approaches-to uncover hidden narratives, layered temporalities, and long-overlooked urban histories.
Coordinators: Nuria Benach, Nuria Font Casaseca, Philippe Rekacewicz
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Coordinators: Nuria Benach, Nuria Font Casaseca, Philippe Rekacewicz
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Session 97 - Slot I
Thursday 3 September 2026 11:15-12:30 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Graphic Essay on Old Palau Reial Menor Urbanization History
Isabel Moreto
abstractIsabel Moreto
Training as architect (1), doctoral thesis preparation (2), studies in Fine Arts (3), some papers (4) and 40 years of professional experience (5) have led me to wonder about the ways we commonly employ to explain the over time cities development. Are oral and written expressions the best way? Are photographs and mechanized drawings enlightening enough? How can we manage to effectively transfer knowledge in a world more literate in images than in words?
The starting hypothesis would be that manual drawing has great hermeneutical potential in urban history’s field. Drawings are conceived not only to be looked at, but also to be read, drawing is thinking, one draws more with the mind than with the hand. Drawing implies taking position. A great deal of the thinking that drawing requires gets lost in the easiness, the brightness and the standardization of digital treatments. Photography does not discriminate information, it’s not capable of building up a discourse of its own, its visual field is limited, and the different focuses of attention that real perception creates cannot be intensified. Traditional drawing's interpretation of the data turns to easier emotional connection with the reader and greater efficiency in the transmission of information and knowledge.
Having had been Temple's Order headquarters in the 12th century, Queen Eleanor’s palace in the 14th and Requesens House in the 16th, the old Palau Menor remained standing until last owner Countess of Sobradiel had it demolished to ease a real estate operation. Ferran Street and Plaça Reial (1848) had transferred urban interest from Pla de Palau towards the Rambla, Raval being a buildable sector. The Palau Menor operation was strategic. Urbanization was carried out very quickly (1849-1859), in two different actions: Milans Street and the urbanization of the land freed by the demolition of the palace. I trust that bibliography's extension and reliability will allow me to focus attention on testing manual drawing’s tool as a method of deepening into an interesting middle 19th urban reform.
(1) ETSAB 1986.
(2) Architectural modernization and urban transformation in 19th-century Barcelona: from Pla de Palau to Plaça Reial 1818-1848 (work in progress).
(3) Fine Arts (studies in progress).
(4) Architecture Class of Antoni Celles 1815-1835 (2005), Irruption of the modern city 1854-1874 (2008), Beauty of modern Barcelona 1874-1906 (2010).
(5) Barcelona’s City Council 1984-2024.
Mapping transformation: Graphical narratives of change over time in the Besòs Delta.
Helena Majó Ylla-Català, Adolf Sotoca, Rosina Vinyes-Balbé
abstractHelena Majó Ylla-Català, Adolf Sotoca, Rosina Vinyes-Balbé
This proposal explores the challenge of expressing time and transformation using cartographic tools. Geographically centered on the eastern side of Barcelona, it focuses on the productive transformation of the Besòs river’s Delta. The investigation seeks to understand the area's current form and economic activities in relation to the past decisions that have shaped it. To achieve this, we use cartographic representation tools and explore how they can express cause and consequence in the transformation of urban space.
The research examines urban industrial areas through the concept of reproduction: it explores how they have evolved over time and their unique effect over the urban landscape in their vicinity. It reviews the historical process of the area's transformation from agricultural land to industrial urban fabric and incorporates the most recent urban regeneration projects into a diachronic, multi-scale analysis. Through a combination of cartographic representation methods and ethnographic fieldwork techniques, we aim to visually depict narratives of power, collective memory and the link between the physical manifestation of urban landscape and the social relations that have produced it. The research explores the potential of maps to express the various dimensions of a particular urban setting and questions the need to incorporate layers traditionally rendered invisible.
For this, we opt for a case study-based analysis: a graphical narration of places where certain decisions and ways of life converge and are specifically visible. Locations that highlight how the past, the present and the future are mutually affected and where the overlap between the physical and social dimensions of the city are particularly evident. The research aims to understand processes by challenging traditional cartographic language, a graphic exercise that incorporates transformation into representations of a changing city.
Cartographies of urbicide on the Barcelona waterfront: the reissue of utopianism and hygienism in commodified cities
María Gabriela Navas Perrone
abstractMaría Gabriela Navas Perrone
In contemporary Barcelona, urban reforms enacted under predatory capitalism are often celebrated as innovative, yet they reproduce long-standing dynamics of spatial dispossession and obscure a paradoxical truth: urbicide remains a key force shaping urban transformation. Extending the concept beyond its wartime origins, this paper develops a cartographic interpretation of urbicide as it manifests in times of peace through neoliberal urban policies.
The study analyzes the transformation of Barcelona’s waterfront over the past twenty-five years through two emblematic redevelopment projects tied to major international sporting events: the Olympic Village (1992) and the recent overhaul of the Olympic Port for the 2024 America’s Cup. Both interventions reconfigured the Poblenou coastline through spatial logics that reorganize, erase, and redraw urban space according to processes of commodification. Situated within a longer genealogy, these transformations reveal how nineteenth-century hygienist and utopian planning -catalyzed by the Cerdà Plan- continues to shape urbicide as a modus operandi of contemporary redevelopment.
Revisiting the notion of urbicide as the symbolic and material annihilation of the “other,” the paper traces its contemporary expression in the erasure of working-class ways of inhabiting, collective memory, and industrial landscapes along the waterfront. Through a mixed-methods approach combining archival research, analysis of urban planning decision-making, and walk-and-talk interviews with displaced residents, the study identifies how urbicidal dynamics materialize both in the physical destruction of the built environment and in the erosion of spatial practices that sustained local social life before and after redevelopment.
The results expose cartographies of urbicide embedded in Poblenou’s urban renewal: the dismantling of industrial heritage, the fragmentation of working-class neighborhood relations, the privatization of governance and public space through exclusionary practices targeting “undesirable” users, and the instrumentalization of architectural discourse to advance utopian ideals detached from everyday urban life while masking the social consequences of commodification.
The paper proposes an experiment in radical mapping and concludes by underscoring the need for critical engagement with urbicide and advocating urbanism that protects the lived dimension of the city to resist the pervasive violence underpinning the capitalist city
Counter-Cartographies of Relief: Gender, Space, and Political Imagination in Fúquene, Colombia
Mariana Valderrama Leongómez, Mariana Valderrama Leongómez
abstractMariana Valderrama Leongómez, Mariana Valderrama Leongómez
This article examines a participatory feminist cartographic project developed with women from Fúquene, Colombia, that explores how gendered spatial experiences are intertwined with emotion, power, and imagination. Using the methodology of counter-cartography of relief, the research reclaims mapping as both a critical and healing practice, one that exposes patriarchal spatial regimes while enabling collective visions for possible futures. The study engaged women from different areas of the Fúquene River basin through focus groups and multi-layered mapping exercises. Each participant created three transparent map layers: the geography of daily life, emotional associations of well-being and distress, and imagined maps of desired futures. This low-tech, affective approach revealed both the constraints and the potentialities embedded in women’s lived environments.
The findings show that domestic spaces, often idealized as safe and nurturing, were consistently marked by participants as sites of discomfort, labor, and control. In contrast, places linked to work, community, or nature—such as the lagoon and the town—appeared as spaces of well-being and freedom. Through collective discussion, the women identified shared burdens of domestic responsibility, restricted mobility, and lack of employment, recognizing these as interconnected forms of structural and emotional oppression. The act of mapping became transformative: personal isolation was reinterpreted as a collective condition, and emotion emerged as a political language through which to articulate spatial injustice.
The creation of the map of desire—a composite visualization of all participants’ desires—signaled a shift from critique to imagination. In this envisioned Fúquene, women enjoy access to transportation, education, healthcare, ecological restoration, and mutual support. The process of overlaying individual maps into a collective cartography fostered emotional relief and solidarity, turning private pain into shared possibility. Drawing on feminist theorists such as Ahmed, Arendt, and Braidotti, the article argues that imagination and emotion constitute forms of political agency capable of redrawing both affective and physical landscapes.
Session 97 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Urban Thrownapartness and Domestic Thresholds
Clara Valverde-Gefaell
abstractClara Valverde-Gefaell
Is opening one's eyes an act of crossing a threshold? For people with Severe ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) it is the first step in a new scale of boundness: body-bound, bedbound, wheelchair bound, couch-bound (Montoya) and homebound.
The long silenced and contested history of this very debilitating neuro-immune illness (classified by the World Health Organization in 1969), causes invisibility, isolation, disbelief and therefore "thrownapartness" (a term developed by the geographer Oren Yiftachel, in dialectic tension with Doreen Massey's concept of "throwntogetherness"). The thrownapartness of people with Severe ME includes no homecare, no healthcare, no social contact, no financial help. In these times of neoliberal necropolitics, these people who neither produce not consume, are not disposed off by the powerful but left to die (as Achille Mbembe has argued).
In their "state of permanent temporariness" (as Yiftachel puts it), people with Severe ME live in a "grey space" where nothing is resolved and are under threat. These people have a powerful emotional relationship to thresholds. Seldom able to cross any of them, they experience their liminal space and ambiguity (following Turner’s terms) with the desire to cross, sadness for not being able to cross, and anger for being thrown apart by society.
Mapping the domestic thresholds, demands new ways of thinking from the patient's point of view. Fabric is perhaps the most relevant material for mapping this situation, as fabric, sheets and pillows, are the material and reality that accompanies the person with Severe ME 24 hours a day during years. Fabric is almost as important as skin.
People with Severe ME in their extreme isolation, seem to be forgotten by the world that threw them apart. They feel no possible implication in changing their situation. But just by being alive, they put in evidence the cruelty of neoliberalism and warn of the disastrous situation of the health system and its future.
Experimenting with visualizations from a different point of view can help make their condition visible and open up new understandings of what thresholds mean—constraints and openings simultaneously—for people in situations of thrownapartness.
"Europe is indefensible": deciphering critical mapping practices
Andrea Pla I Rivas
abstractAndrea Pla I Rivas
Far-right discourses are becoming hegemonic in how migration, borders and belonging are made publicly intelligible—and I ask why critique, even from avowedly radical positions, keeps proving insufficient to unsettle them. I take mapping as the practice through which to pursue this question. Franco Farinelli's "cartographic reason"—an onto-epistemological structure that divides, orders and renders a world commensurable through an act of violent reduction and fixation—together with Denise Ferreira da Silva's "transparent I," lets me ask how the mapping subject comes to appear neutral and immobile, and what that neutrality allows to pass as self-evident: among other things, the border itself as a bounded, natural unit prior to any dispute over what happens within or across it. Even a recent, data-driven account of this summer's mediatised "crisis" at the Ceuta border—one that carefully traces the far right's transnational networks and debunks specific disinformation—leaves this frame intact: more data, however rigorous, is not enough. This is where Sylvia Wynter's practice of "deciphering" becomes necessary instead, asking not what a map, a piece of research, or a set of data gets wrong, but what each of them must already take for granted in order to be thinkable at all. I attempt this deciphering practice through my own situated work of mapping as repetitive sketching and variation—crayons, collage, scanning—working with the Black Mediterranean as a relational space linking Europe, Africa and the sea, while reflecting on what authority I have to map relations I have not lived. I close by returning to deciphering itself: not a method to apply once and set aside, but the praxis from within which such research would need to proceed.
