Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750: Technonatures in the Global North 3031469542, 9783031469541

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Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750 Technonatures in the Global North Edited by Mikkel Thelle · Mikkel Høghøj

Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750

Mikkel Thelle  •  Mikkel Høghøj Editors

Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750 Technonatures in the Global North

Editors Mikkel Thelle National Museum of Denmark Copenhagen, Denmark

Mikkel Høghøj National Museum of Denmark Copenhagen, Denmark

ISBN 978-3-031-46953-4    ISBN 978-3-031-46954-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a collaborative effort which has been enriched by the contributions and support of numerous scholars. Throughout the process, we have thus incurred many debts that we are delighted to acknowledge. The research project Entangled Fluid Cities: Material Politics of Urban Water, Copenhagen 1850–1975 (2019–2023), generously funded Independent Research Fund Denmark, constitutes the starting project of this book. In 2019, the editors of the book set out to explore the cultural and political history of urban water in twentieth century Copenhagen, seeking to understand the emergence of the Danish welfare society through the changing connections between water, materiality, and power relations in the modern city. We quickly learned, however, that in order to adequately understand the material politics of water, we needed to expand our focus from the resource of water specifically to include also the broader technonatural entanglements that make up the modern city. Acknowledging that we had to dig deeper into the intrinsic relations between cities, nature, and technology, we set out to explore these perspectives through a series of conferences and seminars held at Aarhus University. The first conference, Governing Urban Natures: Infrastructure, Citizenship, and Municipal Ecologies (December 4–5, 2019), arose from an interdisciplinary collaboration with anthropologists Heather Swanson and Michael David Vine from the Centre of Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University. Bringing together historians, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and architects, this conference addressed the multiplicity of intersections, exchanges, and interdependencies that shape v

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urban-nature relations in both past and present perspectives. The papers presented at the conference reminded us not only of the extent to which urban natures are always entangled with prevailing political rationalities and regimes, but they also pointed to the transformative capacities of urban technonatures. In many ways, this particular insight gave rise to the online seminar Techno-Natures and Urban Transformations (January 27–28, 2021) which brought together scholars from the field of urban environmental history to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between technonatural assemblages and the transformations of cities and urban life in a historical perspective. This seminar both helped us to develop the concept of technonatures into an applicable analytical category and provided us with numerous invaluable empirical insights that have come to form the main basis of this book. Our deepest appreciation thus goes to all presenters and speakers at both events who through their thought-provoking talks helped shaping the contours of this anthology. To the contributors to this book, your professional engagements and ability to synthesize complex ideas have transformed this anthology into a repository of knowledge and perspectives that, we believe, will be valuable for the field of urban environmental history going forward. For your professionalism and editorial attention to detail, we want to thank the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan. Finally, we wish to extend our gratitude to the student assistants whose professional and tireless work has been pivotal for the realization of both this book and the project of Entangled Fluid Cities generally. Many thanks to Signe Sørensen and Kathrine Kjær Schmidt for collecting and sorting crucial source material that has proved to be a central part of the empirical backbone of the project. Many thanks to Mette Bonnema Fisker for invaluable administrative assistance in connection with the seminar Techno-­ Natures and Urban Transformations, and many thanks to Mikkel Bang Maesen for meticulous and excellent editorial assistance during the final phases of the project. Copenhagen, August 2023

Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle

Contents

1 Unravelling Urban Technonatures  1 Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle Part I Themes and Concepts 2 Planetary Agglomeration 23 Chris Otter 3 Phronologies  of Networked Water: Copenhagen 45 Mikkel Thelle 4 Hybrid  Cities: Agency, Scale, and Power—A Conversation Between Matthew Gandy, Dorothee Brantz, and Chris Otter 63 Mikkel Thelle

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Part II Agency of Flow, Matter, and Technology 5 A  Techno-river in the Making: Three Transformations of the Wien River from the Middle Ages Until the Present 87 Friedrich Hauer, Christina Spitzbart-Glasl, Severin Hohensinner, and Verena Winiwarter 6 River  Lines and Railway Lines: Colonial Military Technonatures in the Making of Sudan’s Capital Region, 1880s–1920s125 Samuel Grinsell 7 Concrete  History: Floodwalls on the Ohio River145 Uwe Lübken Part III Governing Mobility, Waste, and Urban Subjects 8 Closed  Gates and Dark Streets: Spaces and Infrastructures of Transit in the Low Countries, Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries167 Marjolein Schepers 9 At  the Intersection of Expertise and Landscaping: How Technical Advisors Created New Nature195 Nina Toudal Jessen 10 Good  and Bad Nature: Slum Clearance and Metabolic Poverty in Mid-Twentieth Century Copenhagen217 Mikkel Høghøj Index239

Notes on Contributors

Samuel  Grinsell  is a historian of the built environment, with a special interest in the relationship between water and human habitation. His research has focused largely on two regions: the Nile Valley and the southern North Sea. He is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and a visiting researcher at the University of Antwerp. His work has appeared in the scholarly journals Environmental History and ABE Journal: Architecture Beyond Europe. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the climate campaign group Historians for Future. Friedrich  Hauer is a researcher and lecturer at the Urban Design Research Unit (Forschungsbereich Städtebau), Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). He was trained as an architect/urbanist (2006) and historian (2010) in Vienna, Austria. Since 2010 he has been a member of various interdisciplinary working groups in urban design and urban environmental history, focusing on questions of structural spatial development and urban metabolism. His PhD in Urban Morphology in 2019 is dealing with the impacts of water(s) on Vienna’s urban form over the past 500 years. He has also been writing on topics of architectural history, and has organised symposia and curated exhibitions. Mikkel Høghøj  is an urban and cultural historian specialised in Nordic and European urban-, planning-, and welfare history in the twentieth century. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Denmark. More broadly, his research interests include urban welfare history, the social history of architecture and planning, urban environmental history, ix

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and critical theory. He holds a PhD from Aarhus University and has been a guest researcher at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester (2018) and the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (2020). In 2022, he was awarded the Planning Perspectives Prize 2022 by the International Planning History Society (IPHS). Severin Hohensinner  is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Hydrobiology and Aquatic Ecosystem Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, Austria. He holds a PhD in Landscape Planning in 2008. His research focuses on the reconstruction of the historical river/floodplain hydromorphology and morphodynamic processes, with special regard to the Danube River and its alpine tributaries. His studies contribute to the identification of the historical living conditions of riverine biocoenoses. He is also involved in several applied interdisciplinary projects in the fields of river landscape planning, river restoration as well as in interdisciplinary environmental historical studies. Nina  Toudal  Jessen  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sustainability Science Centre, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds an MPhil in History of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in History from University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on land use management and planning policies in twentieth-century Denmark. She is particularly interested in the connections between landscape changes and understandings of land ownership in relation to environmental law-making and planning. Uwe  Lübken  is Professor of American History at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. He has held teaching and research positions at the universities of Cologne, Munich, Münster and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His publications include a prizewinning book on the U.S. perception of the National Socialist threat to Latin America and several edited volumes, special issues and articles on (American) transnational and environmental history. He has written on the history of flooding of the Ohio River (2014) and co-edited volumes on urban fires (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), the management of natural resources (Berghahn Books, 2014) and city-river relations (Pittsburgh University Press, 2016). Most recently, he has edited, together with his colleague Manlio Della Marca, a special issue of Reviews in International American Studies (RIAS, 2021) on Rivers of the Americas.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Chris Otter  is Professor of History at the Ohio State University, USA, where he researches and teaches the history of science, technology, food, environment and health. He is the author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain 1800–1910 (2008) and Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (2020). He is currently writing a book on the deep history of Earth’s technosphere. Marjolein  Schepers  Her work focuses on European migration history from the eighteenth century to the present, with special attention to topics like belonging, transience and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Her current postdoctoral research at KU Leuven, Belgium, focuses on the trajectories of sex workers in nineteenth-century Antwerp in navigating the regulation of prostitution and migration. In 2019, she defended her PhD thesis on the governance of migration and welfare in the border regions of eighteenth-century Flanders and France. Other previous research projects include colonial spaces of arrival in twentieth-­century Belgium, changing infrastructures and spaces of transient migration in cities in the Netherlands and Belgium (eighteenth–nineteenth century) and the subalternity of people without rights to residence in present-day Europe. She serves on the editorial boards of Early Modern Low Countries Journal and the Journal of Migration History. Christina  Spitzbart-Glasl is a freelance researcher, member of the Centre for Environmental History (ZUG) and antiquary at a long-established Viennese shop. She was trained in renewable energy technologies at the University of Applied Sciences Wieselburg (2006) and social ecology at University of Klagenfurt (2014). She participated in several research projects on Vienna’s urban waterscape associated with the University of Klagenfurt and University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna and finished her PhD on an environmental history of Viennese watermills in 2021. Mikkel  Thelle  is a cultural historian working with urban practice and public space, as director of Danish Center for Urban History, more recently combined with an interest in biosocial and environmental perspectives. He has been exploring how qualitative methods work together with new quantitative possibilities within digital humanities, researching for example relations between mobility and social topography. Recently, experiences and practices of welfare society have been more prevalent in

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his research, tracing biosocial becomings of modern citizenship. Mikkel is a senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark and guest professor at Malmö University. Verena  Winiwarter was Professor of Environmental History at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna, Austria, until 2022. She co-founded the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and has authored or edited more than 200 scientific publications. She is the head of the Commission for Interdisciplinary Ecological Studies (KIÖS) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), of which she is a full member.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Medieval monastic agglomeration: Rievaulx Abbey, England. (Wikimedia Commons) 26 Bosporus megalopolis. Note how actual cities are submerged and connected by massive agglomerative growth. (Wikimedia Commons)33 Refugee camp, Chad. (Wikimedia Commons) 37 The Wien River and its location within the system of urban waterbodies around 1780. The river’s catchment is highlighted in blue; it extends beyond today’s city limits (black outline). (Source: Friedrich Hauer and Severin Hohensinner) 92 The map shows the millstream traversing the main river arm at a weir between the Dorotheamühle in Gumpendorf (lower left corner) and the Heumühle in the suburb of Wieden in 1766 (W10 and W9 in Fig. 5.4). Weirs at Wien River were built with an angle of around 45% to the direction of flow, which reduced the risk of floods (compared to weirs constructed perpendicular to the direction of flow). (Source: Section of “Plan zum Gränz-Scheiding-Vergleich vom 6. Juli 1766 zwischen der Herrschaft Gumpendorf, Magdalenengrund und dem Magistrat”, F. Gruß, 1766, WStLA, Sign. 3.2.1.1.P1.277) 94 Spatial reconstruction of mill creeks and mills on Wien River, sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Hydromorphology and urban structures show the state of 1825. Millstreams and mills existing at that time are depicted in purple; already abandoned mills and millstreams are pictured in green. (Source: Friedrich Hauer and Christina Spitzbart-Glasl; Legend: Mills (dates according to first xiii

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

and last evidence, if not otherwise mentioned used for grain processing, Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 224–243): W1 Mühle am Schlifstein (1370–around 1600, also used as metal workshop); W2 Predigermühle (1290–around 1600); W3 Würzburgermühle (1394–around 1600); W4 Spitalsmühle (1217–1683/1684); W5 Royal mint (1676–1835); W6 Heiligengeistmühle (1274–1683/1684, also brewery); W7 Bärenmühle (1705–1856); W8 Schleifmühle (1417–1856, also used for polishing blades); W9 Heumühle (1326–1856); W10 Hof- or Dorotheamühle (1414–1847, in the seventeenth century at times used for metal processing); W11 Kirchenmühle (1357–1847); W12 Dominikanermühle (1357–1847); W13 Mollardmühle (1331–1847, at times also brewery, between 1679 and 1765 also used for metal processing); W14 Leather factory (around 1800–1847, production of tanning agents); W15 Farbholzmühle (around 1800–around 1870, production of dye and tanning agents); W16 Rothe Mühle (1677–1756); W17 Mauerbach Mühle (1360–1604); W18 Steurer Mühle (1686/1687–1756); W19 Kattermühle (1311–1638); W20 Schleifmühle Hietzing (1467–1622, metal workshop); W21 Feistmühle (1346–1867/1886); W22 Feldmühle (1364– around 1886, from 1814 factory for the production of dye and tanning agents); W23 Neumühle (1803–around 1860); W24 Baumgartner Mühle (1494–around 1880); W25 Hackinger Mühle (1346–around 1890, from 1684 cooperation with leather factory for production of tanning agents, from 1848 solely production of dye); W26 Hütteldorfer Mühle (1437– around 1880, from 1599 also brewery, became one of the largest breweries of the Viennese area in the nineteenth century); W27 Gluthmühle (1661–around 1920)) 96 Despite previous training, Wien River “ran wild” again. This 1717 map depicts the bend cut off in 1713 and newly planned regulation measures in today’s Schwarzenbergplatz area. (Source: Austrian State Archive (OeStA), War Archive, HKR 1717 Jänner 130 Exp.) 99 Constriction of the flood run-off area on the Wien River due to the extension of Schönbrunn Palace on the one hand and the expansion of the gardens in the village of Penzing on the other (situation around 1755). The deflection of the river resulted in a scouring of the northern bank downstream of Penzing. (Source: Severin Hohensinner based on Reichstein 2016)103

  List of Figures 

Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7

Fig. 5.8

Fig. 5.9

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3

The redistribution of the Wien River’s water since the late nineteenth century Techno-river and modular boulevard: the central stretch of the regulation project was paralleled by railway tracks and designed to be easily covered at will and need. So far, about 45% of this urban reserve space has been used. The section shown in this photograph (dating from around 1900) was vaulted in 1915. Today it mostly serves as a parking lot. (Source: Copyright Wien Museum, Inv.Nr. 108714/5) Wiental Kanal is the newest component of the techno-river’s flood buffer system. It is filled with wastewater during heavy rainfall, which is later pumped to the regular sewer system. (Source: Heinz Tesarek and Wien Kanal, photo taken in 2015) The unfinished portal of Wien River in Vienna’s Stadtpark designed by Friedrich Ohmann and Josef Hackhofer. By means of a small weir downstream, the bottom of the riverbed was meant to be fully covered by a still water surface. This would have added to the desired imagery of tamed waters and allowed for ice-­skating in winter. (Source: Friedrich Hauer, photo taken in 2019) The Nile from Metemma to Khartoum, 1898, Intelligence Division, War Office, British National Archives, M.P. HH413. Reproduced with kind permission Map of Khartoum and Omdurman in 1905. From E. A. W. Budge, Cook’s Handbook for Egypt and Sudan, (London, 1906), public domain, Wikimedia Commons. Note the railway running to Halfayah, the village around which Khartoum North grew From W. H. McLean, Regional and Town Planning, in Principle and Practice (London: The Technical Press ltd., 1930), facing page 70. McLean imagined that the second-class zone would grow southwards to the line of the railway, which would become the new boundary between third- and secondclass land. East of the railway is government land, in effect a continuation of the elite first-­class zone. Reproduced with kind permission from the British Library Floodwall in Portsmouth, Ohio. (Photo: Uwe Lübken) (a, b) John Marshall House in Shawneetown 1934. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey Floodwall murals in Paducah, Kentucky. (Photo: Uwe Lübken)

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113 126

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138 148 150 160

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List of Figures

Fig. 8.1

An overview of permitted locations for inns in Leiden in 1766–1801, inns and lodging houses in Leiden based on the 1832 cadastre, and inns and lodging houses included in the Pubscape data for Leiden (1808–1894). (Sources: Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken (EL), Stadsarchief Leiden 1546–1814 (SAII), 2287: “Lijst van straatgedeelten waar herbergen toegestaan worden, 1766–1801”; Arie van Steensel, Historisch Leiden in Kaart: Kadaster 1832 (2016). https://doi. org/10.17026/dans-­2a9-­88d3; Ariadne Schmidt and Roos van Oosten, Leiden’s Pubscape, 1820–1894. Towards a better understanding of drink and labour, Leiden University (2020). https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-­z4q-­8c2v) Fig. 8.2 Huiszittenhuis van de Hervormde Diaconie (Protestant Poor Relief Institution) with, on the foreground, the barge to Amsterdam. The Huiszittenhuis was the institution that hosted the passantmeester providing relief to people passing through Leiden. Jacob Timmermans, “Huiszittenhuis van de Hervormde Diaconie,” colour drawing (1788), Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken Fig. 8.3 Excerpt of archival source on the opening and closing of the city gates from the city of Leiden, early eighteenth century. (Source: EL, SA II, 2709: Memorie betreffende het halen en brengen van de sleutels van resp. naar de stadspoorten (begin 18e eeuw) 1700–1725) Fig. 8.4 Korte Mare in Leiden with barges to Haarlem. Paulus Constantijn La Fargue, “Korte Mare,” black and white drawing (1778), Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken Fig. 10.1 Map visualizing the high housing density which characterized the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter. Located in: Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission. 1957. “Boligtilsyn og Sanering. Betænkning afgivet af Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission. Bind 2: Lovudkast og bilag” (Copenhagen: The Ministry of Housing, p. 108). Fig. 10.2 Scheme used by Copenhagen Housing Commission to inspect poor housing on the basis of the seven criteria for slum which were outlined by 1939 slum clearance act. Located at Copenhagen City Archives. Archive for The Housing Commission’s Secretariat Fig. 10.3 The house of Adelgade 87. Located at Copenhagen City archives

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CHAPTER 1

Unravelling Urban Technonatures Mikkel Høghøj and Mikkel Thelle

A wall is collapsing. The movement is captured in a moment when the top is beginning to disintegrate into fragments, meanwhile the lower section of the wall maintains its cohesion, demarking a boundary that encloses the interior space resembling a ruin, illuminated from above. The upper fragments seem to have recently separated from the contiguous wall mass, now floating isolated like pieces of rock off a cliff. Human bodies are all, but a few, depicted diagonally in the composition, frozen in mid-motion reminiscent of a photograph or cartoon. This ‘instant’ character of the image creates a temporal suspension, prolonging the ongoing collapse almost infinitely. The scene evokes an urban structure, but in the background an infinite, flat surface is stretching into the horizon, while in the immediate foreground, the built structure is morphing into an almost two-dimensional pattern of repetitive forms, echoing yet another infinity, namely that of the concrete housing complexes enabled by post-war technologies. Crafted by Danish artist Palle Nielsen in 1958, this linoleum cut, which serves as the cover image of this book, carries the title Into The World of

M. Høghøj (*) • M. Thelle National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_1

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War (Ind I Krigens Verden, own translation). Initiating his artistic explorations during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Nielsen addresses the emergent world infused technological peril and allure that characterized the Cold War’s radical intersection of promise and jeopardy. His work provides a series of visual motifs representing his own generation’s visual experiences of toadstool clouds and new shiny tools. Through series of drawings including The Sleeping City (1955–1957), The Enchanted City (1953), and Necropolis (1970), Nielsen delves into various post-­ apocalyptic spaces and lonely humans. Often, these scenarios are mediated via images of the intergrown: buildings covered in creepers, gardens moving into city squares and vacant buildings morphing into technonatural monuments. Through changing and reappearing motifs, these drawings encapsulate both the resignation and hope that came together in connecting present and future between the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall (Hartog 2015; Simon 2020). The works of Nielsen thus offer a pictorial universe, or language, of collapsing categories. Walls, membranes and zones distinguishing city and non-city are dissolving, being overgrown or simply blown to pieces. Atmospheres of idyllic nature, as we have learned to appreciate it, suddenly seem to be devouring the orderly space of the urban square. Much like the crashing wall within the image, the demarcation between inside and outside does not herald a promise of something new, but rather it denotes a constant exposure of other ruins to inhabit (Tsing 2015). This seemingly continuous collapse of categories forms the starting point of this book. By adopting a hybrid gaze, the book sets out to explore how different entanglements of environment, technology, and agency have shaped cities and processes of urbanization in the Global North from the seventeenth century onwards. With the technonatural fabric of urban rivers, dumps, railways, flood walls, and urban housing as their point of departure, the chapters of the book demonstrate not only how amalgamations of technology and nature have influenced urban development and life within various historical circumstances and situations, but they also underline the politics inherent in the technonatural fabric of cities. By foregrounding the transformative role of urban natures, materialities, and technologies in shaping the politics of urban life and cities more broadly, the book aspires to probe the potentiality of technonatures as a conceptual and analytical strategy for urban environmental historians.

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Technonatures in Urban Theory and Research Thus, this book proposes the concept of ‘technonatures’ as an analytical entry point from where to write urban environmental history. During the winter of 2021, while under the constraints of COVID-19 lockdown measures, we organized an online seminar as part of the research project Entangled Fluid Cities. Seeking to explore the entangled character of the relationship between nature, modernity, and urban transformations, we chose to concentrate the seminar around the concept of technonatures and thereby propose a metaphor or neologism to better capture the hybrid potential of these concepts. It worked in the sense that the seminar turned out well. However, shortly after we discovered that the concept of technonatures was in fact not a neologism. In 2010, the anthology entitled Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century, edited and published by Damian White and Chris Wilbert, had already proposed and operationalized this concept (D.  F. White and Wilbert 2010). This anthology not only introduced technonatures as a concept but also employed it as a tool to explore the exact same overall theme, namely entanglements of technology, and nature, that we aimed to address in the seminar. Specifically, White and Wilbert proposed the concept of technonatures as a metaphor for comprehending a specific moment in time, namely the politics of nature in the early twenty-first century, “during which the environmental debate seems to be folding into a vastly more complex social-ecological-technological field of political discussion” (D.  F. White and Wilbert 2010, 13). The anthology thus reminded us of both the antecedent scholarly insights and traditions, which we build upon in our work, and the societal as well as academic context that shape our positionality as scholars. Hence, it forms an ideal point of departure for delineating the concept of technonatures and the relevance of this book published more than a decade later. Long traditions in environmental and cultural studies underline that scholarly interest in the relationship between technology, nature, and society is not new. Studying nature as a construction across such fields goes back to 1970s intellectuals such as Raymond Williams and William Cronon, the latter known for his seminal Nature’s Metropolis on Chicago’s influence on Midwest ecologies (Cronon 1991, Williams 1973). Identifying Cronon as a forerunner of technonatural analysis is in many ways well placed, also because he caused a turn in environmental history away from the declensionist narrative of a clean nature in decay or what

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White and Wilbert terms a “naturalistic politics of Nature” (D. F. White and Wilbert 2010, 4). However, also Cronon had forerunners, such as Donald Worster, a foundational figure in the field with his analysis of the ‘Dust Bowl’ phenomenon of interwar US rural poverty (Worster 2014). Even earlier, Rachel Carson’s 1960s study of pesticide consequences, Silent Spring, contributed to what Cronon, and later Richard White in his account of the Columbia River, Organic Machine, called, with Hegel, ‘second nature’ (Carson 1962; R. White 2001). There is also a European thread to this development. Whereas the US engagement with the intersection of nature and culture focused on human influence from early on, the development in French history has had a more ambivalent relationship to human agency. Fernand Braudel’s grand analysis of the Mediterranean from the 1940s suggested that humans participate in certain layers of time, but that the time of nature was beyond us (for Braudel, see below). On this impulse, other French historians including Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie developed a ‘history of the environment’, that, using quantitative methods, was a ‘history without humans’ (Braudel 1972). Representing another position in the history of mentalities, Alain Corbin exercised a cultural historical engagement with the sensibilities and representations of ‘milieu’, in line with the New Cultural History emerging around 1980  in Europe and the US (Hunt 1989). However, as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Babtiste Fressoz point out in their The Shock of the Anthropocene, none of these positions in French historiography actually directed their attention towards human impact on the environment (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, 38). Attempts to do so can be found in Richard Evans’ close reading of 1890s politics and pandemic in Death in Hamburg and Timothy Mitchell’s works on Carbon Democracy and techno-politics in twentieth century Egypt. In both cases, nature and technology are closely and dramatically entangled (Evans 1990; Mitchell 2002, 2011). From especially the 1990s onwards, aspects from these strands of research came together in the establishment of new interdisciplinary research fields that took the inextricable entanglements of society and nature, mind, and body, as their analytical starting points. On the one hand, Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis heralded the advent of urban environmental history, especially in a North American context. As noted above, this involved confronting the declensionist narratives in environmental history that positioned cities in opposition to nature. This was spearheaded not only by Cronon but also by Martin Melosi, Christine Rosen and Joel

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Tarr who actively asserted the city as an intrinsic part of nature (Cronon 1991; Melosi 1993; Rosen and Tarr 1994). In a European context, urban environmental history to a great extent developed simultaneously with especially a strong German presence, e.g., with Dieter Schott and Christoph Bernhardts’ work on urban resources (Bernhardt 2004; Schott 2005) and Dorothee Brantz’s engagements in urban animal history (Brantz 2002, 2005). Around the same time, especially from late 1990s onwards, the research field of urban political ecology (UPE) began to emerge. Anchored around critical geographers including Erik Swyngedouw, Maria Kaika, Matthew Gandy, and Nik Heinen as well as political scientists such as Roger Keil, this research field has been a central proponent in advancing a metabolic rather than functionalist reading of the city (Swyngedouw 1997; Swyngedouw et al. 2002; Heinen et al. 2006; Kaika 2004; Gandy 2002; Keil 2003). Concentrating on the politics of urban ecologies, UPE-­ scholars have explored the socio-spatial processes through which nature become processed, urbanized and distributed through various forms of urban infrastructures and geographies. At the heart of this field lies the acknowledgment that cities depend on the control and utilization of various natural resources and that the processes involved in discovering, recovering, and distributing such resources for urban societies and populations effectively transform resources and ecologies into socio-natural hybrids. In this context, the concept of ‘urban metabolism’ has been central for capturing the uneven flow of resources, waste, capital, and people across the urban geography (Gandy 2004; Heinen et al. 2006; Swyngedouw 2006). This has moreover extended the analytical and empirical focus beyond the traditional boundaries of the city and way into the hinterland. In the case of water, which has been a central focal point in UPE, water treatment plants, pumping stations and dams, sometimes locate more than 100 kilometres from the city borders, help to provide cities with clean fresh water while at the same time hiding the uneven social processes perpetuated by the urbanization of water (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000; Kaika 2004; Gandy 2002). As such, urban environmental history and UPE share commonalities in their approach to urban technonatures. First, both fields have been characterized by a shared emphasis on the urbanization of various forms of natural resources and the technologies and infrastructures through which these resources have been mediated and remade through the urban fabric. Second, both strands have had a strong historical focus. Exploring the

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urban political ecologies of water in diverse cities including London, Athens, New  York, Lagos, Mumbai, and Guayanquil, Maria Kaika, Matthew Gandy and Erik Swyngedouw have all deployed long-term perspectives to understand the historically embedded processes through which the urbanization of water entwine with shifting economic and political regimes as well as urban imaginaries (Swyngedouw 1997; Kaika 2004; Gandy 2002, 2014). Third, both strands have incorporated various interdisciplinary insights both across the humanities and social sciences and from the natural sciences. For example, Verena Winiwarter and Martin Schmid approach to so-called socio-natural sites is characterized by the combination of methods from the natural and human sciences (Winiwarter et al. 2013). Similarly, Sabine Barles has employed various natural scientific methods to investigate inputs and outputs in Paris’ ‘urban metabolism’ (Barles 2009, 2020). Thus, the concept of technonatures signifies certain entanglements between nature, technology, and society which have been on the scholarly agenda for at least 70 years; at least within environmental history. Therefore, rather than suggesting this concept as something ontologically novel, our intent with this book is to propose the notion of technonatures as a conceptual umbrella covering these past insights together with present and future ones, whether the inspiration comes from Hegel or, as we shall return to, poststructuralism. But it also goes to show that the conceptualization has shifted over time, and in some periods more rapidly than others. White and Wilbert arguably published their anthology during a rather intense process that we could term ‘expanding natures’ which we might still need some time to adequately comprehend. Specifically, their anthology came as a response to what they deemed a weakened politics of nature, an emergent biological capitalism and unbounded technological remaking of ecologies and society in the beginning of the twenty-first century (D. F. White and Wilbert 2010, 2). Moving well into this century, we still see market forces expanding into the biological and new technologies (or the expectations to them) dominating global ecologies. However, the ways in which these ecologies are politicized does not seem stagnating to the same degree as in the 2000s. Instead, the climate crisis and the Anthropocene now seem to be a matter of concern across various public domains, even if the consequences or wider meaning of this concern is contested. While this development could plausibly be interpreted as a straightforward political result of the expanding natures paradigm, it is also evident

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in the scientific domain that, compared to 2010, offers a much more variegated conceptual and analytical landscape for understanding technonatures. The notion of the Anthropocene, as Bonneuil, and Fressoz have coined it, has brought in a ‘shock’ effect, changing directions, and framings of knowledge production in research with acute speed. Part of this effect is the emergence of environmental humanities (EH), a cross-­ disciplinary field that has proliferated especially during the last decade, with the advent of, for instance, the journal by the same name from 2012 onwards, gathering intellectuals such as Timothy Morten, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. This fits interestingly with White and Wilbert’s observation that the notion of ‘nature’ is not mobilizing, but maybe ‘natures’ in the plural sense will be able to spark political agency. However, there is no consensus that borders have collapsed. In his book The Progress of This Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World, geographer Andreas Malm sparks a debate with post-structuralist positions including Actor-Network Theory and New Materialism, arguing that the notion of ‘hybridism’ is misleading. In his neo-Marxist argument, phenomena often contain and sustain multiple, contesting, properties. For example, the water molecule, known for killing fire, is made from two inflammable elements. The fixation on hybrids as something historically specific, Malm argues, gets in the way of identifying the main culprit in the climate debate, namely fossil capitalism, and thus in the way of acting (Malm 2018). For Malm, in a warming world, it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Calling for scholarly action against climate change, the book Turning up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency edited by Maria Kaika, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler and Yannis Tzaninis (Kaika et al. 2023) also addresses the role of critical scholars in confronting a world of environmental destruction, authoritarianism, and economic inequality. Seeking to mobilize UPE’s critical engagements and energies towards developing potential avenues and recommendations for political change, the book represents an increasing critical awareness towards the positionality and responsibility of scholars in creating sustainable and just urban futures in the face of the ongoing climate crisis. As these examples illustrate, since the publication of the technonatures-­ anthology of 2010, the collapsing of the categorical distinctions between technology and nature has arguably become, if not mainstream, then at least widely acknowledged; not least within the environmental humanities. As Sebastian Haumann, Martin Knoll, and Detlev Mares note in 2020,

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“over the last three decades, the dichotomy of a ‘natural’ and a ‘cultural’ sphere has come under attack” (Haumann et al. 2020, 10), and the seminal insights from thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway have become a platform for what we could term a ‘hybrid gaze’. These insights have also formed the basis of a number of edited volumes within urban environmental history, firmly establishing the collapsing of categories as the ontological and analytical backbone of this field of research (Soens et al. 2019; Haumann et al. 2020). Haraway’s claim that there is no way of sensing or experiencing the world that is anymore outside of the technological (Haraway 1991) does maybe not seem so radical anymore, as the now more widespread use of post-phenomenological notions also goes to show (Idhe 1979; MqCuire 2016). As well as the collapsing of nature and technology as categories, then, the notion of technonatures also point to the observation that our experience of the natural is mediated by the technological and vice versa. Taking a bath requires piped networks, reservoirs, wet room accessories, filtering plants and so forth, but the act of regulating the water temperature is at the same time dependent on the body’s neural system communicating hot and cold to the brain (Hoffmeyer 1996). Though this volume foregrounds material flows of e.g. riverbeds, floodwalls and landfills over human (or animal) experiences, we wish to keep in mind the multiscalar dimensions of technonatural processes. As we will elaborate in the next section, the notion of scale, temporality, and agency therefore form central elements in the analytical focus and contributions of the book.

Historicizing Technonatures: Temporality, Agency, and Power Thus, the discovery of White and Wilbert’s insightful anthology prompted us to acknowledge the substantial developments that have transpired since 2010. However, the significance of this context extends beyond the mere fifteen-year span between the two publications. Temporality also assumes a central role within this volume, differing from White and Wilbert’s intervention which was primarily directed towards a contemporary engagement with environmental questions within the social sciences. The intervention of this volume seeks a more profound engagement with temporal durations, encompassing centuries and occasionally even millennia. Historicizing technonatures can serve to understand the exchanges

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between human and non-human agencies in much more subtle layers that, we contend, often evade scholarly attention in contemporary analyses. French historian Francois Hartog posits that Western temporality since the ending of the Cold War has been dominated by a strong ‘presentism’ in the sense that the world is understood and experienced within the timeframe of a generation, ‘ours’, or to phrase it more radically with historian Zoltan Simon, that everything new, such as the present crises, appear to us as unprecedented, as never experienced before (Hartog 2015; Simon 2020). If this holds true, it seems even more urgent to revisit and expose the complex and layered materialities and traces of technonatural transformations, which, in some cases, even can lead to new understandings of established concepts, such as the city (Chris Otter in this volume). While for some time now, geographers and social scientists have been celebrating a new attention towards space over time, it seems that in the humanities, not least due to the notion of the Anthropocene, the temporal has re-­ emerged as a baseline for research as well as an object of research. Even Malm in his analysis of the roots of global warming call for a stronger temporal attention for researchers in order to address the challenge of the climate crisis (Jordheim 2022; Simon 2020; Malm 2016, 20). Just like questions of temporality is now returning in the light of the climate (or poly-) crisis, so might be the role of the historian and other scholars within the humanities working with the past including archaeologists and ethnologists. Environment as a concept for scientific scrutiny is not new, though, since from the mid-twentieth century, it has been analysed historically, also with consequences for the temporal categories at hand. Braudel formed his idea of three historical times based on a large study of the Mediterranean region. As mentioned above, Braudel’s idea was formed around three temporal categories: the smallest scale deals with events in everyday life, and is, historically, of little interest. Then, there is the time of rulers and social systems that Braudel would observe over spans of maybe two or three centuries. Last, the most important time, the ‘longue durée’ was the time of nature, of geological displacements and climatic shifts (Braudel 1972). In this form of historical time, humans had no agency whatsoever, according to Braudel. Mountains would fall into the sea regardless of human activities. The environmental attention of Braudel and his contemporaries has stayed in historical work in different ways, also in urban history. Barles, for example, points to Richard Evans’ seminal book on the cholera in Hamburg from the late 1980s as an early

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example of showing an uncontrollable environment in urban modernity (Barles 2020; Evans 1987). Dipesh Chakrabarty, a historian of postcolonial power who from the 2000s onwards turned his attention to the planetary challenges, underscores the need to consider humans as a species within historiography (Chakrabarty 2009; Chakrabarty and Latour 2021). This necessitates the fusion of ‘documented history’ with ‘deep history’, predating the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago (Smail 2008). Deep history is crucial to understand the importance of humankind’s genetic and cultural (pre)history for the formation of humankind as a collective phenomenon—or humankind as a species. When the deep history is to be considered in Chakrabarty’s perspective, it is, among other things, to reunite human history with the history of the earth. Humans must be understood in a geological context before we can adequately comprehend the transformation of humans into a geological actor. Thus, Chakrabarty calls for a ‘history of life’ in a broader sense of the term and thus taking a step further than earlier historians who approached the environment as something distinct from human history. While we can see this claim as an expression of the hybrid gaze, we also argue that technonatures can play a part in forming such a historical understanding. As such, we can contend that environment has come to play a role for historians, but what is that role, and how does it translate into academic practice? In the anthology Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency (Dis) Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500, the editors Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid and Bert de Munck reflect on such questions with specific focus on agency. They argue that “human activity and agency can neither be reduced to a result of natural and material conditions, nor be abstracted from them. Every change in the material context (e.g. the introduction of a centralized sanitation in a city) not only affects the urban environment but also the relationship between people” (Soens et al. 2019, 10). This expanded notion of agency resonates with the hybrid gaze emerging in recent decades. In their conceptual discussion, Soens, Schott, Toyka-­ Seid, and de Munck also draw on Bruno Latour, Actor-Network-theory, and related positions. One such related position is the volume Urban Assemblages edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender that aimed to dissect cities as “multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogenous networks” (Farías and Bender 2010, I). This notion of assemblage also aligns Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of ‘agencement’, that is,

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a collection of things that have been gathered together (assembled) and through their relations produce new situations (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). This notion of distributed agency that ascribes no part of the assemblage privileged importance is allowing for a whole other form of analysis, without a single locus of power, as we for example see in Latour’s investigation of Louis Pasteur, whose recognition was due to his alliances with colleagues, the laboratory, and, of course, the bacteria (Latour 1988). Thus, very specific studies can open highly complex sets of relations, informing us on the concrete interdependencies between the elements of what we term nature and technology—as also demonstrated in Annemarie Mol’s praxeology based on a close study of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital. Here, Mol reveals that the phenomenon carrying the name of atherosclerosis is practiced as a range of different things depending on the bodies, devices or procedures involved, while other practices such as the patient-doctor conversation serves as a strategy to make it a coherent phenomenon (Mol 2002, 1). However, it seems the ‘flat ontologies’ affiliated with these distributions also cause concern among historians. Notwithstanding the many that might disagree with the overall notion, the decentralized approach of power also seems to trouble some of the early proponents of this position. In an epilogue to Urban Assemblages, Thomas Bender specifically notes his reservations about the analytical difficulties of historians to locate, as he terms it, the ‘responsibility’ of actors in an assemblage across time (Bender 2010). Others question whether assemblage as a method lacks historical sensibility or if the concept itself is posing the right metaphors (Buchanan 2015). If we think more about Bender’s objection and the search for responsibility, some of these possible shortcomings might become clearer. The notion of responsibility might appear rooted in the ‘old world’, laden with subjectivity and ethics, contrasting with the post-­ structuralist terminology of Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour. Maybe, Bender has a leg in this other world and its historiography, yet he poses an interesting question to historians as well as archaeologists dealing with the notion of distributed agency in historical analyses. Since the ascendancy of Foucauldian notions of power, a decentralized approach to power has prevailed in certain parts of historiography, not only in the Global North but also in postcolonial cultural analytics by thinkers like Edward Said (Said 1979) and Achille Mbembe (Mbembe 2019). Power is present everywhere and pervasive in every relationship, yet in this line of this thinking, responsibility persists. With this book, we

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thus emphasize that power and time is embedded in the processes and workings of the technonatural, thus arguing for a renewed use of the concept attending to new challenges from (and for) the humanities in approaching environmental issues.

