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 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”.