[Counter]cartographies and socio-spatial justice: urban narratives from invisible spaces.
Cristobal Hernandez
abstractCristobal Hernandez
Throughout history, cartography has functioned as a key tool for organizing space, yet its role is not neutral. It primarily represents the political and economic interests driving neoliberal urban development. Serving dominant classes, traditional cartography reinforces social hierarchies, consolidating its power in urban planning.
This study confronts these hegemonic representations by proposing alternative cartographic models—or [counter]cartographies—based on critical practice. Through urban exploration and collaboration with inhabitants, it seeks to reveal hidden processes of resistance and urban complexity omitted from conventional maps.
Traditional maps are often authoritarian and reductive, portraying space through a false neutrality of administrative structures, road networks, and cadastral systems. This approach consolidates geographies of privilege and exclusion, facilitating accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004). Employing a framework of socio-spatial justice (Fraser, 2006; Soja, 2010) and Henri Lefebvre's spatial trialectics (Lefebvre, 1974), this research analyzes how different cartographic models promote or obstruct urban justice. It constructs maps through four intertwined dimensions: institutional (conceived), cartographiable (perceived), social (lived), and proposed ([counter]-cartographies). This methodology visualizes not only physical structures but also the everyday discourses and practices of urban life.
The presentation will showcase preliminary cartographic models from ongoing research in self-produced settlements: Eix del Besòs (Barcelona) and Nuevo Amanecer (Santiago de Chile). These extreme, stigmatized, and marginalized case sites are analyzed using urban expeditions (Bunge, 1973) and collaborative fieldwork. Through direct dialogue, this process co-produces maps that document social resistance, alternative spatial uses, and self-production practices completely absent from official cartography.
Between Cartographic Space and Urban Space: Ode to a Feminist Cartography
Isabela Magalhães Bordignon, Lindon Fonseca Matias
abstractIsabela Magalhães Bordignon, Lindon Fonseca Matias
Although it is employed in different contexts, the original and most established notion of the term “map” in the West remains closely associated with Geography and, consequently, with space. In the Brazilian context, few geographical studies theorize and use maps as a means of thinking about the urban. When they are used, maps, particularly through geotechnologies, are conceived as instruments for urban spatial planning, enabling the rational use of territory. This conception reduces the map to a neutral representation of an empty space, as an irrefutable truth.
Starting from the understanding that cartographic space (absolute) and urban space (relative and relational) are inseparable, and that as cartographic and urban spaces transform, the relationship between them also changes, this paper seeks to understand this relationship in the Brazilian context through the lens of feminist geographical epistemology. To this end, in addition to a theoretical and methodological review of the existing literature on the cartographic representation of urban space, the discussion is guided by the following question: how can a dialectical object (urban space) be understood through instruments grounded in formal logic (cartography)?
There is a gap between cartographic space and urban space that reveals a limitation: mapping is used to order, classify, and separate, whereas urban reality requires a language capable of expressing the conflicting interconnectedness and overlapping temporalities that constitute the urban. The challenge is not technical, but logical and philosophical: to imagine a new form of cartography whose symbols and languages are capable of making visible abstract social relations, conflicts, and the totality in motion.
In this sense, feminist epistemology offers an important theoretical and methodological framework insofar as it challenges formal logic and questions the universal subject of cartographic knowledge, the “God’s eye,” exposing it as a partial, masculine, and supposedly objective point of view. Thinking about, and more importantly, producing a feminist cartography—which simultaneously constitutes an instrument, methodology, and language—makes it possible to construct collective and situated knowledge, grounded in feminist theory, revealing narratives and themes that have historically been rendered invisible by the traditional map.
Session 97 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Re-signifying Venice’s Water Periphery: A 3D Interactive Spatial Infrastructure for the Venetian Archipelago
Ludovica Galeazzo, Federico Panarotto
abstractLudovica Galeazzo, Federico Panarotto
Throughout the early modern period, the more than sixty islands shaping the Venetian lagoon constituted an integral and strategic component of Venice’s urban framework, operating as a capillary network that sustained the city’s supply, defence, healthcare, and civic rituals. These water-bounded settlements hosted a diverse constellation of religious communities, while also serving as sites of agriculture, livestock farming, and proto-industrial production. During major health and military crises, they provided hospitals, care facilities, and fortifications, acting as indispensable bulwarks that safeguarded both public health and the political-economic stability of the Republic. At the same time, they embodied Venice’s culture of hospitality, welcoming foreign communities, minorities, and elite noble lineages from across Europe.
This tight relationship between the capital city and its water-spread periphery came to an end with the fall of the Venetian Republic (1797) and Napoleon’s subsequent dissolution of ecclesiastical orders. Political changes and urban transformations significantly altered the geographic configuration and functions of most islands, which were systematically demolished or remodelled, and now lie largely abandoned. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century interventions obliterated their material presence but, above all, effaced their identities and specific narratives, obscuring their crucial role as a connective tissue within the city’s wider urban fabric.
The ERC project Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss) seeks to digitally resurrect this dispersed cultural landscape by reconstructing the vanished buildings and the intangible urban, economic, and socio-cultural elements that once linked the capital with its aquascape. Using a web-based, interactive geospatial 3D platform—developed at the University of Padua in collaboration with the Universities of Florence and Harvard—the project unveils and visualises the long-term histories of Venice’s lagoon islands, restoring their physical forms and social functions across time and space. This mapping infrastructure integrates interoperable HGIS-based HBIM models with historical data and sources, enabling users to recontextualise the enduring dynamics of Venice’s centre–periphery relations and reassess the archipelago’s role within the city’s urban practices. By digitally tracing the transformations of these now-neglected places, VeNiss re-signifies the archipelago’s historical link to the Venetian cityscape.
Waste, weave, and the city: unraveling intersectional ecologies of wasted space
Giorgia Arillotta, Anna Attademo, Gilda Berruti, Sara Piccirillo
abstractGiorgia Arillotta, Anna Attademo, Gilda Berruti, Sara Piccirillo
Dominant urban narratives only make visible what is planned and recognised as conforming, leaving at the margins the geographies of waste, repair and the subsequent lives of materials. It is precisely in the gap between the city that is represented and the one that actually sustains its metabolism that invisible practices and temporalities surface, yet fundamental to understanding its functioning. In this sense, the article explores how textile waste spaces shape alternative urban ecologies in which gender, labour, material flows and temporal cycles intertwine, opening up other ways of organising everyday life. Along the timelines of textile production, use, disposal and reuse, the research shows how urban metabolism is shaped by the simultaneous intertwining of spatial and temporal forces, and how care and value circulate through material and time.
Grounded in Urban Political Ecology (Keil, 2003; Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006) and Soja's (1996) spatial turn, the study interprets space and matter as active agents in the construction of social relations.
Space is understood as relational and performative, a dynamic field in which material and symbolic dimensions coexist and transform. In this perspective, waste is a relational resource connecting bodies, infrastructures and territories in new plots of the city.
The empirical investigation combines ethnography, participatory mapping and visual documentation in textile reuse contexts such as recycling districts, repair workshops and second-hand markets. These places are seen as metabolic thresholds where the temporalities of spaces and those of social practices overlap, generating hybrid economies and alternative forms of inhabiting the city. Through a visual and semiotic analysis, the article shows the first outcomes of a work in progress of reconnection, data collection that aims to reveal how discarded textiles function as spatio-temporal archives.
The research highlights the performative agency of space, material and time, showing how repair and reuse activate continuous cycles of transformation.
Overall, the contribution argues that mapping discard means mapping the living temporality of space and matter, revealing how urban complexity is constructed through intertwined temporal scales, asynchronies, overlapping rhythms and a constant negotiation between decay and repair practices.
Re-mapping the Campus: Making the Invisible Boundaries Visible
Jing Bai
abstractJing Bai
Compared with universities in Spain—dispersed throughout the city and integrated into its daily life—Chinese campuses, along with many public institutions such as government offices, hospitals, libraries, and residential compounds, remain enclosed by continuous fences or walls. In some campuses, buildings stand directly against these boundaries; in others, wide, unused green belts separate them, forming overgrown and inaccessible buffer zones. Taking Xiamen University as an example, its main campus occupies more than 1,650 hectares with a perimeter wall stretching nearly seven kilometers, enclosing dormitories, classrooms, canteens, and even shopping malls within its limits. These extended boundary lines rarely appear on maps, yet they profoundly shape urban connectivity and accessibility. Despite their ubiquity, there are no cartographic standards or spatial indicators capable of describing such spaces, whose continuity and contrasting urban conditions reveal a complexity long overlooked in conventional mapping.
This research employs boundary mapping as a creative and critical practice to visualize the invisible spatial structures that define and divide the contemporary city. Through layered mappings of Chinese university campuses, it reconstructs the boundary as both a physical trace and a temporal archive—revealing how fences, walls, and vegetated margins not only regulate movement and visibility but also shape the morphological evolution of the surrounding urban fabric. The mappings combine precise linework with interpretive overlays—drawing from field observation, historical imagery, and narrative annotation—to expose the spatial and social thickness of the campus boundary. Rather than offering technical precision, the method embraces ambiguity and multiplicity as tools to uncover overlooked relationships between enclosure and openness, isolation and exchange. Ultimately, boundary mapping becomes a lens to reinterpret the university as a living interface that records, resists, and reconfigures the changing relationship between campus and city.
Session 97 - Slot IV
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Uncovering multiethnic dynamics in Los Angeles history. Critical approaches to uses of statistical data in mapping.
Ruben Pallol, Marcos Prados
abstractRuben Pallol, Marcos Prados
The spread of cartographic software in recent decades has played a decisive role in consolidating the spatial turn in urban history, offering new perspectives on some of the field’s longstanding concerns. This has been particularly evident in the study of urban racial segregation, a central theme in the United States. Geographic Information Systems have enabled the proliferation of digital mapping projects that reconstruct racial boundaries using well-known statistical sources such as the federal census—now processed at scale through computational tools and automated data workflows.
Yet this technological innovation has not been matched by sufficiently critical reflection on the biases embedded in the conceptual apparatus used to produce population data and other historical sources. As a result, digital cartographies often reproduce long-standing narratives of segregation, overlooking forms of resistance to racist projects and erasing subaltern or minority communities that remain invisible in aggregated statistics or in the historical maps created.
This paper proposes an examination of segregation and multiethnic interaction in Los Angeles during the 1930s and 1940s that integrates the analytical capacities of large-scale statistical processing in GIS with a critical reassessment of conceptual definitions, methodological procedures, and representational strategies. First, it foregrounds the research operations required to georeference historical data in ways that avoid the erasure of groups traditionally forgotten or underrepresented in historical cartographies. Second, it underscores the need for alternative analytical categories that do not reproduce the racializing and racist assumptions embedded in the sociological and bureaucratic infrastructures that shaped data collection, particularly in the census. Third, it explores new representational approaches capable of capturing the complexities and ambiguities of the racial and social boundaries that dominant groups sought to inscribe onto the urban fabric of Los Angeles. Fourth, it aims to visualize the historical contingency and instability of such boundaries by rendering their temporal transformations. Finally, it advocates incorporating qualitative materials—beyond the supposedly objective realm of demographic statistics—to illuminate forms of social interaction in public space and to reveal the limits, or even the futility, of attempts to impose rigid separations among racialized populations.