Exploring Technonatures: The Structure of the Book This book is structured in three parts, each centred around central themes that showcase different interconnections of environment, technology, agency, and city-making. The first part of the book is dedicated to the theoretical and conceptual implications of adopting a technonatural approach in urban history. This part not only addresses key theoretical challenges within contemporary urban environmental history but also proposes new ways forward to advance our understanding of the entwinements of urban natures, technology, and the city as a historical phenomenon and analytical category. Critically revisiting the category of ‘the urban’, Chris Otter in his chapter proposes the concept of ‘agglomeration’. According to Otter, agglomeration denotes any collection of buildings, hominins and things and thus the concept encompasses the many forms of “low-density urbanism” that are found in, for example, South America and Cambodia, as well as other settlement types such as monasteries, camps, and industrial complexes. As such, the concept allows us to both incorporate a far wider range of anthropogenic spatial formations into a history of human planetary activity and extend this analysis far deeper into the past. For Otter, the agglomeration concept is not opposed to the urban concept. Instead, it offers a much more expansive and capacious term that allows us to explore the very deep and complex history of how humans have brought themselves and their things together. Using the concept to reframe two key “revolutions” in urban history—C. Gordon Childe’s Mesopotamian “urban revolution” and Henri Lefebvre’s twentieth century global “urban revolution”—Otter points to the relevance of the concept in relation to contemporary debates in critical urban theory about planetary scales of urbanization. Situating these events within a historically deeper and more variegated web of agglomerations, Otter argues that an alternative, more inclusive, less stadial and more unusual history can be written using the concept of agglomeration.

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While Otter engages with urban theoretical debates about the scales and limits of ‘the urban’, Mikkel Thelle’s chapter connects the concept of technonature to ongoing scholarly conversations regarding the notion of hybridity and distributed agency. Drawing upon the Aristotelian notion of ‘phronesis’, which denote the forms of ‘practical’ knowledge that derive from solving problems between nature and man in a sensible and morally plausible way, he proposes the concept of ‘phronologies’ as a potential analytical strategy to analyse and historicize concrete entanglements of nature, technology, and practice in urban space. In his chapter, Thelle develops the concept by tracing shifting entwinements of water networks, spaces, and practices in early twentieth century Copenhagen and pointing to the intimate ties between the material potential of concrete technonatures and emerging social categories and values in the city. As such, he offers an avenue to examine the shifting relations between urban culture, nature, and practice in a way that allows us to identify critical sources of urban transformation without excluding any components in the urban system. To conclude this part of the book, we bring a roundtable conversation between Dorothee Brantz, Matthew Gandy Chris Otter, and Mikkel Thelle. Addressing key concepts including hybridity, agency, scale, and power, this conversation revolves around key themes in contemporary urban environmental history and seeks to identify potential analytical directions and connections to pursue prospectively. As such, this part of the book engages in dialogues with several ongoing scholarly conversations in urban environmental history and urban studies more broadly. As mentioned above, the advent of urban environmental history from the 1990s onwards has entailed that urban history and environmental history are no longer perceived as two separate fields of research. As part of a broader scholarly effort to dismantle conceptual distinctions between nature and culture, a prime marker of ‘Western modernity’, urban environmental historians have attempted to break down the nature-city dichotomy and instead shed light upon the numerous ways in which cities and nature are inextricably intertwined and mutually constitutive on multiple scales. While recent edited volumes in urban environmental history point to the great variety of topics covered and methods deployed in contemporary urban environmental historical scholarship (Soens et  al. 2019; Haumann et  al. 2020), the three first chapters in this book contributes with new potential analytical strategies to pursue this objective prospectively.

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In the second part of the book, we turn attention to the relationship between technonatural systems and urbanization processes in specific historical contexts. Conducting urban history from a technonatural angle entails taking the agentic capacities of urban materiality seriously and thus foregrounding the consequential role of urban natures, materialities, and technologies in transforming cities and urban life. In this context, public infrastructure has particularly proven a rewarding analytical framework. In both urban studies and urban history, scholars have increasingly adopted an infrastructural perspective as a privileged entry to study the formation and negotiation of various aspects of socio-political life (Graham and Marvin 2001; Anand 2017; Moss 2009; Gunn et al. 2022). These studies have convincingly demonstrated the political capacity of urban infrastructure in shaping social relations and inequalities in the city. At its core, infrastructures are technonatural entanglements. Urban water infrastructures, for examples, rely upon the extraction, distribution, and thus urbanization of water as a natural resource. Focusing on technonatural systems connected to urban rivers, railways, and flood walls, the three chapters in this part of the book all address the intricate processes through which nature and technology become urbanized and ‘infrastructured’ and, in turn, work actively in different forms of urbanization processes. In their study of the Wien River, Friedrich Hauer, Christina Spitzbart-­ Glasl, Severin Hohensinner, and Verena Winiwarter examine the historically shifting dynamics in the relationship between the river and the city of Vienna from the middle ages until the present. Specifically, they focus on three different periods and related aspects of Wien River’s transformation as a techno-river. They demonstrate how arrangements to harvest the water’s energy through watermills, millstreams, and weirs shaped the relationship between the river and the city of Vienna from the early Middle Ages onwards and point to the manifold attempts to control and ‘tame’ fluvial dynamic and to stabilize the riverbed from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Last, they address the breaking-up and technical reassembly of the urban river, and its entire catchment is then addressed in the third section around the turn of the twentieth century. This long-­ term perspective allows Hauer, Spitzbart-Glasl, Hohensinner, and Winiwarter to demonstrate not only how shifting connections between natural, technological, and social processes (and their material precipitates) impacted on and were structured by the dynamics of urbanization but also how artificial structures continuously mediate between different layers of the Wien River as a hybrid hydraulic urban landscape.

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Infrastructures are never neutral but always embedded in specific power networks and hierarchies. As such, infrastructures can also be used as concrete tools of power. As Sam Grinsell demonstrates in his chapter, in the case of Khartoum in the late nineteenth century, technonatural infrastructures were specifically mobilized to advance British colonial conquests. By examining how colonial rule reshaped the built environment at the Nile confluence as a ‘technonatural knot’ where the River Nile and the Sudan Military Railway both contributed to the making of urban space, Grinsell investigates the role of colonial military technonatures in the making of Sudan’s Capital Region from the 1880s to the 1920s. Picking up Tim Ingold’s conceptualization of the line as a useful mode of thinking in tracing the entanglements of river and rail, he provides a technonatural history of Sudan’s Capital Region that opens up new ways of understanding colonial urban planning as embedded in material flows, knots, and tangles. In doing so, Grinsell points to the intersection of several scales of power, both spatially and conceptually. As he demonstrates, the earth of the Rwenzori Mountains, the agriculture of the Nile Delta and the politics of British rule over Egypt, all shaped the urban morphology of Sudan’s Capital Region. Colonial visions of the body—the mechanized ideal of the soldier, the vulnerability of the White ruler to the tropical climate, the comfort of the “natives” in their “natural zone”—all shaped how the regime responded to the environment of Sudan and sought to bring order to it through imposed urban ideals. Turning to the Ohio river, Uwe Lübken in his chapter investigates how concrete floodwalls have functioned as technonatural devices that demarcate the boundary between rivers and cities. Pointing to the co-evolution of urbanization, environment, and technology, Lübken traces the reasons why such concrete structures were created in the early twentieth century, how they have been perceived and discussed and why some cities decided against the construction of floodwalls. As Lübken underscores, floodwalls have historically served to mediate between the hazards and opportunities that the river has to offer in processes of urbanization. As delineators of urban space, they have impacted human as well as non-human life in various urban centres. Yet, their social, cultural, and economic role have also changed over time. As such, the chapter also points to the challenges of an ageing infrastructure under the conditions of climate change. As argued above, urban technonatures are always inextricably tied to prevalent power structures and hierarchies. In the last part of the book, we delve into the realm of urban governance to explore the various ways in

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which technonatures have been inscribed into processes of governance and regulation. This part thus connects to recent scholarship in urban history that has revisited the concept of power and rule in urban societies and pointed to the impact of material networks, structures, and devices (Gunn and Hulme 2020). In her study of spaces and infrastructures of transit in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Low Countries, Marjolein Schepers connects the history of urban technonatural governance to the question of mobility. By analysing changes in migration infrastructures and by focusing on the role and agency of nature and technology in transport and mobility, particularly for people arriving in and passing through the city, she uses a technonatural perspective to shed a new light on debates in migration history that have mostly focused on migration regulation and social control. Although entwinements of technology and nature were not the sole reasons behind the changes in migration, mobility, and the city around 1800, the landscape, ongoing transport revolutions, the darkness and danger of the night and the process of nocturnalisation nevertheless impacted on spaces of arrival and transit. Such technonatural entanglements helped to create new spaces of power or regulation mediated through technologies of visibility, recognizability, and containment. While Schepers points to the role of technonatures in regulating urban mobility, Nina Toudal Jessen emphasizes the ways in which technonatures can also work to blur the boundaries between the urban and the rural. By tracing the connections between environmental planning, waste management, and landscape planning through the plans for a new landfill outside the market town Kalundborg in Denmark between 1975 and 1979 and its subsequent use and closure, she shows how the lines between what counted as rural and urban were blurred both through material changes to the site and through ideational understandings of what a rural village was. In doing so, she points to the increasing importance of technical experts in changing the rural landscape in 1970s Denmark. As she shows, the development, planning, and design of the landfill happened in the first years following a national municipal reform, which sought to enlarge and professionalize the municipal administration. Therefore, the planning of the controlled landfill came to exhibit the relations between new bureaucratic ideas and technological possibilities. Together, they created a new space in a rural area that activated a multitude of actors—human and non-­ human—involved in the making of this new urban-rural space.

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The social urban structure is anchored in the technonatural fabric of cities. In the final chapter of the book, Mikkel Høghøj thus demonstrates how urban poverty in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen was a highly enviro-technical phenomenon. Focusing on the development of Danish slum clearance legislation policy from the late 1930s onwards, he shows that although the concept of “slum” was in many ways conceived as a construct to classify and thus eradicate urban spaces of poverty, it was also closely tied to the techno-natural fabric and bio-social conditions of the modern city. Dysfunctional infrastructures, sanitary shortcomings and pervasive nature in the form of animals, pests, rain, and dampness were all central not only for the public perception of slum as spaces of ‘bad nature’ but also for how these spaces interacted with the broader urban system of Copenhagen. The so-called urban slums spatialized poverty but not simply as distinctly delineated zones or ‘islands’ of impoverishment. Rather, their impoverishment stemmed from their disadvantaged localisation in the urban metabolism.

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Heinen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2006. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw. Questioning Cities. London: Routledge. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 1996. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hunt, Lynn, ed. 1989. The New Cultural History. Berkely: University of California Press. Idhe, Don. 1979. Technics and Praxis. A Philosophy of Technology. Dreidler: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Jordheim, Helge. 2022. Natural Histories for the Anthropocene: Koselleck’s Theories and the Possibility of a History of Lifetimes. History and Theory 61 (3): 391–425. Kaika, Maria. 2004. City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203826928. Kaika, Maria, and Erik Swyngedouw. 2000. Fetishizing the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (1): 120138. Kaika, Maria, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler, and Yannis Tzaninis, eds. 2023. Turning up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Keil, Roger. 2003. Urban Political Ecology. Urban Geography 24 (8): 723–738. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-­3638.24.8.723. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. ———. 2018. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics, Theory in Forms. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478007227. Melosi, Martin V. 1993. The Place of the City in Environmental History. Environmental History Review 17 (1): 1–23. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Can the Mosquito Speak? Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. ———. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Carbon Democracy. Verso Books. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Science and Cultural Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Moss, Timothy. 2009. Divided City, Divided Infrastructures: Securing Energy and Water Services in Postwar Berlin. Journal of Urban History 35 (7): 923–942. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144209347742.

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MqCuire, Scott. 2016. Geomedia. Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space. Cambridge: Polity. Rosen, Christine Meisner, and Joel Arthur Tarr. 1994. The Importance of an Urban Perspective in Environmental History. Journal of Urban History 20 (3): 299–310. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schott, Dieter. 2005. Resources of the City: Towards a European Urban Environmental History. In Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe, ed. Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, 1–28. London; New York: Routledge. Simon, Zoltan. 2020. The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological and Natural Worlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Smail, Daniel Lord. 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. Ed. Daniel Lord Smail. Berkeley: University of California Press. Soens, Tim, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid, and Bert De Munck. 2019. Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature Since 1500. Ed. Tim Soens, Dieter Schott, Michael Toyka-Seid, and Bert De Munck. Routledge Advances in Urban History. London: Routledge. Swyngedouw, Erik. 1997. Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880–1990. Environment and Planning A 29 (2): 311. https://doi.org/10.1068/a290311. ———. 2006. Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities. Science as Culture 15 (2): 105–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09505430600707970. Swyngedouw, Erik, Maria Kaïka, and Esteban Castro. 2002. Urban Water: A Political-Ecology Perspective. Built Environment 28 (2): 124–137. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. White, Richard. 2001. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang. White, Damian F., and Chris Wilbert, eds. 2010. Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-First Century. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winiwarter, Verena, Martin Schmid, and Gert Dressel. 2013. Looking at Half a Millennium of Co-Existence: The Danube in Vienna as a Socio-Natural Site. Water History 5 (2): 101–119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-­013-­0079-­x. Worster, Donald. 2014. Dust Bowl the Southern Plains in the 1930s, Southern Plains in the 1930s. 25th ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Themes and Concepts

CHAPTER 2

Planetary Agglomeration Chris Otter

“There is no readily agreed size or proportion that will distinguish a town from, say, a large village, a royal manor, a self-sufficient temple complex, a ‘mega-monastery’,” argue Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea, their epic 2000 study of the premodern Mediterranean (92). To solve the problem, they propose trying to “see what results may be obtained when the town is dissolved as a category and the full range of Mediterranean settlement is approached from an ecological standpoint and viewed in its entirety … we are intent on abandoning ‘town’ as a distinct settlement type” (109). The urban, they suggest, is merely “useful shorthand for architectonic agglomerations” (109). Horden and Purcell are not, of course, the only scholars to have drawn attention to the conceptual slipperiness of the urban. In fact, it is practically de rigueur to acknowledge that “the city” and “the urban” are elusive, imprecise concepts. In referring to “architectonic agglomerations,” however, they name another term, recurrent in urban studies, which has rarely been subjected to sustained analysis. What happens if, instead of reducing our discussions of architectonic agglomerations to “the urban,” we expand

C. Otter (*) Department of History, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_2

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urban history to include all agglomerations, of which cities are merely a subset? What if we approach the history of agglomerations as fundamentally ecological, as Horden and Purcell suggest? The result is to incorporate a far wider range of anthropogenic spatial formations into a history of human planetary activity and to extend this analysis far deeper into the past. Agglomeration is a far more inclusive concept than the urban. In the case of the latter, scholars are impelled to draw boundaries between the urban and the non-urban. With the former, there is no such impulse. This chapter unfolds in five parts. In the first, I briefly explicate the concept of agglomeration. In the second, third, and fourth, I explore the two key “revolutions” in urban history: V. Gordon Childe’s Mesopotamian “urban revolution” and Henri Lefebvre’s twentieth-century global “urban revolution.” The former is often regarded as the point of emergence of the city as a distinct, discrete, and socio-economically central entity, while the latter marks the dissolution of this discrete city into a vast, planet-spanning urban texture. I reframe these two revolutions, situating them within a historically deeper and more variegated web of agglomerations and the connections sustaining them. In so doing, their revolutionary status—and its concomitant stadialism—dissipates, leaving a picture that is far more uneven and gradual. Nonetheless, it does have a direction. Agglomerations are weighty, and as agglomeration became more widespread, humans became more reliant and attached to them. Gradually, we came to rely upon a physical world that, in turn, relied upon us for cultivation, maintenance, and repair, in what Ian Hodder calls a “double bind” characterizing the increasing density and complexity of the human niche (2012, 88). Over the very longue durée, these agglomerations play a critical role in the emergence of a new planetary entity, the technosphere, which had tremendous consequences for planetary ecology (Otter 2022). In the final, short section, I offer a brief history of another type of agglomeration—the camp.

The Concept of Agglomeration Neil Brenner has cogently argued that in the contemporary world, the “urban variable” cannot be satisfactorily disentangled from any distinct milieu: In the early twenty-first century, the urban appears to have become a quintessential floating signifier: devoid of any clear definitional parameters, morphological coherence or cartographic fixity, it is used to reference a seemingly

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boundless range of contemporary sociospatial conditions, processes, transformations, trajectories and potentials. (2014b, 185)

The terms “urban” and “city” have manifold definitions, relating to physical size; population size or density; architectural splendour; economic, political or religious functions; or cultural development or “state of mind.” They refer to things and to processes (Algaze 2018, 48). Definitions vary culturally and linguistically: in China, “city” just means a municipal government controlling a specific area, which often includes rural regions (Shepard 2015, 40–41). Urban scholars routinely introduce alternative terms to grasp the complexity of urban formations: megalopolis and conurbation, for example. Herbert Gans, in a perceptive summary of these problems, suggests, simply, “settlement,” or possibly “aggregation” (Gans 2009, 214). Agglomeration can be used not as a replacement for the urban but as a more general category, of which the urban is a subset. The term “agglomeration” has a ghostly presence in urban theory, often appearing as a rather undefined synonym for the urban (e.g., Brenner 2019, 355; Müller 2016, 7; Ur 2014, 251). Brenner draws attention to the “extraordinary scale and diversity of agglomeration processes that are associated with contemporary forms of urban development around the world” (Brenner 2014a, 20). Alternatively, the city can be seen as a particular type of organized agglomeration. Ian Farrington, writing on Cusco, makes this point very clearly. “In general,” he writes, “a city can be defined as a large, dense, and permanent agglomeration of public buildings for economic, administrative, and religious purposes and residences that house people from a diversity of social grades who service those functions” (2013, 9). These metabolic and cultural connections link cities, economically and politically, to larger tracts of space, often referred to as “hinterland.” “The urban” and “agglomeration” are not synonyms: the former is a hyponym of the latter, denoting its greater specificity and narrowness. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “agglomeration” as “a mass or assemblage formed by union or approximation, often without assimilation; a loose collection; a clustering or cluster.” The term is clearly far broader in scope than “urban,” referring to a “clustering” of any type of entity, which may or may not be organized, or “large, dense, and permanent.” From the perspective of human history, an agglomeration is any cluster or mass of entities (particularly buildings or containers) grouped together to form a larger assemblage. Cities are obviously agglomerations, but so are many

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other assemblages: temples, palaces, fortification systems, “mega-­ monasteries” (see Fig. 2.1), barracks, oil refineries, home bases, cable stations, warehouse complexes, labour camps, caravan parks, economic zones, nuclear power plants, persistent places, villages, farms, airports, ICE detention centres, nomadic caravans. The agglomeration perspective is capacious, heterogeneous, indeed generous. The concept scales easily. Agglomerations can be very large or very small; they can be organized or disorganized; homogeneous or wildly heterogeneous; permanent or evanescent. They can stand alone or overlap and nest one within the other: large urban agglomerations always contain other agglomerations: housing developments, shopping malls, prisons, industrial estates. Agglomeration is, crucially, a process: agglomerations come into being, expand, endure, shrink, merge, coalesce, and dissipate. Agglomerationism opens spatial analysis to smaller, specialized clusters of containers, as well as large-scale assemblages that palpably lack the socio-­ cultural dimensions of urban life. Agglomerations collect and contain: they do not just contain human beings, but also the many things humans corral and control: animals, raw materials, commodities. Hence the term is less

Fig. 2.1 Medieval monastic agglomeration: Rievaulx Abbey, England. (Wikimedia Commons)

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anthropocentric than another generic term, settlement, which has sometimes been preferred to the more specific term urban (e.g., Doxiadis, 1967, 6). The process of enfolding domesticated animals into concentrated feeding operations is a clear case in point, as are the clusters of warehouses and large single-storey buildings which act as logistics hubs for global trade. In Ezhou, China, a new 26-storey abattoir will slaughter 1.2 million pigs annually (“26-Storey Pig Skyscraper” 2022).

Deep Time Perspectives In Man Makes Himself (1936), V. Gordon Childe introduced the idea of the “urban revolution,” which has become central to our inherited idea of what cities are, and where and when they first appeared. The urban revolution is particularly associated with fourth-millennium BCE Mesopotamia. His argument was developed further in his 1950 article, “The Urban Revolution.” The city, he argued, was “the resultant and symbol of a ‘revolution’ that initiated a new economic stage in the evolution of society,” made possible by the rising productivity of agricultural land (3–4). Childe identified ten criteria which distinguished cities from other forms of human settlement. Cities were larger and more densely populated than earlier settlements; they included non-agricultural workers, generated taxes, and possessed monumental buildings (11–13). Cities imported those raw materials “needed for industry or cult and not available locally” (15). The surplus was absorbed by a ruling class who did not perform manual labour (12–13). The city was the cradle of writing, science, and art, while its organization was “based on residence rather than kinship” (14–16). The urban revolution, for Childe, inaugurated a specific stage in world history conceived in stadial fashion. Man Makes Himself plots a history of two revolutions: Neolithic and urban (Childe 2003, 66–104, 140–178). Becoming urban meant becoming civilized: “more often than not, urban is associated with the cultural phenomenon of civilization” (Gaydarska 2017, 179). Urbanization meant a revolution in sociological and economic organization. This involved crossing not one but ten thresholds simultaneously. His model of the urban is fundamentally socio-cultural, linked to the division of labour, class formation, and the development of new knowledge systems based on writing (Smith 2009, 7). The model has little to say about the urban as an ecological phenomenon. In the decades following Childe’s article, other archaeologists developed, refined, and critiqued his theory. In The Uruk Countryside (1972),

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Robert Adams and Hans Nissen described what they saw as a “general, decisive, irrevocable urbanization in the late fourth and early third millennia,” marking a shift from scattered settlements to a definite urban core (11). Much of the southern Mesopotamian population was absorbed “within the walls of many contending city-states” (11). Jean-Luis Huot even argued that Mesopotamian cities were intentionally planned: “all the cities where we can examine the initial stages of development are the result of a deliberate act” (2014, 66). The result was revolutionary, producing a “new type of life, life in a city” (2014, 64). By the end of the third millennium BC, according to one estimate, 90% of the southern Mesopotamian population inhabited cities (Leick 2002, xviii). However, because they were searching for the origins of “the city,” archaeologists inevitably confronted a problem. Childe had, perhaps wisely, failed to define the precise size threshold for urban settlements, leaving to others the task of defining what was, and what was not, urban. Anthropologist Guillermo Algaze suggests 25 hectares as an appropriate size (Algaze 2018, 27–28). Adams and Nissen suggested 50 for urban centres (1972, 18). Many sites displayed some, but not all, of Childe’s criteria, while the urban revolution did not appear to unfold at the same rate everywhere. The development of cities, for example, appeared to be more sudden in northern than southern Mesopotamia (Van de Mieroop 1997, 84–85). Hence there has been a gradual withdrawal from the application of strict Childean principles to late Neolithic sites, and an emphasis on gradualism, ambiguity, and anomaly. The Mesoamerican anthropologist George Cowgill suggested that the urban-nonurban dichotomy should be conceived as a spectrum (Al Quntar et al. 2011, 171). Urbanization is an ongoing process with little in the way of clear thresholds and planning (Ur 2020; Al Quntar et al. 2011, 151). This is surely a sensible approach. Al Quntar, Khalidi, and Ur, in a study of Mesopotamian sites, avoid Childe’s “trait-list approach” and “envision urbanism as a variable phenomenon consisting of a range of different criteria, not all of which will be apparent in all sorts of ancient cities” (2011, 152). Hence the use of the concept of “proto-urban” sites (Al Quntar et  al. 2011, 153). One example is the Syrian site of Khirbat al-Fakhar, a large trade hub with an artefact scatter exceeding 300 hectares which lacked nucleation and looked more like a group of “semicontinuous” villages (Ur 2020, 46). However, such approaches, while more nuanced than Childe’s original formulation, still adhere to the idea that the urban definitively “emerged”

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during the late Neolithic period and that earlier aggregations are at the most “proto-urban.” An agglomeration perspective does not deny that significant change took place in late Neolithic Mesopotamia. However, it regards this change as simply one of many in the deep, planetary history of agglomerations. Mesopotamian urbanism is not a singular break in the history of agglomeration. Moreover, positing such a break reduces tens of thousands of years of earlier agglomerative activity to a “proto-urban” prelude to real urban history. In fact, the history of agglomeration before Uruk is rich, complex, and variegated. Archaeologists and anthropologists have, again, produced multiple terms which are synonyms for such settlement: “home bases,” “special places,” “core areas,” “super sites,” “persistent places,” and “technocomplexes” (Rolland 2004, 261–252; 2018, 1; Gamble 2013, 144; 2018, 4; Ji et al. 2016). These concepts are also, of course, yet more hyponyms for agglomeration and, like the similar set of terms used for later settlements, suffer from inevitable conceptual slipperiness. Nonetheless, a rough 2-million-year history of “nonurban agglomeration” can be sketched. The concept of the “core area” refers to sites of concentrated stone tools and animal bones, which can be distinguished from the spatial practices of ancient primates (Rolland 2004, 260). Core areas were key locations for diurnal subsistence activities; nights, by contrast, would be spent in safe locations away from signs of carnivory (Rolland 2004, 262). Between 800,000 and 200,000  years ago, such agglomerations became areas “which consume and accumulate vast sets of artefacts and materials” (Gamble 2013, 144). Human agglomeration thus began with caches of materials. Home bases were more permanent, earthbound places where groups slept at night, protected themselves against weather and predation, shared food, and transmitted knowledge (Shaw et al. 2016, 1439). These became evident around 400,000  years ago. Controlled fire-making was integral to this shift (Rolland 2004, 259). The “technocomplex”, a site of gathered tools and structures, proliferated in the Upper Palaeolithic, the critical period when Homo sapiens became the earth’s sole species of hominin (40,000–10,000 BP) (Holt and Formicola 2008, 70). This putative core area-home base-technocomplex sequence is highly schematic, but the clear, if glacial, agglomerative trend is apparent. Such early agglomerations were, critically, sites of accumulation of materials, culture, and building: they oriented hominin life towards encapsulation, accumulation, and persistence and entangled it with places and artefacts (Shaw et  al. 2016, 1440). They were also, unquestionably, sites where

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social organization was negotiated and perpetuated, and cultural practices (sharing food, for example) undertaken, over long periods of time (Shaw et al. 2016, 1440). Humans became “increasingly habituated within landscape,” using specific routes and locations, and amassing more material (tools, e.g.) (Shaw et  al. 2016, 1440). The cognitive consequences of agglomeration were highly significant. These sites were built on memories distributed among more people and “once established, the super-site niche set the stage for thinking differently about places. They now formed part of the hominins’ distributed cognition” (Gamble 2013, 171). Agglomeration, then, create centres of culture, social bonding, control of fire, and material accumulation. Agglomeration history is cumulative and accretive, not stadial. There are many points in time and space where significant transition takes place, but none is the privileged, critical transition dividing agglomeration history into some kind of definitive “pre” and “post” formations. Another example comes from the history of settlements in the Natufian and Pre-­ Pottery Neolithic periods in the Levant and upper Fertile Crescent, in the late Palaeolithic and early Neolithic (c.11,500 BP-8500 BP). During this period, well before Childe’s urban revolution, we see tremendous growth in the size and population of agglomerations. At 11,500 BP, the five largest such Late Natufian settlements were each around 2000 square meters. By the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (around 8500 BP), some agglomerations, such as Basta, covered nearly 140,000 square metres (Kuijt 2000, 80). Population rose per settlement, on average, from 59 (c.11000 BP) to 3822 (c.7500 BP) (Kuijt 2000, 81). Thus, settlement size increased by around 5000% over a 2000 to 3000-year period from the Late Natufian to the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (Kuijt 2000, 85). Cyprian Broodbank refers to this as “a veritable population boom” (2013, 169). This is a very significant scalar leap, roughly approximating to that between Uruk and early-Victorian London. During these years, there is evidence of the increasing use of two-storey structures and compartmentalization of buildings. Such transformations allowed density and privacy to co-emerge, leading to zones of restricted access and potentially spaces of atmotechnic control (cooler areas for storage) (Kuijt 2000, 93). Verticality, partition, and atmospheric management were significant developments, unfolding over a similar period of time as those in Mesopotamia, and they were palpably as transformative. The emergence of verticality, for example, is an essential development and part of a long history including the construction of gothic cathedrals, skyscrapers, masts,

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and chimneys (Graham 2016). Urban scholars should regard such scalar transitions as part of a vaster, much more variegated, nonlinear, and morphologically complex history of human containment, accumulation, and persistence, not a definitive rupture creating a new urban age. We should perhaps recast developments in late Neolithic Mesopotamia as simply one significant historical shift among many, massively distributed in time and space. We cannot neatly align phenomena such as sedentism, storage, spatial partition, state-formation, temple-construction, urban consciousness, and a ruling class with the emergence of the so-called first city. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow argued that “in some regions … cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum” (277). In the spirit of their work, agglomeration history contains clues to alternative modes of existence and social organization.

Global Agglomerations The normative Mesopotamian model has posed problems for those analysing urban form in other parts of the post-Neolithic world, where agglomerations are often less dense, and assume very different forms. Such Low-Density Urbanism (LDU) is “very different from the Childean high-­ density norm”, and its identification was precluded for many years by the hegemony of the Childean model (Chapman and Gaydarska 2016, 82; Fletcher, 2019, 10). LDU is apparent at every stage of human history (Fletcher 2012, 286–287). In LDU, the distinction between the city and its outside is often far from clear, with farming composing a significant part of urban space. (Isendahl and Smith 2013, 133). Boundaries are of limited consequence or interest, and such cities do not necessarily rely on hinterland (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 283). Roland Fletcher, whose work has done much to establish the LDU thesis, argues that this pattern is “a usual feature of human behaviour” as opposed to something anomalous (2019, 2). LDU is found in many places around the world: Mesoamerica, Africa, South Asia. One classic example is Angkor, in present-day Cambodia, which was capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. For many years, the enclosed temple space of Angkor Wat was thought to be an urban island within a hinterland, along Mesopotamian

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lines. It was, however, actually integrated into the low-density urban complex of Greater Angkor (Fletcher et al. 2015, 1390). Temples were not separate from but part of a vast urban formation, containing as many as 750,000 people, which has been described as “the largest ritual and urban phenomenon the world would see for 700-800 years” (Fletcher et al. 2015, 1398). Rice fields ran all the way to the giant temple of Angkor Wat (Fletcher 2019, 17). Fletcher suggests that categorizing such agglomerations is difficult, since they are not “the same kind of places as the conventionally defined compact, early cities” (Fletcher 2019, 18). Fletcher also emphasizes the tendency of such LDU formations to dissipate after a few centuries, although scholars should avoid sensational tropes of collapse (Scott 2017, 185–211). As Fletcher argues, “no large, agrarian-based, low-density urbanized settlement has existed during the past five hundred years” (2012, 289). Many LDUs had very impressive infrastructures, particularly for the collection, storage, and distribution of water. Anuradhapura’s Padiwaya tank, in Sri Lanka, possessed 13 million cubic metres of earthworks, but this hydraulic system was later overwhelmed by altered environmental conditions, including those caused by humans, and ultimately may have contributed to ecological stress (Fletcher 2012, 303, 306). However, the last couple of centuries has seen the rise of industrialized LDUs, those palaeotechnic conurbations like the English Midlands and the German Ruhr Valley. These industrial LDUs were born from the new energy relations forged by coal. Fletcher certainly regards such places as LDUs, meaning a new phase of low-density industrialization began unfolding from the nineteenth century (Fletcher 2012, 285). Jean Gottmann’s megalopolis concept captured the twentieth-century trend towards vast, low-density urban sprawl: When driving from Boston to DC, he argued, “one hardly loses sight of built-up areas, tightly woven residential communities, or powerful concentrations of manufacturing plants” (Gottmann 1964, 5). Such agglomerations are far larger than individual cities, which are dwarfed and engulfed by sprawling and often uncontrolled growth (see Fig. 2.2). Every agglomeration, from the smallest campsite to the most massive megalopolis, is forged out of an ongoing, dynamic, and irreducible relationship with its surroundings: trees, waterways, rocks and soil, and, later, fields, mines, and forests. To build, power, feed, and equip agglomerations, new metabolic relations must be forged with the earth, plants, animals, water, trees, and minerals. Hunting, fishing, food-sharing, and fire made early home bases possible; agriculture, in turn, made possible the

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Fig. 2.2  Bosporus megalopolis. Note how actual cities are submerged and connected by massive agglomerative growth. (Wikimedia Commons)

scaling-up of agglomeration size in the Neolithic. Agglomeration history must take account of such ecological issues, like the domestication of crops and animals; the potential reduction of biodiversity; the evolutionary pressures created by dense agglomerations; the modification of landscape geometry; the new disease burdens of dense, sedentary life; and the rising amount of waste as agglomerations grow. Agglomeration is thus among the most basic acts of niche construction. For our species, this involved the creation of durable, persistent, and dense settlements—or ecologies—which were spaces where genes and cultural norms were transmitted. Hence, “the assertion that preindustrial societies had only local and transitory environmental impacts is mistaken and reflects lack of familiarity with a growing body of archaeological data” (Boivin et al. 2016, 6393). Erle Ellis makes a similar point, noting how niche construction and material accumulation were well underway “long before the rise of cities and urban lifeways” (Ellis 2015, 310). For millennia, most humans have been born into a world where they have inhabited containers, handled tools, and refashioned the landscape. This has usually taken place at a small scale, at a home base, a village, or a camp, and such agglomerations retain their significance today.

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Planetary Agglomeration In The Urban Revolution (1970), Henri Lefebvre analysed a very different form of revolution to Childe’s Mesopotamian event. Lefebvre’s urban revolution is a twentieth-century, planetary phenomenon. The argument here is that while society has not become a single city, it has, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “become completely urbanized” (2003, 1). “Urban society can only be defined as global,” he argues, since the entire planet has become a necessary resource for sustaining urbanization. “Virtually,” he continues, “it covers the planet by recreating nature, which has been wiped out by the industrial exploitation of natural resources (material and ‘human’), by the destruction of so-called natural particularities” (2003, 167). If Childe’s work plotted the emergence of the discrete city, Lefebvre presided over its dissolution and explosion. However, these two conceptions of “urban revolution” form the alpha and omega of a particular narrative of urban history: a Mesopotamian birth and a twentieth-century planetary expansion. Lefebvre’s work has been most creatively, substantively, and brilliantly furthered by Neil Brenner, particularly in his theory of planetary urbanization. By this, Brenner means that: Even spaces that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries—from transoceanic shipping lanes, transcontinental highway and railway networks, and worldwide communications infrastructures to alpine and coastal tourist enclaves, “nature” parks, offshore financial centres, agro-­ industrial catchment zones and erstwhile “natural” spaces such as the world’s oceans, deserts, jungles, mountain ranges, tundra, and atmosphere—have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric. (2014b, 196)

“Even the biosphere itself” forms part of this fabric: the same “urban stuff”, albeit in numberless states, combinations, and forms, is found everywhere (Brenner 2014b, 196). The “urban fabric” is sometimes thick and knotted, sometimes thin and frayed. The driving force of planetary urbanization is capitalism, albeit heavily mediated by technology and the built environment. If urbanization is thus coextensive with the earth’s surface, then it makes no sense to regard “the city,” in its Childean form, as the object of urban analysis. Brenner refers to this intellectual move as the abandonment of “methodological cityism” (Brenner 2019, 13). Instead, urban formations have become inseparable from wider infrastructures,

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landscapes, extractive zones, and so forth: “peripheries, the underground, the skies, mountains, oceans” (Brenner 2019, 76). Lefebvre and Brenner’s work has pushed urban studies in exciting new directions, but their focus is almost exclusively on the twentieth century. What if we further Brenner’s work and abandon “methodological cityism” for the pre-twentieth-century world? A deeper historical focus might reveal that the discrete city, in its Childean formulation, is historically rather exceptional, and that agglomerations of all sizes have always forged metabolic relations with their surrounding ecosystems, even before the emergence of agriculture. These broader ecosystems, however, should not be conceptually conflated with the urban or the agglomerative. Arguing that urban formations are inseparable from the earth, the oceans and the sky threatens to collapse the entire world into an unending, monoscalar urban system. Here, the metaphor of the “urban fabric” occludes as much as it reveals. A better way to conceptualize this phenomenon is to regard agglomeration as merely one scale of a more heterogeneous and complex entity, the technosphere, defined as the sum total of everything humans have ever built. While the technosphere is sometimes viewed as a vast, planetary system of recent origin, it is in fact a multiscalar phenomenon emergent over the past 2 to 3 million years (Otter 2022). The tool is the smallest and oldest dimension of the technosphere, a process beginning at least 3 million years ago (Gamble et al. 2011, 121). We were tool-users before we self-contained, accumulated, and agglomerated. Machines and containers are two other smaller scales with their own historicity. Three scales are larger: the scales of network, anthrome (humanly modified biomes), and anthropogenic sink (terrestrial, hydraulic, or atmospheric repositories for human waste). Planetary agglomeration, then, has a long history, stretching back to Homo sapiens setting foot in the Americas (c.15000 YA). But it is not the only “planetary” process forming the technosphere, as the history of networks, anthromes, and anthropogenic sinks suggests. Brenner regards the “hinterland question” as central to any rethinking of critical urban theory (2019, 356). An agglomeration perspective is ecological and involves thinking through the connections between agglomerations, anthromes, and anthropogenic sinks. Agglomerations need networks (tracks, roads, rivers, sea lanes, airports) to coordinate the influx of useful energy (and, increasingly, of information) and the escape and dispersal of waste and effluent. The agglomeration-technosphere model explores these dynamic and productive relations with soil, water, minerals,

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plants, animals, and air. For example, large ancient agglomerations required the transformation of hinterland into anthromes, and taxation was used for the construction of roads and canals. Agglomerations create waste on a mass scale: smoke, ash, rubble, garbage, bones, excrement. The channelling, management, dumping, and dispersal of waste via containers, network, and sinks became the key modality through which agglomerations began to generate large-scale ecological problems.

Nonurban Agglomerations: The Case of the Camp The camp is an excellent example of a nonurban agglomeration, with a deep and complex history which is distinct from, yet intimately connected with, the history of the urban. As Charlie Hailey observes, the twentieth century—the century of planetary urbanization—saw a great proliferation of camp forms, most of which exist at a smaller scale than the urban, and can exist inside cities or even within other structures, like camps within airports (agglomerations within agglomerations) (2009, 87). He breaks these down into three forms: camps of autonomy, camps of control, and camps of necessity. The first form is linked to protest, artistic expression, and escape (Hailey 2009, 19). Such camps can exist in a multitude of places, for example, in trees or space or on ice (Hailey 2009, 90–91, 107, 126). The origins of camps of control have been located in the prisoner-of-­ war camp, particularly associated with the Napoleonic wars, by the end of which there were nine purpose-built camps across England (McConnachie 2016, 400). The later nineteenth century saw an explosion of internment camps across the landscape of Western empires, including the Spanish in Cuba (1890s), the United States in the Philippines (1899–1902), Britain in South Africa (1899–1902), Germany in Southwest Africa (1904–1907), and Italy in Libya (1928–1932) (McConnachie 2016, 402). These were followed by the notorious extermination camps of the twentieth century, the Soviet gulag system, and the camp archipelagos of China, North Korea, and Cambodia (Pitzer 2017). Hailey’s third type of camp, the camp of necessity, occupies “a gray area between autonomy and control” (Hailey 2009, 322). Examples here include camps for migrants, refugees, and the homeless. The camp as a response to forced migration has been dated to 1915 (McConnachie 2016, 404). During the 1970s and 1980s, the creation of refugee camps became “a humanitarian industry,” run by a variety of international

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agencies supplying food, shelter, clothing, and so forth (McConnachie 2016, 405). Today, camps house millions of people (see Fig.  2.3). In 2016, there were several hundred camps globally, housing over 12 million refugees and internally displaced people (McConnachie 2016, 397). Kutupalong, in Bangladesh, created for Rohingya refugees, became the world’s largest refugee camp (800,000 people) (“Inside the World’s Five Largest Refugee Camps” 2021). One line of scholarship, particularly associated with the work of Agamben, views the camp, not the city, as the paradigmatic twentieth (and twenty-first) century space: “today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (1998, 181). Agamben refers to camps of control and necessity. Such camps are physically bounded, impermanent, biopolitical (i.e., aimed at specific populations), and separated from surrounding agglomerations (McConnachie 2016, 399). It has sometimes been argued that this logic exceeds the actual space of camps themselves and suffuses society as a whole (Minca

Fig. 2.3  Refugee camp, Chad. (Wikimedia Commons)

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2015, 76). This Foucauldian logic marks the camp as a kind of “diagram of power” or blueprint for population management. The camp has a complex relationship to the “urban”: it is often located far from urban settlements and clearly fenced to demarcate its spatial ambit. In practice, the boundaries are considerably more porous (Turner 2016, 141). Camps are clearly less “networked” than urban zones, meaning that food, water, and energy supplies are more precarious. The camp, then, has a rather different metabolic profile, and ecological imprint, than the city. In Shatila camp in Beirut, for Palestinians, electricity was episodic, supplemented by small generators that might power a television or light a room: there was also no potable water (Peteet 2005, 13). Camps often lack the partitions and privacy of urban spaces (Peteet 2005, 119). Here, however, I would suggest that, again, there is a serious note of presentism to these histories. Small, transient settlements are arguably the oldest form of agglomeration on the planet: often dispersed and low density: “this must be an essentially universal human behavioural characteristic” (Fletcher 2019, 2). The earliest hominin settlements are camps: temporary open-air meeting points or clusters of shelters. Hunter-­ gatherers lived in camps. James C. Scott refers to the earliest states not as discrete cities, but as “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp[s],” in which humans, animals, and germs crowded together in the same environment (2017, 84). The camp might arguably be the paradigmatic twentieth-­ century space, but it was certainly the paradigmatic 35th millennium BC space. Military camps have been vital apparatuses of geopolitical control for millennia. Camps can become cities. Vienna and Barcelona started life as Roman camps (Abourahme 2020, 25; Hailey 2009, 178). In fact, one could make an argument that camping—with whatever sense of security it brings—is the archetypal agglomerative practice, not least because of its historical ubiquity, variety, and profound antiquity.

Conclusion The field of critical urban theory, notes Brenner, “is in a state of disarray, if not outright crisis,” owing to the collapse of the urban as a discrete object for analysis (2019, 308). Brenner argues that distinguishing between city and noncity is “at once necessary, since it is only on this basis that cities’ distinctiveness as such can be demarcated, and impossible,” since there are no criteria for doing this, and the boundaries between city

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and noncity have themselves broken down heavily since the 1850s (2019, 318). There are many ways to write urban history, and each one has its advantages and pitfalls. In this chapter, I have suggested that our predominant Western model is one of “double urban revolution.” Childe’s Mesopotamia is the first, and Lefebvre and Brenner’s urban planet the second. As a thesis, planetary urbanization makes no sense without the 6000-year period of discrete cities that predates it. The Mesopotamian model frames the “classic” city as a dense, concentrated, differentiated space with a monumental core, a model which is itself by no means representative of all cities, let alone all agglomerations. Lefebvre’s model charts the dissolution and explosion of these discrete urban spaces into a single, massively variegated, planetary urban texture. Emphasizing rupture can promote a view of urban history that is a kind of punctuated equilibrium, with easily identifiable stages (the ancient city, the industrial city, planetary urbanization) and their global diffusion (Gamble et al. 2011, 115). In this chapter, I have suggested an alternative, more inclusive, less stadial, and more unusual history can be written using the concept of agglomeration. This perspective begins with the heuristic proposition that hominins, and particularly Homo sapiens, like many other organisms, like to cluster, aggregate, accumulate and contain. Unlike the structures of termites, wasps, and beavers, whose architecture is undoubtedly extraordinary, the agglomerations built by humans are immensely varied and ultimately of planetary significance. We create agglomerations not only for ourselves, but for our materials, our animals, and our energy supply. But these agglomerations cannot be reduced to a single urban type. It is fair to say that our planet is typified more by agglomeration than by urbanism per se. The agglomeration perspective perhaps offers one way to think our way out of the crisis of urban theory. It differs from the traditional urban history perspective in two clear ways. First, it does not posit a radical break around 6000 years ago marking the conjoined emergence of cities, writing, civilization, and history. Instead, it views the emergence of those agglomerations we call cities as one significant transformation within a far deeper and more heterogeneous history of how humans cluster, aggregate, accumulate, and endure. The emergence of the urban can be viewed for what it was: a multiple event, occurring in different ways in different places; and only one transition among many. Moreover, the emergence of cities did not erase a longer history of living in smaller settlements. There

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is no single, linear, stadial model of urban development: “no one trend of density and settlement size is applicable to all human communities” (Fletcher 2019, 16). Second, the agglomeration perspective treats all agglomerations as worthy of study. Aside from vastly extending the temporal sweep of traditional urban history, this also opens up other analytical trajectories. Low-­ Density Urbanization, for example, complicates the original Childean model of urban development and questions whether the implosion/ explosion model of planetary urbanization is unique to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A focus on nonurban agglomerations calls our attention to other histories, such as those of the camp, the village, the ceremonial complex, the farm, the cache, and so on. This approach directs scholarly focus to all those spaces where humans have lived and worked throughout history (Gans 2009, 215). The agglomeration concept is not opposed to the urban concept. Instead, it is a much more expansive and capacious term that allows us to explore the very deep and complex history of how humans have brought themselves and their things together. It is not a history neatly divided into stages or modelled on a graph. The city is, arguably, simply a particular type of agglomeration to which an immense and perhaps excessive amount of cultural and theoretical weight has been attached. Drawing attention to its putative (Childean) birth and (Lefebvrean) death only serves to force our focus towards the vast range of planetary agglomerations, from Palaeolithic home bases to today’s Pearl River Delta. Doing so also invites us to explore the deeper history of human life on earth. It is time to open analysis to this rich, multiple, and heterogeneous history.

References Abourahme, N. 2020. The Camp. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 40 (1): 35–42. Adams, R., and H. Nissen. 1972. The Uruk Countryside: The Natural Setting of Urban Societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life., trans. D. Heller-­ Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Al Quntar, S., L.  Khalidi, and J.  Ur. 2011. Proto-Urbanism in the Late 5th Millennium BC: Survey and Excavations at Khirbat al-Fakhar (Hamoukar), Northeast Syria. Paléorient 37 (2): 151–175.

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Algaze, G. 2018. Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamian. Current Anthropology 59 (1): 23–54. Boivin, N., et al. 2016. Ecological Consequences of Human Niche Construction: Examining Long-Term Anthropogenic Shaping of Global Species Distribution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (23): 6388–6396. https:// doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1525200113. Brenner, N. 2014a. Introduction: Urban Theory without an Outside. In Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. N. Brenner. Berlin: Jovis. ———. 2014b. Theses on Urbanization. In Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. N. Brenner. Berlin: Jovis. ———. 2019. New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broodbank, C. 2013. The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapman, J., and B. Gaydarska. 2016. Low-Density Urbanism: The Case of the Trypillia Group of Ukraine. In Eurasia at the Dawn of History: Urbanization and Social Change, ed. Manuel Fernández-Götz and Dirk Krausse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Childe, V. 1950. The Urban Revolution. Town Planning Review 21 (1): 3–17. ———. 2003 [1936]. Man Makes Himself. Nottingham: Spokesman. China’s 26-Storey Pig Skyscraper to Slaughter 1 Million Pigs a Year. 2022. Guardian, 25 November. Doxiadis, C. 1967. Ecumenopolis: The Settlement of the Future. Athens: Athens Technological Organization. Ellis, E. 2015. Ecology in an Anthropogenic Biosphere. Ecological Monographs 85 (3): 287–331. Farrington, I. 2013. Cusco: Urbanism and Archaeology in the Inka World. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Fletcher, R. 2012. Low-Density, Agrarian-Based Urbanism: Scale, Power, and Ecology. In The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, ed. M. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. Trajectories to Low-Density Settlements Past and Present: Paradox and Outcomes. Frontiers in Digital Humanities 6 (August). https://doi. org/10.3389/fdigh.2019.00014. Fletcher, R., D.  Evans, C.  Pottier, and C.  Rachna. 2015. Angkor Wat: An Introduction. Antiquity 89 (348): 1388–1401. Gamble, C. 2013. Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. Thresholds in Hominin Complexity During the Middle Pleistocene: A Persistent Places Approach. In Crossing the Human Threshold: Dynamic

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Transformation and Persistent Places During the Middle Pleistocene, ed. Matt Pope, John McNabb, and Clive Gamble. London: Routledge. Gamble, C., J. Gowlett, and R. Dunbar. 2011. The Social Brain and the Shape of the Palaeolithic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21 (1): 115–136. Gans, H. 2009. Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology: Toward a Sociology of Settlements. City and Community 8 (3): 211–219. Gaydarska, B. 2017. Introduction: European Prehistory and Urban Studies. Journal of World Prehistory 30: 177–188. Gottmann, J. 1964. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graeber, D., and D. Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Graham, S. 2016. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London: Verso. Hailey, C. 2009. Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hodder, I. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Maldon, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Holt, B., and V. Formicola. 2008. Hunters of the Ice Age: The Biology of Upper Paleolithic People. In Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, vol. 51, 70–99. Amherst: University of Massachusetts. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20950. Horden, P., and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Huot, J.-L. 2014. From Village to City, the Wrong Question? In Preludes to Urbanism: The Late Chalcolithic of Mesopotamia, ed. Augusta McMahon and Harriet Crawford. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Inside the World’s Five Largest Refugee Camps. 2021. UNHCR, April 1. Accessed 15 December 2021. https://www.unrefugees.org/news/inside-­the-­world-­s-­ fivelargest-­refugee-­camps/#life%20in%20refugee%20camps. Isendahl, C., and M.  Smith. 2013. Sustainable Agrarian Urbanism: The Low-­ Density Cities of the Mayas and Aztecs. Cities 31: 132–143. Ji, X., et al. 2016. The Oldest Hoabinhian Technocomplex in Asia (43.5 ka) at Xiadong Rockshelter, Yunnan Province, Southwest China. Quaternary International 400: 166–174. Kuijt, I. 2000. People and Space in Early Agricultural Villages: Exploring Daily Lives, Community Size, and Architecture in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19: 75–102. Lefebvre, H. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Trans. R.  Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leick, G. 2002. Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City. London: Penguin. McConnachie, K. 2016. Camps of Containment: A Genealogy of the Refugee Camp. Humanity 7 (3): 397–412. Minca, C. 2015. Geographies of the Camp. Political Geography 49: 74–83.

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Müller, J. 2016. Demography and Social Agglomeration: Trypillia in A European Perspective. In Trypillia Mega-Sites and European Prehistory: 4100–3400 BCE, ed. Johannes Müller, Knut Rassmann, and Mykhailo Videiko. New  York: Routledge. Otter, C. 2022. Socializing the Technosphere. Technology and Culture 63 (4): 953–978. Peteet, J. 2005. Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pitzer, A. 2017. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Rolland, N. 2004. Was the Emergence of Home Bases and Domestic Fire a Punctuated Event? A Review of the Middle Pleistocene Record in Eurasia. Asian Perspectives 43 (2): 248–280. ———. 2018. Homebases in Paleolithic Archaeology. In International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. H. Callan. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Scott, J. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shaw, A., et al. 2016. The Archaeology of Persistent Places: The Paleolithic Case of La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey. Antiquity 90 (354): 1437–1453. Shepard, W. 2015. Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the World’s Most Populated Country. London: Zed Books. Smith, M. 2009. V.  Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: A Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies. The Town Planning Review 80 (1): 2–29. Turner, S. 2016. What Is a Refugee Camp? Explorations of the Limits and Effects of Camps. Journal of Refugee Studies 29: 139–148. Ur, J. 2014. Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24 (2): 249–268. ———. 2020. Space and Structure in Early American Cities. In Landscapes of Preindustrial Urbanism, ed. G.  Farhat. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Van de Mieroop, M. 1997. The Ancient Mesopotamian City. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Phronologies of Networked Water: Copenhagen Mikkel Thelle

In his book, The Great Cultural Traditions, from 1941, historian Ralph Turner posed an argument on the development of cities (Turner 1941). Over time, Turner suggests, certain features of technology coincided with certain forms of production and ways of ruling, and through this juxtaposition, Turner could identify a certain number of revolutions in world history: first, of food production, then of urbanization, and finally of industrialization. Emergence of the cities was simultaneous with agricultural technologies like the plough and with economic surplus that led to social specialization. This is not new to historians at large, but Turner’s argument was part of a debate at the time on urban history, technology, and nature that could be relevant to look at in its own context. The debate also counted early urban historians such as Lewis Mumford, and for him, technology and city was intersecting through history with the consequence of concentrating burdens on the surrounding nature, to a degree that total depletion was foreseeable. In contrast to Turner, Mumford views

M. Thelle (*) National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_3

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technology as having almost an inherent force of acceleration that with modernity overtakes humanity’s ability to understand or control it. These views come together in an understanding of agency, where technology and economy afforded certain cultural models or phenomena. As Mumford notes, “the village, a collective utility brought forth by the new agricultural economy” (Mumford 1956). Criticized as these views have been, they represent early attempts to articulate an urban history of technonatures, and as such, we might revisit them to trace the assumptions on which they rest. One such assumption is that technology is a category distinct from human practices as well as from nature, and that it is defined by making the former controlling the latter. By revisiting this question, the present chapter will suggest conceptualizing a broader approach to a technonatural history based on the notion of phronologies, attempting to integrate practice, ecology, and technology. This idea will be related to a discussion of hybridity as it has been brought up in recent decades. First, such a history will be considered briefly through the meetings between certain historians and the questions of environment. Then, some specific cases related to urban water and space will be presented to suggest empirical categories and outcomes. Finally, some further directions for future research will be suggested.

A History of Life? Reflecting on some of the critical environmental history debates, the issue of nature and culture seems a key perspective, leading from the field’s pioneers of the 1970s until today. Oftentimes, historians have approached issues of technology and nature, and the solutions or reflections of such meetings are interesting. William Cronon’s early problematization of the wilderness as a notion posed a problem of distinguishing nature from culture, and his analysis of Chicago’s metabolic effects on midwestern ecologies, as well as e.g. Richard White’s investigation of the Columbia River, also observed human practical solutions that were entwined with the changing flora, fauna, and hydrology. This presence sometimes finds conceptual solutions, as when White or Cronon employ the Hegelian notion of ‘first nature’ and ‘second nature’ to get an understanding of environment without and with technology (White 1996; Cronon 1991). Urban infrastructure as technonatural forms of mediation are well described by historians and has been in focus since the 1980s. According to Martin Melosi, however, recent urban environmental history has been strongly

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influenced by the so-called cultural turn, and borders between the ecological and imaginations of nature have been blurred. Joel Tarr considers these problems through concepts such as nature’s role as ‘the ultimate sink’, or bottled water as a recent infrastructural commodification of nature reaching deep into everyday cultural life (Tarr 1996; Melosi 2010). More recently, the problem has been unfolded in different ways by historians as different as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sverker Sörlin, and Christophe Bonneuil (Asdal 2016; Chakrabarty 2009; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; S. Sörlin and Warde 2009; Jørgensen et al. 2013; Latour 1993). Common for them, and many others, is that the entwinement of nature and culture, they point to, is often mediated through what we would call technologies in a broad sense: for Chakrabarty, fossil engines make the difference, and for Bonneuil, it is agricultural seed technologies. In a significant text, Sörlin and Wormbs argue that historical understanding and the Anthropocene, so to speak, change one another. The climate crisis, on one hand, forces historians to adopt a more holistic view of humans and non-­ humans and their role in relation to nature (Sörlin and Wormbs 2018). Specifically, they suggest, the process is related to technology and its central role, which is to create environment, that is, as different from nature. This process, the authors argue, is to be understood as ‘environing’ that forms a key concept for understanding relations between technologies and nature—in a sense, to translate, a kind of technonatural historical understanding. Using this scope, Sörlin and Wormbs observe how the scope of environing has changed from an ‘additive’ approach beginning in the nineteenth century, when singular indicators such as moving dunes were observed and added up to a more complex understanding of the late twentieth century when human-induced changes were seen as interacting on a growing scale. This argument shares a lot with a preceding one by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who, in a reflection on the same relation between history and climate, came to observe the entry of humans into a temporal scale hitherto only accessible for nature, that is, geological time. With the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty argues, the agency of humans has been recognized to comprehend also the planetary processes that were until now only relegated to natural history, a history, he argues, whose duration and resilience was thought to be far beyond human reach. With this role as a ‘geological actor’, humans must rethink their history to encompass the two distinct tracks of natural and human history, in what Chakrabarty calls a ‘history of life’ (Chakrabarty 2009). Also, for historian Zoltan Simon, reflecting on historicity in the wake of the climate crisis, a significant shift

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is happening in these years, in our relation to both past and future. Following from what he terms the ‘triad of cataclysm’—artificial intelligence, atomic war, and climate collapse—we have come to dissociate ourselves from the past, experiencing the present as a negation of past reality. More significant in this context is Simon’s notion of the future, which has been changed from something (better) progressing from the present to something disruptive and unexpected—something unprecedented (Simon 2019, 2020) . While the future in this sense, Simon argues, has been erased as a political imagination, reflected in Fukyama’s End of History-­ claim, it is thus still a possibility in the realms of technology and nature, however dystopian these imaginations might be. Common here, I will argue, is the dominant presence and rising agency of both nature and technology. Further, and interestingly, these historians all seem, in their own ways, to argue that the premise of this growing agency, in some way threatening the humans as species itself, is created by humans. As distinct from earlier ‘total threats’ such as ice ages or asteroids colliding with Earth, the future threats of today, it is argued, have grown from human practices.

Phronologies If we accept this proposal, it might make sense to think about a possible conceptual way of approaching the entanglement of nature, technology, and practice. One way to do so could be to think about an analytical strategy around what I will term phronologies. Technology, as epistemology, derives from concepts of knowledge in Greek philosophy, techne concerning mechanical labour and production, and episteme frames universal questions of truth, dislocated from specific situations. As Heidegger points out, these two forms are abstract and outside of lived life. There is, however, a third way of knowing, sometimes translated as practical knowledge, but not limited to practice as we understand it in, for example, cultural history. In his Ethics, Aristotle holds it out as the virtue of phronesis, the knowledge of acting practically on the basis of values, or moral (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, interpreted by Bent Flyvbjerg; Flyvbjerg 1998). In contrast to the two other universal forms, it is situated and bound to historically defined frames of possibility. While techne and episteme have survived as concepts, phronesis has disappeared, though it might be related to the English term prudence today.

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The two last concepts have had a long and influential history within disciplinary and everyday discourse, also far beyond the scope of this text, but the third form has been less employed. Phronesis points to what in Aristotle can translate as ‘practical’ knowledge, that is, ways of solving problems, between nature and man, in a sensible and right way. Thus, we have here a concept that encompass an interesting set of relations between culture, nature, and practice—or could potentially be operationalized to do so. Let us return to this concept again but for now, what if we could actually employ a notion of the technonatural that simultaneously encompassed the ‘solving’ of problems. What, then, are the values, intentions, and consciousness inherent in this form of problem solving? And confronted with historical sources, what categories would this entail? Reflecting upon these questions through empirical examples could shed light on such categories, and in choosing them, it could be relevant to choose a case where nature, technology, and practice are entwined, as, for example, the case of urban water. It will require us to accept water as possibly belonging to the category of nature, even though this can be a conceptual long shot.

Metabolic Networks and Reversed Technological Causality In 1911, the tram system in Copenhagen became municipalized. Since the mid-nineteenth century, many private enterprises had been running trams, but at this point, the growing city administration took over. One consequence was standardization. Tram cars had to be described in detail, whereas earlier tacit knowledge became articulated so that different producers could deliver parts fitting together and a diverse set of actors could understand the craft entailed in processing a tram car. Detailed specifications described, for example, the six different sorts of wood needed for each part of the wagon skeletons and the ways in which the thread of screws should be measured. Among the multitude of processes, the wagon roof filled out some pages in the guidelines. The special challenge here was that the construction should be light and watertight, and for this reason, it was built up over a slender, wooden ridge covered with cloth, that again was sealed with a certain, white paint, ‘lead white’ against rain and dirt. However, as all painters might have known earlier, it now had to be

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manifested in text, that exactly this kind of paint, being perfectly functional on the roof and outside, should not be used on the inside of the wagon: As we know, lead white is not suitable for coating the inside … as human vapours in a relatively short time will blacken the wall as part of the colour is converted to hydrogen sulphide… (Copenhagen Tramways 1911)

Thus, when passengers were exhaling and, especially, flatulating, the clothed walls would be discoloured. This observation is so microscopical, it seems, that it is just as well kept in the oblivion of the municipal archives. However, the paint was not the only case: going over the specifications, one finds other examples, for instance, the ways in which water was directed in small pipes along the wagon roof to prevent decay in the wooden parts; the protective fluids used for iron stiffeners for corrosion protection; the ways of avoiding “vagrant electricity” from entering from the engine to the tram tracks, where it would cause the metal to rust. All these unnoticeable details of tram technology assembled suggest that here is a multiple set of solutions, keeping the tram, and in extension the tramway line, from disfiguring or materially (or economically, which amounts to the same) collapsing. The need to handle vapours, raindrops, and moisture over time, we can imagine, became an integrated part of sustaining the system, and we can pinpoint it clearly in the 1911 regulation, because there all these details had to be articulated in text and images to be shared among stakeholders. The tramways were a full-blown part of the urban metabolism, processing input and output through partly organic work. But what if these multiple, metabolic details were responsible, not only for sustaining the tram system but were actually constituting it, over time? The Copenhagen tram network existed as a system in Copenhagen from 1863 to 1972, and throughout this time, I argue, it was as much the myriads of microscopic adjustments and mutations as Thomas Hughes’ more top-down notion of Large Technological System that secured its existence as a tramway system. Alongside the social construction of the tramway, there was also a metabolic one, ascribing both humans and non-­ humans into the process, where, during a century, the tramways had to change significantly in order to stay the same. We can view these paints, fluids, and pipes as ‘devices’, or in the words of historian Stefan Höhne, ‘media’, making up the link between the system, urban metabolism, and human practices (Farías and Höhne 2016). This concept of ‘devices’ is

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developed by historian Chris Otter to consider relations between human, technological, and material agency in liberal Britain, but it can also shed light on the workings of the tram in Copenhagen: a device, Otter argues, that is in a relation of co-dependency with the machines and networks that enable it in order to function (Otter 2007). Thus, a multitude of devices work in order to keep the urban system existing. If we stay in Copenhagen as a case, water-related installations such as fire hydrants changed over time in the city, and for example, from 1910, fire alarms were delegated to alarm lockers where the first casual passer-by could hit a button if spotting a fire. The need for firefighters to be “on the beat”, as Richard Dennis coined it, caused the system to incorporate the distributed bodies of Copenhageners, in order to work sufficiently (Dennis 2008). As a whole, humans, nature, and technologies were involved in affording and sustaining the tram, and a multiplicity of miniscule devices (adjustments?) took part in this work. Can this be seen as an instance of a phronological process? If it is, then we can actually use the concept to talk about the technonatural, and thus also pose questions to the interpretation of technological causality—as in Hughes’, and maybe Heidegger’s understanding—that it works from a centre that is defined by its essence, which in this case could be electrical traction. Thus, one perspective to bring into the discussion about phronologies could be the multiple agencies of natural and practical materialities, here in response to water, that constantly sustain, and even conditions, a technological system.

Transformed Water Practices: The Plumber The plumber Petersen recall how, up until WWI, it was a good thing to keep to the craft of repairing household utensils—and go into the industrial work. As he writes in his memoir, ‘the pipe work couldn’t support a full wage’ in those days (Andersen n.d., 16; Petersen n.d., 33). He had gone into the plumbing trade to work with kettles and buckets in tin and brass, but suddenly, just around 1900, large factories took over and started producing cheap utensils. Another branch of work street lightning also changed radically with gas and later electric lights, also putting pressure on the role of the plumber. But the trade was a resilient one, and new innovations such as cooking gas created demand for new skills—the pipe work— and consequently the plumbers became oriented towards the building

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industry that would become their main area of interest in the coming decades. This engaged the plumber in water. During the nineteenth century, most buildings with multiple floors would have water pipes, first from the kitchens and later from WCs and bathrooms. At the time though, these pipes would be made from paper-thin zinc pipes breaking through the walls running down on the building’s outside to spit out the water at street level. During the winter, water froze, and the walls became vertical landscapes of ice, putting pressure on the pipes and taps causing them to crack. All summer, the plumbers would have a full-time job fixing the exploded zinc pipes and iron taps that would then break again in the coming winter. Circles of freezing and thawing water would make their own seasons, penetrating the growing number of apartments. Around WWI, new forms of pipes emerged, in cast iron and running internally through the core of the buildings and directly in the underground sewer network. Consequently, over the next decades, the repair work gradually diminished, although poorer quarters still had the need, and the buildings would no more be covered in ice formations. However, the plumber would survive and even thrive on the more complex tasks of internal pipes, and now with a more extensive responsibility, that of water security. After an exam, they would be authorized to assess and approve a building’s fittings, pipes and the network as such. Moreover, new workshops sprouted forth, where showers, bathtubs, and ovens for heating water was made, and in 1930, when WC became mandatory in all buildings, the plumber’s trade was provided with a grand, continuing task (Petersen et al. 2011, 45). In the 1950s, the plumbers’ union changed their name to include ‘sanitation’, and by the 1970s, independent unions for sanitation work had emerged. Throughout, the plumbers’ flexible navigation caused friction with other fields, notably the masons, smiths, and slate roofers, who pushed for the right to, for example, do service on the central heating installations that emerged in the 1920s (Thing 1998). This fragmented story of the plumber indicates how, in the rising urban dependency on water for households, the position of a whole branch is transformed. Causalities of provision, weather, urbanization, and changing hygienic notions would transform the plumber to a water installation specialist, navigating alongside the changing hydrological patterns of Danish cities. In this sketchy story, also we might see how nature (water), technology, and the practices of work are inseparable components of this change, but interestingly here is also that a main driver over time is the

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‘sensible solution’, directing the adaptive plumber through the major disruptions of industrial and post-industrial conditions. We can get an insight, then, in this new occupation and its meaning in the technonatural history of cities, by regarding it as a phronology of networked water.

Wet Spaces and Membranes What we looked for in the tram was actually ways of keeping water in the right place, and here ‘right’ could be a key word. In part, it echoes the Aristotelian definition of phronesis, that is, right as the most sensible way for ‘man’ to solve the problem. However, the exact same phrase comes across less neutral if we turn to Michel de Certeau, for whom the ‘right place’ is a core issue (Certeau 1984). Having the position to determine the right place (place proper) determines the locus of power in the negotiation between strategic and tactical operations in de Certeau’s universe of oppression and oppositional practices. So, we could already here think about the notion of the proper, or right, position in the light of this, and of other proponents of the cultural history of the 70 s and 80 s, locating power with seemingly powerless subjects (Ginzburg 1989; Hunt 1989; Davis 1983). As such, the example talks into Maria Kaika’s discussion of water’s othering within modern urban planning and construction of the Victorian home. About the same time, Kaika notes, as water became networked and thus separated in ‘good’ drinking water and ‘bad’ brown water, the city became zoned in hierarchical areas, and in this process, the bourgeois home became established as the peaceful escape from the ‘bad’ nature that modernity is set out to repress (Kaika 2015). She mentions how in the modern city, dedicated wet rooms emerged as indicators of social status. If we are looking for a technonatural history of urban water, this concept seems to open a window, that also has been developed elsewhere (Høghøj & Thelle, 2023). The wet room has as its prime purpose to serve as a border for water in all forms—splashing, steaming, running—but at the same time to allow for this border to be penetrated by the networks feeding it. All featuring this obvious contradiction, the wet rooms are both specific, material assemblages and abstract networked hubs in the urban metabolism, simultaneously extremely isolated and connected. This contradiction also relates to the social tension of many wet rooms, in that they carry intense demarcations of intimacy and sexuality derived from rearranged sensibilities of modern urbanity. Identifying and interrogating the

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emergence and distribution of these wet rooms and the humans in them might provide another way to explore the phronologies of urban water. Like the tram devices, water taps in private housing bodies of Copenhagen ‘problematized’ the question of the larger system, in a Foucauldian sense, as Stephen Legg makes operational (Legg 2009). Due to intense investments, running water was available to a rising number of households from 1859 onwards. In technical descriptions, we see a multitude of different water taps emerge, and in the 1890s, city council begin to express concern over the spread of these devices, since they make it impossible to identify and control users, but enable the users for their part to drain the system, where a constant pressure is laid out on a business model based on main taps, that is, whole buildings. Throughout the first three or four decades of the twentieth century, technical and legislative attempts were made to control and regulate this problem. In London, as Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann have documented, the issue made way for consumer interest groups and multiple conflicts between private suppliers, municipal authorities, and citizens (Taylor and Trentmann 2011). In Copenhagen and Stockholm, it included practices of filling tubs from the kitchen tap and storing the water, and discussions broke out between municipal policy makers about the poorer classes’ right to accessing water (Hallström 2002). So much for devices. The taps obviously were constitutive of all the wet spaces, and it is interesting to note that this certain device, gatekeeping the important border of the wet spaces, was object of conflict. In European cities, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the urban domestic bathroom developed from exclusive to common wet space (Quitzau and Røpke 2009; Penner 2013). After the kitchen and the introduction of domestic water closets, the bathroom would be a kind of the third type of wet space to be built into urban homes (Jakobsson 1999; Soens and Janssen 2019). In Paris, domestic bathrooms began to appear in middle-class homes from the mid-nineteenth century, and in Athens, from 1928, all new apartment buildings should have a fitted bathroom (Kaika 2004, 269). Copenhagen was in-between: In response to the third global cholera pandemic, striking Copenhagen in 1853, water and hygiene took centre stage in urban spatial politics. Following the example of Central European cities, Copenhagen increasingly invested in the provision of abundant, clean water and, at the same time, discarding brown water. In the 1920s, new buildings came with bathrooms, even though

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some still for collective use, and with an initial push from the suburban areas. The domestic bathroom came to signify the most private of wet rooms. Being a space for the undressed (female) body, it was in the Victorian home relegated to the highest rank of privacy, in the bottom of the apartment, locked with a key and often having a concealed door to the bedroom of the household couple. In the decades around 1900, this Victorian home was reorganized and spread out among middle classes, and in this process, it was as if the whole spatial structure became organized around the bathroom as core of privacy (Frykman and Löfgren 1987; Dennis 2008). Early Victorian bathrooms, at least in Copenhagen, could be shaped around the bathtub, the mirror and dressing furniture, often with walls and ceiling decorated with, for example, exotic animals and plants. At the same time, the whole apartment was assembled to facilitate the access of water to the bathroom. In the kitchen, water could be heated on the stove, and some early solutions was to set up pipes from here to the bathroom, but more often the maid would fill the tub by carrying a kettle back and forth. In the early cleansing ensembles, one would begin the cleansing in the bedroom, where the vanity unit stood, complete with mirror, night potty, sink, and water brought in. Later this unit is moved to the bathroom. In 1916, a Copenhagen paper stated that ‘for a modern individual, a bathroom is indispensable (…) the adjoining bathroom is part of a movement’, and in the press and at meetings among professionals, bathing frequency became a hot topic. An influential etiquette guide of the time poses that the habit of washing hands and face daily is not enough, since the whole body should be cleansed once a week. In her multivolume book Vort Hjem from 1903, the influential Danish writer and socialite Emma Gad conveyed to the new middle class the bourgeois norms for domestic culture and conduct. In this context, she emphasized the bathroom as an indispensable part of any modern dwelling, thereby connecting the practice of bathing to a modern lifestyle (Gad 1903). According to Gad, a weekly bath was not only the bare minimum for a modern individual, but this bath also had to encompass the entire body instead of merely the face and hands which was custom at the time (Gad 1903, 61). As ideals for a clean body entwined with Victorian lifestyles, a bourgeois home thus became unthinkable without first a water closet and then a bathroom. Yet these wet spaces were—spatially and economically—to be located as far away from the front stage of the home as

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possible, hidden at the very bottom of the apartment and equipped with a lock and key. Besides contributing to the increasing privatization of hygienic practices in the late nineteenth century, the invention of the domestic bathroom perpetuated the social stratifications of the city. The first adds for bathrooms and bathing objects thus appeared in exclusive real estate ads and catalogues for department stores, specifically catering for an uppermiddle-class consumer group (Magasin Du Nord: Foraaret 1889 1889). As part of this development, bathing frequency in itself became identified a line of demarcation between the social classes of the city. In 1875, a Copenhagen newspaper noted that while the wealthy classes had become accustomed to bathing every morning, such a habit was still incomprehensible for the urban poor (Fædrelandet 1875). Decades later, the engineering journal Ingeniøren stated that though the frequency was rising, ordinary citizens still only took baths approximately twice a year (Ludvigsen 1910). In practice, access to domestic bathrooms also remained inaccessible to the vast majority of Copenhagen’s population well into the twentieth century. Hence, in 1911, only 6.4% of the dwellings in Copenhagen had access to a domestic bathroom (Copenhagen Municipal Council 1875, 33). As frequent bathing developed into a new urban ideal, the uneven access to bathing became a site of political contestation at the municipal level. In 1896, the topic was addressed in the city council as social democrats and social liberals proposed the construction of municipally owned bathing halls targeting the wider public. As the main proponent of the proposition, the social democrat Kristoffer Marqvard Klausen argued that it was the city’s responsibility to provide modern bathing facilities for the entire urban population. While several municipal schools already offered bathing facilities for children, this was, according to Klausen, insufficient for both hygienic and social reasons. As access to bathing was to consider a social right, municipal bathing halls, he argued, should ideally be free of charge.1 Although the proposition was met with opposition from especially conservative politicians, who argued that municipal solutions was unfair to the private bathing establishments, the city council agreed to proceed with the idea. Thus, in 1899, plans for a municipal bathing hall in the working-class district of Vesterbro (Saxogade Bathing Hall) was presented to the city council. It was completed in 1903, and in the 1

 Copenhagen Municipal Council 1897, 66.