The Cartography of Inscription, Erasure, and Re-inscription: heʼišup-tovaangar and Los Ángeles, California, 1325-2025 CE
Philip Ethington
abstractPhilip Ethington
This paper begins with a theoretical assertion: that all societies inscribe their institutions into the landscape, and these inscriptions endure even beyond conquest and colonization. Colonization uses toponymic erasure as a tool, but it can only cut so deep into the already-transformed natural-cultural landscape. Cartographic reconstructions can expose the subordinated civilizational past and re-inscribe places of conquest, making them contested places with revitalized ancient names. Every culture, along with its modes of production, exchange, reproduction, and power, has a finite footprint that is mappable in two-dimensional cartographic space.
This argument is presented in maps drawn collaboratively by the author with the indigenous Chumash and Kizh-Gabrieleño Tribes, of the terraqueous regional ecology and urban civilization of heʼišup-tovaangar, which under Spanish, Mexican, and United States conquests, was re-inscribed as “Southern California.” Chumashan and Uto-Aztecan people of heʼišup-tovaangar created a dense urban exchange network of highly specialized sedentary village-states, across roads and sea-lanes, and came, through their sustained prosperity and stability, to dominate the larger inter-regional trade networks from the Pacific Coast to the Colorado Plateau. Maps of this civilization, including hundreds of villages and their road and ocean networks, reveal that the Chumashans and Uto-Aztecans, not the Europeans, created the urban region we know today.
Toponymy is an archive of power. Mapping the conquest after 1769 exposes the systematic erasure of Indigenous placenames and route-names. The conquerors–usurping the ancient places and routes, now falsely portrayed themselves as the region´s urban original founders.
To this day no nation, band, or tribe owns any territory nor the all-important federal recognition. And yet, they are organized, by the thousands, demanding recognition and the return of at least some of their lands to support their ancestral way of life and to heal the industrialized landscapes that their ancestors co-produced. Collaboratively mapping their ancient villages, with their ancient Indigenous placenames, is an act of re-inscription, supporting the struggle for sovereignty by creating awareness among non-native people of the very presence of the invisibilized indigenous, of the great antiquity of their own neighborhoods, and the debt they owe to the founders of the region.
Session 97 - Slot V
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 2 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Mapping Historic Squares: Use, Perception, and Memory in the Public Spaces of Roman Zaragoza
Isabel Ezquerra, Alejandro Gómez
abstractIsabel Ezquerra, Alejandro Gómez
Public space is a structuring element of urban configuration and the articulation of collective life. In historic centres, its study reveals processes of continuity, adaptation and reinterpretation that connect urban form with contemporary social uses. In Zaragoza, the current system of historic squares within the former Roman core offers a distinctive case for examining how the persistence of historical layouts conditions successive transformations and contributes to the construction of recognisable urban morphologies, in which past and present coexist materially and symbolically.
This paper presents the preliminary results of a research project examining the historical evolution, spatial configuration and current social use of seven historic squares in Zaragoza. Two contrasting cases are analysed in detail in this work: Plaza del Justicia and Plaza de SAS. Their selection responds to the different processes of persistence and transformation that have shaped their morphology, environmental qualities and collective memory. The research combines documentary sources, historical cartography, morphological analysis, architectural and functional analysis of building frontages, and direct observation and fieldwork. Historical plans are redrawn over the current urban fabric in order to identify continuities, ruptures and elements of persistence, while the analysis of contemporary frontages and ground-floor uses provides insight into the physical and functional conditions of each square. This reading is complemented by the observation of staying activities and pedestrian flows. So, this work explores, on the one hand, their historical evolution and their contribution to the city's collective memory, and on the other hand, their function as places of encounter and socialization, as well as modifications that could improve their identity and social cohesion. The comparison reveals a clear relationship between spatial configuration and contemporary patterns of use, although this relationship is mediated by other factors.
The study proposes an analytical and graphic framework capable of making visible the structure, evolution, use and spatial qualities of these public spaces. Beyond documenting their historical persistence, the research seeks to support critical reflection on how inherited urban configurations interact with contemporary practices and on how targeted interventions could strengthen their identity, social vitality and capacity to support urban life.
Street Evolution: reciprocity between street design and society
Daniel Casas-Valle, Ivo Oliveira, Lucas Carneiro
abstractDaniel Casas-Valle, Ivo Oliveira, Lucas Carneiro
Streets form resilient collective spaces. In time, new societal and technological demands affected how streets were designed. Streets have the ability to change and adapt in its materialisation, design layout, and functionality. In parallel, its gross urban space hardly changes, maintaining its dimensions often during a very long period. This is related to the complexity of urban networks (rainwater system, sewerage, drink water tubes, gas and heating systems, electricity, and communication cables), the layouts of the street surfaces (pavements, urban furniture, trees), as well related to changings in of private structures: buildings and parcellation. That is why streets and street patterns are solid, rigid, resilient, and structural systems in urban areas.
In parallel, streets are a cultural reflection of society. The way they are organised, functioning, designed, planned, used, appreciated, and experienced is constantly adapting and interweaved with urban life rhythms. Herein social, economic, and technology aspects have a (in)direct impact on how streets are designed and organised. In the basis, streets provide spaces for social (every daily life), natural (green, climate adaptation, ecology) and mobility (flows, accessibility, parking) functions.
This article provides a systematically overview on street design along the last two centuries, questioning the actual debate on rebalancing street design based on social, natural and mobility aspects. The research outcomes, based on literature review, will show a reconstruction of a street type to represent how street design evolved, from its specific spatial design to its functionality. The reconstructed street has a central urban location with mix functional building programmes, including shopping, cafes and restaurants on the ground level. The reconstruction of the street evolution exits of a comparison in six-time moments, namely: 1840, 1880, 1920, 1960, 2000, and 2040. Except the last moment that looks ahead of our actual time, all the other moments are a re-construction. Each moment is presented in a reconstructed composed ´photograph´ and a floor plan map, and a description of its ´daily urban rhythm´, as well an Street Evolution timeline based on three main spatial themes: (street) layout, traffic and (urban) networks).
Counter-Mapping the unseen: visual grammars for Urban Metabolic Risk
Sara Piccirillo, Benedetta Pastena
abstractSara Piccirillo, Benedetta Pastena
Urban space is often read through what we can see: infrastructures, density, built forms. Yet these visible elements are only the surface of deeper forces at work. Materials and labor circulate, places grow and decay at uneven rhythms, and social–ecological cycles unfold largely out of sight. Sometimes they move too slowly to notice, sometimes they are buried underground, and sometimes they are simply left out of dominant narratives. These hidden dynamics form a kind of urban metabolism—one made of fragile balances, delayed effects, and interlocking dependencies.
Within this lens, Urban Metabolic Risk (UMR) can be understood as the cumulative impact of disrupted or inefficient metabolisms. Rather than a sudden shock, UMR produces slow exhaustion: long-term exposure to environmental stress, abandonment, shrinking populations, declining health, and the quiet exclusion of certain groups from everyday urban life and decision-making. It settles into bodies, infrastructures, and landscapes over time. It is diffuse, hard to pinpoint, and structurally overlooked. It shows up as illness without crisis, as the fading of work, memory, and presence—phenomena that rarely appear on conventional maps.
Urban Political Ecology has highlighted the limits of traditional cartography, pushing instead toward Counter-mapping as a way to reveal the ties between infrastructures, ecologies, and inequalities. Here, mapping becomes less about describing what is already visible and more about asking: how do we represent conditions that are unstable, delayed, or invisible altogether?
This contribution examines a set of contemporary atlases that sit between critical cartography, radical geography, and activist knowledge. These visual works try to give shape to what usually escapes representation: metabolic processes, slow harm, and uneven risk. Drawing on ideas of slow violence and on critiques of established mapping conventions, the paper argues that UMR demands a shift toward meta-cartographic approaches—ones able to trace absence, relation, and temporal displacement instead of simply locating problems in space.
In this view, counter-mapping is not just a tool but a stance. It challenges the way urban knowledge is produced, asking us to see the city not only where it stands, but where it erodes, accumulates, and remembers. It points to a landscape where vulnerability moves quietly, thickens over time, and ultimately reshapes what urban life can be.
Session 99 - Digital cartography for the Historic Charter of Barcelona
The development of the Historic Charter of Barcelona, is an ongoing project held by the MUHBA in which many historians, architects and researchers have collaborated. The use of big data from different sources, historical maps and studies on this area made possible the drawing of 30 different stages in the history of Barcelona.
Coordinators: Oriol Hostench Ruiz, Pablo Martínez Díez
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Coordinators: Oriol Hostench Ruiz, Pablo Martínez Díez
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Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Session 100 - Cambridge Urban History of Europe
After many years of preparation, the Cambridge Urban History of Europe was published in late 2025. With its three volumes and c. 2,700 pages, this is a landmark publication for European urban history, and the session wants to mark the occasion with celebratory drinks, as well as a conversation about the place of these books in our field. Rosemary Sweet (Leicester, Urban History) will interrogate the editors, while contributing authors will talk about the ideas underpinning their chapters.
Coordinators: Maarten Prak, Dorothee Brantz, Patrick Lantschner, Gábor Sonkoly
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Coordinators: Maarten Prak, Dorothee Brantz, Patrick Lantschner, Gábor Sonkoly
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Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 3 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Session 101 - Clark’s new book Why Study Small Towns and Cities?
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 3 Museu d'Història de Barcelona
Session 102 - General Session
Session 102 - Slot I
Wednesday 2 September 2026 15:35-17:35 Room 1 CCCB
Silk Trade and Tensions: Networks of Officials in the Context of House of Correction and Children’s Home in 1620s Sweden
Susan Kiiski-Seiskari
abstractSusan Kiiski-Seiskari
In 1624, inspired by Northern European ideas of correctional and forced labor institutions, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden decided to establish a House of Correction and a Children’s Home in Stockholm. The institution was intended to receive beggars, vagrants, and petty criminals, who would be put to work for the common good and the benefit of society.
A German craftsman, Joachim Firbrandt, was recruited to lead the institution and tasked with developing its operations into a diverse and functional system as the master of discipline.
In my presentation, I focus on the networks of this German master of discipline within the context of the House of Correction and the Children’s Home, using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital as an analytical framework.
The silk trade vividly illustrates Sweden’s integration into global silk markets, as well as the society’s early efforts to initiate a successful domestic textile production. However, Sweden lacked the necessary expertise and experience in commerce, which made it dependent on internationally networked Dutch actors. At the same time, competition with them influenced the nature of Sweden’s cooperation with, for example, German merchants.
In my presentation, I examine the operations of the House of Correction and the Children’s Home, as well as the role of official networks in maintaining its activities. I ask: What significance did these networks have in decision-making and in the establishment of the institution of control?
My archival sources include a diverse range of materials from the Swedish National Archives, the Stockholm City Archives, and the Lübeck City Archives. I examine the operations of the House of Correction and the Children’s Home through surviving administrative and legal documents, such as minutes, memoranda, and financial records. In addition, I present the agency of officials as maintainers of networks through correspondence, complaints, and case reports produced in various contexts.