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following decades, multiple municipal bathing halls were built in various working-­class areas of Copenhagen.2 These bathing halls variated in size, but all followed the same model. Divided into designated sections for men and women, they offered different types of hot water baths including bathtubs, showers, and steam baths at low costs, thereby providing the working-class population of Copenhagen with an alternative to the kitchen sink. From the 1880s onwards, the domestic bathroom also came to enrol clusters of water objects. Copenhagen department stores pushed, as in any larger city across the continent, new accessories, and as their catalogues testify, the bathroom universe expanded and diversified in next decades (Borgmann 1984). In 1889, Magasin du Nord—catering for upper-­middle classes—sold bathrobes for 20 Danish Kroner (a worker earned around 180 Kroner per year), towels and a few other exclusive objects, soon after to devote an entire section to bathing suits, slippers, and caps. From here, it expanded to new products as bathing sheets, terry and cloth, and soon competitors joined, introducing the sponge as a new exotic product, along with novel ‘toilet accessories’ including a ‘toilet box’ with built-in mirror, glass bottles, and metal cases for powder and perfume. Lower-end department stores get a growing repertoire of white linen, advertised as ‘whiteware’ and embodied by images of a busy handmaid occupied with practices of cleanliness. Thus, expanding and diversifying the urban ‘bathscape’, the products were construing it as a homely wet space where the (female) user could spend more time. But there were other components of solving the bathing problem, beside the water tap mentioned above. Just after 1900, linoleum flooring was advertised, known to be hygienic and even antiseptic, besides its water-resistant quality (Edwards 2010; Simpson 1999). The soft material could come as tiles in different colours, or as whole plates to install. Then the pipes grew into the home. In the inter-war period, the solutions with hot water from the stove began to be replaced by increasingly standardized pipe-bound systems, to quote historian Lasse Hallström (Hallström 2002). We see how also here multiple material devices or points can sustain or change the wet room, as with the tram. But there is also here a certain set of causal relations in play: on the one hand, the relegation of the naked 2  Besides Saxogade Bathing Hall (1903), this included Helsingørsgade Bathing Hall (1908), Sofiegade Bathing Hall (1909) and Sjællandsgade Bathing Hall (1917).

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female body to the isolated, locked back of the Victorian home, and banning naked bodies in general from public space. On the other hand, the reorganization of the home around privacy of the bath (and bedroom) also included the setting up of a growing penetration of water through walls, pipes, and hallways. Another contradiction concerns the ways in which hygiene, the core rationale for the whole reassembling of the home, is attracting public attention across all registers, all while in the domesticated space, the hygienic problems are solved in isolation. In frequent accounts of technological history, the agency works from technological invention to effect, but we might here imagine a set of causal relations to and from the network, the practices and the flows of water, and maybe the tensions between them could be contained and elucidated by a notion of phronologies.

Conclusion During the last two decades, concepts such as the hybrids of John Law, Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, the urban metabolism of UPE, or Anne Marie Mol’s praxeology have addressed more complex causalities across technology, biology and practice, expanding the repertoire of agency. Building on earlier conceptualizations such as the dispositif, reemployed in Gilles Deleuze’s assemblage theory and Giorgio Agamben’s apparatus, and to a degree by Actor Network Theory and shared critique of basic scientific dualisms, they all somehow offer an entwining of technology with categories such as humans and nature. As publications show, this field has been influencing urban history significantly, and three recent works: Urbanizing Nature, Botanical City, and Concepts in Urban Environmental History, both express and exert this influence (Soens et al. 2019; Gandy and Jasper 2020; Haumann et  al. 2020). Already in 2010, Thomas Bender and Ignacio Farias called for a debate of how to understand causal relations in these sets of relations—assemblages, actor-networks, dispositifs—and how to account for change over time within them. Theories of entanglements tend to describe situational constellations, sometimes having trouble explaining what an entanglement has inherited from the past and passes on to future entanglements. Bender touched upon this in his afterword to the book, questioning both temporality and “responsibility” within assemblage theory—if agency is distributed, how is it possible to locate the critical sources of causal transformation? It is relevant to involve the historical dimension in this. If we try to look at causal changes over time, it becomes

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apparent that non-human actors and non-linear processes can be included to produce at least thought-provoking results, as Timothy Mitchells’ analysis of the mosquito’s role in Egypt in WWII (Mitchell 2002). As noted above, phronesis as concept is connected to judgements of right and wrong, that is, something we could translate as values, or what Bourdieu might call taste. We might then imagine ways in which humans, nature, and systems of material objects interacted, producing the right practical solutions. The ways in which solutions manifest themselves as ‘right’ are at any time tied to values or ideologies and thus historical in their core, connecting the practical experience now relegated to phenomenology, with the extra-human systems now understood as technologies. I suggest the notion of phronologies to cover this field of practical, situated, and normative processes of technonatural development over time. If we see the urban bathing in a phronological perspective, we will relate both the material potential in these new wet rooms, the way in which they produced or reproduced social categories, and water as a biosocial hyper-­ object pervading the city, maybe causing more complexity and trouble in this modern narrative than it would have done in an early modern history. Entering the field of technonatures in a time when humans have become geological agents, to paraphrase Chakrabarty, it can be relevant to revisit both the oldest and most recent places in conceptual development. While the empirical examples are from approximately the same period, a last observation could be that looking further up in time, the phronologies of water point to a degree of continuity in the tendency for material growth. In this regard, it is not an alleged shift, for example, from liberalism to the welfare society of the twentieth century that play a role, but the emergence of environment as a recognized actor from the 1970s onwards that cause this shift. Also, when it comes to the approach to the water as an infinite resource, we see the domestic and public wet spaces being calibrated for a still higher consumption per capita well into the period we would normally deem as the prime years of welfare society. When we enter the values in the metabolism, the core notion of cleanliness is seemingly guiding the development throughout, along with later additions such as the erasure of bad nature connected with the central sewer and water network, and the healthy body for which water plays an expanding role. This figure could be containing several tracks, such as the magical healing of spring water already investigated by Goubert, later accompanied by the vital and then the optimized body(Goubert 1989).

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CHAPTER 4

Hybrid Cities: Agency, Scale, and Power—A Conversation Between Matthew Gandy, Dorothee Brantz, and Chris Otter Mikkel Thelle

Mikkel: This roundtable conversation emerges from a seminar held at Aarhus University as part of a larger research project on water, and the multiple ways in which water interacts in the development of modern cities. During the development of the project we became especially interested in the hybridity of the bio-­ physical elements and the urban arena.  In the seminar we had a longer discussion about these socio-­ nature hybridities and we decided to return to this theme in this exchange. An interesting point of departure is how we can discuss both the “urban” and “nature” today in relation to earlier discourses, and how we might conceptualize these emerging developments. How, for example, should we connect urban hybridities with the political sphere and the exercise of power?

M. Thelle (*) National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_4

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Matthew: The question of hybridity is interesting to me. An initial question to ask is: a hybridity between what? The terms “nature” and “culture” imply a dualistic analytical framework when in fact we might imagine that hybridity would dispel a dualistic conception of nature and human society. I am cautious, however, about the term hybridity. There is a certain kind of etymological hesitation for me, driven in part by the term’s connotations of “contamination” between purer constituent elements. I would also question whether hybridity has an indirect directionality or temporality to it. In other words, can hybrids be “unhybridized”, or taken in multiple directions? Is there an implicit pathway between particular manifestations of hybridization? The other concern for me is how the hybrid functions as a specific kind of cultural and material artefact and how this complex form relates to the shifting terrain of an intellectual or historiographic landscape. How do these various hybrid objects connect in terms of intersecting analytical frameworks? Dorothee: When I was a doctoral student, the notion of hybridization was very influential on my thinking about environmental and urban history. Bruno Latour’s work and especially his We Have Never Been Modern really transformed my thinking. But I always faced the problem Matthew pointed out, namely that one has to think about dualities and binary oppositions. Latour was trying to overcome the conceptual separation between culture and nature, a separation he considered artificial and illusory. In recent years, we have been talking more about notions of entanglement to point at the multiplicity of interconnections and interrelations on numerous levels; and also, to dissolve the overly deterministic notions of intentionality that somewhat undergirded Latour’s concept of hybridization. Chris:

I agree, and I have spent most of my career in this post-­ hybrid epistemological space where dualism is the enemy, yet an awful lot of literature which aims to move on from dualism ends up reinforcing it. For example, “envirotech” is a big concept these days, but I am not convinced that it

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doesn’t simply replicate the dualism. It is very hard to get beyond these binaries. Maybe we can get at this from another perspective and leave it there for now. Mikkel:

It is symptomatic that there seems to be an overall agreement that we have in some sense moved on. Ten years ago, discussions were focused on dissolving the duality. But where have we moved on to? Dorothee mentioned entanglements. You can also think about the discussion about agency and flat ontologies, as noted by e.g. Thomas Bender and Ignacio Farias (2010, 303–325). Thinking about where we have moved since the 1980s and 1990s, it will be interesting to move on to the notion of transformation and temporality. If we all agree on leaving this, where are we going, if not back to the Cartesian distinction between nature and culture, that were criticized in the first place?

Dorothee: If I may use my own research interests as an example, my early work centered on the historical relations between humans and animals, especially livestock, and how their intersections transformed urban spaces in the nineteenth century. But I have come to realize that human-animal interactions are much more complex and that they involve many different lifeforms ranging from tiny microbes to plants and all kinds of animals, including diverse human groups. These days, I am working more with the notion of “multispecies urbanism” to capture this diversity of lifeforms that shape urban life. For me this is also a political move because I think we need a much more open understanding of diversity if we want to transform cities into spaces of greater environmental justice. With regard to temporality, it seems we need to also broaden our understanding. Historically, cities have been conceived in contrast to the rural. Cities were (quite literally) man-­ made spaces where technological innovation was meant to free humans from natural constraints. One important constraint in many areas of the world was seasonal variation. Summers brought heat while winters might grind things to a freezing halt. On one level, urbanization might be read as

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a process of temporal transformation where the cyclical dependence on seasons was increasingly replaced by more linear and rationalized notions of time made possible by countless technologies (heating, cooling, electricity). Modern metropolitan engineers, planners, and urban administrators were trying hard to build cities that could operate 24/7  year around. Of course, this generated all kinds of problems, not the least with many of the technonatures that were being created. In my current research I am exploring the persistent impact of seasons on urban life and how seasonal variation challenged the promise of a rationalized, clean and efficient urban technonature. Matthew:

I would like to ask Dorothee a question: do you think “multispecies urbanism” is a coherent conceptual paradigm or still in a state of intellectual reconfiguration, and how might it relate to Mikkel’s concern “trails” or “layers” of power in the urban arena? In the case of multispecies urbanism, where does power lie within urban space?

Dorothee: As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, of course we read and discussed Michel Foucault’s work on power very extensively, and it deeply shaped our understanding of social relationships and practices of knowledge production. In my own work, though, I never really focused on notions of power because they seemed to inevitably revolve around questions of dominance, which always struck as a rather male way of looking at the world. Instead, how about focusing on notions of rights. Who has a right to the city and what does that imply about the allocations of urban spaces? For instance, if we acknowledge that animals, plants, and other lifeforms also have a right to the city, how would we have to rethink questions of shelter and space? Multispecies urbanism raises new questions about sharing and also about conflicts arising from having to share, but I would not want to frame that primarily in terms of power. Matthew:

The emphasis on multispecies ethnography within anthropology and related fields has become particularly influential.

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I’d be curious to know what you both think about the potential intellectual intersections between these emerging ethnographic approaches and new developments in urban and environmental history. On the question of power, I have framed my thinking to a significant degree within urban political ecology and operation of political power within the urban arena. One very interesting dialogue that links neo-­ Marxian political ecology with multispecies urbanism is the idea of extending power to the non-human, including the vital work that plants and animals do within the urban arena. Chris:

I don’t think you can get, or should, rid of power. In the literature on the technosphere, for example, power relations are frequently absent. Instead, we often are faced with “humans” as some kind of undifferentiated mass. I would like to introduce some other thoughts here, about scale and temporality, which I think are very central. We need to find ways to link very large and small scales over very long durations. With regards to the technosphere, it is very often juxtaposed to so-called “natural spheres”: the geosphere and the biosphere, but it is not necessarily conceptualized as unnatural as much as artifactual. The question is whether these are the same thing, or if we, by using notions such as artefactual, begin to get away from having nature as an analytical category. Thinking over very long durations, there is a long history of agglomeration whereby entities come together which is a geological and biological process, e.g. bacteria and mineral deposits as sorts of agglomerations. We can then try to think about the city as a special type of agglomeration which has developed during a recent phase of our planetary history, which is, yes, artifactual: but not necessarily unnatural. That history is supposedly one of about 5000 years, but there are other human and hominin assemblages many thousands and even millions of years older, so hominin agglomerations are merely one aspect of a deeper history of agglomeration. “Nature” is simply a concept that has emerged in certain languages at certain times. In ancient times people talked about grains and animals, but not “nature”. So, it becomes a concept with a history, and clearly

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that concept relates in complex ways to the concept of the urban—getting into the deep past is reframing the conversation a bit. Dorothee: You said you didn’t want to get rid of power as a category of thinking, but where can we empirically locate power within these larger timeframes and across these different scales? Chris:

In terms of the history of human assemblages at various scales, power seems to reside in who gets control of how assemblages are built, who gets access to which networks and when. Every single person is situated differently within the technosphere, but certain groups are situated more advantageously, have access to more networks and better resources. The way we are heading at the moment is that the technosphere has been built on the labour of people of color, slaves, women, the global proletariat (Graham and Marvin 2001; Clark and Szerszynski 2021, 117). They inhabit the worst parts of it, they have the worst water, get access to fewest resources—whereas the elite will escape the crisis in their survival pods or even in their spaceships, so that’s one way in which power operates. But human history is the history of how the world has been built via the labor of others to benefit the elite. That is simple and rough; it’s a broadly accurate political history of the technosphere. In other words, the planet’s technosphere is a kind of effigy of power relations.

Matthew:

I would like to ask Chris about the “long view”, sometimes referred to as “deep history” within the literature, and the presence of a kind of “neolithic fatalism” in the works of Jared Diamond or David Wallace-Wells, for instance, marked by the idea that the agricultural revolution leads inexorably towards urbanization and a future pathway of “no return” for human societies exemplified by the contemporary technosphere. What would you say to those who claim that “there is no way out”?

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Chris:

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It’s tricky, because that model is replicated through so many literatures, as a narrative of fall or sometimes of progress (Diamond 2017; Sapolsky 2017; Pinker 1994). It is ultimately a fall narrative which is inscribed again and again, yet, I would like to avoid the idea of these “massive breaks” of history, since it simplifies history so much. The first thing to say to that is that it is not a turning “point”, since the Neolithic transformation takes many thousands of years and happens at different rates, times, and places, and in some places, it never fully happens. It’s hard to make a “point” out of something that takes 5–7000 years. That said, humans were settling long before that in ways that were more ephemeral but not necessarily impermanent, which is why the idea of a camp is important. This point challenges the idea of the camp as the paradigmatic twenty-first-century human settlement (see e.g. Agamben 1997). Besides, it already happened a lot of places before this. But it is unquestionable that agriculture and its affordances transforms things in ways it is difficult to get out of, because of the population it supports and the size of cities it can sustain.

Dorothee: I wonder about the fatalism, you mentioned Matthew. Is such fatalism maybe more an expression of the present position from which one looks at the past? In other words, if one has a fatalist view on his/her own present, one will explain the past in a way that then culminates in precisely that present. But the past is not teleological. Things did not inevitably develop the way they did. There were always many possible pathways. Moreover, interpretations of the past change, there is no history with a capital H. Matthew:

Coming back to the question of one or many pathways really interests me. My sense from reading Chris’ work is that there are often multiple pathways and it is not at all certain in which direction societies might develop. I think this position is important because it serves as a kind of counter-­ narrative to the more dystopian, fatalistic, or teleological narratives that are linked to presentism, as Dorothee pointed out. If we are talking about alternative urban and

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e­ nvironmental futures then we must hold on to the argument that there are alternatives. It is fundamental, I think, to build a different set of urban ecological imaginaries through alternative forms of political and social mobilization. Dystopian cultural projections often reflect reactionary bourgeois anxieties, as literary critics such as Fredric Jameson and others have pointed out in relation to science fiction literature. It is important, therefore, to articulate critical perspectives that avoid dystopian teleological narratives. Dorothee: Perhaps we are living in somewhat dystopian times. Many of us, especially many young people, are very worried about the future and what it might bring, particularly with regard to climate change and the demise of biodiversity. There seems to be less of an excitement about and hope for the future. At the same time, there are those who continue to believe in the power of technological innovation, and they seem to be less concerned because they are convinced that there will be technofixes to solve any problem. In Germany and many other countries, these two positions find expression in opposing political camps, which stifles the momentum for change. With regard to cities, it is interesting to see how they are identified as a primary problem (e.g., with regard to their ecological footprint), but how they are also viewed as a key arena for finding solutions (e.g. mobility transformation, carbon neutrality). Chris:

Another point about this is also embedded in urban history itself, and the origins of what we think a city is and what we think the city should be. If we look back to anthropological and archeological history of cities, V. Gordon Childe, who worked on Mesopotamia, was largely responsible for creating our hegemonic idea of what a city is. He made a list of criteria defining what a city is. This Mesopotamian urbanism is very dense, with a large number of people living in close proximity surrounded by hinterlands, whereas other types of urbanism, for example meso-American urbanism and south-­ east Asian urbanism, unfolded in very different ways, at

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much lower densities—making, it really hard to figure out where the “city” ended and “nature” began, because urban gardening was so central. We have one particular “model” for the urban, which excludes the natural, which is really come to dominate the way we think about cities, but it is Mesopotamia-centric but has become Eurocentric (think of tightly walled European medieval cities). It has blotted out alternative forms of urbanism. Studies seem to suggest that low-density urbanism is doomed in the long run. So I think the history of urban history is also worth reflecting on, when we reflect on what it excludes—what types of agglomeration, perhaps, it excludes.

Mikkel:

I think, that is a really interesting point. Also, the idea of scaling—you developed a kind of sophisticated idea of how to think about agglomerations in different scales. Returning to an essay Dorothee did about humans and animals in a new book on environmental urban concepts—thinking and challenging this idea about the city as something bordered. But challenging the borders of biological body, of the material city—do we have a potential for framing and conceptualizing the city in another way than this bordered, dense, heterogeneous entity?

Chris:

Again, the question of defining the city is an old one and in one sense a fruitless one. But let’s assume cities exist; they come in many different forms. Some have walls, some have boundaries but a lot don’t. But now with the Lefebvrian model and planetary urbanization, there is an idea that cities broke out of their walls and covered the planet, since walls physically broke down. But on the other hand, there have always been these non-bounded or less bounded cities (or agglomerations) and we must involve them in the conversation as well. The idea of the boundary is somewhat illusory, since the history of cities also is the history of pathways, canals and other connectors. Mesopotamian agglomerations had these hollow ways radiating out of them, into the hinterland, which is hardly natural, if you by that mean

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untouched by humans, so these places are anthromic rather than biomic. Matthew:

I would like to ask Chris whether your conceptualization of the “technosphere” is related to, or different from, the planetary urbanization thesis?

Chris:

First, I think, the planetary urbanization thesis is quite presentist, and it is quite mono-scalar in that it assumes that there is a single scale of planetary-techno-spherization, and this single scale is urban. It doesn’t take into account scales such as the anthromic and the planetary sink. If everything is urbanized, it kind of flattens the technosphere into a single scale. For example, agriculture is a different scale of human engagement with the world than the urban. It doesn’t mean it is natural in any simple sense. It’s clearly part of the technosphere, but just to regard it as urbanized is, I think, wrong. The planetary urbanization thesis is really important, but the technosphere concept is quite different, more multi-scalar, and much more attendant to long durée processes.

Dorothee: And I guess it is also not premised on such hegemonic narratives. The planetary urbanization thesis seems to presuppose that the urban has become a singularly dominant force and that we can understand and critique the planetary only through an urban lens. I am not sure about that. Chris:

Yes, it is not the largest scale. The largest scales within the technosphere are the atmosphere we are using as a sink and filling with greenhouse gases and the oceans (also sinks) that we are filling with plastics and nitrates. These scales are less designed, less concentrated and more diffused than the urban. They are not urbanized. I don’t think it makes any sense to call them urbanized.

Mikkel:

I would like to take the question of scale and power a bit back to you Matthew. Thinking about urban political ecology recently one of the founders of UPE thinkers,

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­ wyngedouw, wrote that urban political ecology was not S being political anymore. It was maybe 10–15 years ago, that the concept developed, so thinking about the political and the notion of power vs. agency, and as you, Dorothee, have brought up agency as something we should think more about—how can we think about political ecology as agency today as in relation to when urban political ecology started as a political movement? Matthew:

I have been thinking a lot recently about the future direction of urban political ecology. The question of social power is still very present in most of this research. I think the key tensions lie in relation to thinking beyond the bounded human subject. Specific challenges might include Dorothee’s notion of multispecies urbanism. Here I think urban political ecology becomes less conceptually certain, as it moves towards the multisensory post-phenomenological realm. I would also argue that the neglect of nature itself, and the scientific significance of ecological processes within urban political ecology, has meant that the field has not fully engaged with important developments such urban epidemiology. Equally, I think the global diversity crisis—and specifically urban biodiversity—has been neglected in comparison with metropolitan natures such as parks or access to green space. Urban political ecology has tended towards a more utilitarian stance rather than more imaginative or experimental modes of engaging with urban nature. Here again I think that urban political ecology hasn’t really been very sure of its direction in relation to ecocriticism, the visual arts, and a variety of more recent cultural interventions.

Dorothee: Do you think, Matthew, that these “blindspots” result from UPE’s strong emphasis on a critique of capitalism and a neo-­ Marxist approach? Matthew:

Yes, I think this is a very interesting point. At a conceptual level a lot of the underlying logic is derived from the neo-­ Marxian emphasis on capital to the relative exclusion of other potential explanatory vantage points. Sometimes the

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outcome of research agendas within urban political ecology is effectively known in advance which restricts the scope of imaginative or unexpected insights. Dorothee: As a historian, I often wonder about theories that are singularly based on a critique of capitalism because they tend to ignore other historical forces and political ideologies. To give just one example, if capitalism is the main culprit, how do we account for socialist ideologies that operated in a very similar exploitative way with regard to nature, urbanization, and the use of technology? Capitalism is undoubtedly problematic, but a critique of capitalism might not be able to explain everything. We also need to question the more general foundations of modern western epistemologies that emphasize particular notions of reason and scientific investigation and the rationalization of the world through technospheres. As Chris stated, there were and are many different pathways to urbanization across cultures and historical epochs. We should acknowledge them and give voice to them, as many scholars increasingly do. Different forms of knowledge, for instance indigenous knowledge, or types of artistic expression might offer new perspectives on alternative futures. Capitalism does not have to be as inevitable as it appears right now. Matthew:

Do you think that there are any experimental spaces of urban nature that point to future alternatives or is that too utopian to consider? Could the Südgelände park in Berlin, for example, engender different visions of society or is that too utopian an interpretation?

Dorothee: There have been many interesting utopian ideas, but utopian visions are often also problematic, for instance when they implicitly and explicitly proclaim an end to history. Moreover, utopian social models tend to be exclusionary in one way or another; they are rarely democratic, sometimes even despotic. But it is definitely worthwhile to think about alternative societal models and to think big.

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Chris:



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I don’t know about utopian visions, but I have been thinking about the way in which the senses, the motions and bodily feeling have been excluded by an overfocus on capitalism. There are more subtle ways in which our bodies and our affects are linked to different forms of urbanism, things that Alain Corbin wrote about long ago, which again are linked to these technologies that were developed and left behind or abandoned (Corbin 1986). For example, water closets are linked to high levels of water use and pollution. In the nineteenth century there was a movement across Europe to use not water closets but vacuum closets or earth closets which meant recycling human waste—this was, perhaps, rather utopian. But it failed, partly because it was deemed impractical for large urban areas, because of actually needing to move so much earth into cities. But it also failed because of the smell, despite the fact that if you used it properly it apparently didn’t smell very much. But there was a problem with proximity—simply being near excrement was (and is) unsettling. So water closets were used instead. In the later twentieth century, there has been a massive interest in composting toilets and reusing human waste, because water closets are expensive and impractical, and even dangerous, in large parts of the world. For example, in Erdos, China, a form of eco-toilet was introduced for around 3000 people. China is often regarded by Westerners as being rather less disgusted by human waste, historically, than the west. But the system failed again because of the smell, and now they are pumping water into the area to carry away human waste. There are people in Arizona who are trying to turn their air-conditioning off and learning to deal bodily with heat again. There is a guide this year that was published about that we don’t need to shower that much, that we have become obsessed with washing ourselves (Hamblin 2020). Rather than being ideas of totally rebuilding cities, one of other challenges here is to kind of recalibrate our emotions and our senses. As Corbin showed, such recalibration takes a long time and has major social ramifications. And I think, if we have to move forward in the world, we have to become a bit more comfortable with waste and

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organic smell. I think cleanliness has a lot to answer for. I keep telling this to my family and I get heavily criticized, but I think, in some sense, we have to recalibrate our senses. Dorothee: Yes, we do, but in the U.S., this might be a bigger challenge because American culture appears to be more fearful of germs than many European cultures. But there is no standardized sense of cleanliness; it is a learned practice that is mediated by class, gender, cultural attitudes and ecological understandings. It is a complicated issue that has surely influenced the make-up of urban environments. For instance, the establishment of centralized public slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Europe was driven by the ambition of hygienists to clean up the urban environment and to remove stench, blood, and death from public space. In the modern period, urbanization went hand in hand with practices of “covering up” streets, rivers, swamps, and fields in response to fears about miasmas and infection. By sealing the ground reformers hoped to clean up the environment and make the city healthier and more controllable. In recent years, however, there is a growing trend to reverse this thinking. A growing number of urbanists now call for the unsealing of urban spaces to improve the resilience of cities in light of climate change and extreme weather situations. In both of these processes, science and technological innovation played a key role. When thinking about these historical transformations, it is striking to see which kinds of knowledge and technologies moved to the fore and which were forgotten or even actively dismissed out of political, economic, or cultural reasons. Here, we do see the impact of power quite clearly. Chris:

Right. The number of technologies that has been sidelined for one reason or another … a totally different subject: the history of hovercrafts. Do you remember hovercrafts? I wonder what happened to them. There the problem was noise I think (Wheeler and Donno 1966). There is another

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example of something was cancelled because of sensory issues. Mikkel:

Water might be an interesting case here. In Denmark in the 1970s a normal citizen used 250 liters a day and I think at the same time in the states is was 1500 liters. How do you translate this into cultural history? That was a little bit what you began to do. In itself, it seems quite extreme, that one body should consume that much water. It’s the same with the ultimate sink: Waste disappears, resources disappear, that might be the modernist utopian. One way of thinking the utopian might be getting rid of the notion of disappearance—or endlessness. What is very significant about the notion of water—at a certain point in urban history, it kind of becomes a right to get access to endless amounts of water. And it is kind of a notion related to the modern city. As you mentioned Dorothee, talking about circularity—both with materials but also with time is something we might need to think more about in trying to grasp how to get on. I was also thinking about the text by Dipesh Chakrabarty on the Anthropocene, and what you were talking about earlier Chris and Matthew—the teleological idea of modernity. What Chakrabarty said was that: yes, we moved into capitalist societies, but it was not determined that that society would be a fuzzled society. Thinking about this as something not determined process going towards the ultimate destruction of the planet, but thinking more about it as multi-layered series of developments that kind of interacted in certain points that led to the climate issue and dystopian narrative.

Matthew:

On the question of water and urban space we have this very interesting concept of the “modern infrastructural ideal”, elaborated by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, on the unnoticed dimensions to the organization of the urban space, which for a number of reasons are beginning to fade. New kinds of infrastructural constellations are now emerging in response to climate change and other challenges. Examples include micro-interventions such as bio-swales on

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pavements that serve as miniature rainwater harvesting systems and at the same time boost biodiversity. These are new elements in the urban landscape oriented towards the future. It will be interesting to see how these design features might filter through urban planning discourse and wider political contestations over the organization of space. We should also pay attention to different forms of grassroots intervention at street level. In London and other cities there are examples of people taking over “tree pits” and other marginal spaces to plant small-scale gardens. There is much going on at ground-­ level. We are clearly moving away from a monolithic, technocratic, bureaucratic model of urban space towards a much more heterogeneous set of possibilities marked by different ways that people can intervene. If I am looking for signs of something positive within the contemporary urban arena I am often drawn to these small examples of alternative worlds. Dorothee: In Berlin we see similar developments. People are planting tree pits and street gardens. There are initiatives to get people to water street trees. But there is also a persistent belief that the municipality is responsible for maintaining public areas including urban greenery. If we want to reframe the use of large-scale infrastructures, we might also need a debate about civic responsibilities when it comes to the urban green and blue spaces as well as biodiversity. How do we engage people with their neighborhood to water street trees and pick up their trash? There are many engaged people, but there is also a lot of indifference and a sense of “someone else should be responsible”. We also often hear the argument that planting a tree pit is not helping in the fight against climate change and that it might even contribute to gentrification. So-called green gentrification has become a frequent criticism, which is quite problematic. Having a green and clean-living environment should be a right, not a luxury, so it should be foregrounded much more in debates about the right to the city. And it should be done across scales and across species boundaries.

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Matthew:

I would argue that environmental politics is marked by different scales and networks operating simultaneously. It would be a mistake, for example, to exaggerate the power of cities as political actors in isolation. It is not just a question of nation-states but an extended state-capital nexus. The pro-carbon polluting networks, for instance, are incredibly powerful and well-organized. I think it is important not to underestimate the resources or political strategies of those who directly benefit from the current state of things. In addition to the notion of climate-change skepticism I would also note the presence of biodiversity decline skepticism which tends to see the resilience of nature as a reason not to worry too much about mass extinction.

Chris:

Yes, resilience is a super neo-liberal concept. As if we could just let everything go and it will sort itself out like a perfect autonomous market. The idea that nature will just “bounce back” is confounded by the Anthropocene. Numerous people are arguing of the danger in resilient thinking (Cowen 2014). There is something problematic about the concept, that needs to be rethought.

Mikkel

Talking about resilience, I agree Matthew, with you, in the sense that decentralization and local responses to urban nature is emerging. In Denmark in 2012 they decided a policy of climate-response for the cities that were totally decentralized in the sense, that in Copenhagen alone they had done 300 projects of water catchment that wasn’t connected to the sewer-system, but to the ground and soil. A bit like resilience also being appropriated by with what we might call the neo-liberal paradigm in the sense that dealing with the problems decentrally is also getting away from the dangerous state. As well as it’s a sign of agency and empowerment, there is also something part of the power-play in these years. So scaling might also be in some sense political and techno-natural agency.

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One thing that has been brought up a couple of times is the notion of the Anthropocene, and this is so exposed and being widely used. And also with non-cultural studies people. And as you have done Matthew in the botanical city—actually going into the natural sciences’ terminology and causalities, and maybe we could talk a little bit about that. And as you said Chris, the responsibility issues in the Anthropocene. Well maybe it is fading a little bit—but still an important issue. So, do you think it can enhance our dealing with these urban nature issues from the cultural-studies to the natural sciences?

Matthew:

I have a question for Chris about the naming of periodicities. How does your reading of the “technosphere” relate to the Anthropocene discourse and the emergence of alternative terms such as the Plantationocene? Intuitively for me, there is quite a close relationship between the technosphere and the Plantationocene and I wondered if that was something you have been thinking about?

Chris:

Yes, it’s important to think more broadly about resource extraction on a planetary scale, about agriculture and mining and the labour that goes into that. Here, the Plantationocene concept fits the anthromic scale of the technosphere concept very well—it makes more sense to talk about the plantation than the urban here. The technosphere concept is very spatial. It is more about where and how things develop than when they develop. That seems to be a debate that the earth system-scientists can have, and can come up with a definition which works for them. But people in the humanities don’t have to use their definition if they don’t want. I am thinking about the 1945 Anthropocene date here. I’m very hesitant about people working in the humanities in a scientist fashion. Our job is not to verify science. This is not what (I think) we should be doing. Regarding terminology the Anthropocene is here to stay. Although I completely understand the Capitalocene perspective, there is something about our species-being that is important and different to other animals. That doesn’t mean that other living beings and pro-

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cesses don’t have huge environmental, even planetary, effects. But the tool-wielding hominin can do things that no other being can do. I’m happy with Anthropocene despite its ambiguities, which are many. Matthew:

The cultural geographer Arun Saldanha has written an article arguing for multiple Anthropocenes that significantly frees up this wider debate.

Chris:

Same with the technosphere and biosphere. When do they begin and who cares?

Mikkel:

I’m curious Chris: I agree on the notion that our job shouldn’t just be to confirm science, but in the sense that time and temporality also is about causalities and processes, shouldn’t we have that interest in temporal developments and reasons for transformations? There was this anthology, “Urbanizing nature” where they challenge the idea of the modern—in the sense looking at the relationship between nature and the city. Time is also for us humanists to challenge scales and processes.