The societal role of the institution of control has been viewed in research literature as part of a religious and criminal-political structure. The institution’s functional mechanisms have been interpreted as simultaneously implementing poor relief and criminal punishment. The study of official networks provides a broader picture of the cooperation between the Swedish realm and its operating officials, as well as the economic objectives behind these efforts.
Men who didn't love (too much) women. Infidelity and attitudes towards women sexuality among the Valencian nobility (14th-15th c.)
Luis Galan Campos
abstractLuis Galan Campos
This communication aims to assess social attitudes towards the sexuality and agency of aristocratic women, especially regarding two major transgressions of marital commitment, the abandonment of home and the adultery. It has been stated by social history, since mid-20th century, that intellectual elaborations —chiefly theological and Church Law’ elucidations—, law institutions and social conventions in late medieval Europe acted conjointly to restrain the liberty of women and to bridle public behaviour and attitudes towards sexuality, distinctly amid social elites.
Nonetheless, the reappraisal of different sources from the 14th and 15th centuries, i.e., from literary texts to judiciary sources and notarial documentation, discloses a more nuanced impression of the perspectives on marital behaviour and sexual desire —of both married and widowed men and women— and the political uses of lust and transgressions among the nobility of the Kingdom of Valencia, chiefly in a context of political and social conflict.
First of all, discourses about women’ sexuality and marital life in a wide range of literary texts reveals not only a variety of viewpoints but also a contrast between the ecclesiastical interpretation of freedom of choice and the lay posture underlining familiar duties. Second, the strategical employment of the accusations of adultery against noblewomen in political, factional of familiar conflicts. As appreciated per the parliamentary process in 1388-89 against Carroça de Vilaragut and per the posthumous trial against Violant d’Arenós, duchess of Gandia, between 1414 and 1423. Third, the tactical purposes of such transgressions, specially the abandonment of home, in noble and oligarchical feuds, as seen per various examples in the judiciary and notarial documentation.
In consequence, the evolution of social roles and representations of noble women at the end of the Middle Ages is more precisely grasped. First, the late medieval dawning of modern misogynistic discourses and representations. Since these constructions, we can see, rooted not exclusively, as stated, in the recovery of Roman Law and Philosophy among ecclesiastical intelligentsia, but also in the lay cultural productions. Second, the restraint of the notions of “honour” and “virtue” owing to the weaponization of these concepts in political and familiar strife. Last, the actual agency of noble women and their part in the conflicts of political and social elites in the late medieval period.
The exodus of court merchants and craftsmen and Jewish bankers as a result of the relocation of the imperial court from Prague to Vienna in 1616–1617
Petr Vorel
abstractPetr Vorel
The proposer is currently engaged in analyzing the deep financial crisis of the Habsburg Empire, which manifested itself in the bankruptcy of the royal credit in Bohemia in 1615. This topic, which was completely unknown in older historiography (due to Anton Gindely's misinterpretation of preserved sources in the 19th century), brings completely new insights into the origins of the Bohemian Estates Uprising and the beginning of the Thirty Years' War in 1618. This is also related to the question of the transfer of the imperial court from Prague to Vienna, which did not take place in 1612, as is traditionally stated in older literature. In 1612, only the imperial court office was moved to Vienna, which was a requirement of the imperial estates when electing King Matthias as emperor. The imperial office was to be located within the territory of the Roman-German Empire, a condition that Prague did not meet (at the end of the 15th century, the lands of the Bohemian Crown did not become part of the newly established Roman-German Empire). At the beginning of the reign of Emperor Matthias Habsburg, Prague remained the main seat of the imperial court, where extensive and representative residential and technical facilities had been built during the reign of Rudolf II. By preserving Prague's residential function, the Bohemian estates also made further financial contributions to the monarch, collected through the tax system, conditional. The gradual transfer of the imperial seat from Prague to Vienna took place in 1616-1617, i.e. only after the Bohemian Land Diet declared the bankruptcy of the royal credit (1615) and the opposition of the estates took control of the administration of taxes and royal revenues. Along with the transfer of the main imperial residence to Vienna, a large group of court merchants and craftsmen, who were accredited to the imperial court as independent suppliers and were not subject to municipal law, were also expected to move. There were a total of 125 individual entrepreneurs or larger companies linked to specific courtiers. The citizens of Vienna feared a massive influx of privileged competition (exempt from taxes and municipal fees) and, through the court chamber, attempted to restrict the arrival of this privileged group of merchants and craftsmen in various ways. This also applied to Jewish bankers, who were to be subordinate to the Vienna Court Chamber.
The Spiritual War for Meaco (Kyoto): Evangelizing Key Urban Areas in the Land of the Rising Sun during the 16th and 17th Centuries
Raul Cervera Alvarez
abstractRaul Cervera Alvarez
The encounter between Christianity and Japan during the 16th and 17th centuries was not merely a religious episode but a multidimensional struggle for cultural, political, and spiritual influence. This paper aims to explore what may be termed the “spiritual war for Kyoto”, focusing on the efforts of Jesuit (the ones that developed their influence the most), Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries to establish Christianity within Japan’s key urban centers —Kyoto, Nagasaki, Osaka, and Sakai— between the arrival of Francis Xavier in 1549 and the Tokugawa persecutions of the early 1600s. Far from a simple narrative of evangelization and repression, this process reveals a profound contest over the meaning of order and civilization in early modern East Asia.
Drawing on missionary correspondence, Japanese chronicles, and Iberian reports, this research reconstructs the strategies through which European religious agents sought to appropriate urban space and adapt Christian doctrine to Japanese cultural frameworks. Kyoto—by 1568 again the symbolic and imperial heart of the archipelago—became the ultimate goal of missionary ambition, confronting the resilience of Buddhist and Shinto traditions. The study also examines the social mechanisms that allowed Christianity to flourish temporarily among local elites, as well as the tensions within the missions themselves between accommodation and orthodoxy.
By analyzing the urban dimension of the Japanese missions, this paper situates the so-called “spiritual war” within the broader dynamics of global Catholic expansion and the transformation of early modern urban religiosity. The conflict for Meaco thus emerges as a symbolic battlefield where competing cosmologies—Christian, Buddhist, and later neo-Confucian—struggled to define Japan’s moral and spiritual future. Ultimately, this research argues that the failure of the Christian project in Japan was not only the consequence of Tokugawa political control but also the result of a deeper civilizational incompatibility, one that nonetheless produced a fertile intercultural dialogue whose echoes would endure in the intellectual and artistic exchanges between Japan and the West.
Session 102 - Slot II
Thursday 3 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 CCCB
From Saint Petersburg to Tashkent and Back: City Postcards in the Russian Empire
Maria Chernysheva
abstractMaria Chernysheva
This paper examines early postcards with photographic views of Tashkent, which was then the capital of Turkestan – a Central Asian region annexed by the Russian Empire in the 1860s. Turkestan postcards became widespread at the turn of the 20th century, when a railway was constructed to Tashkent, the first line connecting Central Asia with European Russia. They were produced by metropolitan, local, and foreign publishers. Among the cities of Russian Turkestan, Tashkent stood out as the most Westernized and Europeanized. It was regarded as an “outpost of Russian civilization in Central Asia” and as “a window to Asia,” similar to how St. Petersburg was described as “a window to Europe.” Parallels between Tashkent and the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, were clearly expressed within various frameworks – administrative, social, urban, architectural, and symbolic. The new Russian Tashkent appeared as a Central Asian mirror of Petersburg.
My focus is on how postcards from the final years of the Russian Empire captured Tashkent’s new European appearance in contrast and in intersection with its older, authentic one. What approaches to photographing Tashkent were used depending on whether the new or old city districts were depicted and whether local or metropolitan publishing houses produced the images? In what respects and to what extent did the Europeanized image of Tashkent differ from those of the empire’s central cities, beginning with Petersburg? Which Tashkent postcards can be seen as typical, and which should be considered exceptional? What overall (un)intentional definition of Tashkent as a Russian/Asian city was shaped through the postcard photographs? These are the questions I address in this paper.
Peripheral Visions: 35mm Slides and the Politics of Urban Knowledge
Sarah Borree
abstractSarah Borree
This paper examines how 35mm teaching slide collections functioned both to standardize knowledge and to contest epistemic hierarchies focusing on a slide collection held at the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch (Aotearoa New Zealand). Until the shift from analogue to digital in the early 2000s, 35mm slide collections were a common and essential resource for teaching urban and architectural history. In New Zealand, slides made a canon of buildings and cities visually accessible that were considered culturally significant but located on the other side of the world, reinforcing New Zealand’s place at the global periphery within a Eurocentric worldview, and framing its urban and architectural history as marginal or only legible within broader imperial narratives.
At UC, however, 35mm slides also played a subversive role. In the early 1980s, a local art history lecturer initiated an architectural survey project, aiming to document the city’s built environment and involving students. Situated within global postcolonial debates as well as local social and cultural shifts, this initiative sought to make local urban environments visible and illustrate its relevance to students and local inhabitants, thus also challenging the view of New Zealand architecture as peripheral.
Beyond reconstructing the collection’s history, the paper uses this case to address a methodological concern: when assessed today, the collection’s significance as a pedagogical instrument and site of epistemic (re-)negotiation is not immediately apparent. The approximately 1,200 surviving slides predominantly depict colonial-era European heritage buildings. The paper thus highlights the significance of considering not only what is photographed but also the larger matrix of photographic practices and circulatory systems that shape perceptions and constructions of the urban world.
From Ruin to Render: Visual Attention Biases in Representations of Ancient Cities
Zahra Alinam, Patrick Roberts
abstractZahra Alinam, Patrick Roberts
Digital reconstructions have become a central medium through which ancient cities are interpreted and communicated. While previous research has debated their authenticity, transparency, and historical accuracy, little attention has been paid to how representation shapes visual perception. This study investigates how archaeological photographs and digital reconstructions organize visual attention. Using computational visual attention analysis (3M's Visual Attention Software), we compared paired photographs and digital reconstructions of Angkor Wat. Reconstructed environments strengthened architectural continuity, monument-centered attention, and spatial legibility, while also introducing new perceptual anchors through interpretive and compositional choices. Grayscale control analyses further indicated that these effects cannot be explained solely by chromatic rendering or increased visual completeness. Our findings suggest that digital reconstructions do more than visualize archaeological evidence: they actively mediate how ancient cities are perceptually encountered and interpreted. The study provides a replicable framework for evaluating representational bias in archaeological visualization.
Exhibiting the Industrial Past: A Comparative Study of Two Mine Museums in Japan
Mengfei Pan
abstractMengfei Pan
Museums that present a city or region’s industrial past have been established around the world. This paper examines two mine-related museums in Japan and compares them with overseas examples to show how they are embedded in their respective city narratives and how difficult histories have been transformed into more palatable exhibits.
The two Japanese cases are the Coal Memorial Hall in Ube City, Yamaguchi Prefecture (hereafter the Ube museum), and the Ogoya Mine Museum in Komatsu City, Ishikawa Prefecture (hereafter the Ogoya museum). They were selected for two main reasons: they are among the earliest mine-related museums in Japan, and one is located on its original mine site while the other off. This paper critically analyzes their exhibitions, activities, and related discourses found in policy documents and media reports.