Chris:

I think time is very important—but be we should not collapse history into a linear graph with a key set of turning points or revolutions. There is already a standard way of teaching global environmental history that has these sorts of revolutions: the agricultural, the urban, the industrial, the great acceleration. It is a great way to teach under-graduates, but it flattens out the spatial complexity. The issue is that not that we have these great revolutions, but that we have millions of temporal developments that even make linearity impossible.

Dorothee: I agree, but I also see the challenges related to that because how do we narrate such a multiplicity of temporalities? And I don’t mean meta-narratives à la Jerrod Diamond, but if we want to explain larger developments and conceptual currents, we need a way to structure our narratives. Surely,

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these temporalities don’t not have to follow linear trajectories but here, too, we have to find a way to connect multiple scales—from small temporal units to larger processes. History is a discipline that deals with time, and environmental history, in particular, needs to reach across scales to capture the daily existence of all kinds of creatures but also long-­range geological time spans. And we need to explain this complexity and multiplicity of temporalities to our colleagues in other disciplines. In urban studies there has been a strong sense of presentism, particularly when it comes to thinking about the challenges related to climate change. What can historians contribute to understanding current problems and proposing new ways to think forward? Certainly, we can show how people have dealt with similar challenges in the past, and in doing so we can broaden our ability to think about different pathways and alternative possibilities. As Chris said earlier, things could have always gone in many directions. At the same time, I also see a problem with the current direction of scientific discourses. At least in Germany, there is a strong current to promote system-thinking and to solve problems through technological fixes. Scholars analyze green spaces as eco-system services that can be measured, modeled and ultimately optimized to serve human needs. In this kind of understanding there is little room for stories, uncertainty or the general messiness that makes history fascinating. But it is this kind of systems thinking that receives attention and funding.

Matthew: I think that is absolutely right. In terms of the urban-­ environmental sphere, systems-based thinking is very dominant within urban ecology. We discussed some other possibilities such as urban political ecology, multi-species urbanism, and so on but these fields are almost invisible to the dominant paradigm. In the very highly cited urban ecology literature such as Marina Alberti, Steward Pickett, and others, you almost never see any connection to these other literatures. The underlying rationale is a kind of forced epistemological unity that revolves around the aggregation of

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large datasets and the use of quantitative models. The capacity to do this kind of work both in terms of funding and technological means has clearly significantly increased. The risk of eclipsing alternative perspectives has never been stronger at this critical moment.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1997. Homo Sacer. Paris: Seuil. Bender, Thomas, and Ignacio Farias. 2010. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-­ Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. Routledge. Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Corbin, Alain. 1986. The Foul and the Fragrant Odor and the French Social Imagination. Leamington Spa: Berg. Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping the Violence of Global Trade. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Diamond, Jared M. 2017. Guns, Germs, and Steel. W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated. Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge. Hamblin, James. 2020. Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less. The Bodley Head. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow. Sapolsky, Robert M. 2017. Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Wheeler, R.L., and G.F. Donno. 1966. The Hovercraft Noise Problem. Journal of Sound and Vibration 4 (3). 415,IN15,423–422,IN16,430.

PART II

Agency of Flow, Matter, and Technology

CHAPTER 5

A Techno-river in the Making: Three Transformations of the Wien River from the Middle Ages Until the Present Friedrich Hauer, Christina Spitzbart-Glasl, Severin Hohensinner, and Verena Winiwarter

Cities, as today is widely acknowledged in the social sciences, can be understood as hybrid artefacts. Not only are they the result of social and natural processes, cities also changed human interaction with nature far beyond the built-up areas (Soens et  al. 2019, 3–5). One of the most rewarding objects of study in this regard are urban waters. As Matt Edgeworth notes, rivers “defy categorisation” more thoroughly than other

F. Hauer (*) Urban Design Research Unit (Forschungsbereich Städtebau), TU Wien, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] C. Spitzbart-Glasl Centre for Environmental History (ZUG), University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_5

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elements of man-made environments. “If we have to classify, we might call them ‘wild artefacts’—for whereas the form of most artefacts is more or less fixed, rivers have a wildness about them that cannot be entirely contained. Unlike things crafted out of stone or other solid material, a river is an artefact that can escape the bounds of its culturally applied form” (Edgeworth 2011, 21). This chapter is dedicated to the dialectics between water flow and its “culturally applied” forms, its solid containers and fittings. Wien River is a relatively small but very dynamic tributary to the Viennese Danube. Being both an important resource and a nuisance to city dwellers, it structured urban expansion and production since early modern times (Pollack et  al. 2016; Hauer 2019a). As outlined in the introduction to this volume, rethinking techno-natures is also about the distributed agency of disassembly and assemblage. In our contribution we will locate power or influence not only in terms of agents, but in terms of space-time. We will elaborate on three different periods and related aspects of the techno-river’s emergence and transformation. Arrangements to harvest the water’s energy are scrutinized in the first section. For several centuries since the Middle Ages, watermills, millstreams and weirs formed a delicate large-scale ensemble paralleling the suburban course of Wien River. The second section traces the manifold patchworked attempts to control fluvial dynamics and to stabilize the riverbed from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. The breaking-up and technical reassembly of the urban river and its entire catchment is addressed in the third section, focusing on the properties and legacies of a comprehensive river-­ training undertaken between 1895 and 1906.

Status of Research Within environmental history, the investigation of river-society relations has become a prominent field (e.g. Mauch and Zeller 2008). Large river systems have received particular attention. Narratives have evolved from S. Hohensinner Institute of Hydrobiology and Aquatic Ecosystem Management, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] V. Winiwarter Commission for Interdisciplinary Ecological Studies (KIÖS), Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected]

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being either “histories of the dead river” (e.g. Fradkin 1981; Hill 1997) or “histories of the conquered river” (Worster 1992; Tvedt and Jakobsson 2006) to more complex treatments of the interaction between rivers and societies. Their narratives also include rivers as actors (White 1995; Cioc 2002; Pritchard 2011). Urban rivers in European cities have been addressed in overview articles (e.g. Schott and Toyka-Seid 2008), but long-term studies are scarce. The interdependency of hydrographically induced technological change and urban development has been discussed in an early study by André Guillerme for eighteen cities in Northern France between 300 and 1800  A.D. (Guillerme 1988). Schott (2007) conceptualized both the impacts of a city on its river and vice versa. Castonguay and Evenden (2012), Schönach (2017) and Evenden (2018) provide sound overviews of ongoing debates and approaches to urban rivers. London, and the Thames, is probably  the best-researched major European city. Porter (1998) describes the entanglement of political, economic and social forces in creating arrangements (see also Hamlin 1990; Keene 2012). Studies using the concept of social metabolism investigate the flow and transformation of material resources and energy into, within and out of social systems and describe the changes of these flows through time. European urban metabolism studies have centred on Paris (Barles 2007; Billen et al. 2012); Vancouver and its surroundings have also been analysed in detail (Keeling 2004, 2005). Hoffmann (2007, 2010) provides a metabolic approach to European medieval cities. Rivers play a role especially as routes of transport connecting, for example, cities and their hinterland or as recipients of waste (e.g. Gingrich et  al. 2012; Barles 2007). Multi-­ layered approaches to urban rivers and their co-evolution with urban entities have recently gained ground even within urban studies and planning disciplines (e.g. Prominski et al. 2017; Knoll et al. 2017; Seewang 2019; Hauer 2019b; Rossano 2021). The exploitation of hydro-energy has always been associated with the construction and maintenance of infrastructure that deeply interferes with riverine landscapes. It is therefore an important subject of numerous environmental histories. However, most of this work focuses on the construction and operation of large hydroelectric power plants beginning around 1900. It questions narratives of progress where large power plants feature as signs of national prosperity and feats of engineering by elaborating on the major changes such projects impose on river-society relations (Landry 2013; Zeisler-Vralsted 2008; Jakobsson 2002; Pritchard 2011). The construction of most large hydroelectric power plants abruptly puts an end to

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a wide range of previous practices of river use and the associated hydraulic structures, including watermills. Environmental historians have emphasized the pre-industrial history of hydro-energy exploitation, but continuities in the transition from mechanical watermills to hydroelectric power plants (e.g. in terms of hydraulic infrastructure, technical components, water rights and expertise) have received little attention. Especially on smaller and peripheral rivers practices and hydraulic structures of water milling were slowly adapted to new production processes, economic strategies and water laws of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remained part of riverine landscapes until today (Zumbrägel 2018; Schoder 2018; Spitzbart-Glasl 2018). Spatial reconstructions of sites of hydro-energy exploitation have been used as a starting point to investigate continuities and severe changes in riverine landscapes. Usually, the spatial distribution of watermill and hydroelectric power plant sites is compared at several points in time. This approach has been applied to large catchments such as the Po Valley, as well as to smaller river courses such as the Lea in east London (Parrinello 2018; Clifford 2012, 2018). Because of the cartographic sources required, these works tend to focus on changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, covering the transition from an agrarian to an industrial energy regime. Comprehensive studies on watermills focus on technical functionality and progress (Reynolds 1983), their contribution to industrialisation (Hunter 1979; from an environmental history point of view, e.g. Steinberg 1991; Barca 2010), the long-term effects of milling structures on geoand hydromorphological characteristics (Walter and Merritts 2008) and the evolution of water rights (Schlottau 1985). A social and economic history on urban watermills and the provisioning of Paris have been provided by Kaplan (1984). Decidedly environmental history studies of watermills on urban rivers are very rare—although the watermill can be considered a key technology that first spread to urban environments, where it changed the interaction of urbanites and their environment (Bloch 1977, 185). In urban-­ environment histories, watermills are often acknowledged as one of many uses of pre-industrial riverine landscapes (Deligne 2012, 17–34; Haidvogl et al. 2018; Spitzbart-Glasl and Winiwarter 2019). One major focus has been on conflicts between millers and other water and river users (Oliver 2013; Clifford 2012, 43–44; Bagle 2012). Many of the described conflicts emanate from the extensive infrastructures for milling such as dams, weirs, canals and reservoirs, their impacts on fluvial processes and their potential

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to exclude other water and river users both spatially and by acquisition of resources. The persistence of these socio-technical structures since the Middle Ages—despite all changes in technical characteristics and due to fluvial dynamics—has been decisive for the severe regulation of rivers starting from the eighteenth century and the implementation of networked infrastructures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While numerous studies highlight the historical hydromorphological changes of rivers and floodplains in still rural areas, the human caused transformation process of running waters in urban agglomerations received far less attention (e.g. Fortuné 1988; Gregory et al. 1992; Kondolf et al. 2007). Urban watersheds have been mainly investigated for the twentieth century due to the easily available geodata for spatial analyses (Gurnell et al. 2005; Paul and Meyer 2008; Altić 2010). Long-term investigations covering several centuries are very rare. In Vienna the abundant historical sources allow for spatio-temporal studies of fluvial landscapes from 1529 onwards (Hohensinner et al. 2013a, 2013b). Combining this data with written sources and current socio-ecological concepts enables well-based studies on Vienna’s larger urban running waters from the environmental historical perspective (ZUG 2019). In particular the history of Vienna’s largest Danube tributary, Wien River, reveals striking insights into the transformation process from a formerly rural to an urban water body (urbanized surfaces make up about one-third of the catchment today, see Fig. 5.6). In contrast to many other urban rivers, Wien River showed both a torrential fluvial regime associated with intensive erosion/deposition processes and periods of water scarcity (Table 5.1, Fig. 5.1). Despite being a rather small water body, its dynamic nature posed threats such as inundations and land erosion to numerous forms of human uses. Offering the particular merits of a long-term perspective, our study covers a large pre-­ industrial phase which seems vital to placing today’s techno-river in deep historical context. It can draw upon a wealth of sources and scholarship which make it a rewarding object for interdisciplinary long-term socio-­ ecological research (e.g. Kortz 1905; Békési 2010; Pollack 2012; Pollack et al. 2016).

The River as Energy The city of Vienna, based on the fortified Roman military camp of Vindobona, became the residence of the Babenberg dynasty in 1145. Evidence for watermills close to the fortified medieval city dates to the early thirteenth century. The Babenbergs as rulers of the Duchy of Austria

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Table 5.1 Historical and today’s hydromorphological characteristics of Wien River Characteristics

Historical

Today

Catchment size (km2) River length (km) River type Channel slope (‰) Channel pattern Max. river width (m) Mean discharge (m3/s) 100-year flood (m3/s)

223 36 Montane 4.4 Sinuous/braided 270 2.0–2.1 ca. 400 (?)

223 (87 in Vienna) 34 Montane 4.5 Linear straightened 30 1.3 325

cf. Hohensinner (2019a, 35)

Fig. 5.1  The Wien River and its location within the system of urban waterbodies around 1780. The river’s catchment is highlighted in blue; it extends beyond today’s city limits (black outline). (Source: Friedrich Hauer and Severin Hohensinner)

and territorial lords leased land around the city and along Wien River to several profane and religious landlords who, in turn, founded mills to process their own agricultural products and those of their tenants. They also gave some of these mills as fief to influential urban citizens and institutions (Lohrmann 1980, 5–6).

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Many of the medieval mills associated with the provisioning of urbanites or urban institutions were located along Wien River as it was close to the fortified city and well connected to agrarian areas and transport routes. The average discharge of 2000 litres per second and average slope of 4.4 m per km were appropriate to drive pre-industrial mills, but the highly dynamic flow regime and uneven distribution of discharge imposed many challenges on the millers. During dry spells in summer and autumn the strongly reduced amount of water often seeped away in the wide gravel bed. Intensive rainfall and thunderstorms often caused destructive and dangerous floods. Because of the impermeable underground of the river catchment, devastating flood waves hit the valley fast and vigorously (Hohensinner 2019a, 54–57). The river’s irrepressible fluvial dynamics in turn often changed the course of river arms, eroded banks and broke into millstreams. Sediments and gravel from the hilly catchment silted up in front of weirs and in the millstreams, making these structures inefficient over time. Millers adopted several strategies to deal with these fluvial processes. Practices and hydraulic infrastructure were characterized by the aim to level out dry seasons and floods. One result of the millers’ efforts to control the river to meet their requirements was an extensive structure of millstreams paralleling the river (Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 251). This structure was highly influential for the urban and suburban development of the river valley for centuries. Close to today’s city limits, the river left its narrow valley and entered an up to 900 m wide plain where it formed meanders and branched out into several arms. The oldest mills were most probably built along some of these side arms, which could drive undershot wheels without much modification of the riverbed (Lohrmann 1980, 5–6; Hohensinner 2019a, 54–59). In the decades and centuries to come, these side arms were steadily altered by landlords and millers to improve or at least maintain suitable working conditions. Already by the fifteenth century they had established a millstream system parallel to the riverbed from Hütteldorf, close to today’s city limits, down to the mouth of Wien River into a side arm of the Danube (today’s Donaukanal). The millstream, about 13.5 km long, traversed the main river arm at several locations where weirs directed the water from one bank to the other. Water from smaller tributaries was either diverted directly into the millstream or contributed to the flow of the main arm and was channelled out at the next weir (Fig. 5.2; Spitzbart-­ Glasl 2021, 142–151). As rivers tend to connect users along their entire course (Schmid 2009, 68–69), the extensive millstream bound together

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Fig. 5.2  The map shows the millstream traversing the main river arm at a weir between the Dorotheamühle in Gumpendorf (lower left corner) and the Heumühle in the suburb of Wieden in 1766 (W10 and W9 in Fig. 5.4). Weirs at Wien River were built with an angle of around 45% to the direction of flow, which reduced the risk of floods (compared to weirs constructed perpendicular to the direction of flow). (Source: Section of “Plan zum Gränz-Scheiding-Vergleich vom 6. Juli 1766 zwischen der Herrschaft Gumpendorf, Magdalenengrund und dem Magistrat”, F. Gruß, 1766, WStLA, Sign. 3.2.1.1.P1.277)

all of Wien River’s millers in a consistent process of conflict and cooperation, especially those located in a section that received water from the same weir. The construction of weirs to control the amount of water in the millstream and increase the useable head at the mill has been labelled as one of the key technical innovations of the Middle Ages by technical historians (Reynolds 1983, 62–69). The first edict on the operation of mills on Wien

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River dating from 1429 already mentions structures that directed water from the main river arm into the millstreams (brief uber das mülwerch auf der Wienn 1429, transcribed by Lohrmann 1980, 42–43). It is plausible that the first millers already built basic dams or weirs to improve water supply, hence engaging in cooperative practices. Maintenance and repair of the millstream was a time-consuming, exhausting and resource-­intensive task. The milling decree of 1429 regulated the concerted efforts of all millers along Wien River. Later agreements also involved other users in the maintenance of millstreams, such as craftsmen withdrawing water for cleansing processes (Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 200–205). The efforts for cooperative activities were counterbalanced by many advantages. Shared weirs resulted in lower maintenance costs for each miller and reduced flood risk for areas upstream to fewer spots. Long millstreams enabled landlords to locate their mills in some distance to the riverbed on less flood-prone ground and to make use of bigger heads (as the slope of the millstream was smaller than the slope of the river). An important benefit during dry seasons was the passing of water from one miller to the next. Small volumes of water could be concentrated in the narrow millstreams and were saved from seeping into the gravel of the natural riverbed. Moreover, water was withdrawn from other potential users, who would have extracted it for watering gardens or animals, for bathing or washing. Conflicts among millers, the author of a guidebook published in Vienna in 1865 advised, could be settled much easier than disputes between other people because they shared a similar view on the use of fluvial resources (Pohl 1865, 36–39). While this seems plausible, conflicts among millers were still frequent and could not always be mitigated by the Rat der Vierer, a committee of four experienced millers elected to supervise all works and settle disputes. A milling decree of 1672 therefore referred to the superordinate authority of “Wassergrafenamt” that decided on all water-bound conflicts. In 1749 this authority was replaced by the technical sections of the newly created Kreisämter, where public servants soon received standardized technical training to understand and rule on milling conflicts (Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 200–202). Despite all quarrel the layout of the millstream system proved effective for the use of hydro-energy and remained widely unchanged from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Figure 5.3 depicts the millstream system around 1825, but also relates to stretches already abandoned or not yet built at this time. Codes for specific mills in the text refer to this map, which also provides a list of mills along Wien River in its caption. Around

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M2

Hadersdorf M1

Mariabrunn

W27 Auhof

Hütteldorf W26 Baumgarten

W25 W24 Hacking

W23 Ober St. Veit

Pen

W22 Unter St. Veit

W21 Hietzing

1 km

Fig. 5.3  Spatial reconstruction of mill creeks and mills on Wien River, sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Hydromorphology and urban structures show the state of 1825. Millstreams and mills existing at that time are depicted in purple; already abandoned mills and millstreams are pictured in green. (Source: Friedrich Hauer and Christina Spitzbart-Glasl; Legend: Mills (dates according to first and last evidence, if not otherwise mentioned used for grain processing, Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 224–243): W1 Mühle am Schlifstein (1370–around 1600, also used as metal workshop); W2 Predigermühle (1290–around 1600); W3 Würzburgermühle (1394–around 1600); W4 Spitalsmühle (1217–1683/1684); W5 Royal mint (1676–1835); W6 Heiligengeistmühle (1274–1683/1684, also brewery); W7 Bärenmühle (1705–1856); W8 Schleifmühle (1417–1856, also used for polishing blades); W9 Heumühle (1326–1856); W10 Hof- or Dorotheamühle (1414–1847, in the seventeenth century at times used for metal processing); W11 Kirchenmühle (1357–1847); W12 Dominikanermühle (1357–1847); W13 Mollardmühle (1331–1847, at times also brewery, between 1679 and 1765 also used for metal

W20

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Donaukanal W1

fortified city centre W2 Linienwall (outer fortifications)

W5 W3 W6

Gumpendorf

W4

W7 W8 W9

Wieden

W10 enzing

W13

W12 W11

W15 W14

W19

Linienwall (outer fortifications)

W17

Schönbrunn W18 Palace

W16

Meidling

processing); W14 Leather factory (around 1800–1847, production of tanning agents); W15 Farbholzmühle (around 1800–around 1870, production of dye and tanning agents); W16 Rothe Mühle (1677–1756); W17 Mauerbach Mühle (1360–1604); W18 Steurer Mühle (1686/1687–1756); W19 Kattermühle (1311–1638); W20 Schleifmühle Hietzing (1467–1622, metal workshop); W21 Feistmühle (1346–1867/1886); W22 Feldmühle (1364–around 1886, from 1814 factory for the production of dye and tanning agents); W23 Neumühle (1803–around 1860); W24 Baumgartner Mühle (1494–around 1880); W25 Hackinger Mühle (1346–around 1890, from 1684 cooperation with leather factory for production of tanning agents, from 1848 solely production of dye); W26 Hütteldorfer Mühle (1437–around 1880, from 1599 also brewery, became one of the largest breweries of the Viennese area in the nineteenth century); W27 Gluthmühle (1661–around 1920))

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1800, W14 and the stretches providing mills W23 and W15 with water were added—both running in parallel to already existing millstreams and therefore suffering from water scarcity. The outermost site of Glut(h) mühle (W27) is first mentioned in 1661 but probably also dates to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Around 1600, the court’s council of war (Hofkriegsrat) decided to remove all buildings in front of the city’s fortification walls to create a free field of fire (Glacis) for defence against the Ottomans. Five of the most important mills for the provisioning of Vienna (W1–W4, W6) were removed and the millstream was filled up by the end of the seventeenth century (Hohensinner 2019a, 57; 2019b, 74–75). The poorly documented site of W17 probably deteriorated after having been damaged by a flood around 1600. Two mills located near Schönbrunn Palace and garden (W20 and W19) were abandoned in the first half of the seventeenth century in connection with the expansion of the palace. In 1756, Empress Maria Theresia closed their replacements (W18 and W16) that had received water by a partly underground millstream crossing the imperial garden (see Fig. 5.5). She ended the century-long competition for water between millers and gardeners by forced acquisition and subsequent demolition of the two mills (Hassmann 2004, 321–324). Locations of the other mills remained largely unchanged from the late Middle Ages to their abandonment in the nineteenth century, despite frequent changes in ownership and operation and the recurring damage of the buildings by fire and flood. The permanence of mill buildings was based on immaterial and material factors alike: the right to operate a mill (Mühlschlag) was bound to a certain geographical location (rather than a person or a building) and the relocation of the infrastructure supplying water and improving the amount of head was expensive or, especially in densely built-up urban environment, outright impossible (Kropač 1982, 30–31; Spitzbart-­Glasl 2021, 214–216). Most mills were used to grind grain into flour; although in some installations a part of the gears was used to drive other production processes: knifes and blades were polished from 1370 at the mill an dem Schlifstein (W1) and from 1570 at the mill in der Froschlacke (W8). The royal mint was located at W5 from 1678 until 1830, but part of the production process also took place at Dorothea and Mollard mill (W10 and W13) during some decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Breweries were located at W6, W13 and W26; at W10 oil seeds were mashed and at W25 the mill was partly used to process tanning agents for the nearby Lederey (a leather workshop founded in 1684). While the dominance of flour

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Fig. 5.4  Despite previous training, Wien River “ran wild” again. This 1717 map depicts the bend cut off in 1713 and newly planned regulation measures in today’s Schwarzenbergplatz area. (Source: Austrian State Archive (OeStA), War Archive, HKR 1717 Jänner 130 Exp.)

milling indicates a general shortage of available hydro-energy, the assignment of at least one of the gears to a second craft was a good strategy to make use of peaks in water supply and level out fluctuations in the demand of agricultural customers (Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 208–214). During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Wien valley changed from an agricultural to an industrialized area, craftsmen from other professions and early industrialists took over some of the mills. The production of flour was increasingly replaced by the production of chemicals for the leather and textile industry and the processing of metals (see Fig. 5.4). The remarkable continuity of this vast hydraulic structure on the large scale was paralleled by recurring changes on the small scale that were induced by the co-evolutionary interaction of human actors and river dynamics. Millers continuously tried to improve the course of millstreams in terms of gradient (reduce the slope as far as possible to increase the head at the mills) and course (reduce curves and straighten the course to achieve higher stream velocities) and safeguard the banks against erosion (Stummer 1847–1857, transcribed by Spitzbart-Glasl 2015; Spitzbart-Glasl and Pollack 2016, 367–368). Technical changes at the mills also required

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changes in the millstream system. As described above, in the late Middle Ages mills at Wien River usually featured four or five undershot wheels. Each of these wheels drove one gear for grinding grain or other production processes. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, millers and landlords implemented wheels with larger diameters and better performance. The number of wheels could be reduced to three or four (Buchinger et al. 2008, 161–165; Hassmann 2004, 87–89, 152). Overshot wheels used the potential and kinetic energy of the water more efficiently. They were implemented at mills with a head of more than 2.4 m. Hence, a change from undershot to overshot wheels was often connected with the attempt to maximize the available head at the mill. This could be achieved by changes in the slope of the millstream or the impoundment depth— which often had negative consequences on mills up- and downstream— and the enhancement of weirs—which increased flood risk in the surrounding area. Contemporary experts for mill laws described this change of a technical component as a major source of conflicts among millers (Schilling 1829, 20). Larger and heavier wheels required the continuous supply of higher amounts of water. This resulted in the need to control a larger share of the river’s discharge by means of higher weirs, impermeable millstreams and the appropriation of other sources such as springs or creeks (Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 163–170). The resulting hydraulic structures on Wien River have been exhaustively described in a mid-­ nineteenth-­ century technical survey. By that time the only millstream sections which still bore traces of their origin as side arms were those between the last mill and the mouth into the main arm (Stummer 1847–1857, transcribed by Spitzbart-Glasl 2015). Still, Professor Stummer’s study shows that fluvial dynamics and discharge variability could not be completely evened out. For many mills it is documented that each gear was still connected to one wheel—a technical solution that seems outdated when compared to contemporary literature but was very tolerant to irregular water supply. For the river’s physical characteristics and its ecosystems, the withdrawal of significant parts of the discharge, especially during dry seasons, was a major impact. Nineteenth-century profiles of millstreams and measurements of the water depth suggest that 40–75% of water at low and average flow conditions were deviated to the millstreams, leaving the riverbed almost dry (Spitzbart-Glasl 2021, 148). This not only destroyed habitat for aquatic life but also contributed to disastrous hygienic conditions, as waste and waste water from households and production processes that

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were dumped and discharged into the riverbed would not be swept away (Pollack et al. 2016, 336). During the nineteenth century Vienna faced several outbreaks of Cholera (1831, 1836, 1849, 1854/1855, 1866 and 1873). Public health experts, especially the Stadtphysikat (Vienna’s health administration), observed higher death rates close to Wien River and its millstreams. They reasoned that polluted water was seeping into the groundwater feeding the wells on which most urbanites depended for drinking water. After a flood in 1847 destroyed the weir close to the suburb of Meidling (supplying mills W10–W13), the city’s construction authority (Stadtbauamt) prohibited its reconstruction. It ordered to fill the millstream and to replace it by a street. Compensations were paid to the millers—all of this to reduce groundwater pollution. Gumpendorf weir, supplying the most urbanized stretch of the millstream (W7–W9), had been criticized for increasing flood risk during the eighteenth century but endured several flooding events after a more flood-resistant design with mobile locks had been built in 1818. In 1856 the construction authority nevertheless ordered its demolition to counter a recent Cholera outbreak. The small millstream supplying a leather factory at W15 was equally abandoned after being destroyed by a flood in 1875 (Spitzbart-­ Glasl 2021, 161, 205, 217). While mills located close to the city were for more than six centuries essential for the alimentation of its inhabitants, city authorities in the mid-­1800s could rely on railways and steamships to supply the city with flour from mills powered by more distant waters or steam mills powered by coal. Sanitary problems and changes in risk assessment due to settlement expansion in flood-prone areas could only be tackled at their precise locations, the millstreams. This perception put an end to the hegemony of the techno-river as energy provider. Between 1847 and 1875 milling installations on the urbanized stretch of Wien River were replaced by the emerging networked city. In the upstream and peripheral parts of the valley, millstreams slowly disappeared between pipes and sewers, railway lines, roads and industrial sites. The last mills were abandoned by their owners between 1880 and 1920. The decline of milling infrastructure gave way to an almost complete makeover of the river valley—the river as energy gave way to the river as infrastructure. Within a few centuries not only the materialities of the techno-river but also practices to control river functions were set up in a new way. Under the hegemony of mechanical hydropower use a group of millers regulated river dynamics, which were both a

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prerequisite and an obstacle for the harvest of riverine energy. When communal and state institutions drew up their new infrastructure projects, they had little need for these dynamics.

The Wild River, Tamed? The first tangible historical evidence of regulation measures on the Wien River dates back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. While the river was still largely untouched by hydraulic engineering measures, the millstreams accompanying it already represented a complex, artificially created fluvial system. Wien River was directly affected by this system, especially during low and medium flow, when as much water as possible was channelled into the millstreams. Then the river fell largely dry. This in turn favoured the mining of gravel and sand, which the river conveniently transported from the hinterland to the settlements along its course (Atzinger and Grave 1874, 14). The proximity to the city in this respect was advantageous but could quickly turn into the opposite during floods. In one such instance, shortly before 1713, the river eroded parts of the Glacis and washed out the outer fortification walls (Fig. 5.4; Eberle 1909, 264–265). Accordingly, the first documented river engineering measures were not subject to the jurisdiction of civil administrative institutions, but rather under that of the court’s council of war. To protect the city’s fortifications, a large river bend was straightened at today’s Schwarzenbergplatz and the old riverbed was dammed off. Available rubble from the city was also used to raise the banks. Three years later, however, Wien River broke through the newly constructed dam and flowed back into its old bed (Hohensinner 2019b, 73–74). In addition, it again began to form river bends. Despite several restorations of the straightened course, the war council was unable to solve this problem completely in the following decades due to the intensive river dynamics (Hummelberger and Peball 1974, 68). It was not until Wien River was straightened, deepened and narrowed at the Glacis in the 1780s that the danger was averted for the time being. This regulation work should probably be seen in connection with several extreme floods caused by an adverse climate phase. Starting in the late 1760s, “Little Ice Age-type” climate conditions negatively affected agricultural production and economic development in Central Europe (Pfister 2006; Pfister and Brazdil 2006). The already detrimental situation additionally worsened after the eruption of the volcano Laki at Iceland in

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1783–1784 (Brayshay and Grattan 1999). Between 1768 and 1785, thirteen floods occurred on the Wien River, six of them were particularly devastating (Hohensinner 2020). Although the population along the river suffered greatly from the associated devastation, there is no historical evidence that protective measures were taken. Instead, interventions focused on the imperial palace of Schönbrunn further upstream and outside the agglomeration at that time. The floods repeatedly inundated the park and the ground floor of the palace (Hohensinner 2019b, 76–77). As early as 1769, under the direction of hydraulic engineer Sigismund Hubert, the Wien was extensively regulated near the palace. The danger of flooding at the palace was partly self-inflicted, since it had been continuously enlarged from 1695 onwards (Hassmann 2004, 21). The extension of the palace and the landfill for the prestigious forecourt caused the complex to extend further and further into the river’s flood run-off area. To protect the palace complex, bank protection structures had to be built that diverted the river to the opposite bank, creating a large bay in the bank there (Fig. 5.5;

Penzing

Bank Scouring Clay Pit

Private Gardens

Mill (W21)

Hietzing Mill

Schönbrunn Palace

Cree

k

Mill (W18)

Mill (W16)

250 m

Fig. 5.5  Constriction of the flood run-off area on the Wien River due to the extension of Schönbrunn Palace on the one hand and the expansion of the gardens in the village of Penzing on the other (situation around 1755). The deflection of the river resulted in a scouring of the northern bank downstream of Penzing. (Source: Severin Hohensinner based on Reichstein 2016)

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Reichstein 2016, 70–71). The village of Penzing, where many servants working at Schönbrunn Palace lived, was also located on this bank. The residents also extended their gardens into the floodplain by filling in earth. This massively reduced the run-off area. At the narrowest point, it was constricted from about 150 m to 70 m in 1755. Such a reduction of the channel width inevitably leads to a delayed flood discharge and consequently to even higher water levels. Hence, the dangers during the climate-­ induced phase of increased floods from 1768 onwards were additionally exacerbated by human practices of land reclamation—the creation of representative stately facilities and gardens. Comprehensive regulation of the Wien River therefore became increasingly urgent in the perception of the authorities. The plans of architect Wilhelm Beyer from 1781 and court mathematician Jean-Baptiste Brequin from 1783 are well documented (Atzinger and Grave 1874, 14–16). Wilhelm Beyer, who was entrusted with the design of the imperial palace’s park, held a personal interest in the regulation as he owned a garden complex near the premises. His gardens were largely located in the former riverbed, for which he had the area filled in. The flood of 1785 dwarfed all previously recorded floods, once again submerging the palace and leaving devastation all along the river’s course. Beyer’s gardens were likewise destroyed (De Luca 1785, 44). The numerous floods since 1768 had caused river bends to widen and eroded pastureland, meadows and vineyards. In the process, the riverbed became wider and wider in some sections until new vegetated islands appeared in it. Despite the immense damage, none of the proposed ambitious regulation and flood protection projects were implemented. The population along Wien River continued to be defenceless against the floods. Between 1783 and 1825 alone, around 16 hectares of meadows and pastures along the river outside the Linienwall fortification line (today’s Gürtel belt road, compare Fig. 5.3) were lost due to bank erosion (Hohensinner 2019b, 78). It was not until a new series of floods from 1805 onwards, in which mill weirs were destroyed several times, that mill operators, neighbouring residents and Vienna’s health administration pressed ahead with regulation. A larger weir upstream of the palace was removed in 1808 and several massive dikes were built to straighten larger river bends (Atzinger and Grave 1874, 13). For centuries, the aforementioned weir represented a great potential danger for the palace and the villages downstream. Large amounts of gravel and sand were deposited in the weir’s reservoir, so that the Wien River reached a width of up to 280 m here. During major floods,

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these sediment masses could start moving and cause considerable damage further downstream. The example of this weir shows once again that human-made arrangements for the optimized use of natural resources are often associated with increased risks (Winiwarter et al. 2012, 119). Since 1805, the systematic regulation of the Wien River in the area of the suburbs (i.e. within the Linienwall) was discussed again. The health administration pushed the project primarily for hygienic considerations; it was finally implemented between 1814 and 1817 (Atzinger and Grave 1874, 17). In the process, the riverbed was redesigned with a uniform width, deepened and its banks were protected. This was the first major regulation project on Wien River that was not initiated and paid for by the Hofkriegsrat or the imperial court, but by the City of Vienna, highlighting the general trend of the city council’s increasing involvement in technological and sanitary planning. Outside the Linienwall, however, a general regulation concept was still not within reach. Too many actors with different interests were involved, as the suburbs and outskirts of Vienna had not yet been incorporated into the administrative municipal area. Apart from the Danube, until the 1860s there was no legal obligation for state authorities to become active in higher-level hydraulic engineering (Haidvogl 2019, 206–207). However, new impulses arose in an unexpected way in 1848: after the so-called March Revolution, when the impoverished proletariat revolted against the government, a job creation programme was initiated. In the course of this, further regulation work was carried out on the Wien River within the Linienwall (Atzinger and Grave 1874, 19). The greatest changes, however, resulted from the abandonment of the millstream system as described above. The demolition of weirs and the filling of the channels had a severe impact on the river, as it suddenly carried much more water and eroded gravel and sediment that had accumulated behind the weirs. Similar to present-day removals of dams of reservoirs, Wien River most likely reacted with retrograde, upstream channel erosion (Pizzuto 2002; Buchty-Lemke and Lehmkuhl 2018). The thereby mobilized sediments are typically deposited in a downstream river section with less channel slope. In the case of Wien River, the sediments probably accumulated close to the river mouth or in the Danube side arm Donaukanal, which posed new threats for navigation or flood risk prevention. After another great flood in 1851, a new attempt was made for a comprehensive regulation programme outside the Linienwall, but it was immediately put on hold. The intention was first to wait for the planning

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of the Empress Elisabeth Railway (today’s Westbahn), which was to parallel the river bed. The railway company refused to co-finance a regulation project with the affected municipalities in 1857 and only conducted hydraulic works where it was absolutely necessary for the railway construction (Atzinger and Grave 1874, 20). Since a regulation of the river according to uniform planning principles did not materialize, the growing number of residents along Wien River was obliged to bear the costs for bank protection measures themselves. This rapidly degenerated into uncoordinated activities. Some landowners protected their banks by planting willows, constructing embankments or bank walls. They did not consider an overall regulation scheme and were not all too particular about their plot boundaries. Others remained inactive. The people living along the river were primarily concerned with protecting their own properties, a purpose best served by diverting the current to the opposite bank—and a sure recipe for future flood disasters (Spitzbart-Glasl and Pollack 2016, 368). Until their administrative incorporation in 1890–1892, the suburbs along the outer Wien River were independent municipalities. Although they suffered from the dangers posed by the river, they could not agree on a common approach and certainly not on financing it. Only the river section near Schönbrunn Palace was sufficiently regulated (according to the time’s hydraulic engineering standards). Individual municipalities built local bank protection structures or constructed open-air baths in the former riverbed (Stummer 1847–1857, transcribed by Spitzbart-Glasl 2015, 166–167). By 1875, this had resulted in an extended patchwork of mostly wooden protective structures, partly impeding each other. This practice of piecemeal hydraulic engineering continued in the following years, when a comprehensive regulation project for the entire Wien River was finally discussed and drawn up (Willfort 1887). Analogous to the Viennese Danube regulation, on the Wien River old hydraulic engineering practices were continued until increasing land consumption and pressure of use made completely new planning paradigms virtually unavoidable (Hohensinner et  al. 2013b, 162). As urbanization soared, the pre- and early modern conceptions of the techno-river had reached their limits.