The Ube museum, established in an urban park in 1969—two years after the closure of the nearby mines—is recognized as the first museum in Japan to feature coal mining. The Ogoya museum opened in 1984 on the site of a former copper-mining town that operated from the 1880s to 1971. The two museums share four notable characteristics. First, both are managed by municipal governments—Ube and Komatsu, respectively. Second, both exhibits tend to omit difficult histories, including pollution and labor issues. Third, both cities use art as a means to cleanse or soften the region’s troubled past and to promote revitalization. Ube City has maintained a long-running public art program since the 1960s, primarily centered on Tokiwa Park. Meanwhile, Komatsu City is pursuing an urban revitalization plan that incorporates contemporary art (Komatsu City 2025). Finally, each museum’s narrative has been folded into its broader city narrative: the Ube museum emphasizes coal as the foundation of the city’s economic development, while the Ogoya case highlights the region’s rich geological resources.
This paper also draws on examples from Canada and Europe—such as the Britannia Mine Museum north of Vancouver and the Electricity Museum in Lisbon—to situate the Japanese cases in a global context. It argues that the everyday is idealized in these museum settings (Sand 2013) and proposes reinterpreting mine-related museums in Japan through the lens of the “city museum” model (Lanz 2013) to reconsider how museums grapple with their cities’ pasts.
Between the West and the East: The Housing Policy of Merchants from Alsace and the Rhineland settled in Kraków in the 15th century.
Joanna Brzegowy
abstractJoanna Brzegowy
In the 15th century, three merchants from the Upper Rhine arrived in Kraków: in the 1460s Siegfried Bethman, in the 1470s Friedrich Schilling, and in the 1480s Hans Boner. All three quickly rose to the ranks of the city elite, becoming some of the wealthiest individuals in the Kingdom of Poland. Their careers offer an intriguing example of the successful adaptation of migrants to a new economic and social environment, while also allowing us to trace patterns of residential mobility within the urban space of late medieval Central Europe.
Thanks to preserved information in municipal records – not only from Kraków, but also from Nuremberg, Lviv, and Wrocław – it is possible to reconstruct their “housing policies.” They owned houses not only in Kraków, but also along their migration route, in Nuremberg and Wrocław. In Nuremberg, the Boners lived in the neighborhood of Albrecht Dürer, with whom they did business.Their houses in Wrocław and Kraków were located in the most prestigious parts of the cities – by the market square. Their neighbors were other wealthy merchants, with whom they often formed trading partnerships, indicating that residential and commercial spaces were closely connected.
Bethman, Schilling, and Boner also invested in real estate in other urban centers – in Bardejov, Košice, and Lviv. These towns were situated along major trade routes linking Central Europe with the South and East, and their choice was by no means accidental. The network of houses and trading posts formed the logistical backbone of their economic operations. Moving between these centers, acquiring and selling property, and renting out houses or their parts were important elements of their economic and social strategy, and reflected the high level of mobility characteristic of the urban mercantile elite.
An analysis of their biographies shows that the choice of residence was not merely a practical matter, but also a symbolic one – a house in a prestigious part of the city served as confirmation of one’s position, wealth, and belonging to the elite. The presentation aims to show how the phenomenon of residential mobility was intertwined with migration, investment, and the creation of networks in the late medieval commercial world. Using the example of three merchants from the Upper Rhine, it demonstrates that the house and place of residence were not only private spaces, but also part of the economic infrastructure and a tool for constructing status and urban identity.
Session 102 - Slot III
Thursday 3 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 CCCB
The Temporary Jewish City: Bureaucratic Violence and the Refugee Space of Zbąszyń, 1938–1939
Ewa Splawska
abstractEwa Splawska
This article examines how a Jewish biography can be written for a city that briefly became “Jewish” due to a sudden refugee influx. It focuses on Zbąszyń, a small Polish-German border town of about 5,000 inhabitants, transformed between October 1938 and August 1939 into one of Europe’s key refugee centers following the Polenaktion, during which approximately 17,000 Polish Jews were deported from Nazi Germany. For ten months, nearly 5,000 Jewish refugees lived there—creating what witnesses called a “Jewish city within a city,” raising the town’s population to unprecedented levels.
Traditional Jewish urban biographies concentrate on larger cities with well-established Jewish communities. Zbąszyń, in contrast, had only a few Jewish families before 1938. Its sudden transformation raises urgent methodological questions: Can a city acquire a Jewish biography through a temporary, forced presence? And how can urban biographies capture disruption, contingency, and displacement as central components of Jewish urban experience?
In Zbąszyń, the interactions between refugees and urban space were intense and mutually transformative. Refugees occupied military barracks, a disused mill, schools, and many private homes. The town’s rhythms and infrastructure changed, and international aid introduced new flows of people, resources, and communication. At the same time, local authorities shaped the refugees’ daily lives through restrictions, registrations, and bureaucratic control—what can be termed bureaucratic violence. Despite support from Jewish organizations and state institutions, refugees demonstrated remarkable agency by organizing schools, religious services, cultural events, and self-help systems, proving themselves not just passive victims but active shapers of their environment.
The case of Zbąszyń enriches the genre of Jewish city biography in three main ways: (1) it extends the focus beyond major cities and enduring diasporas to include small towns and temporary refugee enclaves; (2) it shows how Jewish migration could rapidly reshape urban space and identity, even if briefly; and (3) it argues that Jewish urban biographies must incorporate experiences of forced migration, crisis, and rupture, not only continuity and rootedness.
Zbąszyń demonstrates that Jewish urban history is not solely about permanence but also about transformative encounters during moments of upheaval—offering a critical redefinition of what it means to write a Jewish city biography.
CITY AS A MARKER OF IDENTITY: FORCED MIGRANTS, LOCALS WITHIN THE SPATIAL LIMITS OF CALCUTTA, POST-1947
Subhasree Ghosh
abstractSubhasree Ghosh
Taking decolonization of Asia as the wider canvas, this paper seeks to explore, with the city of Calcutta as the site of study against the backdrop of the 1947 Partition that created the two nation-states of India and Pakistan and triggered one of the largest mass migrations in human history, how identities—both at the individual and the collective level— came to be shaped and influenced by the coming of the refugees. The present crop of literature (Prafulla k. Chakrabarti, Monika Mondal) pit the refugees versus the locals discourse to chart out the post-Partition dynamics of the metropolis, giving the impression that both groups, whether the forced migrants as well the original inhabitants of the city, are monolithic entities. Going against this narrative, this paper wishes to cull out the layered equations that informed the psyche of the inhabitants of the city and consequently their identities that translated into fractured social space, reflected in the re-contouring of the living pattern within Calcutta, leading to pockets/enclaves/ghettos. Fault-lines operated at several levels—between the migrants and the local Hindu population (both sharing the same religion and speaking the same mother-tongue with variations in dialect), between the migrants (based on their original place of residence back in East Bengal), between the local Muslims and the migrants (both belonging to the same ethnic stock and often speaking the same language with variations in dialect), between the local Muslim population (both sharing the same religion but variations in economic status and language)—the borders that remain etched in the recesses of the mind and got translated in the social scape of the metropolis, displaying an uneven socio-cultural-linguistic topography with several ‘zones of contestation.’ Individual and collective identities sometimes collapsed/merged, at times remained distinct, thus influencing the quotidian life of the city and its people. Identities did not remain fixed/static—be it that of the city or its people.
Planning against land speculation? Formalizing real estate development and informalizing housing self-construction in late Francoist Madrid (1950s-1970s)
Noel Antonio Manzano Gómez
abstractNoel Antonio Manzano Gómez
During the first half of the 20th century, urban growth frequently took place through private subdivisions of rural land. Landowners laid out streets, sold plots, and frequently, public administration was forced to provide urban infrastructure. Although there were intense transnational debates in the 1920s to prevent such developments, by the early 1950s they were still occurring illegally in many European cities, including Madrid (Manzano, 2022). However, twenty years later, the development of new illegal subdivisions in that city had become residual if compared to the real estate activity led by private developers (Vaz, 2013). Consequently, illegal land subdivision became the exception rather than the norm of urban development, in a simultaneous but different way in cities in the global North and South (Topalov 1979, Jaramillo 2009).
This contribution aims to discuss the influence of urban planning regulations on this “formalization” of urban growth from the mid-20th century until the dawn of neoliberalism, using Madrid as a case study. To this end, it has been undertaken a review of legal texts from the 1950s to the 1970s, an analysis of grey literature (Archivo Regional de Madrid, Colegio de Arquitectos de Madrid) and a review of historical bibliography (Biblioteca Histórica del Ministerio de Vivienda, Fondo Histórico de la UPM).
Provisional results show how the approval of the first Spanish Land Law (1956) and a series of subsequent regulations enabled the development of highly profitable urban processes through urban operations that were much more complex and capital-intensive than their predecessors. Presented in internal bulletins of the Ministry of Housing and discussed in the United Nations Committee on Housing, Construction, and Economic Planning, the new Spanish urban planning frameworks sought to fight speculation, identified with uncontrolled land subdivision. To do so, the urban planning authorities projected (i) to attract the private sector to “produce” new areas equipped with urban infrastructure, and (ii) to relieve the public sector of the management of peripheral slums. As a result, the new urban planning frameworks not only reinforced the illegality of self-building precarious shelters, but also succeeded in integrating market forces into the legal land commercialization. Therefore the new frames created competitive pressure to invest in land and develop it, making previous practices of precarious plotting counter-economic.
Private urbanism and nested inequalities: Understanding the Viennese "Strassenhof" typology with the help of spatially explicit statistical data.
Friedrich Hauer
abstractFriedrich Hauer
Vienna’s approximately 75 „Strassenhöfe“ (i.e. „street courtyards housing estates“) are a unstudied anomaly in the history of Central European metropolitan architecture and housing typology. The prestigious multi-party residential ensembles feature an indented, cul-de-sac-like semi-public open space (private road or garden). They were developed by private enterprise from about 1880 until 1914 to maximize the more marketable street-facing living spaces, especially the coveted corner rooms. Commonly referred to as an upper-middle class building type, it traded representation for privacy and improved (at least superficially) the sanitary conditions in terms of lighting and ventilation (Bobek & Lichtenberger 1978).
This paper will present ongoing research on this typology in relation to both its socioeconomic and urbanistic characteristics: Where did the Strassenhof estates emerge and how did they differ from the existing urban fabrics (e.g. in terms of urban density metrics)? Did they foster social inequality in the respective neighborhoods? What type of intersectional analysis can help answer these questions? In our case study we will tackle these questions by intersecting data on the estates with the ample statistical-demographical data available in Vienna’s historical atlas and statistical publications. The relevant datasets comprise: rent and tax yields (1914, parcel level data); population development (1783-1939, district level data); the share of day roomers (“Bettgeher”) by district (1910); education and occupational structure (1869-2001, district level data); apartment amenities (toilets, bathrooms, 1910, district level data); socio-geographical functional zones on neighborhood level data as of 1914 according to Lichtenberger (1967).
In doing so, we will critically relate social and built urban fabrics and hence contribute an explicit focus on the spatial resolution of urban statistical data. By finally looking inside the buildings and discussing the floor plans and the “nested” social inequalities (differences in flat size and orientation, domestic servants, janitors) within the estates, the paper will provide a further critical lens on the potentialities and limits of tracing inequalities through census data and statistical sources in historical urban studies. Only by combining different sources and scales of resolution a nuanced reconstruction of urban realities of the past becomes possible.
The Nordic semi-periphery in the colonial web – the example of Malmö’s (Sweden) cotton textile industry
Pål Brunnström, Linus Sollin, Simon Sirenius Frohlund
abstractPål Brunnström, Linus Sollin, Simon Sirenius Frohlund
As Beckert (2014) and others have described the process of industrialisation in urban locations such as Manchester is intrinsically connected to the colonial system and the British empire. While these relationships are well explored by an expanding research field, the connection to the colonial system of cities in – in Wallerstein’s understanding – semi-peripheral countries has been less investigated, with some notable exceptions.
Swedish cites industrialised late compared to other European countries but starting up in the mid-19th century, the country underwent rapid industrialisation. As in the British example, the textile industry was key in this process, in particular cotton yarn and cotton textile production.
With the example of two companies in Malmö, this paper will investigate how an industrialising city in the Nordic semi-periphery was connected and integrated in the colonial system.
In 1855, two companies were founded that worked with cotton in Malmö. This was not the first time cotton was processed in the city and at the time there were several small companies producing cotton socks and clothing. But in terms of scale and the forms of organizing production, these two companies constituted something entirely new. They marked the beginning of industrial capitalism in Malmö. These companies were Malmö Manufacture Company Ltd. and Malmö mechanical cotton weavery.
Through an international network of cities and companies, the emerging industries acquired technical equipment, technical expertise and raw materials, connections that the companies would maintain over a long period of time. In this paper we look at how these networks were formed and how they developed.
We also look at how this positions Malmö and the cotton textile companies in the colonial system. Sweden had only minor colonial holdings of its own but as Lausen (2021) describes it played a role of a junior partner to the larger colonial powers. In this text, we argue that the term colonial complicity, borrowed from Vuorela (2009), could describe the position. As we show, cheap raw cotton produced on slave plantations in the southern parts of the USA was key in generating profit for the Malmöite companies.
References:
Beckert, S (2014) Empire of cotton : a global history
Lauesen, T (2021) Riding the wave : Sweden’s integration into the imperialist world system
Vuorela, U (2009) Colonial Complicity: The ‘Postcolonial’ in a Nordic Context. In Keskinen, S Complying with colonialism
Session 102 - Slot IV
Thursday 3 September 2026 16:00-17:30 Room 1 CCCB
The Nationalization of Jewish Real Estate and Residential Property during the First Soviet Occupation of Lithuania: Process and an Underexplored Source Complex for Micro-historical Analysis of Jewish Urban Life
Jurgita Verbickienė
abstractJurgita Verbickienė
Prof. dr. Jurgita Verbickienė, The Nationalization of Jewish Real Estate and Residential Property during the First Soviet Occupation of Lithuania: Process and an Underexplored Source Complex for Micro-historical Analysis of Jewish Urban Life
During a particularly difficult period in Lithuanian history, the first Soviet occupation, which began in the autumn of 1940 (followed by the second occupation after the expulsion of the National Socialists at the end of World War II), brought numerous challenges to the local population. Not only were intellectuals, business leaders, and clergy deported—Jews accounted for approximately one-third of all deportees—but property was also subject to nationalization. This included not only commercial premises but also residential buildings: apartments, kloyzn (prayer houses), and auxiliary spaces. A relatively coherent and preserved body of archival sources enables the reconstruction of the nationalization process itself. Moreover, these sources enable a micro-historical analysis of Jewish-owned property in the city, including its location, apartment sizes, ownership, and neighborhood context, while incorporating various dimensions such as social and professional affiliations, gender, and other factors. This presentation aims to evaluate the potential of micro-level research based on nationalization records and to analyze Vilnius as a complex Jewish urban space by reconstructing living conditions across different parts of the city, as experienced by diverse social and professional groups.
In the Tracks of Cement – Aspects of Cement’s Impact on the Capitalist Welfare Society, the Example of Köping in Sweden 1941–1978
Magnus Gustafson
abstractMagnus Gustafson
This paper aims to study the capitalist welfare society through two prisms: the place Köping in Sweden and the material cement. Through these two prisms, the study will illuminate how the global and the local are connected and clarify the relationship between cement, concrete and the urbanization of small towns. How do industrialization and urbanization affect people’s experiences of their reality in the small town of Köping – which becomes one of several epicenters for cement manufacturing – and how are these expressed in literary and other texts?
During the intensive construction period of the Million Programme from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, cement production in Köping was in full swing. The cement factory also brought with it cementrelated industries, e.g. Eternit.
Aspect view and aspect change are key concepts for the paper. Both the place Köping and the material cement can be seen from several aspects. Similarly, the capitalist welfare society and urbanization can be seen from several aspects. Aspect view and aspect change are usually associated with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the example of the image of the duck hare that can be seen alternately as a duck and as a hare, but not as both at the same time.
The place Köping and the material cement are correspondingly duck hares that contain contradictory properties or aspects. These different aspects have partly to do with a broader environmental perspective – living environment, working environment, cultural environment, natural environment and climate threats, and partly how the local and global are interconnected in the capitalist welfare society. Small town Köping is the center and periphery at the same time.
During the thirties, a wave of social organization came to Sweden, ranging from labor and peasant parties to trade unions and interest organizations that laid the foundation for a dynamic capitalism side by side with large and firmly rooted popular organizations. The seventies would prove to be the crowning achievement of the labor movement.
The focus is on stories in the form of memories, but also, for example, in the form of satire, irony and criticism. The question is how these stories are structured based on how, for example, characters are presented, what the environment looks like, how focalizer (the story’s filter), narrator, story levels and time aspects are depicted. The question is also how different types of experiences, primarily memories, are structured.
Terra Abstracta: Hydromodernity and the Waters of Forgetfulness in Berlin's Mass Housing Estates (1200-1900)
Robin Hueppe
abstractRobin Hueppe
Berlin’s peripheral mass housing estates (Marzahn and Märkisches Viertel) are built upon a relentless, centuries-long project of hydraulic conquest. With Ivan Illich’s framework, I trace the deep history of water management in Berlin, moving far beyond 19th-century sanitary reforms to illuminate the transformation of water from an ontological medium, critical to early settlement and ritual, to H2O, a manageable technical burden. The process of “taming the water” in Berlin (berl = swamp in Polabian) began not with industrialization, as urban historians often argue, but with medieval feudalism. German margraves of the Holy Roman Empire conquered and subjugated the Slavic tribal marshlands, along with their multispecies inhabitants, a process cemented by the import of Dutch drainage expertise in the twelfth century. This legacy of hydraulic land colonization was later codified by Prussian absolutism (see figure above). Frederick the Great’s militarized drainage of the Oderbruch in the seventeenth century established the template for techno-state control and large-scale geo-bureaucracy, fusing scientific legibility through instruments such as mapping and statistics with coercive expansion. I will further emphasize how Frederician land abstraction translated to Berlin’s periphery through the Hobrecht-Virchow system of nineteenth-century sewage farms (Rieselgüter), providing the material and administrative substratum for later modernist abstraction on the sites of post-war mass housing estates. In the 20th century, mass housing projects internalized this logic, transforming water into an entirely invisible utility, thereby contributing to the forgetting of memory through landscape. Two spatial case studies of artificially engineered lakes, Wuhle Pond and Seggeluch Basin, serve as aesthetic containers that conceal their design genesis as necessary drainage or former wastewater infrastructure. The subsequent reclamation of these ponds by ruderal collectives, following administrative failure, demonstrates the persistence of the swamp’s ancient environmental agency against the modernist promise of permanent control. I eventually want to reveal how deep the still waters of hydromodernity run.
Interurbanity in Practice: France as a Playground for American Builders, the United States as a Training Ground for French Professionals
Elodie Bitsindou
abstractElodie Bitsindou
Jean-Louis Cohen introduced the concept of interurbanity to describe how urban forms reappear across distinct geographical contexts, functioning as spatial “quotations.” Extending the literary idea of intertextuality into urban and architectural production, it posits that cities, like texts, are composed through acts of reference, adaptation, and reinterpretation. Identifying such phenomena often begins intuitively, yet as Patrick Leitner notes, intuition must evolve beyond “speculative interurbanity” toward a rigorous, evidence-based approach.
The postwar development of French suburbs is frequently interpreted as a key episode of Americanization. While contested, scholars generally agree that “France, although it did not become a ‘mini-America,’ became more like America.” As Manuel Dorion-Soulié has shown, France’s embrace of car culture derived partly from U.S. strategies of containment. How, then, does geopolitical influence translate into architectural resemblance?
Transatlantic expert networks offer a productive lens to explore the interplay between suburban France and America, revealing the circulation of technical knowledge, planning models, and typologies. Before WWII, French suburbs included elite residential pockets, but democratizing single-family housing remained limited to self-built efforts, often ending in sanitation crises. In the postwar years, professionals and officials visiting the U.S. under Marshall Plan productivity missions discovered Levittown’s efficiency but struggled to replicate it. A turning point came when American builders—foremost Levitt & Sons—exported their model to France. Levitt’s engineers trained French teams, who were later recruited by other firms, propagating skills and standardizing methods. Simultaneously, Marshall Plan academic exchanges fostered a generation of architects and developers versed in U.S. design processes, many of whom later collaborated with or joined these firms.
This paper maps the network of experts surrounding Levitt’s French venture (1964–1981) and traces their professional trajectories. It argues that this constellation of actors constituted a decisive rupture in postwar suburbanization, consolidating a transatlantic transfer that redefined both the form and governance of the French suburb.
Heikki von Hertzen, Tapiola in Finland and urban planning in the United States in the 1960s.
Loup Calosci
abstractLoup Calosci
This contribution re-evaluates the influence of Heikki von Hertzen (1913-1985), lawyer and housing reformer in Finland and creator of the garden city of Tapiola, on American real estate development, urban planning and architecture circles. It proposes to shift the focus away from the narrative that often centres on American initiatives by reintroducing the Finnish perspective and showing how Tapiola became, at the end of the Second World War, a reference point for professionals facing urban challenges in the United States.
The work of Frederick Gutheim (1903-1993), an American urban planner and historian who founded the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies (WCMS), increased international recognition of the Tapiola Garden City and its designer in the 1960s. The latter then gained legitimacy to participate in major urban debates through numerous conferences and as a consultant for many cities and new towns in the United States.
Based on a multi-sited archival investigation, this paper is an extension of doctoral research, scheduled for completion in late 2025, devoted to the transfer of urban and landscape models between Europe and the United States through the implementation and development of New Communities from 1963 to 1973.
In order to shed light on the links and dialogues between networks of experts, the study will focus on the Espoo municipal archives, a previously unpublished collection of correspondence and internal notes. These documents make it possible to map Heikki von Hertzen's contacts, measure their reciprocal influences and identify the concrete levers that made these exchanges operational through international and American organisations, specialist journals and conferences. By combining prosopographies, network analysis and examination of this correspondence, the approach will uncover the paths taken by ideas and the mediators who ensured their transfer, revealing the role played by the von Hertzen–Tapiola duo in the dissemination of ideas on American urbanisation. This off-centre reading will fuel the conference debates by documenting, with supporting sources, the dynamics between the transfer of ideas, reinterpretations and concrete effects on urban practices.