The River as Infrastructure In an unprecedented bid to deal with Wien River’s natural dynamics and hygienic flaws “once and for all”, Vienna’s construction authority carried out a comprehensive river-training over a staggering length of 17  km

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between 1894 and 1906 (Hohensinner and Hauer 2019, 102–109; Hauer 2019a). Celebrated as an engineering feat, the partly vaulted concrete channel radically changed the face of the city. Around 12 km of the urbanized corridor occupied by Wien River were rearranged by compressing the space it occupies to a 21 m-wide concrete channel, adding a parallel metropolitan railway line (Stadtbahn) and intercepting sewers to the profile. Vast flood relief basins in the outskirts were to buffer the water’s natural dynamics; a pipeline would carry process water collected in Wien River’s upper catchment to the city. Moving from a patchwork of interventions to a linear, catchment-wide comprehensive engineering project, this resulted in the river bed and the representative urban spaces following its course known today. It meant a massive upscaling of regulations and their spatial impact. Its prerequisites lay not only in the available engineering techniques of the late nineteenth century, but equally in the administrative expansion of the city limits (1890–1892) and a joint financial effort of the state (i.e. the crown), the province of Lower Austria and the city of Vienna. In the lower part of the river valley, the engineering project triggered massive urban renewal, remodelling large parts of the formerly neglected urban river space to become a prestigious boulevard. The modern techno-nature replacing the patchworked old river and its millstreams meant a radical break-up of hydrological interconnectedness and the manifold traditional ways of water use (watering animals, bathing, fishing, laundering etc.)—a process typical of modernity which may be dubbed “functional segregation” (Pollack et  al. 2016). Engineers and planners in charge at that time preferred to speak of “reassembling” the river or of its “improved redesign”. Sándor Békési (2010) aptly characterized this process as the reversal of the dialectical tension between city and river into an extreme form of technical transformation and control. The newly established large-scale linkage with formerly extra-urban environments is reflected in a highly specialized local disentanglement of functions. We will now elaborate on the far-reaching decoupling of urban flows and the functionalization of landscape along its most important aspects: water discharge, the redistribution of precipitation, hydraulic buffer spaces and urban renewal, railways and tourism. In the early 1800s Wien River was draining a surface of about 230 km2. The construction of intercepting sewers along both banks of some of its inner stretches started in 1831 (Cholerakanäle), literally cut out major areas of this hydrological system. Their waters were diverted to a

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man-­made structure that would be incorporated in the city-wide web of the waterborne sewerage system by the 1890s (Neundlinger et al. 2014). Consequentially, the enhancement and expansion of the existing sewers along Wien River became an important part of the regulation project. Except for heavy rain floods, when sewerage waters would (and were meant to) spill over to the new concrete channel, it was now kept free from this kind of pollution that had made up the river’s reputation as an urban cesspool and menace to public health in the preceding decades (Pollack 2012, 50–88). As settlement surface in the metropolitan area grew in the twentieth century, so did the number of households and buildings, the extent of surface sealed by asphalt and concrete and the water discharge into the sanitation system. Today, 55 km2 or about a quarter of the river’s natural hinterland is drained by Vienna’s sewers (Fig. 5.6). Grey- and blackwater

Fig. 5.6  The redistribution of the Wien River’s water since the late nineteenth century

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flows are structurally decoupled from Wien River and travel as far as 27 km to the central purification plant located on Donaukanal. Just as surface drainage has been technically detached from the river, the concrete bed is sealed off from any groundwater infiltration. Another intervention that redistributed water within and beyond the river’s catchment was the construction of the Wientalwasserleitung, an aqueduct that had been projected since the 1870s and was finally licensed in 1891 (Kortz 1905, 232). It was built and operated by the private Belgian Compagnie des Eaux de Vienne. Its concept was based on the construction of several reservoirs in the western Wien River valley, which were to retain natural run-off. A part of the stored water would be filtered, treated and piped to Vienna. In the city it was distributed to the western and central districts in its own pipeline network (Fig. 5.6). The aqueduct’s main customers were municipal facilities and businesses; water was delivered, for example, to train stations, public swimming pools, parks and numerous fire hydrants (WStLA 1932). Initially, the company had been granted the management of the entire catchment of the Wien River west of the city, a vast area of 181  km2. However, of the four planned reservoirs, only Wolfsgraben Reservoir (later renamed Wienerwaldsee) with a catchment of 55  km2 was built because Vienna’s dense supply situation considerably improved after the second municipal alpine water pipeline became operational in 1910. By 1958 the city authorities took over and upgraded the facilities of Wientalwasserleitung. The catchment of the Wolfsgraben Reservoir was declared a water protection zone in 1964. Up to 2004, when it was decided to close the waterworks, they supplied a small share (2.3% of total consumption in 2003) of drinking water for the city. While the closure ceased the utilization of Wien River’s water, it ended neither the city council’s administrative outreach nor the use of the existing infrastructures. The water protection zone persists, and the actual pipeline was re-used to carry alpine water to Vienna. In 2010, the reservoir was adapted for flood protection. The water level was lowered by 2.3 m, making retention space available without raising the dam. Wienerwaldsee is thus now one of the buffers for the dynamic natural discharge of Wien River and considerably contributes to flood control in the urban areas downstream. The urbanistic impact of the comprehensive river-training went far beyond the actual watercourse and its new containers. A multifunctional urban restructuring programme transformed the valley into a major traffic artery and sparked real estate development all along (Fig. 5.7). Since the

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Fig. 5.7  Techno-river and modular boulevard: the central stretch of the regulation project was paralleled by railway tracks and designed to be easily covered at will and need. So far, about 45% of this urban reserve space has been used. The section shown in this photograph (dating from around 1900) was vaulted in 1915. Today it mostly serves as a parking lot. (Source: Copyright Wien Museum, Inv.Nr. 108714/5)

1890s, 3 km of the river channel were covered, rendering the watercourse invisible in central parts of the cityscape. The additional surface won by vaulting was mostly dedicated to the ever-growing urban traffic and, from 1916 on, to Naschmarkt, an important inner-city food market. This far-reaching urban renewal programme depended on the precise control of Wien River’s natural discharge, which in turn required its own, functionally specialized realm in the project. Martin Paul, one of the chief supervising engineers, pointed to this indispensable, yet often neglected section of the techno-river: “The flood water reservoirs in Weidlingau have the important task of regulating or dividing the extraordinary floods before their further discharge to Vienna. […] The filling time of the reservoirs is two hours, and within this period the flood wave has already left its highest level, as many years of observations have consistently shown” (Paul 1905, 333–334). In the western periphery of the city (near the village of Weidlingau), extended basins to buffer flood peaks were necessary to gain prestigious

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inner-city space along and on top of the channel. We may think of them as compensation areas in a large-scale urban barter arrangement. Regulation works reduced the area occupied by Wien River downstream of the reservoirs from about 70 ha in 1875 to about 25 ha. The gain in urban terrain of 45  ha contrasts with the 37  ha of today’s flood water reservoirs in Weidlingau. Recent interventions demonstrate that the quest to manage flash floods is an ongoing one. They became more pressing in recent decades with bids to make some outer sections of the River’s channel accessible to the public and rising concerns over water quality. As mentioned above, Wienerwaldsee was incorporated in the sequence of flood buffers only in 2010. It finds a sophisticated downtown counterpart in Wiental Kanal, a 3.5  km long flood relief buffer for the sewerage system built between 1997 and 2006, up to 38 m below ground level (Fig. 5.8). One century after the completion of the great regulation, this project aimed at the perfection of the

Fig. 5.8  Wiental Kanal is the newest component of the techno-river’s flood buffer system. It is filled with wastewater during heavy rainfall, which is later pumped to the regular sewer system. (Source: Heinz Tesarek and Wien Kanal, photo taken in 2015)

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decoupling of the river and adjacent sewers. Along its course, Wiental Kanal keeps the river free of wastewater spillover even during extreme precipitation which improves both water quality and the efficiency of the sewerage management. Railroads, by far the most powerful terrestrial transportation technology in the late nineteenth century, exercised great influence on the functional differentiation along Wien River. The entanglement of railroad and river started in 1858 with the Empress Elisabeth Railway mentioned above. It made the Vienna Woods accessible as a recreational landscape for the ever-growing urban population. While the areas downstream of the Weidlingau reservoirs were absorbed by the emerging metropolis, the upper valley became one of Austria’s prime tourist regions. In 1901, the westbound transport axis was reinforced by Stadtbahn, which enjoyed great popularity as an “excursion railroad” (Békési and Hradecky 2018) and triggered a wave of upper-class suburbanization along Wien River. Designed by famous Art Nouveau-architect Otto Wagner, the downtown installations of the railway formed an integral part of Wien River’s comprehensive redesign as metropolitan infrastructure (Fig. 5.7). Around 1910 up to ten million people visited the Vienna Woods per year, frequenting hiking trails, excursion sites, classic summer resorts and even a few sanatoria (Matzka 2007). Clean water, tranquillity and good air, coupled with easy access by train—environmental qualities had become a commodity in the era of industrialization. Nature was transformed into something that could be experienced and consumed, hence also something that needed protection and marketing. The “Wien River valley tourist association” was eager to do away with its water-related image problems, emphasizing in 1903 that the “so-called danger of flooding in the valley has been completely eliminated by the regulation of Wien River”. It presented the dams and flood reservoirs in Weidlingau as “admired works of local technology, [that] will find recognition as true sights and ornaments of our region, as evidence of the fatherland’s orderly water management and as novel, very instructive points of interest” (Wienthal-Verein 1903, 6). Just as the locomotives steaming and smoking alongside Wien River these “ornaments” of modern hydraulic engineering were a prerequisite for the functionalization of the valley’s landscape. It took some rhetorical effort, though, to make them compatible with the romantic imagery of nature and “authentic country life” that was marketed to visitors. At the other extreme of the former catchment, the staging of aquatic nature found its metropolitan counterpart in the lowest 1.1  km of the

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Fig. 5.9  The unfinished portal of Wien River in Vienna’s Stadtpark designed by Friedrich Ohmann and Josef Hackhofer. By means of a small weir downstream, the bottom of the riverbed was meant to be fully covered by a still water surface. This would have added to the desired imagery of tamed waters and allowed for ice-­ skating in winter. (Source: Friedrich Hauer, photo taken in 2019)

techno-­ river. Representative waterfronts, walkways and bridges were designed for Vienna’s central city park (Stadtpark). They were praised as a substitute for the loss of the picturesque old riverbanks. An impressive portal structure reminiscent of Baroque grotto architecture was built in 1906 but never fully completed (Fig. 5.9). It marked not only the end of the vaulted stretch but was devised as a monument to the whole titanic 12-year urban transformation project (Békési 2010; Pühringer 2002). The architects made it their programme “to depict in the river prospect […] the conquest of the force of nature” (Ohmann 1907, 14), while creating a romanticizing antithesis to the otherwise purely technical design principles of the regulation project. Ever since, the lowest stretch of the watercourse is embedded in a beaux-arts leisure environment, forming an

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“oasis” for stressed-out city dwellers. In a condensed form it is exactly what was offered to urbanites in the upper regions of Wien River valley. Between the woodland summer resorts and the city park, between Wienerwaldsee and Wienzeile, the transformation of the valley decisively shaped the urban morphology and functional development of the entire region.

Conclusions Our interdisciplinary longue durée study demonstrates how the shifting connections between natural, technological and social processes (and their material precipitates) impacted on and were structured by the dynamics of urbanization. Over several centuries, urbanites struggled to come to terms with Wien River’s energy. Their bid to store, harvest, tame, deflect or channelize it materialized in extended, carefully crafted, yet sometimes dysfunctional and contested entanglements between nature and culture, between fluvial and urban space. It was only in the late 1800s that a comprehensive project to “train” the unruly waters was implemented. It not only “disassembled” what had hitherto been one river (its water, its space, its usage, its image), but extended the scope of intervention to the entirety of the catchment and beyond. It even tried to emulate natural qualities that were deemed desirable—either by landscape protection or by technology. While in the eyes of many contemporaries this absorption of Wien River into the wider “networked city” of sewers, water pipes and railway lines maybe really was “the ultimate celebration of the technological approach to nature that became prevalent in the modern city” (Soens et al. 2019, 7), it certainly was not the end point (and not even the apogee) of this approach. “Reassembling” the Wien River into a versatile techno-river brought with it the need for continuous maintenance and occasional enhancements. The fin-de-siècle design scheme set hard and far-reaching limits to all further attempts to change its appearance and/or functional parameters. This counteracts recent efforts to re-naturalize parts of the fluvial corridor and make it more accessible to urbanites. Even seemingly local interventions are intrinsically connected with the techno-river’s re-assembled catchments. On multiple scales sophisticated artificial structures mediate between different layers of this hybrid hydraulic landscape. From those usually hidden to those most prominently on display, the present techno-­ river is best conceptualized as one big entangled “wild artefact”.

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Various actors viewed the Wien River according to their interests and demands. Each of these views fragmented and exploited the river as a varying resource. The transformation proceeded accordingly, in a feedback between ideologies and materialities. From medieval guilds managing water levels to civil engineers surveying hydrographic conditions and infrastructural potentials, the focused perceptions hinged these two prerequisites of any intervention into socio-natural sites (Winiwarter and Schmid 2020). This also limits the historian’s possibilities. Marginalized, often non-instrumental perceptions would only occasionally gain enough support to become archival documents. What can be traced back in time therefore testifies to the perceptions that prevailed. By upscaling the interventions to the entire river catchment (and beyond), powerful actors on communal and state levels remained as the only ones who could muster the immaterial and material resources necessary for transformation on such scale. That way, the multiple rationalities of (co-operating as in millers or conflicting as in early industrial) actors were excluded from further intervention. The large-scale transformation offered possibilities for state actors not just to exercise their power, but to put it on display. It also showed the limits of this power. Like any other intervention of earlier times it led and leads to side effects beyond the capacity of the intervening actors. “Re-naturalizing” the river is not only a futile attempt, it is a misnomer. The newest demand on the river is to support urban recreation made attractive by furnishing it with paraphernalia of “naturalness”. While hiding its techno-nature, the recreational water course depends on techno-nature’s functioning—like many of its predecessors. Looking back on several centuries of Wien River’s transformations reveals not only the changing conditions of exchange between human and non-human agency but underlines the potentials of a wide temporal and spatial scope in urban environmental studies.

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CHAPTER 6

River Lines and Railway Lines: Colonial Military Technonatures in the Making of Sudan’s Capital Region, 1880s–1920s Samuel Grinsell

On 2 September 1898, some miles north of the confluence of the Blue and White Niles  (Fig. 6.1), an army of British, Egyptian and Sudanese troops inflicted a devastating defeat on the forces of the Khalifa, the ruler of independent Sudan since 1885. Thousands were killed, including many wounded who were put to death rather than being taken prisoner. “It was not a battle, but an execution”, journalist G.  W. Steevens approvingly reported (1898, 264). British soldiers and commanders saw the reconquest of Sudan as revenge for the death of General Charles Gordon, killed in 1885 in the defence of Khartoum (Nicoll 2013; on Gordon as hero see Jones 2015). Victory depended on the cutting edge of colonial technology (Headrick 1981, 2009): the maxim gun, military intelligence and the railway. Besides avenging the 1885 humiliation, the British were invading Sudan in order to extend their control over the waters of the Nile, vital to

S. Grinsell (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_6

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Fig. 6.1  The Nile from Metemma to Khartoum, 1898, Intelligence Division, War Office, British National Archives, M.P.  HH413. Reproduced with kind permission

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Egyptian agriculture (Tvedt 2004; see also Derr 2019; Mitchell 2002). In the coming years and decades, colonial rule reshaped the built environment at the Nile confluence. This was not just a meeting point of waterways, but also a technonatural knot (Ingold 2015, 22–26) where river and railway both contributed to the making of urban space. This chapter traces the entanglements between these two systems, or, one might also say, of two lines in their making of urban space. The anthropologist Tim Ingold has picked up and followed the line as the thread that weaves the worlds in which we live: the lines of gesture, the lines we walk, the thick tangles of lines that make up surfaces (Ingold 2007, 2013; on lines of thought see Brodsky Lacour 1996). We might also think of Donna Haraway’s (2016) playful string figures as webs of lines or Doreen Massey’s (2005) insistence on the role of the trajectory in making space. These thinkers all evoke lines for their own purposes, which do not necessarily match, but for all of them thinking with lines opens up ways of enlivening their accounts of agency, making and space. They take us out of static or mechanical thinking and towards knotting and/or criss-­ crossing interactions leading to loose-ends and open possibilities. In this sense, to think of the past of a city might also be to gather up some of the lines that have made it, to trace them and account for their modes of interweaving. To think of Sudan’s capital region in this way leads us to ask what kind of role a river or a railway might have in the making of a city. And, if we are interested in developing an idea of cities as technonatural spaces, we might be especially interested in asking what it means for these different lines to come together and interact. The complex colonial (and postcolonial) history of Sudan’s capital region has often been told by those engaged in shaping the cities of the confluence (for more information on the general history, see Daly 1986, 1991; Collins 2008). Early histories of Khartoum were produced by the same colonial officials who held power in Sudan: town engineer William H. McLean and provincial governor Edwin Sarsfield-Hall both worked on histories of the colonial development of the capital region. McLean’s work found more public audiences and will be examined more closely below; Sarsfield-Hall never found a publisher for his proposed pamphlet on the planning of Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman, but preparatory notes and drafts are preserved in the Sudan Archive at Durham University (Sarsfield-Hall, 1933,  Sudan Archive, Durham University [hereafter SAD] 679.1). Later twentieth-century work by the likes of Gamal Hamdan (1960) and Valdo Pons (1980) often started from an

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interest in postcolonial urbanism in Sudan and explored history in order to understand this. Although these scholars took more interest in the people of Sudan than McLean or Sarsfield-Hall, their accounts retain much of the colonial officials’ desire for order and control. By the end of the century, scholars such as Adil Ahmad (2000) and Bushra Babiker (2003) were explicitly contrasting the achievements of colonial planners with the failures of the postcolonial regime. D’Errico (2023) offers a new engagement with Omdurman, but her contrast between “tradition” and “modernity” still tends to cast the colonizers as the agents of the modern. In short, much work on the history of Sudan’s capital region can be considered an intervention into its future. At times, these studies evoke the colonial period not for consideration on its own terms but in contrast to more recent failures of postcolonial governments. This chapter, instead, offers an account of the colonial making of urban environments in order to shed light on cities as products of military, political and environmental power. It draws on thinkers in the emerging field of environmental humanities to offer an urban history in which the river and the railway act in the making of space. This chapter contributes to the literature on urban Sudan by tracing more closely than existing work the entanglements of human action within webs of material and non-human agency. This chapter uses colonial sources to illustrate the ways in which the River Nile and the Sudan Military Railway shaped the urban region at the Nile’s confluence. These are inherently elite sources that directly give voice to the powerful and their concerns, not those of the colonized people living under their rule. The latter do appear: as a problem to be solved or in resistance to the attempted actions of those in power. By using these sources, I am not asserting that we ought to spend more time listening to colonial voices. But the rich record of the experiences of colonizers and Western travellers in Sudan does allow us to read histories of the power of water and infrastructure, if we dig under the bombastic tone of the documents themselves. I will draw especially on writings by the town planner William McLean and the tourist Emily Hornby, a former mountaineer who travelled the Nile Valley in the early twentieth century. These sources are not directly concerned with how water and the railway made urban space, but in their margins, we can find the technological and the material acting together in making Sudan’s Capital Region. In seeking to adopt terminology from anthropology for use in historical analysis, we must be alert to what is lurking in the margins of our sources. The colonial setting perhaps makes this especially clear, but elite discourses and resources drive

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much of the production of urban space and are the most easily traced even in democratic nations. It is hoped, therefore, that this chapter will speak not only to historians of Sudan or colonial cities, but also anyone thinking about environmental histories of modern urbanism. The next section will explore the possibilities offered by thinking with lines, before we progress to a detailed exploration of the site in question through specific sources.

Lines, Knots, Tangles and Meshwork The lines of river and railway are not abstract. They are not the depthless trajectories of Euclidean geometry, but all too material in their figuration. In the case of the Nile, even to imagine it as a line on a map is to risk simplifying how it acts in the world, especially in the millennia before its flow was reshaped by twentieth-century dams and barrages. This water entity was at times a wild surge in full flood, saturating the land on which Sudan’s capitals were built and sweeping rich soils northwards to Egypt and the Mediterranean, but at others a trickle, the Blue Nile in particular adding very little water to the river’s main channel in its dry season. The White Nile, which has a less powerful flood but provides more water in the low season, emerges from rich wetlands known as the Sudd. Here, the water moves so slowly that it is hard to think of this as part of a river system at all, let alone the world’s longest. The cartographic line might trace one moment in the active movement of the Nile, but we must not reduce the latter to the former. The river remakes its line through the earth as it flows, and the line on the map is merely a shadow of this, made by the cartographer’s hands, materials and tools; it is not the river itself (da Cunha 2018; Ingold 2007, 60–63; on Nile environments see Dumont 2009). In Ingold’s (2007, 41–44) terms, the river is a thread while its representation in a map is a trace. The railway might appear, by comparison, to be a more orderly line, but it too is distinctly multiple in its materiality. It was laid by Egyptian and British soldiers. Its growth allowed them to advance into the desert while remaining connected to the bustling supply sheds of Wadi Halfa, the southernmost town in Egypt whence came their food, coal, water and equipment. Both lines exist as threads (water mixed with silt in the case of the river, rails and sleepers in the case of the railway) and also leave traces on paper and earth (where it has been packed and levelled to support the railway, or where the river has carved out its bed by redistributing soil). Both lines possess a temporal as well as spatial significance: the seasonal flooding of the river, the time taken by trains to travel the rails

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(this itself shaped by such material considerations as supplies of coal and water). Mapmakers then make traces on paper, and these traces return to the earth through the maps’ influence on the production of space. When colonial builders take planning documents and make them material, they have transformed a trace into a thread. Thus, to ask how these two lines made colonial space is to ask how they acted materially on the earth and also how their tracing into colonial cartography played a role in the planning, construction and use of the built environment. In this sense, the cultural is not separate from the material but essentially of it and always already engaged with it (LeCain 2017). These two lines are not being contrasted, with one as techno and the other standing for nature. The aim of the term technonature is to escape such binaries, to plunge our thinking more deeply into the materiality of envirotechnical relations (White and Wilbert 2009). The meaning of the River Nile cannot be taken as given, it is not natural: that is to say that colonial relations to the river were mediated through the technologies available to know and shape it, notably hydrological engineering, dams, cartography, soil sampling and depth measuring. Epistemological systems do not simply describe relationships that are already given, but bring them into being by enabling some kinds of responsiveness and precluding others. This is a complex argument but perhaps most cogently presented in Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2006), in which they show that the insights of quantum physics, in which to measure can change the result, reveal a general feature of knowledge making rather than something specific to quantum scales. As Dilip da Cunha (2018) has argued, to think of a river only as the water that flows through a particular channel, rather than including (for example) the rain that becomes the river, is a feature of Western thought, neither common sense nor universal (see also Sen 2019; Knoll et al. 2017; Pritchard 2011). The Nile as we think of it, then, is already shaped by technologies of knowing. Ontology and epistemology are not firmly separable things, but richly entangled (Gandy 2008). In thinking with lines, we must be alert to the knot and the tangle. By knot, I mean the assemblages that are brought together at least somewhat intentionally; the overall structure or organization of an urban site might be one example of a knot, but a similar logic also works at the smaller scale of individual buildings. These too are intentional gatherings of material and energy. The tangle, on the other hand, may resemble the knot in that it is an entwinement of lines, but it is certainly not intentional. The specific social interactions of urban life always remain a tangle, even if those in

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authority seek instead to knot them. The materiality of the Nile entangles Sudan’s capital region in a far wider expanse of connection than any imposed knot can take account of. Even though the railway is part of a military knotting of Sudan to the British Empire, it too is also entangled in forces beyond those that colonialists can grasp. Both knot and tangle are more expressive of the variety of possibilities in spatial or temporal intersection than the word node, which historians often use to describe the meeting points in a network (e.g. Carminati 2017; Sivasundaram 2017; see also Latour 2005). Ingold (2007, 80–84) has argued that the term meshwork (adopted from Lefebvre 1991, 117–18) captures these multiple connections in a more satisfying way than does network, by putting more emphasis on the lines than the nodes. For our purposes, it matters little if we call the assemblages produced by multiple knotted and entangled lines, meshworks or networks: what is vital is to follow the lines and so trace the ways in which they have been tangled or tied together. Doing so will, it is hoped, contribute both to the history of Sudan’s Capital Region and to our conceptual approaches to the technonatural making of cities.

The Site Riverine relations and transformations are vital to any account of the modern history of Sudan (Tvedt 2004, 2011; Ertsen 2016; Collins 1990). The region was conquered by Egypt in the 1820s, an invasion motivated by desire for control over the Nile’s floodwaters, on which Egyptian agriculture depended. By extending political power southwards, the governor of Cairo, Mohammad Ali, sought to secure advance warning of the size of the Nile flood and ensure that as much of it as possible would arrive in the north of Egypt to feed the fertile soils of the delta. The Egyptian military built a base to the south-east of the confluence that developed into Khartoum, the first capital of Sudan. Over subsequent centuries, power over Sudan remained concentrated in this region, although the hold of the urban centre over such a large country was often weak. In the 1880s, an Islamic leader called Muhammad Ahmad, and hailed by his followers as The Mahdi, led Sudan to independence, expelling British-led Egyptian forces. His followers built a new capital, Omdurman, on the western banks of the confluence. When Anglo-Egyptian forces seized control of the Sudan again in 1898, they returned the capital to Khartoum on the south-­ east bank, rebuilding it as a vision of colonial power. They also built a

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Fig. 6.2  Map of Khartoum and Omdurman in 1905. From E.  A. W.  Budge, Cook’s Handbook for Egypt and Sudan, (London, 1906), public domain, Wikimedia Commons. Note the railway running to Halfayah, the village around which Khartoum North grew

railway station to the north-east of the confluence: the industrial area around this grew rapidly to become Khartoum North. Thus, by the early years of the twentieth century, there were three settlements grouped around the confluence, constituting a connected urban system, but deeply divided in terms of inhabitants and building types (Hamdan 1960; Ahmad 2000) (Fig. 6.2). Conquering British and Egyptian forces centred their power at the confluence because they were most concerned with the Sudan as a space through which the Nile’s waters flowed. “Khartoum and Omdurman are what they are because here the two great tributaries join their forces and set out across the waterless desert on their great mission to Egypt”, British statesman Sidney Peel (1904, 184) told his readers, relegating Sudan to an empty wasteland and granting a peculiar adventuring sense of mission to the Nile itself. William Willcocks (1904, 61) went so far as to describe Egypt as “nothing more than the deposit left by the Nile in flood.” These reductionist evocations of water’s importance imagine the river as a

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pipeline supplying the agricultural lands far to the north, and much colonial engineering was directed at producing a Nile that could fulfil this role. But the rivers arrived at the confluence with their own material histories, dragging soil from distant regions with them. The Rwenzori Mountains lie on the equator, along what is now the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. From this wet and biodiverse landscape flow the headwaters of the White Nile into the Ugandan lake systems and from there, in various streams, to the river itself (Eggermont et al. 2009). This journey is far from straightforward, however: before becoming the White Nile, the water that flows from the lakes forms a wide marshland called the Sudd. The rich plant and animal life of this region would no doubt be surprised to learn that the slow-moving water was on a “mission” to feed fields of cotton far to the north. Much colonial hydrological effort was spent trying to transform this waterscape, to drive through canals that could provide perennial irrigation in Egypt and the north of Sudan. From the 1920s on, shifts in relations between Britain, Egypt and Sudan led to the colonial power becoming more interested in securing water for Sudan itself, and to a certain extent with working on more locally grounded plans for water management, moving away from imagining the Nile as a pipeline to Egypt (Tvedt 2004; Collins 1990; Ertsen 2016). The Sudd ensures that there is always water flowing into the White Nile, which outside flood season provides most of the water to the confluence. When the flood comes, however, it is largely fed by the Blue Nile from the east. In contrast to the biologically rich lakes that feed the White Nile, Lake Tana, from which the Blue Nile flows, lies in a semi-arid region and is poor in nutrients (Vijverberg et  al. 2009). Wetlands around the lake are absorbed by its expansion during the rainy season (May-October, with a peak in July-August). The rivers that feed the lake carry heavy sediment loads into it during the rains, and the Blue Nile, the only flow out of the lake, likewise carries much sediment on its meandering flow south, west, and then north to the confluence. In full flood, it is strong enough to hold back the White Nile, its waters sweeping between Khartoum and Khartoum North and on northwards, while the less powerful flow from the White Nile is barely able to push its way into the Nile’s main channel. By centring their power at this confluence, Egyptian and British regimes ensured that they had early news of what the flood would bring to Egypt, but also found themselves encountering a set of environmental relations that were not always conducive to urban living.

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Colonial Invaders, Travellers and Town Planners Emily Hornby, who had been a mountaineer of some repute (Roche 2013), first travelled up the Nile in the winter of 1904–1905. Her train to Sudan’s capital region from Wadi Halfa on Egypt’s southern border rode the same rails that had carried Kitchener’s troops to the confluence six years earlier. Hornby notes the difficulty of building a railway across the desert at speed, and that although prices were high the government ran the service at a four-figure loss “as coal is an enormous price, and water has to be carried, as the district traversed is largely without water” (Hornby, 1905, SAD 880/10/165). Coal power is a form of hydropower: to use the heat energy released by burning coal, it has to be transformed into kinetic energy in the form of steam (Barak 2020, chapter 1). The building of the Sudan Military Railway was celebrated as a great achievement of colonial technological power in British accounts of the conquest of Sudan. “Everybody knew that a railway from Halfa across the desert to Abu Hamed was an impossibility—until the Sirdar turned it into a fact”, wrote G. W. Steevens (1898, 45–6). The Sirdar was the highest ranking general in the Egyptian Army; Steevens was referring to Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan. Steeven’s praise became so lavish that he portrayed Kitchener himself as if he were a piece of state-of-the-art military machinery: He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind… His precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No.1, courshors concours, the Sudan Machine. (Steevens 1898, 46; emphasis original)

Colonial ideology revelled in the creation of a mechanized world, so much so that here we see a man idealized to such an extent that he becomes a machine. His supposed mastery of the world around him, through the building of a railway no one thought was possible, is projected back into a mastery over his own character; the conquest of the unruly landscape and peoples of the Nile Valley becomes rooted in a supposed conquest of the human self (Cain 2006). As we trace the ways in which the Nile and the railway made urban space, we should also remember that some accounts

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of colonialism celebrate the heroes of empire as technonatural supermen. To remake the world into something harder, more predictable, less fluid, rhythmic and changeable was central to the ambitions of many of those who promoted high imperialism and modernity more broadly (Plumwood 1993; Latour 1993). Hornby arrived not in Khartoum itself, then being rebuilt and not yet reached directly by the railway, but in the small settlement then known as Halfaya, amid “the Government workshops and stores, dockyards, Artillery Station, [and] Custom House” that would grow into Khartoum North (Hornby, 1905, SAD 880/10/182). From here, she looked across the Blue Nile to find an “exceedingly pretty” view of tree-lined avenues, houses with gardens, and large government buildings (175-6). The sound of military exercises made Hornby reflect on how recently war had ruined the region: “Peace, order and comfort reign at Khartoum now, and it is pleasant to us to feel that this change had been effected by the work of the English” (177). Rather than hearing the sounds of occupying forces as an assertion of the bloodthirsty power underpinning British control over Sudan, she instead takes it for a sign of peace and order. In Hornby’s thinking, the built environment of colonial Khartoum obscures the blood on which it was constructed. Later on in her trip, Hornby would encounter a more overt demonstration of British military force. Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi, the religious leader who had led Sudan’s rebellion against Egyptian rule, had died in 1885 only a few months after the Battle of Khartoum. His tomb had been one of the major buildings of Omdurman, a conical dome rising high above a city that was predominantly made up of single-story, mud-brick dwellings. After the Battle of Omdurman, the tomb was desecrated and Ahmad’s corpse thrown into the river. The building was left in ruins, in Hornby’s words, “to prevent the fanatical Mahdists from making it into a shrine and place for pilgrimages” (Hornby, 1905,  SAD 880/10/186). Instead, it became a site of pilgrimage for colonial tourists like herself, who signed a visitors’ book in what had been the house of the Khalifa, the Mahdi’s successor. Thus, the colonial authorities not only demonstrated their power over life and death, what Achille Mbembe (2019) would call necropolitics, but also asserted control over memorialization. Military technology could devastate the built environment, and if that served the purposes of those in power, then they would preserve the devastation as a symbol of their rule (Hristova 2016).

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The divisions between Omdurman, Khartoum and Khartoum North emerged from colonial attitudes to town planning, and further developed and inscribed spatial divisions created by the river and the railway line. The colonial regime put in place building regulations that determined where larger, more permanent structures could be built based on land classification. In Khartoum there were four classes: first, second, third and “government land”; Omdurman and Khartoum North had only the latter two (McLean 1980). These rules were intended to ensure that Khartoum would be the grander of the three confluence cities. The separation of urban space by the river was, thus, the starting point from which a distinction in the built environment was elaborated. This can be found in colonial accounts of the history of the city and the British role there, even if these writings were intended as celebrations of colonial rule. The town engineer from around 1906 was William H. McLean, who later took up positions in Jerusalem and Alexandria; in the 1920s he wrote up his experiences as a PhD thesis and later book (McLean 1930). His writings can help us understand not only colonial attitudes to urban space, but also how history could be used as a promotional tool to spread narratives of progress under empire. In the early 1910s, McLean wrote two conference papers that give accounts of Sudan’s capital region. The first, “The Planning of Khartoum and Omdurman in the Earliest Period of British Rule”, was presented at the Town Planning Conference of 1910; the second, “Town Planning in the Tropics, With Special Reference to the Khartoum Development Plan”, had a somewhat broader scope and appeared in The Town Planning Review in 1913. In this latter article, McLean draws a connection between racial groups and climatic zones: The principles of Town and House Planning require certain modifications in the tropics, and the problems are intensified by the fact that usually a portion of the population are not in their natural zone, and are, therefore, not in adjustment with their environment. Special consideration and provision has to be made if this portion of the population is to enjoy even a fraction of the comfort of the native population who are adjusted to the climatic conditions. (McLean 1913, 225)

McLean, it seems, wants us to imagine that the delicacy of the colonizers justifies putting their comforts above those of the colonized, who are assumed to be more comfortable than their rulers because they are in their

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“natural zone”. Similarly, he claims that “natives” preferred to live in Omdurman or Khartoum North and points out that many of them travelled from there to Khartoum daily, but fails to mention that in 1902 colonial officials had ejected any colonized person from Khartoum who was not either a householder or living with their employer (Stanton 1902). By McLean’s logic, this focus on European comfort had nothing to do with power but was, rather, a response to the effects of climate on White health: “the direct effect of tropical light on such men is injurious, causing nervous and other diseases,” he claims. The driving principle of planning in the tropics is therefore, according to McLean in 1913, to create zones that can protect European health. The body of the colonizer, machine-­ strong in Steevens description of Kitchener, becomes a delicate vessel in need of protection from the rigours of the tropics in McLean’s account of town planning priorities. Despite this apparent contradiction, both of these moves serve the power of the colonizer by marginalizing the colonized. McLean’s account of the history of the region before the Anglo-­ Egyptian invasion was also designed to serve colonial narratives of progress. As Omdurman had been the capital of independent Sudan, and Khartoum was being rebuilt as a grand new colonial capital, this history of course had to denigrate the former and present the latter as a great achievement. McLean tells us that much of the material for the building of Omdurman came from the ruins of Khartoum, but also claims that the former began as “a countless agglomeration of straw huts, but these were ultimately replaced by the mud houses which are still to be seen.” It is not entirely clear why either straw or mud constructions would have relied on the ruins of the previous capital. Furthermore, if Omdurman were nothing but a haphazard reconstruction of Khartoum on a new site, which seems to be what McLean is implying, then what does this subsequent change in building material signify? He is at pains throughout to present Omdurman as unplanned or disorganized, in contrast to the colonial rationality of Khartoum, but in this he again runs up against inconvenient comparisons. He criticizes the Khalifa, for example, for moving existing homes in order to make way for broad streets, cutting a dictatorial line through Omdurman. But this was not unusual, being precisely how many of the boulevards of Europe were created (on the relationship between European and colonial urbanism, see Nasr and Volait 2003; Bigon and Katz 2015; Bremner 2016). The colonial rulers of Khartoum, by contrast, unwilling to spend much on the city, would create new roads by drawing

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them on maps and then banning building or repairs on the line of this imagined road (to compare a similar case, see Bissell 2010 on Zanzibar). It is hard not to think that if the Khalifa had done the latter and the British the former, then it would still have been the British who came in for praise from McLean. By writing the history of Sudan’s capital region, the colonial official seeks to control the narrative of urbanization in addition to the material making and political governance of the city. The line of the road returns us to the line of the railway. Between 1907 and 1909 the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company built a rail bridge over the Blue Nile which allowed the construction of a railway station in Khartoum itself for the first time. The new line ran to the south of the city, cutting across land intended for building. McLean described the system of land classification in 1913 and the possible changes to come: land nearest the river was first class, to the south of this was a strip of second-class land, and this was followed by third-class land  (Fig. 6.3). In first- and second-class areas, all houses were required to be built “of brick, stone or concrete, while those

Fig. 6.3  From W. H. McLean, Regional and Town Planning, in Principle and Practice (London: The Technical Press ltd., 1930), facing page 70. McLean imagined that the second-class zone would grow southwards to the line of the railway, which would become the new boundary between third- and second-class land. East of the railway is government land, in effect a continuation of the elite first-­ class zone. Reproduced with kind permission from the British Library

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in the Third Class quarter may be of mud” (McLean 1913, 228). He notes that “the railway gives an opportunity for a girdle and avenue round the city”, and envisages it becoming a new boundary to Khartoum proper: It is extremely probable […] that the Third Class quarter between Abbas Avenue and the railway will gradually become a Second Class quarter, and the natives who can only afford to live in mud buildings will remove to the south of the railway. As a matter of fact, this change in the class of quarter is what is happening gradually, and there are now many quite substantial houses in the Third Class quarter. (229)

There were practical reasons for using the riverfront as the site for elite dwellings: water supply was vital, both for houses and for gardens, so any other site would have greatly increased the cost of maintaining the homes of colonial officials. McLean therefore envisions an expansion of the first-­ class area along the river. Actually, living in such areas brought colonizers face-to-face with the unstable boundaries between land and water: “We are all afloat here at Khartoum. Great pools of water appear all over the place”, wrote Llewellyn Gwynne, later Bishop of Khartoum, in 1906. His diary entry was illustrated with cartoonish sketches of his flooded house, marked “closed for repairs” (SAD 33/5/9). Where the colonial map showed dry land, the reality was far less clear: lines between land and water were inconveniently mobile and changeable. McLean’s description of an expanding second-class area in Khartoum, occupied by the wealthier members of the colonized society, shows how urban morphology itself became a technology of colonial rule. The lines of the river and the railway were given new meaning in the urban structure as the boundaries of differentiated areas. By creating a spatial division between classes, represented in the built environment through building height and materials, colonial town planners sought to remake colonized societies into models of hierarchical order. The tangled knot of the river and the railway was intended to become a site that could twist Sudanese society into a new shape.

Conclusions This technonatural history of Sudan’s Capital Region has opened up new ways of understanding colonial urban planning as embedded in material flows, knots and tangles. The built environment—both in its physical form

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and in its representation in planning documents, historical accounts and travel journals—became a way of overwriting the military violence that underpinned British power in Sudan. The river was central to the logic of the site, and the railway made British conquest possible and also restructured the urban region through the creation of Khartoum North and the later redrawing of Khartoum’s southern boundary. In gathering together this understanding of the making of Sudan’s Capital Region, we have had to look far beyond both the spatial and conceptual boundaries of the city. The earth of the Rwenzori Mountains, the agriculture of the Nile Delta, and the politics of British rule over Egypt, all shaped the urban morphology of Sudan’s Capital Region. Colonial visions of the body—the mechanized ideal of the soldier, the vulnerability of the White ruler to the tropical climate, the comfort of the “natives” in their “natural zone”—shaped how the regime responded to the environment of Sudan and sought to bring order to it through imposed urban ideals. To understand the city as a technonatural assemblage, we need to be mindful of various scales of historical power: the biopolitics and necropolitics of bodies; the material flows along rivers, railways, roads and (in later periods) flight paths and telecommunication lines; the global economic dynamics that reproduce power structures and spatial injustices. I have proposed picking up Ingold’s use of the line as a useful mode of thinking in tracing these entanglements. In particular, the knot is perhaps a more productive way of thinking of the city as a meeting point than is the node, being more amenable to the loose-ends of historical/geographical trajectories. The knot is more easily connected with the tangle, bringing it comfortably into conversations concerning material entanglements. In the history of the city, we might usefully consider the knot as the specific type of tying together created by the powerful to preserve and extend their domination. The accidental and incidental meetings, connections, coincidences and comings-together that are also associated with the urban scene are tangles in a truer sense: unintended, temporary, improvisatory, unpredictable, beyond the logics of authorities. The line, the knot and the tangle thus have serious potential in reading the complex technonatural mixes that make up the urban. In drawing on such thinking, however, we must remain alert to the dynamics of oppression and power that these urban lines inscribe. Mbembe’s postcolonial reading of the state as a means to exercise life and death power is thus vital to the analysis presented here. The railway was a direct tool of military power, intended to ease the flow of death into the

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heart of Sudan, whereas management of the Nile was fundamentally concerned with the biopolitics of economic production. The two lines operated as part of a complex machinery of power; they represent not merely material and environmental forces, but also the ways in which such forces are always implicated within systems of domination. Thus, in applying material thinking from the environmental humanities, urban historians and scholars should remain alert to postcolonial critiques of the city as a product of the powerful and remember that material relations are fundamentally relations of power. In thinking with lines, we must continue to also think in terms of life and death, power and resistance.

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CHAPTER 7

Concrete History: Floodwalls on the Ohio River Uwe Lübken

Water and modernity are interrelated in many ways. Rivers, oceans, and lakes have been used as ultimate sinks for the disposal of industrial, urban, and agricultural waste. Modern water supply and sewage systems are important conduits of the urban metabolism, and in industrial societies, waterways provided crucial infrastructural backbones not just by acting as navigation routes for ships but also by forming a corridor in which other communication lines such as telephone and telegraph lines, streets, and railways are concentrated (Tarr 1996; Barles 2020; Castonguay and Evenden 2012). The “rectification,” improvement and colonization of water bodies such as swamps, marshlands, oxbows, and bogs have also been a key part of nation-building processes—both in a material and in an ideological sense (Zeisler-Vralsted 2015; Cioc 2002; Pritchard 2011;

U. Lübken (*) Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_7

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Blackbourn 2006). Modernity, as it turns out, has always been liquid (Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw 2004).1 Technological systems played an important part in these developments. In fact, the technosphere is embedded in both nature and culture to such a degree that the boundaries between these spheres have become increasingly indistinguishable, as several scholars have pointed out (Otter 2020; Gandy 2014; Swyngedouw 2015). Big lakes have been stored behind huge dams, often at the cost of submerged towns and displaced people. Levees and reservoirs have significantly altered the hydrology of rivers to protect cities against floods. Hydroelectric plants have transformed entire regions by providing cheap energy and fostering industrialization and urbanization. Water flows through filtration plants and a (mostly underground) network of storage tanks, canals, and pipes before it touches and enters our bodies. Binary approaches that emphasize the dichotomy between nature and culture are insufficient to understand the important role that water plays in modern society. Instead, environmental historians, geographers, sociologists, and others have developed several hybrid concepts and theories such as “enviro-technical landscapes”, socio-ecological sites, and naturecultures that much better explain the complex and conflicted relationship between nature, technology, and society (Pritchard 2011; Winiwarter and Schmid 2020; Haraway 2008; Latour 1993). This article looks at floodwalls through the lens of techno-natural entanglements, treating them not just as passive parts of the built environment but as devices enmeshed in a web of natural, social, economic, and cultural relationships. So far, floodwalls have not been considered in such analyses of technonatures. Although these structures have come to define urban riverfronts in many parts of the world, there is hardly any scholarship on their wider impact. While big dams, the “shrines of technology” and the epitome of high modernism, have garnered a lot of attention, their little urban siblings have been by and large neglected (Kaika 2005, 3). This is to a certain extent understandable because dams and other megaprojects are often awe-inspiring structures and tourist sites, they trigger sublime experiences and symbolize the success of modern societies’ attempts to tame wild and unruly natural forces (Nye 1994). Floodwalls share the building material with the big dams—reinforced concrete—but they are 1  For the allegedly solid nature of modernity as opposed to the fluidity of post- or late modernity, see Baumann (2000).

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much smaller and hence lack the aesthetic qualities of the vast structures. Also, they do not advertise the dangerous potential of water as much as dams since there is no water stored behind them, except during floods. Floodwalls appear to be mere slabs of concrete rammed into urban ground. At first glance, it would in most cases be difficult to distinguish between a wall separating the river from a city and a wall separating two political systems, countries, or other entities (however, many flood walls are much higher than the Berlin Wall used to be). Yet, floodwalls are important for a variety of reasons. Their very existence can influence the relationship of a city to its river. A long concrete wall manifests an intervention not just into the built environment; it can also transform the perception of urban nature and influence social relations. Also, floodwalls influence the metabolic exchange between both sides of the wall, for instance by changing drainage patterns. They are embedded into a large web of relationships generated by and for rivers such as streets, gates, ports, promenades, etc. In general, floodwalls manifest a concrete and permanent answer to the question of how to deal with a substantial but irregular hazard, that is, flooding. The difference between flood protection and irrigation, environmental historian Donald Worster (1985, 20) once quipped, was like the difference “between holding an umbrella over your head when it rains and making the rain go somewhere else. The first is a momentary defence, the second a concerted attempt to control and defeat a threat once and for all”. While Worster’s metaphor captures the unpredictable and spontaneous nature of floods, it ignores the permanence of flood control structures. These structures must prove themselves not only during normal high-water levels but in particular at the time of an extreme event. Although levees and floodwalls often shape the hydrology of a river and the aesthetics of a landscape for decades, their location and size are determined by the few hours during which they will be tested, as Siegfried Posegger (1971, 16) has pointed out. The umbrella, to use Worster’s metaphor, remains over your head long after it has stopped raining (Fig. 7.1). Floodwalls arguably are the most dramatic device to draw a clear line between the river and the city. While levees, no matter how big they are, have at least a semblance of “naturalness,” and while storage reservoirs take care of the flood problem out of sight (and often out of mind) of the urban population, floodwalls are immediate technological structures (or techno-natures) that can hardly be overlooked. A closer look though shows how these concrete structures are part of and embedded in larger

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Fig. 7.1  Floodwall in Portsmouth, Ohio. (Photo: Uwe Lübken)

urban discourses and practices. This chapter looks at the history of floodwalls on the Ohio River—a valley that was given a unique opportunity with regard to levees and floodwalls when after an enormous flood in 1937 several factors came together to greatly facilitate their construction. It will first describe the intricate relationship between the river and the settlements along its banks. Then, it will analyse selected campaigns for the construction of floodwalls—both successful and unsuccessful ones. Finally, this chapter will highlight the economic, social, and cultural impact of floodwalls and reflect on the challenges of an ageing infrastructure under the conditions of climate change. In doing so, this chapter treats floodwalls not as passive slabs of concrete but as techno-natural systems that have influenced the demographic composition, the economic outlook, the cultural and aesthetic properties, and the urban metabolism of river cities not just on the Ohio River.

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Co-Evolution: The Ohio Valley and the Ohio River The Ohio River valley at the turn of the twentieth century was one of the most densely populated areas of the entire United States. Places like Cincinnati and Louisville had developed from small frontier outposts to big cities within a few decades. In 1936, one in seven Americans lived within the watershed limits of the Ohio River (National Resources Committee 1936). For this transformation to take place, the river was of crucial importance. It represented a “highway” for people and goods on their way to the West and the South, and, after the invention of the steamboat, in the opposite direction, too. The Ohio was a sewer, a source of drinking water, and energy production. The location of cities, industrial plants, and infrastructural corridors along its banks did not happen accidentally but was the direct result of the “ecosystem services” the river provided. In many river cities along the Ohio, as elsewhere, the waterfront was for a long time the centre of urban culture. At the same time, the Ohio was also a constant source of danger. Until way into the twentieth century, the river was hardly controllable. When the Ohio and its tributaries flooded, what had been built up in decades could be destroyed within a few days. Flood control along the river was for a long time mostly a local affair, and levees were the first and often the only choice to protect communities against flooding. However, settler societies such as those on the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers had only limited knowledge of the rivers’ dynamic and volatility. Hence, levees were often built only a bit above the height of the most recent flood. They did not protect against the worst possible scenario. As a result, levees had to be expanded both in height and width after each new record flood. In urban areas, this increasingly caused problems. In some cases, the expanded levees were literally swallowing up buildings (Fig. 7.2). Floodwalls, on the contrary, consume much less space. They are slim and can be constructed almost anywhere, even on top of older structures. Concrete walls with reinforced steel became technologically feasible in the second half of the nineteenth century (Palley 2010; Forty 2012). Thus, after the devastating 1913 flood, a few cities on the Ohio River began experimenting with floodwalls. Portsmouth, Ohio, for example, finished construction of its concrete wall in 1930, financed without state or federal support, and rejoiced six years later when the Upper Ohio River was hit by an enormous flood. “[C]hildren shot marbles in the streets of Portsmouth and normal business continued while the river swirled outside the wall,” as

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Fig. 7.2  (a, b) John Marshall House in Shawneetown 1934. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey

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historian Leland R.  Johnson (1977, 168) has pointed out.2 However, since the construction of floodwalls was extremely costly and often controversial, many river towns shied away from this sort of protection. On the Ohio River, however, three developments led to a significant change in the appreciation of floodwalls. First of all, the damage potential in the urban floodplains along the Ohio and its tributaries had increased significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century. While antebellum flood damages consisted mostly of houses, farm animals, fences, and other agricultural and commercial items, the industrialization and urbanization of the Ohio Valley had created entirely new patterns of economic vulnerability. Inundations now also threatened factories, densely settled residential areas, and infrastructural facilities such as gas and waterworks, telegraph and telephone lines, railroad tracks and bridges (Lübken 2012). Secondly, the Ohio River “behaved” much more violently between the 1880s and the 1930s than it did in earlier times when the valley witnessed what environmental historian Christian Pfister (2009) has called a “disaster gap.” With only a few exceptions, between 1832 and 1882, not a single flood came close to the high water marks the river had reached before or would reach thereafter. This relatively calm period ended when the Ohio Valley witnessed two “floods of the century” within consecutive years in 1883 and 1884. The Ohio River surpassed old records again in 1907 and 1913. After that, the First World War and later the Great Depression overshadowed the flood problem on the Ohio, while in the 1920s many cities along the river, the federal government and the Ohio River Improvement Association focused on the completion of the canalization of the river which was accomplished in 1929. However, the river returned with a vengeance with a record flood on the upper Ohio in 1936 and, most importantly, the “Thousand-Year Flood” in 1937 (Welky 2011). This series of catastrophes served as a constant and forceful reminder of the necessity to prepare and protect. Many towns along the river were flooded not once or twice but more than a dozen times within a few decades. Thirdly, with the Flood Control Act of 1936, flood protection finally became a federal prerogative. While the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers had been engaged in flood protection measures along the Mississippi for decades, these activities were either singular, specific projects or they had been carried out under different names (such as channel improvements). 2

 This wall was not high enough for the epic flood in the following year, though.

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Previously, structural flood protection measures such as levees or floodwalls often overburdened the financial means of individual cities. But now, with the Federal Government on board, centrally planned flood protection systems for entire basins carried out by the Corps of Engineers became feasible on rivers that crossed state-boundaries. The only thing still missing was a significant flood event to convince Congress to appropriate the necessary funds (O’Neill 2006, 20–21). The 1937 flood of the Ohio River provided that opportunity. It was, in terms of economic damage, the most devastating river flood in the United States, worse even than the 1927 Mississippi flood.3 Almost 200 counties in 12 states were affected, from West Virginia down to Louisiana (almost every big flood of the lower Ohio River is automatically transformed into a Mississippi River flood). The flood affected 1.5 million people directly. Between 500,000 and one million people were made homeless. A total of 137 people died, many due to illness and exhaustion. According to the official report of the United States Red Cross, more than 70,000 houses and other structures were destroyed or damaged (American Red Cross 1938, 21; United States Congress 1937, 3). One of the most important consequences of the 1937 flood was the rapid acceleration of flood control implementation on the Ohio and Lower Mississippi Rivers. With the Flood Control Acts of 1937 and 1938, Congress approved no less than 78 reservoirs and 231 local projects such as levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements. Taken together, these projects “have literally changed the face of the nation,” as E. R. Heiberg III (1988), lieutenant general with the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), later noted. All along the river, from West Virginia to Western Kentucky, levees and concrete walls were built behind which the river vanished from view. For two reasons, this development was not as uncontroversial as it might seem given the recent experience of one of the worst natural catastrophes in American history. First of all, while the USACE paid for the construction of all these projects, local communities were responsible for securing the rights-of-way as well as the operation and maintenance of the flood control system. This procedure required them to issue bonds and vote on taxes. As soon as a plan to construct such a wall emerged, various questions and problems beyond the financial 3  If one measures the destruction in flood damage per unit wealth, the 1937 flood was even the most destructive flood in the twentieth century (See Pielke Jr. et al. 2002, 56–58).

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aspects were raised as well, questions that were fiercely debated in many communities—from the aesthetic qualities of such structures to their impact on the local economy and the residential neighbourhoods affected by a potential wall.

Concrete Campaigns Huntington, West Virginia, was one of the few places where the construction of a protective system of levees and floodwalls was uncontroversial. In dramatic statements before Congress, local dignitaries and Corps engineers highlighted how often the city had been affected by floods in the past—almost every other year—and how urgent flood protection was at this site (Johnson 1977, 174). The fact that the Nickel Co., an enterprise that turned out to be crucial for the United States war effort, had had to shut down for six weeks during the 1937 flood certainly helped to pick Huntington as one of the first places to receive a floodwall. Huntington was also one of the very few cities in which construction was (at least partly) completed before all civil activities of the USACE were halted after the outbreak of World War II. Thus, the West Virginian city became a testing ground where standards for the construction techniques and the material used for floodwalls in many other places along the river were established (Johnson 1977, 175). Newport, Kentucky, is a good example of how the availability of Federal money to support the construction of floodwalls has changed attitudes and triggered construction. An industrial town on the Kentucky side of the river, opposite Cincinnati, the first serious attempts to erect a floodwall in Newport were elicited by the 1913 Ohio River flood. But unlike in Portsmouth, Ohio, here the costs proved to be too high for the city to shoulder. Thus, a plan to build a 20-foot wall and to raise streets had to be abandoned. The situation changed, however, after the 1937 flood. The Kentucky Post argued in an editorial of October 25, 1940, that Newport’s citizens would make a huge mistake should they decide against a floodwall: That is exactly what the federal government is saying to the people of Newport, offering to make a $2,000,000 improvement and enhance the value of the city if the voters of Newport will vote approval of a mere $350,000 in bonds to pay for the city’s share of rights-of-way for flood protection. (Bauer 1988, 61)

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The Newport Rotary Club, also in favour of the bond issue, argued that the floodwall would bring new industrial plants to the city and provide security for the existing ones. Furthermore, it expected property values and taxes to rise behind the wall and “non-productive” property to be reclaimed (Bauer 1988, 61). Despite these incentives, public votes on a floodwall bond failed to reach the necessary two-thirds majority both in 1938 and in 1939. It was only after the Andrews Steel Company, one of the largest beneficiaries of the proposed floodwall, threw its weight behind the campaign that the bond was finally accepted in 1940 with a slim majority of just 36 votes (Bauer 1988, 59–60). In Cincinnati, a system of floodwalls, levees, gates, and pumping stations to seal off the downtown area from the Ohio River had already been envisaged in the 1925 Official Plan of the City of Cincinnati (Pettit 2019, 89). These projects were never implemented, but after the 1937 flood, when the Ohio River climbed to unimaginable 79.99 feet, the Queen City quickly grasped the opportunity provided by the flood and the Federal program for flood control. The new City Manager, Col. C.O. Sherill, a former engineer with the USACE, emphasized the need to implement the flood control provisions of the 1925 City Plan (Pettit 2019, 95–96). The most pressing problem in Cincinnati, though, was not the Ohio riverfront but the Mill Creek, a small tributary of the main river in the western part of town that was regularly flooded when the Ohio was at flood stage (52 feet in Cincinnati) and backed up into it—in 1937 up to eight miles. The Mill Creek Valley was home to many industrial facilities and densely settled neighbourhoods and had been badly affected by the 1937 flood. Therefore, floodproofing the Mill Creek Valley by constructing a barrier dam at its mouth was uncontroversial (Hedeen 1994, 1998, 19). The opening ceremony for the movable dam, 14 floodgates and a 1.5-mile-long floodwall took place exactly ten years after “Black Sunday,” the worst day of the flood, on January 24, 1947 (Cincinnati Street Railway News 1947). Immediately after the flood, it looked as if the Central Bottoms would also be protected by a floodwall soon. Wholesalers, factory owners, and other businesses located in that area intensely lobbied for protection against future inundations (Pettit 2019, 96). Other voices were less enthusiastic about the prospect of a floodwall in this prominent area. Mayor James Stewart argued that such a project would cut downtown off from the river and that it “would preclude plans for future development of the river front” (Cincinnati Enquirer Staff 1940, 9, quoted after Pettit 2019,

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121). Merchants feared that the vast structures would interrupt their trade with boats on the river while many citizens regarded them as an eyesore. Also, businesspeople were afraid that the concrete walls would advertise the very danger they were supposed to combat and hence put off investors. The flood wall in Huntington that already had been completed while Cincinnati was still discussing the benefits and disadvantages was regarded by a coal trader from the Queen City in 1939 as “penitentiary wall” and “hideously ugly” (Pettit 2019, 121). Herbert Schroth, a member of the influential Cincinnatus Association, voiced concern right after the flood that a system of levees and floodwalls in the Central Bottoms area would create a “Dyked City of the Hills” (Pettit 2019, 22). Another grave concern of elite Cincinnati organizations such as the Cincinnatus Association was the fear that a floodwall would delay or even preclude the removal of “dilapidated buildings” (Pettit 2019, 96). The Cincinnati Planning Commission was afraid that such a barrier would create “protected slums” (96). Interestingly, as Raymond Pettit has shown in his historical-anthropological study of the Cincinnati riverfront, organizations such as the Citizen’s Rehabilitation Committee and the Cincinnati Planning Commission (CPC), the local Chamber of Commerce and the Cincinnati Engineers Club in the following years utilized the river’s dynamic for planning purposes, i.e. “slum clearance” and urban renewal. Through such arguments, Pettit argues, city planners like the influential Alfred Bettman “and the CPC staff successfully shifted the discussion from a focus on the engineering-driven problem of river management in 1937 to an urban planning problem of urban blight by 1940” (Pettit 2019, 15). In other words, they let the river do the work for them. In general, low-income neighbourhoods were much less likely to be protected by a floodwall than more wealthy quarters since USACE cost benefit calculations required the damage potential in a potentially protected area to be higher than the construction costs for levees, floodwalls, etc. Also, even if the USACE did recommend construction, there were financial obstacles. The city of Cincinnati, for example, was not willing to pay its share for a flood protection structure in the California neighbourhood eight miles upstream of downtown, since according to a contemporary report, the inhabitants of that neighbourhood would be able to cover only a minor share of the overall amount necessary for operating and maintaining the system (Pettit 2019, 113).

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Impact of the Walls Floodwalls should not be imagined as a smart, cheap, and small-scale technology that can be easily and quickly adapted to solve the urban flood problem. On the contrary, in most cases, they are part of a huge system designed to protect a city against a flood—a networked technology that includes levees in the less densely populated areas of a town, pumping stations, floodgates, as well as an elaborate regimen to operate them. In Paducah, Kentucky, the protective system extends over 12 miles of which 3 miles consist of 14 feet high concrete walls (City of Paducah 2022). Construction of the 2800 feet Newport floodwall lasted from April 1946 until September 1951 (Bauer 1988, 62). Altogether, 13,000 cubic yards of concrete and 1.8 million pounds of steel reinforcing were used. For the interlocking wall to protect the steel mill, 12,800 tons of steel were required. The three pumping stations were able to transport up to 315,000 gallons of water per minute beyond the wall towards the river (Bauer 1988, 91; Cincinnati Post 1947; Louisville Times 1937; Louisville Courier-Journal 1997). In Louisville, Kentucky, the flood control system constructed in the aftermath of the 1937 flood consists of 4.5  miles of reinforced concrete floodwall, 24.5 miles of levees, 45 gates, and 15 pumping stations (Louisville Courier-Journal 1997). When the river rose, it took several dozen men and a detailed script to close the gates, as David Welky (2011, 285) has emphasized: “Step 1: inspect a seven-by-sevenfoot sluice gate in the sewer at Fourth and Main when the water reaches seventeen point eight feet. Step 292: close the opening just south of Western Parkway pumping plant when the water reaches fifty-eight feet— eleven inches higher than 1937’s crest.” From an economic perspective, most of these structures quickly proved their worth and paid off the initial investment. Cincinnati’s Mill Creek barrier dam, for example, prevented flood damages of approximately four million dollars already in its first year of operation, when the Ohio River climbed to 64 feet. “Transportation arteries were not disrupted, and 7,000 people who would have otherwise had to abandon their homes were spared the hardship. An estimated 200 industrial plants were able to continue operations, thereby saving a million hours of work by thousands of men and women” (Hedeen 1998, 21). The social and cultural consequences of the floodwalls are much more ambivalent than their immediate economic effects, though, even in those cases in which communities opted against having one. In Cincinnati, the

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City Council decided in January 1940 against a floodwall protecting the Central Bottoms area (Pettit 2019, 101). The floodwall question was brought up again several times in the two following decades but with the accelerating decline and neglect of the riverfront, the chances of such a project being implemented dwindled. The problem was solved in 1961, when the city used federal funds after Congress had passed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956. Newly constructed Fort Washington Way, a highway with an incorporated floodwall, protected the Central Business District while the Central Bottoms area remained vulnerable to Ohio River floods (Pettit 2019, 102). Thus, while some areas in Cincinnati experienced decline and decay because they were not protected by a floodwall and because the river did the slum clearance work for the planners, other places witnessed similar developments although they were protected by concrete walls. In Newport, Kentucky, the floodwall at first did have the intended effect of securing jobs and real estate. Lenora Bacon, who worked for the local Chamber of Commerce during and after the construction of the floodwall, was convinced that “the 1950s were good. Mormouth Street was as busy as any downtown street with shops, banks, and stores. It all changed in the 1960’s [sic].” Asked by Donald Bauer in 1988 whether the floodwall was worth the effort, she replied: “Yes, don’t be silly. It was needed to protect business and people” (Bauer 1988, 48). George Rosen, who used to sell cars in Newport, agreed. “The floodwall was good. People kept their jobs and homes. Business was good after the wall” (Bauer 1988, 47). In Louisville, the floodwall had a positive effect, too, as David Welky (2011, 285) has argued. Local businesses flourished once the floodwall had been completed and had brought back confidence. Urban citizens rediscovered their river and a “new cultural vibrancy swept the community.” There were other forces at play, however, that not even a floodwall could stop. “Foreign cars and steel forced the steel mill out of the city and not the floods,” George Rosen held about Newport, Kentucky (Bauer 1988, 47). Globalization and deindustrialization indeed played a huge role in the fate of many urban areas, including riverfronts, especially in the Midwest (Cowan 2005). In Newport, both the steel mill and the rolling mill closed in 1979. The former workforce of 3000 was reduced to 600 (Bauer 1988, 47). Also gone were the railroad depot, the Weidemann Brewing Company, and Higgin Manufacturing (Bauer 1988, 64). With the industrial base of the area in steady decline, many of its residents moved to the suburbs. “Where the factory workers lived, worked, and

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played along the Licking River stands block after block of deteriorating public housing. Where the Newport Army barracks stood, looking west to the Great American Frontier, automobile dealers sell their cars and children play in the parking lots” (Bauer 1988, 65). Louisville and Paducah, Kentucky, witnessed similar developments (Welky 2011, 286–287).

Back to the River? The slow but steady decline of urban riverfronts in the United States and other parts of the world also opened possibilities, though, and in the end even laid the foundations upon which many cities rediscovered their river. With the loosening grip of railroads, warehouses, and industrial facilities on the urban waterfront, many cities opted for less intense utilizations of the urban floodplain such as parks and other recreational spaces. Furthermore, the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a change of perspective with regard to urban rivers. They were no longer exclusively regarded as economic arteries but also as ecological assets with a value in their own right (Knoll et al. 2017). So, what role did the floodwalls play in these developments? While the concrete structures could not prevent the economic and demographic decline of many riverfront areas along the Ohio and while they certainly contributed to many cities literally turning their back on the river (because who enjoyed looking at a dull, grey wall?), they did play a role in the revitalization of urban waterfronts in the 1980s and 1990s. Paducah, Kentucky, according to David Welky (2011, 287), “owes its character, prosperity, and revival” to the concrete aftermath of the 1937 flood: “Artists’ communities flourish in low-lying downtown areas once subject to inundation. Funky cafes and eclectic galleries lure in visitors who view the Ohio as a nice place to picnic rather than an existential threat. Paducahans began a full-fledged ‘back to the river’ movement in the early 1990s.” Louisville’s former mayor Wilson Wyatt held in 1987 that “had that floodwall not been built, the downtown renaissance of the city today would not have been possible” (286). There remained, however, a certain tension between the rejuvenated cultural and social life in the protected neighbourhoods and the aesthetic qualities of a concrete wall (Nunnally et  al. 1987, 188). Murals were increasingly used as a means to make the floodwalls both more attractive and porous. The idea to paint a mural on a floodwall first came up in 1992  in Portsmouth, Ohio, after city officials had visited nearby

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Steubenville and were impressed by the regular murals there. In the following year, Portsmouth Murals, Inc. (PMI) was created on a non-profit basis. PMI hired Louisiana artist Robert Dafford to begin work on the first mural. After ten years, Dafford had painted 2000 years of history on 2000 feet of concrete on this wall alone (Portsmouth Ohio Murals 2022). Other cities quickly followed Portsmouth’s example, and today, floodwall murals can be seen in more than a dozen towns along the river. Dafford and his co-muralists have depicted a wide array of topics, many of them dealing with the history and culture of the specific place. Trompe l’oeil effects and realist painting techniques make viewers feel they are part of what is happening on the wall. The murals’ motifs are diverse in the sense that they contain indigenous groups (such as the Moundbuilders in Portsmouth and Paleo Indians in Paducah) and African American heritage, for example. They are not, and certainly do not intend to be, a critical analysis of the settler society’s history on the banks of the Ohio. Thus, there is hardly any conflict to be seen on the walls (not to mention the frequent massacres and battles in the Ohio Country and the brutal manifestations of slavery). Most walls paint local history in a folkloristic fashion. According to Dafford himself, the murals had a transformative effect on Portland’s residents. A “medieval prison wall” had been turned into “a piece of art that has something to do with the people who live there. It’s their art. It’s their history. It’s their ancestry. And it changes their feeling about where they live” (Feight 2021) (Fig. 7.3). In many towns on the Ohio River, the floodwall murals have become a tourist attraction and as such have contributed to the re-appreciation of waterfront neighbourhoods. In Paducah, riverboats make stops for their passengers to watch the paintings while horse-drawn carriages and a trolley take tourists on tours along the wall. At night, sidewalks are lighted, and the paintings illuminated by spotlights (Paducah Wall to Wall Inc 2022, 99, 109). In Portsmouth, a recently developed app takes viewers on a guided tour along the floodwall (Portsmouth Murals Inc. 2022).

Ageing and Maintenance While the murals have rejuvenated many riverfronts along the Ohio and, at least aesthetically, the floodwalls themselves, this facelift did not regenerate the physical qualities of an ageing infrastructure. Most of the walls, made from reinforced concrete, are still sound, but the moving parts create constant problems. Pumping stations, pipes, sluice gates, and

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Fig. 7.3  Floodwall murals in Paducah, Kentucky. (Photo: Uwe Lübken)

switchboards from the 1940s must be repaired frequently while replacement parts are sometimes so hard to get that they have to be acquired in other parts of the country or even refabricated at a great cost. In Ironton, Ohio, pump engines and electrical switchgear have caught fire. In Huntington, West Virginia, Sherry Wilkins, director of the local Stormwater Utility, compared the challenges of maintaining a decades-old flood protection system to operating a 1940 car on current roads (Niemeyer 2019). Climate change doesn’t help either. A warmer and wetter future might pose a huge challenge for the floodwalls and levees along the Ohio River. It is generally assumed that due to the many reservoirs having been created at the tributaries of the Ohio, the river can no longer get as high as it did in 1937. Changing hydrological and meteorological conditions, however, might undermine this certainty. The predicted increase of annual river streamflow of about 30 percent until the end of the century could

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enable the Ohio to repeat disasters like in 1937 and put the vast techno-­ natural flood protection system of levees, reservoirs, and floodwalls to a severe test.

Conclusion Floodwalls offer a quick fix for urban flood problems—and quite often this is what they do. A closer look at the history of floodwalls reveals, however, that they are much more than mere instruments to prevent flood damages. Floodwalls are ambivalent techno-natural systems that are part of the urban metabolism rather than insurmountable obstacles. Floodwalls can waterproof endangered urban areas and thereby protect residential structures, companies, jobs, and capital investments. In doing so, they not only paid off rather quickly but shaped the fate of riverfront areas often for decades. Floodwalls stimulated the movement of people, businesses, and money into areas that would have been considered too dangerous without them. They could not, however, protect against broader developments such as deindustrialization and the long-term transformation of entire neighbourhoods. At the same time, floodwalls interrupt intra-urban trade flows and the movement of people, just like highways or railroad lines. In the eyes of many city planners of the postwar era, the concrete walls had the potential to “protect slums,” although low-income neighbourhoods were much less likely to be protected by structural flood control means in the first place. Their aesthetics challenges are manifold and cannot easily be overcome (for example, by hiding them as part of larger buildings or by adorning them with murals). Riverine and coastal floodwalls have also become “repositories of social memory,” concrete monuments that recall disastrous floods in the past (Schlichting 2022: 14). Finally, they have a life and materiality of their own. One might expect that their time has come that the ageing (infra)structures could and should be replaced by other, more sustainable methods that have the ability to both protect cities from flooding while not cutting them off entirely from their rivers. However, in a time of a steadily changing climate and increasing uncertainty about fundamental meteorological parameters, it is to be expected that these walls will remain with us for quite a while. Thus, the challenge for many river cities is to live with a volatile river and with the permanent patch that these walls represent.