FROM RUINS TO RURAL MODERNITY. Experiencing Reconstruction in postwar Vosges
Hugo Steinmetz, Jade Berger, Adrien Marchand
abstractHugo Steinmetz, Jade Berger, Adrien Marchand
La seconde Reconstruction dans l’arrondissement de Saint-Dié (France) constitue une expérience originale de transition d’un territoire rural vers la modernité architecturale du second XXe siècle. Loin d’être réductible à une simple politique de modernisation portée par l’État reconstructeur, elle témoigne d’une forme de compromis permanent entre le recours à des savoir-faire et des matériaux vernaculaires et des techniques de construction et de mise en œuvre originales portées par le ministère de la Reconstruction et de l’Urbanisme (MRU). Dans un territoire marqué par la « politique de la terre brûlée » consécutive à la retraite allemande, où la quasi-totalité des bourgs a été détruite, la Reconstruction engage les habitants dans une expérience à la fois matérielle et symbolique : reconstruire ne signifie pas seulement relever les ruines, mais redéfinir un nouveau cadre de vie moderne dans un territoire majoritairement rural.
Portée par le MRU, mais mise en œuvre par un réseau d’acteurs locaux, la Reconstruction prend la forme d’une modernité négociée. L’étude croisée de huit communes rurales révèle ainsi une tension féconde entre, d’une part, l’usage massif de ressources locales et, d’autre part, l’introduction progressive de dispositifs industriels et de plans-types standardisés, notamment dans les écoles, mairies et opérations d’habitat préfinancées. Ces expérimentations typologiques sont le témoin d’une modernisation qui procède par ajustements spécifiques plutôt que par rupture radicale.
Dans quelle mesure la Reconstruction dans l’arrondissement de Saint-Dié représente-t-elle une forme de transition territoriale « tempérée » où la modernité architecturale s’invente à partir de l’adaptation et du compromis ?
Cette communication vise à mettre en évidence la façon dont les programmes de reconstruction deviennent des lieux d’expérimentation architecturale et urbaine. En effet, les plans de reconstruction et d’aménagement dotent les villages étudiés de centres administratifs qui concentrent les équipements publics reconstruits. Pour des raisons principalement économiques, les édifices conçus par les architectes reconstructeurs mêlent des programmes très variés : école, mairie, poste, caserne de pompier, par exemple. Ces combinaisons programmatiques permettent aux maîtres d’œuvre de déployer une écriture architecturale fine et originale : dessins de façades soignés, imbrication programmatique sophistiquée ou bien distribution intérieure originale.
Session 102 - Slot V
Friday 4 September 2026 08:30-10:45 Room 1 CCCB
The barcelona gay exodus: from the clandestine Raval to the visible Gaixample
Pierre Maeso
abstractPierre Maeso
This paper examines the formation of a metropolitan sexual culture through the case of Gaixample, Barcelona’s gay neighborhood that emerged in the late 1990s. As part of a broader doctoral thesis on gay men's affective relationship to their neighborhoods in Paris, Barcelona, and Montreal, it explores the transition from a homosexual sociability historically rooted in the Raval, a working-class, marginal district under the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975), to a bourgeois and visible space in the Eixample. This shift does not constitute a spontaneous migration but rather a process structured by urban regeneration policies, mega-events, and a post-Francoist liberation with its own distinctive modalities. Gaixample thus appears as a counter-example to Western gaytrified neighborhoods, having emerged in an already bourgeois space, integrated into transnational LGBTQ+ tourism networks, and embodying an uninhibited Southern sexual culture.
Never-ending Desires. Art Interventions as Tools to Negotiate Dissensus and to Create Civic Space
Cosmina Goagea
abstractCosmina Goagea
Climate action in cities is produced through permits, maintenance regimes, allocation procedures and evidentiary claims - the layer where the political economy of land is administered. Artistic interventions in public space are routinely credited with contributing to it, yet the claim is rarely tested. This paper proposes a threshold for testing it across four cases.
The argument begins from the condition named in the title. The desires driving climate-related artistic practice - for consensus, for coexistence without conflict, for a climatic equilibrium restoring safety, for equitable solutions, for a voice that is heard - are structurally unresolvable. They are not failures awaiting better execution but the horizon these practices operate against. If resolution is unavailable as a criterion, evaluation must shift to what sediments along the way.
Three variables are proposed: Persistence (do effects outlast the intervention, in what register?), Negotiation (did the practice open conflict, sustain it, or was it absorbed?), and Actionability (what became possible to do, to claim, to govern, for whom?). Two thresholds separate levels of claim: mechanism activated, where a governance process is demonstrably entered, and effect demonstrated, where a documented change outlasts it, independently corroborated.
Applied to Eliasson's Ice Watch, Winderen's underwater acoustics, Mosher's HighWaterLine, the xAire citizen-science campaign from the CCCB exhibition After the End of the World (2017-2018), and Tree Nursery. 1306 Plants for Timisoara (2023), the framework produces a graded rather than binary result - including for two cases proposed as exemplary at the outset and repositioned by the instrument itself.
The paper closes by relocating architectural agency. If agency consists in reshaping the frameworks through which spatial production is structured, then the rewritten permit condition, the maintenance routine, the evidentiary claim entered into a public record are not traces left by an artwork: they are the architectural form the practice produced. The object was temporary; the organisation of space it established was not. This reverses the standard account of ephemerality and answers the question underlying the research: what artistic practice contributes to architecture is access to the governance interface through exception, since a request framed as art is processed as a singular case to be negotiated rather than a precedent to be refused.
Session 102 - Slot VI
Friday 4 September 2026 11:15-13:00 Room 1 CCCB
Dušan Moškon: city-making and the search for identity in Eastern Slovenia during Late Socialist Yugoslavia
Raimondo Mercadante
abstractRaimondo Mercadante
A very intriguing example of urban renewal in Yugoslavia in the 1970s was that of Ormož, a small town in the Eastern part of Slovenia, stretched between the vineyards near Ptuj and the southernmost part of the Pannonian plain, near to the border with Croatian Zagorje and Slavonia. In spite of its interest both for its architecture and its social and cultural aims, it remains still scarcely studied and not categorized as architectural heritage. Thanks to the characteristic Yugoslav self-management in the economic field, after 1960, the Town Planning Institute of Maribor had started a program of urban renewal, which involved semi-private companies; at the end of the decade, the architect Dušan Moškon took the charge of the operation, becoming the city architect of Ormož. Imbued with the teaching of the School of Ljubljana, Moškon acted as a skillful tailor, customizing new buildings or urban interventions, both in the private as well as in the public sector, filing voids and creating several new landmarks, which were at the same time useful infrastructures: a new hotel, the bus station, a renewal of the square devoted to the hero of Titoist resistance, greenery before the church, housing blocks, the renewal of the House of Culture, a department store and, finally a urban gate recalling the Medieval city walls. All of these interventions were projected and built between 1968 and 1990. The experiment attempted and successfully managed, the search for urban identity, was a counterexample, when compared to several ambitious cases of Postmodern urban design, filled with too many quotations from the past or symbolic items. Working with a narrow array of materials: brick, concrete, wood and often with prefabricated elements, Moškon interpreted the sensitive Slovenian approach to critical regionalism. Moreover, newly discovered archival sources from the Historical Archive of Ptuj in Slovenia, a survey on newspapers from the time and an interview with one of his strongest pupils made possible an in-depth focus on the highly personal approach of the architect both towards the limits imposed from current urban policies as well as towards the revitalization issue itself.
Urban strategies in the work of Alvar Aalto and Álvaro Siza
Eduardo Jorge Cabral Dos Santos Fernandes
abstractEduardo Jorge Cabral Dos Santos Fernandes
This proposal aims to explore the affinities between the work, method and ideas of Alvar Aalto and Álvaro Siza, two architects whose work presents an important contribution to the consideration of global-local relationships in the urban landscape.
Despite the extensive scholarship on both architects, this specific topic remains largely unexplored and will be addressed through the relation between design methods and conceptual frameworks.
The research will focus on the similarities between their methods and ideas; these affinities can be structured into five key aspects: seeking a relationship with the context; understanding architecture as a tectonic fact; adopting a modern approach without abandoning traditional values; intentionally incorporating foreign models as influences; practicing hand drawing as a means of thinking, conceiving and communicating.
When, in 1983, Álvaro Siza wrote “Alvar Aalto: Três facetas ao acaso” (Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, nº 51, p. 18), his proximity to Alvar Aalto became evident, particularly when he described the Finnish architect’s methodology: “by mastering tried models (…), by transforming them, by introducing them into different realities, deforming and crossing them, he uses them in surprising and luminous ways: strange objects that land and immediately spread roots”.
Beyond suggesting a relationship with context — echoing his famous quote, “the idea is in the site” (“Notas sobre o trabalho em Évora”, Arquitectura # 132, 1979, p.36) — this notion implies that external references can “spread roots” and integrate harmoniously into the landscape.
A close reading of Alvar Aalto’s writings reveals further affinities with Siza’s ideas. In “Motifs from the past” (Arkkitehti #2, 1922), he argues that modern architects should be able to “receive influences” just as “our ancestors were able to be international without complexes, while remaining faithful to their identity.” In the text “On the latest trends in architecture” (Uusi Aura, 1928) he advocates for a third way between modern shapes “almost literally resembling parts of a machine” and “creating works that take up motifs and forms of the past.” Finally, in “The Humanizing of Architecture” (The Technology Review, 1940), he argues that “functionalism must take into account the human point of view”.
This theoretical framework will be applied to the analysis of several examples of Aalto’s and Siza’s work that present a significant urban impact.
Rapid urbanisation and locally-grown urban experts: The case of Colombia's Jorge Gaitán Cortés
Julio D Davila
abstractJulio D Davila
After WWII, foreign experts advised governments of newly independent nations in diverse areas, including urban planning. In Latin America, independent for well over a century, rapid urbanisation involved planning for mass rural-urban migration, housing shortages, informality, and inadequate road and utility infrastructure. In Colombia, by the 1940s a generation of young architects had embraced International Modernism well before leading stars of the movement like Le Corbusier and Sert were hired as advisors to the government. This paper examines the long-lasting planning and governance legacy of Jorge Gaitán Cortés, a former mayor of Bogotá. An architect from the newly formed Faculty of Architecture in Bogota’s National University and MSc in Architecture and Engineering from Yale University (US), he embodies the young professionals who filled huge professional gaps in a rapidly urbanising, socially unequal and politically troubled country struggling to modernise. Along with other architects of his generation, he is credited with helping advance the principles of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Central to the prevailing preoccupation with housing in Latin America was the Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento (CINVA), established in 1951 by the Organisation of American States. Gaitan's Bogotá mayorship (1961-1966) spanned three national administrations. Prior to this he worked as an architect and urban designer, construction entrepreneur, university professor, insurance employee, and elected Bogotá Councillor. His roots in a Liberal political family, training, and presidential support were crucial in his success as a planner in a city where the population doubled every ten years, and spatial and socio-economic inequalities continued to rise for years. Often labelled as a ‘technocrat’, he is the product of the transnational circulation of expertise that also found an echo in the Economics profession at a time when technical expertise became a source of political legitimacy. Following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the US Government sought to contain the spread of Communism in the region. This included funding mass-scale low-income housing through the Alliance for Progress. Having overseen the forcible relocation of poor families from a centrally located urban land invasion, Gaitán Cortés represented the city government during President John F Kennedy's visit to inaugurate a large-scale housing project that bears his name.
Reexamining China’s People's Commune in light of Global [Digital]
Governance as Howard's Garden City Prospects lasted in far-Asian Context Seventy Years On
Ming-Wei Liu
abstractMing-Wei Liu
It is noteworthy that the concept of *global governance* has evolved from a materialistic worldview to discussions situated within the digital realm—specifically, a cyber-sphere conduct that has existed for only several decades, emerging as early as the rise of computing technologies in the 1960s. Interestingly, with the dominance of codes attempting to shape the world through this new form of global governance, Edgar Grande proposes that we, as urban theorists, ought to develop a framework that accommodates global governance within a post-national agenda.
From the late 1950s—specifically 1958—into the early 1960s, a new urban morphology known as the People’s Commune (人民公社) spread widely and rapidly following the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which had successfully endured its first decade. The typological setting of the People’s Commune was neither derived from China’s traditional modularity nor an entirely new creation. Rather, as Shen Zhihua (沈志華, 2003) reports, the *superblock* was the urban module that Russian experts insisted on imposing upon China’s modernistic socialization model.
Additionally, according to Karen Koehler (1998), we learn that the concept of the superblock may have been derived from the USSR’s experience, which itself inherited elements from Wassily Kandinsky’s advocacy in the 1920s. Kandinsky can be acknowledged as drawing upon his background as a member of the Bauhaus faculty. However, Koehler further notes that the flawed implementation of Ebenezer Howard’s prototype was erroneously applied to the USSR’s rural context while attempting to align it with modern European urbanity. As these errors persisted, they may be assumed to have been successively adopted into China’s newly emerging urbanity.
This article employs the framework of *The Communist China’s People’s Commune* as a conceptual model—while the Garden City is regarded as its raw prototype contributing to China’s modern urbanity—mediated through Europe and Russia following Kandinsky and his successors’ introduction into the PRC. Theoretically, Howard’s European prototype has been cast into a global experiment. The *People’s Commune* in China’s folk society thus functions as a sign, a coding interpretant, and a merging of social relationships as detected in practice. Figuring out this Howard-based framework reveals how China’s spatial modularity constitutes modernity, wherein the nation-building narrative in local justification is applied through Howard’s indicator of global governance.
The Spaces of Statistics:
Hospital Architecture, Urban Planning, and a Statistical Reconfiguration of the Individual in Valletta, Malta
Brianne Wesolowski
abstractBrianne Wesolowski
The Spaces of Statistics:
Hospital Architecture, Urban Planning, and a Statistical Reconfiguration of the Individual in Valletta, Malta
The rise of statistical ways of thinking throughout the nineteenth century reconfigured how people came to understand their individual bodies and lives in relation to broader social networks. In many ways, the field of medicine has remained on the forefront of such statistical recalibrations between individual and social bodies, visible in the ways that health was reimagined in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and in the ways that the welfare state came to provide (or not) for people with disabilities and illnesses beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper attends to a less explored facet of changing perspectives of the relationship between the individual and social: the material restructuring of places and practices of health according to statistical tastes. In particular, it brings together the history of statistics with the history of colonial Malta to examine how hospital reforms materialized in Malta’s port city of Valletta.
Quaintly described by Homer as the “navel of the sea,” the island nation of Malta has often been understood as insular, its culture as singular. Yet Malta’s history reveals multiplicity, particularly visible in the residues of various conquests, most recently that of the Knights Hospitaller from 1530 until 1798, a brief French occupation until 1800, and the subsequent British occupation throughout the nineteenth century. It was then that Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) visited Valletta on her way to serve as a nurse in the Crimean War. From the data she collected there, she began to advocate for hospital reforms. Intriguingly she presented her findings not within realms dedicated to health or medicine, but at societies aimed at statistical inquiry. As a result, Nightingale began to push for new architecture schemes for hospitals both in England and abroad. In particular, she enlisted architect T. H. Wyatt (1807-1880) to help materialize her reforms in Valletta. The resulting designs of their partnership became something of a flagship project for Nightingale, offering a poignant example of how developments in the colonial “periphery” were used to effect change in the “metropole.” In these designs, strands of history that comprise the port city of Valletta—including its harbor as a juncture of conquest, trade, and quarantine protocols; its military garrisons; and
Session 102 - Slot VII
Friday 4 September 2026 14:00-15:30 Room 1 CCCB
Negotiating Urban Subjectivities: Individualization, Collectivity, and Spatial Power in Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland
Jakub Frejtag
abstractJakub Frejtag
The proposed paper investigates how individual and collective actors navigated, contested, and reinterpreted urban space under imperial domination. Drawing on a microhistorical study of Radom – a gubernial city of the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland – it explores how processes of individualization and collective mobilization were shaped by practices of spatial governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It further demonstrates that individuality could crystallize even within urban environments heavily structured by autocratic power.
The analytical framework focuses on mechanisms of spatial violence – the imperial state’s effort to encode authority into the city’s morphology through symbolic dominance, controlled visibility, ceremonial routes, and architectural monumentalization. Imperial “action” centered on the establishment of an Orthodox cathedral in Radom’s newly developed downtown district, a site chosen for its strategic visibility and role as a threshold between the old town and the city’s modernizing periphery. Modeled on the Moscow–Yaroslavl idiom and aligned with empire-wide “temple-monument” templates, the project sought to discipline urban subjectivities and naturalize the presence of the Russian state.
This top-down program encountered a dense field of local reactions, revealing the interplay of individuality and collectivity in producing alternative meanings within the contested city. Conflicts around the construction of a new Catholic church – involving urban elites, rural parishioners, clergy, and imperial administrators – exposed tensions between class interests, emotional attachments, and competing visions of community. Individual strategies (such as petitions and symbolic appropriations) interacted with collective mobilization (fundraising, assemblies or public debates), as actors negotiated their position within an imposed political order.
The eventual construction of the Vistula–Baltic Neo-Gothic Catholic church transformed the downtown district into a symbolic arena where competing architectures articulated competing subjectivities. Community funding and an artistic program registering donations from diverse social groups turned the building into a spatial archive of emerging modern citizenship. Interpreting the city as a palimpsest of imperial action and local reaction, the paper argues that urban subjectivities emerged from tensions between structural domination and everyday negotiation.
Regulating Urban Food Safety: Municipal Control and Social Impact in Post-Unification Italy
Sara Morri
abstractSara Morri
During the nineteenth century, the Italian food system underwent a profound transformation. The gradual improvement of socioeconomic conditions enabled societies to move beyond the issue of food availability and shift attention toward the quality and safety of foodstuffs (food safety). The development of the chemical industry, the arrival of foreign goods, and the liberalization of trade facilitated the circulation of increasingly sophisticated products, difficult to monitor and often detrimental to health. In urban settings, where production and distribution were concentrated and intermediaries multiplied, food adulteration reached its most acute expression, disproportionately affecting the lower classes, who lacked access to higher-quality foods. Although not always immediately harmful, such practices undermined nutritional value and caused cumulative long-term damage. In post-unification Italy, marked by deteriorating dietary conditions and the absence of a centralized system of control, municipal administrations intervened through local hygiene regulations, the only effective legal instruments for safeguarding public health. Nonetheless, municipal authority was limited by private economic interests and by the liberal principle of freedom of commerce, generating a persistent tension between the protection of collective health and the defense of economic initiative. The paper sheds light on a crucial aspect of modern food history: the quality of food as a social, sanitary, and legal issue. Through the analysis of local contexts, legislation, and jurisprudence, the research shows from a legal-historical perspective how the food question became a privileged arena of negotiation between economic freedom and public intervention.
KARS UNDER SNOW
Neşe Gurallar
abstractNeşe Gurallar
KARS UNDER SNOW
Kars was a small town on the peripheries of two empires in the South Caucasus: the Ottomans and Russia. Its citadel is perched on a hill. The Kars River curves below that hill, with a stone bridge crossing the river. Miniatures and engravings throughout its history depicted these views. In the 19th century, photography began recording Kars. From 1888 to 1918, Russians occupied the city. Photographs from this period constructed the narrative of Russian colonialism and mainly focused on Kars' new urban and architectural features. After the city was annexed to the Turkish Republic, Kars became a city at the far eastern border of Türkiye and was forgotten. Decades later, in 2002, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk described Kars' "loneliness" in his novel Kar (Snow). Inspired by this novel, Russian-born photographer Max Sher published a book of photographs about Kars in 2025, titled Snow. In this book, Sher focused on the lonely landscape of Kars under snow, depicting not only architecture but also people: families, men crowding the streets, soldiers at the border, and a woman in a headscarf. This paper will examine the story of the photographs of this small, remote, unseen, unknown city—buried under snow—through both historical photographs and Max Sher's photographs.
Educating the Urban Female Worker: The Society of Ladies for Female Education (ΣΕΝ) and the Access to the Labor Markets in Greece (1872–1972).
Lydia Sapounaki-Dracaki, Maria-Louisa Tzoyia Moatsou, Katerina Chatzikonstantinou
abstractLydia Sapounaki-Dracaki, Maria-Louisa Tzoyia Moatsou, Katerina Chatzikonstantinou
This paper examines the role of The Society of Ladies for Female Education (ΣΕΝ)—founded in 1872 on Swiss and Belgian models—in promoting girls’ and women’s education and respectable employment, as a pathway into Greece’s urban labor market from 1872 to 1972. After WWII, the Society broadened its mission beyond impoverished women to address the needs of a wider range of female learners, reflecting shifting social and professional realities.
Established in the early Greek state, ΣΕΝ emerged alongside civic and industrial reform movements that created cooperative institutions to meet social and economic needs at a time when the State frequently delegated such responsibilities. Combining vocational training with welfare, ΣΕΝ offered salaries, food, medical care, and, in 1907, Greece’s first pension fund created by a women’s association. Its model inspired similar workshops nationwide, linking women’s vocational strategies to expanding home-based and industrial labor sectors, especially textile manufacturing, then Greece’s primary “heavy industry.”
ΣΕΝ operated at the intersection of education, social mobility, and urban labor markets. From its Athens base, the Destitute Women’s Workshop provided expertise to new workshops across cities, islands, and rural areas. It offered structured training in nursing with the establishment of the first School of Nursing, and, principally, weaving, carpet making, and dressmaking, while gaining international visibility through international fairs that connected Greek women to wider transnational professional networks.
In the postwar period, responding to new aspirations and rising private vocational schools, ΣΕΝ founded the Vocational School for Childcare Workers, the Vocational School for Sales Assistants, and the pioneering School for Elderly Companions, reflecting women’s diversification of skills and growing participation in urban economies.
Analyzing ΣΕΝ as both a gateway institution and a networked social actor, this study shows how education, vocational training, and institutional support structured women’s entry into urban labor markets. It highlights the interplay of gendered strategies, social networks, and urban mobilities, revealing how women navigated constraints and expanded opportunities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
* Please, note that the order of authors is the following: Lydia Sapounaki-Dracaki, Maria-Louisa Tzoyia Moatsou, Katerina Chatzikonstantinou