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References American Red Cross. 1938. The Ohio-Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1937. Washington, DC. Barles, Sabine. 2020. Urban Metabolism. In Concepts of Urban-Environmental History, ed. Sebastian Haumann, Martin Knoll, and Detlev Mares, 109–124. Bielefeld: transcript. Bauer, Donald. 1988. Floods to Floodwalls in Newport, Kentucky: 1884–1951. Master’s thesis, Xavier University. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_ num=xavier1274982457. Accessed December 16, 2022. Baumann, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press. Blackbourn, David. 2006. The Conquest of Nature. Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. New York. Castonguay, Stéphane, and Matthew Evenden, eds. 2012. Urban Rivers. Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America. Pittsburgh, PA. Cincinnati Post. 1947. Newport Snuggles Safely Behind Levee, October 31. Cincinnati Street Railway News. 1947. Barrier Assures Unbroken Transit for Valley, January/February. Cioc, Mark. 2002. The Rhine. An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000. Seattle. City of Paducah. 2022. Floodwall. http://paducahky.gov/floodwall. Accessed December 16, 2022. Cowan, A. 2005. A Whole New Ball Game: Sports Stadiums and Urban Renewal in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, 1950–1970. Ohio Valley History 5 (3): 63–86. Feight, Andrew Lee. 2021. Robert Dafford & the Portsmouth Floodwall Murals. Scioto Historical. https://sciotohistorical.org/items/show/41. Accessed December 16, 2022. Forty, Adrian. 2012. Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London. Gandy, Matthew. 2014. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN. Hedeen, Stanley. 1994. The Mill Creek: An Unnatural History of an Urban Stream. Cincinnati, OH. ———. 1998. Waterproofing the Mill Creek Floodplain. Queen City Heritage 56 (1): 15–24. Heiberg, E.R., III. 1988. Preface. In The Evolution of the 1936 Flood Control Act, ed. Joseph L.  Arnold. Fort Belvoir, VA. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ gc_etds/3020/. Accessed December 16, 2022. Johnson, Leland R. 1977. Men, Mountains and Rivers. An Illustrated History of the Huntington District, U.  S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1754-1974. Washington, DC, 1977. Kaika, Maria. 2005. City of Flows. Modernity, Nature and the City. New York.

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Knoll, Martin, Uwe Lübken, and Dieter Schott. 2017. Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained—Introduction. In Rivers Lost, Rivers Regained, ed. M.  Knoll, U. Lübken, and D. Schott, 3–22. Pittsburgh, PA. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA. Louisville Courier-Journal. 1997. System Protecting Jefferson County Will Be Given Major Test by Ohio River, March 4. Louisville Times. 1937. 10-Mile Wall for City is Flood Plan, June 8. Lübken, Uwe. 2012. Rivers and Risk in the City: The Urban Floodplain as a Contested Space. In Urban Rivers, ed. S.  Castonguay and M.  Evenden, 130–144. Pittsburgh, PA. National Resources Committee. 1936. Drainage Basin Study. Ohio Valley Summary Report, 6 (Frederick W.  Heed, Water Consultant; Philip Burgess, Associate Water Consultant; Daniel E.  Davis, Associate Water Consultant; Charles F. Ruff), 1.9.1936, University of Cincinnati, Alfred Bettman Papers, pt. I, Box 15, Folder 1. Niemeyer, Liam. 2019. Rising Waters: Aging Levees, Climate Change and the Challenge to Hold Back the Ohio River. Environmental Health Newy, December 19. https://www.ehn.org/ohio-­river-­climate-­change-­levees-­ 2641607247/particle-­4. Accessed December 16, 2022. Nunnally, Nelson R., F.  Douglas Shields Jr., and James Hynson. 1987. Environmental Considerations for Levees and Floodwalls. Environmental Management 11 (2): 183–191. Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge MA. O’Neill, Karen M. 2006. Rivers by Design. State Power and the Origins of U.S. Flood Control. Durham, NC. Otter, Chris. 2020. Technosphere. In Concepts of Urban-Environmental History, ed. S. Haumann et al., 21–32. Bielefeld: transcript. Paducah Wall to Wall Inc. 2022. Paducah Wall to Wall: Portraits of Our Past. History in Dafford Murals. https://www.paducahwalltowall.com/the-­book. Accessed December 16, 2022. Palley, Reese. 2010. Concrete: A Seven-Thousand-Year History, 2010. New York: Quantuck Lane Press. Pettit, Raymond W. 2019. Development, Expertise, and Infrastructure Between the Ohio River and Cincinnati Riverfront, 1895–Present. CUNY Academic Works. Pfister, Christian. 2009. The ‘Disaster Gap’ of the 20th Century and the Loss of Traditional Disaster Memory. Gaia 18: 239–246. (in German). Pielke, R.A., Jr., M.W. Downton, and J.Z. Barnard Miller. 2002. Flood Damage in the United States, 1926–2000: A Reanalysis of National Weather Service Estimates. Boulder, CO. Portsmouth Murals Inc. 2022. https://portsmouthmurals.com/mobile-­app/. Accessed December 16, 2022. Portsmouth Ohio Murals. 2022. https://www.portsmouthohiomurals.com/ murals.php. Accessed December 16, 2022.

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Posegger, Siegfried. 1971. Katastrophenjahre in Kärnten—Schutz und Hilfe bei Hochfluten. In Hochwasser und Raumplanung. Ursachen, Vorbeugung und Massnahmen (Referate, gehalten bei der I. Internationalen Tagung zur vorbeugenden Bekämpfung von Hochwasserschäden), ed. Landesregierung Kärnten, 15–19. Klagenfurt. Pritchard, Sara B. 2011. Confluence. The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône. Cambridge, MA. Schlichting, Kara M. 2022. Misremembering Risk in the Age of Hurricanes: The Rhode Island Coast in the 1930s–1950s. Coastal Studies & Society 1 (1): 10–33. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford. ———. 2015. Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain, 1898–2005. Cambridge, MA, London. Tarr, Joel. 1996. The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective. Akron, OH. United States Congress. 1937. House of Representatives, Committee on Flood Control, Comprehensive Flood-Control Plan for Ohio and Lower Mississippi Rivers. 75th Cong., 1st Sess., Washington, DC. Welky, David. 2011. The Thousand-Year Flood. The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937. Chicago. Winiwarter, Verena, and Martin Schmid. 2020. Socio-Natural Sites. In Concepts of Urban-Environmental History, ed. S.  Haumann et  al., 33–50. Bielefeld: transcript. Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire. Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York. Zeisler-Vralsted, Dorothy. 2015. Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers. New York: Berghahn.

PART III

Governing Mobility, Waste, and Urban Subjects

CHAPTER 8

Closed Gates and Dark Streets: Spaces and Infrastructures of Transit in the Low Countries, Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries Marjolein Schepers

These days, a farmer travelling by railway from Leeuwarden to Hardingen has left the train at Dronryp to continue his travels by barge. He considered 13 stuyvers too expensive for that trip of half an hour, while for five stuyvers he could sit for hours on end on a barge. —Utrechts Provinciaal en Stedelijk Dagblad 1864, 2

While the farmer mentioned in the above quote travelled from the Frisian city of Leeuwarden to Hardingen by train, he changed his mind during the trip. He preferred to change to transport by barge because the price was lower, and the journey lasted longer. It almost forms a gimmick of the history of Dutch infrastructure development in the nineteenth century.

M. Schepers (*) Department of History, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_8

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The country was relatively late in adopting railway infrastructure and mostly adopted the train to transport goods. Several historians argued that the creation of train networks was only possible through profits from overseas colonial exploitation (cf Nusteling 1974). The history of the railways in the Dutch Republic has always been ambivalent. There were limited train connections in the nineteenth century, mostly connecting the seaports to the hinterland. There were limited itineraries rather than a structural nationwide system, and human travel continued to occur by barges and road travel. The connections between landscape and transport in the Low Countries changed in the nineteenth century with the expansion of the paved roads system and the introduction of the railways. This influenced the ways people travelled, as well as who travelled, and the connections of migrants to the cities they travelled through (cf Guldi 2012). Historians have nevertheless had difficulties getting a grasp on changing mobility in the nineteenth century. This chapter thus seeks to understand the changing relations between mobility and urban space by focusing on the more-than-­ human agency of nature and technology. So far, most literature has focused on quantitative approaches, the difference between policy and practice, or migration policy as a form of social control. The technonatural perspective employed here reveals a more complex set of relations between migrants and urban space. The nineteenth century has often been framed as the take-off moment for global mobility, with people travelling larger distances than ever before (Zelinsky 1971; Lucassen and Lucassen 2009; Ehmer 2011). Steam ships facilitated intercontinental migration, and trains made different categories of people, particularly non-elite groups and women, move further away than before (Moch 2003; Feys 2013; Greefs and Winter 2016). Similarly, labour migration likewise underwent a change in scale and new recruitment areas. The Netherlands for example witnessed an influx of German labourers (Lesger et  al. 2002). But the debate over whether the nineteenth century actually formed a transition period is a heated topic. Several historians of the Low Countries have argued that categories like sailors or soldiers already travelled large distances and established intercultural contact (Van Lottum 2007; Lucassen and Lucassen 2009). Moreover, many societies were already highly mobile long before increased urbanisation. This is proven for example by agrarian capitalist areas or more nomadic societies, in which mobility was the norm rather than sedentariness, but also by the itinerant lifestyles of marginalised groups like female sex

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workers in colonial empires (Deschacht and Winter 2019; Chang 2021; Joshi 2021). The debate over the supposed mobility transition has reached somewhat of a standstill because of the large dark number of human movements that went unregistered. Several historians have argued that migration was only registered if it was problematised by local authorities, for example, the perception of poor migrants forming a threat for local (poor relief) means, or anarchists or communists perceived as threat to national political stability (cf De Munck and Winter 2012; Rosenberg 2006). Another impetus for migration registration could be commercial interests such as brokers of intercontinental travel (cf Feys 2013), although these are generally less elaborately documented and less well kept in archives than those of authorities. Despite the impasse in the debate on numbers, there is a general consensus that the frameworks of migration changed in Europe in the nineteenth century. Yet, this change was not linear. Cities were more open and more closed to migration at different times (Salzberg 2019b). Changing transport options moreover did not directly imply a change in mobility behaviour, as evidenced here by the example in the above newspaper article. What the nineteenth-century changes meant for being on the road, or for travelling, is more difficult to assess. Colin Pooley argued that mobility has too often been studied from different isolated disciplines. He advocated for bringing together transport, travel, and migration history (Pooley 2017). This new approach has been rather influential. Historians like Gerrit Verhoeven, Jo Guldi, and Pooley have studied the changed experiences of travel, for example, in terms of the sociability of travel or the gendered distribution among travellers, because of the introduction or expansion of transport technologies like carriages over paved roads or trains (Verhoeven 2009; Guldi 2012, 153–197; Pooley 2021). In this chapter, I contribute to these recent developments by analysing changes to mobility from an urban history approach. I propose to analyse the connections between transient mobility and the built environment and to study the spatial and material frameworks within which mobility was accommodated, stimulated, regulated, or limited. As historians have had difficulties getting a grip on the changing concepts of being on the road, analysing the moments of transit might help to provide a new perspective onto these questions. Cities formed places where people on the road could have a stopover or stay overnight. Studying how and why this transit function of cities, among other transit places such as coach houses and rural

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inns, changed between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helps to better understand the general changes in mobility. This time period can be viewed as a transition period when the great transatlantic migrations took off, which witnessed the extension of paved road networks and the introduction of the railways. It is also a period for which the balances between central state and local migration control changed (Coppens 2017; Debackere 2020). And it is generally considered as the time period which witnessed the start of tourism and commercial travel for middling groups (Verhoeven 2013; Feys 2020). The implications of these changes for cities, and the contact of non-citizens with the urban sphere, will be investigated here. Several historians argued that migration patterns changed to different destinations, and that the dynamics of migration control had a strong local continuity despite centralisation. This chapter investigates what these changes implied for transient populations rather than focusing on  resident immigrants, in an attempt to go beyond the host-­ origin or arrival-departure binary in migration history (cf. Schepers 2021).

“Passanten” in the City of Leiden In order to contribute to the debate on changes to transient migration in cities, this chapter was deeply inspired by, and aims to contribute to, the spaces of arrival debate as well as theories on migration infrastructures (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Meeus et  al. 2019, 1–32; Salzberg 2020; Schepers 2021). In contrast to the discussion on arrival spaces though, it focuses on cities as places that were used by people who were passing through: visiting a market, on a stopover on their way to another city or region, selling or buying goods in the city, studying, or passing by for festivities, for example. The focus on arrival spaces in cities has a binary focus on arrival versus departure, and citizens versus migrants, whereas cities knew changing populations of people using its facilities and services. In that sense, the Low Countries concept of “passanten” is very useful, also known as “passants” in French, which can be loosely translated as “passers-by” in English. Cities like Mechelen, Leiden, or Oudenaarde had “passantenhuizen” (sometimes named “baaierd” or “beyerd” in the Northern Netherlands) or knew practices of “passantengeld” (De Vries 1978, 82–84; Pot 1987; Spaans 1997, 80–82). From the perspective of authorities, “passers-by” were a set category with specific regulations in place.

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Moving beyond the focus on arrival, this research emphasises the infrastructure within migration infrastructure theory. The concept is often used as an umbrella term, or used  as synonym for older concepts like migration networks, frameworks, or fields (cf. Schepers 2021). Instead, in this chapter, I focus on infrastructural elements as shaping the relations between people and the state, and between migrants and the city. The research pays particular attention to the role played by tangible, material, and non-human aspects like the built environment, the street grid, transport technology, or more natural aspects like landscape, seasonality, and the rhythm of day and night. Such entanglements of technology and nature and their influence on spaces of transit, as well as how they were mediated by authorities, civil society, and migrants alike, is the topic of study here (White and Wilbert 2010). To what extent did infrastructures shape the mobility and encounters of passanten with the city, and to what extent and why did this change over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? As such, the chapter contributes to the traditional European migration history debates on social control and migration regulation in cities, but takes a different approach. It introduces cultural history perspectives on the meaning of spaces of transit and the implications of the night-time. It uses digital humanities and historical geography methods to shed light on the spatial constellations. Using a technonatural approach,  this chapter  studies the access migrants had to public space and the spaces they were confined to, in an attempt to understand how they related to the margins and centre of urban society, and how the infrastructures guiding or controlling this access were designed (cf. Guha 2000; Rodríguez García and Lauro 2016, 34). In order to answer these questions, the chapter is based on a case study of the city of Leiden in the Dutch Republic. The Leiden city council issued a legislation in 1765 regarding hosting people overnight, which stated: that against the good intention of the Magistrate of this city, free stay and a safe shelter is granted too lightly to all kinds of beggars, vagrants [“landloopers”], vagabonding persons and other passers-by, among which often those kinds are found who, fleeing the rightful punishments they took upon themselves by misdeeds committed elsewhere, do not only try to hide here, but even also, at all occurring or sought-after occasions, add new misdeeds to the previous, enrich themselves by estranging goods of other people in indecent ways, or instead, through other mischief and nefarious practices, astonish and disturb the

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c­ ommon good, which awakes a fair fear that, in case this increasing evil is not halted in time, this city would become a trusted inn for all kinds of naughty people, through which very big calamities could come to exist, whose unfortunate consequences are not enough to be feared (…). (Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1765)

The historian Pot argued that the Leiden city council was preoccupied with passers-by and that they considered passanten in the same vein as the poor, or vagrants: as people who could possibly become a burden to local poor relief (Pot 1987). Urban policies for passanten should be understood in the context of poor relief and were nearly the same as the policies for the labouring poor and people receiving poor relief, according to Pot. The above legislation shows that the city council was particularly focused on possible deviant behaviour of passers-by. It corroborates with theories in migration history, voiced by amongst others Leo Lucassen, on the “migrant threat” (Lucassen 2005). In discourses, immigrants have often been named a threat to local societies. Lucassen argued that this perception of the migrant threat was mostly related to the homogeneity of characteristics (such as age, profession, gender, or religion) and size of the migrant group. But how was this supposed threat represented in urban space, or how did infrastructures mediate this supposed threat? This chapter contributes to the research tradition on social control by using a new approach. Instead of studying policies, discourses, or migration data, this chapter focuses on more material elements such as spatial and technonatural elements instead of limiting the focus on policies and migration numbers. Therefore, the chapter is based on an analysis of changing locations of spaces of transit in the city and the characteristics of these spaces. It pays particular attention to natural and technological factors and how they influenced the relations between migrants and cities. The mapping of inns and lodging houses, stopover of barges, and analysis of cartographic information on landscapes and the street grid are central to the methodology of the chapter (cf. Vaughan and Griffiths 2020). This is based on archival sources, as well as previously published databases and mapping made available by historians of Leiden University, notably the projects of Pubscape, Historisch Leiden in Kaart, and Dangerous Cities (cf. Vaughan 2018). The chapter centres the city as a place where people could pass through or pass by and stay overnight. It engages with recent lines of thought on mobility infrastructures and access to urban space as set forward by Rosa Salzberg, Jo Guldi, Laura Vaughan, Carlos Galviz

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Lopez, Danielle van den Heuvel, Bob Pierik, and Anneleen Arnout (Guldi 2012; Van den Heuvel et al. 2018; Salzberg 2019a, 2021a; Lopez Galvis 2021; Arnout 2022; Pierik 2022).

Logic of Transit People passed through Leiden for a myriad of reasons, such as attending university, going to the market or visiting local fairs, trade, short-term jobs, or simply changing from the barge coming in from Delft to, for example, Utrecht. The city had clear, defined stopping places for barges and coaches arriving in Leiden. The main entry roads were marked by city gates, and the barges had stops near the gates or in the centre of the city. We could thus define these locations as part of the spaces of arrival: they were the first contact people established with the urban form of Leiden. But public and private transport was not the only thing defining these spaces: I would argue that they formed designated spaces of transit. Mapping the locations of transport stops and places designated for inns and lodging houses, and combining this with an analysis of the public spaces of the city, shows that there was some sort of logic of transit (Fig. 8.1). Let us first focus on the locations of the hospitality sector in the city and what this can tell us on the movement of transient migrants in the city and their encounters with urban society. While analysing the spatial and geographic characteristics of accommodation infrastructures as part of the spaces of transit, the resulting maps demonstrate the locations in which the Leiden city council allowed for inns. These were certain designated areas which were noted down in a register created in 1766 (Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1766–1801). Up until 1801, exceptions to these authorised areas were also registered in the book, such as an inn at the Doelensteeg, near the main building of the university, which was granted permission on the 8 May 1801. Several hotspots of accommodation in the city come to light, namely in the northwest around the Steenstraat and Mare, in the centre near the public buildings of the Waag and the City Hall, and in the east near the port and other markets (see Fig. 8.1). These locations were often adjacent to an entry route and stop of the barges, for example  in the cases of Hogewoerd (Utrechtse Veer), Marepoort (Haarlemmerveer), and the city  centre (Amsterdamsche Veer). A second pattern shows up when comparing the designated areas to the cadastral data of 1832. Many of these were located next to a public place such as a

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Fig. 8.1  An overview of permitted locations for inns in Leiden in 1766–1801, inns and lodging houses in Leiden based on the 1832 cadastre, and inns and lodging houses included in the Pubscape data for Leiden (1808–1894). (Sources: Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken (EL), Stadsarchief Leiden 1546–1814 (SAII), 2287: “Lijst van straatgedeelten waar herbergen toegestaan worden, 1766–1801”; Arie van Steensel, Historisch Leiden in Kaart: Kadaster 1832 (2016). https://doi. org/10.17026/dans-­2a9-­88d3; Ariadne Schmidt and Roos van Oosten, Leiden’s Pubscape, 1820–1894. Towards a better understanding of drink and labour, Leiden University (2020). https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-­z4q-­8c2v)

market or specific buildings such as the university (Historisch Leiden in Kaart 1832). One might argue that the authorised areas thus functioned according to the dynamics or logic of transit. They were located at spaces where people arrived in the city, or the places they would visit during their stay: spaces that already witnessed an influx and transit of people. It poses questions as to what extent city councils tried to contain the transient population in certain locations or prevent their encounters with other parts of the city. As Rosa Salzberg argued for early modern Venice,

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inns were essential hubs in the long-distance journeys of migrants and temporary visitors coming from all directions; places where people on the move could meet not only their basic needs (food, drink, and shelter) but also access other things of great value, such as useful information regarding local practices or future destinations, spaces to meet with city residents and other travellers, and entertainment to help pass the time spent waiting for the next phase of travel to begin. Located in strategic positions close to transport nodes and thoroughfares, they formed a key part of arrival zones that were not peripheral but pivotal to city life. (Salzberg 2021b, 116)

The Leiden spaces of accommodation demonstrate a close connection between spaces of arrival and transit and the locations of transport facilities in the city. This appears to be a general pattern: Maarten Hell argued that early modern Amsterdam inns were often located near transport routes (Hell 2014, 756). In his seminal work on inns, Beat Kümin emphasised the pivotal role of inns in the transport of goods, letters, and people; how they grew into major social centres; and the connections with major transport axes (Kümin 1999, 2007, 99–120). Rosa Salzberg likewise found concentrations of inns and lodging houses near the ports of Venice (Salzberg 2021a). But the nature of travel and transport differs from case to case. In Holland, the barges network formed the main mode of transport until the elaboration of the railway network in the mid-nineteenth century. As the British travel guide Mariana Starke wrote in her Information and directions for travellers on the Continent in 1824: Travelling post in Holland is always expensive, and often disagreeable; for many of the roads are bad: neither ought it indeed to be attempted during spring and autumn, on account of the rains and fogs, which render almost every road so wet and muddy, as to be dangerous; and this circumstance united to the exorbitant sums usually charged for baggage, makes Dutch Diligences ineligible; therefore the general mode of travelling is in Treckschuyts, or covered barges. (Starke 1824, 433)

The railway line was initially mostly constructed to transport goods, not people. The Netherlands did have some railway lines from the mid-­ nineteenth century onwards but was one of the last continental European countries to adopt a countrywide train network. Several authors argue this has to do with the sufficiency of the existing transport networks, others emphasise the economic decline of the country (Nusteling 1974, 111). Profits through colonial exploitation, euphemistically named “batige sloten”

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(positive profits), made it possible for the Dutch government to eventually develop a nationwide railway system (Nusteling 1974, 111). And therefore, for the period of study, the locations of spaces of transit in the city depended on the natural and technological aspects of mostly water transport. Places of stopover in the city were influenced by natural conditions such as the locations of rivers and human technologies such as canal digging and waterway maintenance. There was a regular need for dredging the canals in winter, for example (Van der Leer 2021, 72–73). The geography of the Dutch river delta forms an important factor and agent in the localisation of the spaces of transit and the connections of transient migrants to the city. Water shaped the city. In his seminal work Barges and Capitalism, Jan de Vries argued that cities in the Holland region emerged along water routes and that the barge network was the driving force behind economic growth of the cities (De Vries 1978). Later generations of historians, on the other hand, demonstrated how the intercontinental trade of enslaved people and its related economic activity played an important role, forming up to a third of the local economy in cities in the province of Zeeland, for example (De Kok 2020). Nevertheless,  the river delta landscape determined the formation of cities and the nature of trade between cities in Holland. The city of Leiden is situated in the midst of different flows of the Rhine River. It is connected to several canals such as the Vliet, which was the busiest canal in Holland in the early modern period. Some of the city’s canals have been dug purposely for creating barge connections, like the Haarlemmertrekvaart. In the seventeenth century, cities competed to create barge connections to other cities, creating an integrated economic network of trade over water. This was not a centralised effort, but rather incentivised by city councils and merchants (Looijestein 2021, 20–27). Merchants in Leiden, for example, petitioned in 1640 for a barge network to obtain a barge connection to Haarlem, with the plan to become a central node in regional trade. The economic expansion of the city was closely connected to the barge network, and the city’s main economic activity of textile production and trade largely depended on water transport. The Lakenhal, for example, a trade building where the quality of textile was gauged, was built along the waterfront and near the main gates connecting Leiden to Haarlem, Amsterdam, Delft, and Den Haag, so merchants could easily access it (Zijlmans 2021, 60–61). Barges would stop at the city gates, and goods would be transferred to carriages or smaller boats to be delivered throughout the city. Humans travelling from one city to the other would

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have to cross the city by carriage or by foot, thus creating liminal zones of mobility and interactivity within the urban network. The map in Fig. 8.1 gives us an overview of the late eighteenth century, when transport by barge was still the main mode of transport. This was increased with transport by post carriages through the expansion of the paved road system (cf. Wellenberg and Van der Zee 2021). In the early nineteenth century, however, especially in the first three decades, transport by barge declined for a few decades. Fewer people entered the city on a trekschuit. While many argued the introduction of the train killed the barges system, the number of barge drivers and the number of barges per day were already in decline in the region from the mid-eighteenth century onwards (Van Tilborg 2021, 87–89). What did such changes in transport mean for the spaces of transit and arrival? If accommodation was indeed connected to entry routes and transit stops in the city, could we witness a change upon the temporary decline in barge use? And considering the arrival of trains, or the expansion of the paved road system, which changed modes of travelling as Guldi and Verhoeven amongst others showed, did these also impact the visibility or role of spaces of arrival and transit in cities (Verhoeven 2009; Guldi 2012)? To what extent did they impact the encounter of migrants with the urban sphere? Although it is not possible to track the changing landscape of transit in detail, two nineteenth-century sources do provide more information on the changes in the locations of inns and lodging houses. The cadastre of 1832 was digitised by the Historisch Leiden in Kaart project of Roos van Oosten and Arie van Steensel and provides information on professions of plot and house owners, thus indicating the locations of hospitality in the city (Historisch Leiden in Kaart 2016). Similarly, the research on alcohol-­ serving or -selling establishments in patent registers for 1808–1894, digitised by the Pubscape project of Ariadne Schmidt and Roos van Oosten, allows to extract those alcohol-serving or -selling establishments with lodging facilities (Pubscape 2020). Distilling the locations of inns and lodging houses from the cadastre and the alcohol patent registers allows to estimate the continuity of the locations of spaces of transit. Lodging houses and inns were mostly situated on the same locations as indicated in the eighteenth-century regulations, even if these regulations were no longer valid since the end of the Ancien Regime. Inns and lodging houses were concentrated in specific places: near the gates of the city, such as Noordeinde (Wittepoort), Hogewoerd, and Marepoort; near a marketplace; and near the premises of the university and the army barracks. In

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contrast to the eighteenth-century regulations on inns, which prescribed specific streets and blocks, the  nineteenth-century spaces were located more in side streets or nearby streets. The hospitality sector remained in the same areas but was not necessarily located on the exact places established by the eighteenth-century regulations. We also see a notable expansion of lodging houses and inns in the area of the Steenstraat. Although this street was included in the eighteenth-century regulations, many new places of accommodation pop up in the surrounding streets in the nineteenth-century map. This neighbourhood was on the entry route for the barge line to Haarlem, but it also became the train station neighbourhood. Leiden became connected to the railway system in the 1840s with connections to Haarlem and The Hague. We might thus speak of a continued logic of transit in the city of Leiden, the reasons for which at this point are still unclear. It is possible that they relate to the path dependency of permissions which were already granted for specific locations, or continued ownership or family property of inns and lodging houses locations.

Public and Private Space Having established that designated zones existed for passanten in the city, we will now turn our attention to the implications of these zones and their relations to daily urban life. The early modern practice of passantenhuizen concentrated passers-by in set locations, allowing authorities to keep an eye on them and ensuring they would travel on the next day. This was based on religious forms of charity, present in both Christianity and Judaism, of hosting a fellow believer overnight and providing a meal, allowing them to continue their travels (Levie Bernfeld 1997). Did this spatial concentration still exist in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, considering the tensions between more centralised charity institutions and more ubiquitous civil society accommodation? And where were these supposed spaces of transit located, in busy streets or quiet back alleys? Spatial syntax theory can help provide insights into the tensions between public space and the privacy of the night in accommodation. Griffiths and Vaughan argued that spatial syntax theory offers a tool for historians to analyse the street grid of cities to understand the interactions between the built form and the lived experiences of the city (Vaughan and Griffiths 2020). For spaces of transit, it can also provide an indication of the physical and symbolic space migrant accommodation occupied in the city, and the access to and use of the streets by those accommodated there (Fig. 8.2).

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Fig. 8.2  Huiszittenhuis van de Hervormde Diaconie (Protestant Poor Relief Institution) with, on the foreground, the barge to Amsterdam. The Huiszittenhuis was the institution that hosted the passantmeester providing relief to people passing through Leiden. Jacob Timmermans, “Huiszittenhuis van de Hervormde Diaconie,” colour drawing (1788), Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken

Spatial syntax method offers the opportunity to calculate the interactivity of streets. That indicates what would theoretically speaking be the most visited or the quieter streets. Interactivity in this case is based on a calculation of the street grid, indicating how many streets one would have to take to get to a certain street. Streets that are easily accessible from multiple angles have a high interactivity score, indicating that we would expect these streets to be busier; streets that take quite some time to be reached are considered less interactive in these calculations. High interactivity can thus be used as a proxy for busy, public, central areas, whereas low interactivity should indicate backstreets, or peripheral neighbourhoods. Based on Charles Booth’s survey of poverty in London, Laura Vaughan, for example, calculated that streets with a low interactivity score were generally located in poorer neighbourhoods (Vaughan 2018, 61–92). Streets

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with high interactivity were generally located in the better off areas. The method has also been used by other historians to analyse the locations of political manifestations in the city, to provide a sense of their visibility and also the meaning of the choice for high-profile or more hidden locations (Navickas 2021). For this research on spaces of transit, it an provide an indication of whether migrants were tucked away in backstreets or highly visible in central spaces in the city. The spatial syntax of Leiden shows a clearly defined centre of high interactivity (geovisualisation based on calculations by  Vermaut 2020). This most highly interactive area is located between the Breestraat and Haarlemmerstraat, surrounding the city hall and the Waag, an area that is till today considered to be the centre of the city. The area contained several inns and lodging houses, such as the lodging house held by Van Ingen or an inn with “one to three rooms” at the Oude Rijn (cf. Pubscape 2020; Historisch Leiden in Kaart 2016). Other spaces of accommodation were generally located near the city gates, in areas with low interactivity. Theoretically speaking, they were thus either in highly visible public spaces, or in back areas. The inns and lodging houses in Leiden thus portray a relatively clear binary pattern regarding street interactivity levels: either in very central, highly interactive locations or in places with low interactivity. The east part of the city, generally considered the poorer neighbourhood, had a lower interactivity calculation (cf. Tjalsma 1985, 31). There is no clear correlation between the poorer neighbourhoods and the places of hospitality in this city level map: more research on the neighbourhood and street level is necessary to further clarify this. But the dichotomy between high and low interactivity is striking. Salzberg discovered a similar pattern for sixteenth-century Venice (Salzberg 2020, 2021a). Although she did not make calculations on spatial syntax or interactivity, her spatial research indicates that early modern Venetian inns and lodging houses of the city were either located at a big piazza (square) or in less central locations. The Piazza kind of accommodation was generally considered prestigious and hosted foreign merchants, political figures, and other high class or elite people, whereas the less central locations, such as in smaller streets and alleys, generally hosted less prestigious people. In her earlier innovative research on accommodation as spaces of arrival, Salzberg also argued for a distinction between cities with regulations for inns as determined by guilds and cities without (Salzberg 2019a). Some cities had strict regulations on who could be hosted and who could  not, restricting access to lodging to for example

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people convicted as criminals or vagrants.  In Venice, such marginalised groups often stayed in informal lodging houses, for example, some rooms rented out by single women, who tried to stay under the radar, Salzberg demonstrated. It indicates a strong link between locations and the character and clientele of lodging houses, and particularly how these related to migration regulation and notions of safety. Comparing Salzberg’s findings for Venice with the mapping of Leiden shows that similar patterns occurred in both places. The calculations of interactivity, which have not been used for spaces of arrival and transit before, moreover, point us towards a similar pattern: a class divide for migrants between lowly interactive and highly interactive neighbourhoods, which also represented in differences between elite guests and other kinds of migrants. For Leiden, this is corroborated by Pluskota’s research on locations of crimes committed in the city and interactivity of the streets (Dangerous Cities 2018). She argued that more crimes were recorded near inns. This might be related to the alcohol involved, or to what authorities called “night walking”, i.e. the leisurely evening culture of local students involving alcohol and knife fights (Hallema 1924). In addition to the  class  of migrants, gender also strikingly correlates with the syntax calculations. Most of the inns and lodging houses included in the study were exploited by men, according to the registries and tax lists (Historisch Leiden in Kaart 2016; Pubscape 2020). Although some were exploited by women, such as Van Haarlem who held a lodging house at the Hogewoerd according to the 1832 cadastre,  none of these was in a highly interactive neighbourhood. The low interactive neighbourhoods contained relatively more female inn and lodging house managers than the rest of the city. Again, Salzberg’s seminal research provided indications on the gendered nature of the hospitality sector (Salzberg 2019a). She argued that opening a lodging house, especially in the form of renting out a few rooms, formed a survival strategy for single women, especially widows, in sixteenth-century Venice. She argued that highly regulated cities like Venice, which had strict rules on who could be hosted in the city, left a leeway for single women opening informal lodging houses for people trying to stay under the radar. Women also often used their ethnic ties, preparing ethnic food styles, and connecting travellers from outside of the city. For Leiden, we do see that women mostly owned smaller inns or lodging houses, and mostly in less interactive neighbourhoods. More research on the microlevel of the individual inns and lodging houses is needed to assess these implications for the daily practices in these spaces.

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It must be noted that there are definite limits to my use of spatial syntax calculations in this chapter for understanding mobility within the city, particularly for arrival and transit (Griffiths and Vaughan 2020). The calculations I made on interactivity do not consider the continuing roads between the city and the surrounding countryside, nor do they include the barriers to incoming mobility posed by (remains of) city walls and city gates. They also only focus on transport by road, i.e., people walking or traveling on horses or carts, but do not take the water network of the city into account. Especially in the cities of the region of Holland, however, transport by water remained the main and preferred method of transport in the time period studied. Although some barges stopped at the city gates, others had stops in the cities. De Vries argued that the barge transport collapsed in the early nineteenth century during French occupation, recovered slightly in the first half of the nineteenth century, and increasingly declined in the later nineteenth century (De Vries 1978; Wellenberg and Van der Zee 2021, 18). The city council of Leiden argued that the creation of paved roads and diligences, as well as the local decrease in trade and production, declined the revenue from the barge network. Leiden maintained barge connections until the late nineteenth century. The barge to Haarlem was cancelled in 1860, while barge connections with Utrecht were maintained until 1884 and to Delft until 1887 (Bultink 2021, 49; Van der Wielen-De Goede 2021, 71; Wellenberg 2021, 177)

Night-time Considering the moment of the night as a stillifying moment (a concept coined by historian David Hitchcock at a seminar on passanten and transient migration at the University of Warwick in 2021) within the travel or journey, begs the question what the concept of the night meant in spaces of transit (cf. Hitchcock 2021). Or, from a technonatural perspective, one might ask how the nature of the night influenced such spaces, and which technologies were used to mediate this. The night as a natural force can be considered to have two major meanings. Firstly, the night functions as a phenomenon of time, as part of the rhythm of day and night, structuring urban life through the changes from dusk to dawn. Secondly, the night signifies darkness, including the cultural connotations of unsafety and danger in European and Christian culture. Both aspects of the phenomenon of the night impacted spaces of transit in cities.

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The night may be considered as a moment in the transit journey in which travellers and migrants sought shelter, in an inn along the road, in a village, or in a nearby town. It also was a time in which cities in the early modern period locked down public life. Every evening, the city gates were closed. The Leiden gates closed at sundown (Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1700–1725). In the city of Brussels, the closing hours of the gates were adjusted several times per year, with longer opening hours in summer than in winter (Jütte 2014, 220). In the evening, life in the city changed. Taverns and pubs had to close overnight, and the night watch patrolled the city. Arrival and transit in the city were only possible during daytime, and the daily closing of the gates prevented people from entering the city at night. Research into “kermissen” and other fair-like festivities in the early modern Low Countries also indicates that the city gates would be closed during these periods. But despite the gates closing, the city of Leiden allowed for one night-­ time arrival: the Maarsepoort opened again for the “night barge” which arrived at 23h daily (Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1700–1725, see also Fig. 8.3). The city guards would pick up the key, open the gate, let the barge pass, and close the gates again. Travellers on that last barge had to pay an extra fee, known as “pillow money”. As per the rules, this was

Fig. 8.3  Excerpt of archival source on the opening and closing of the city gates from the city of Leiden, early eighteenth century. (Source: EL, SA II, 2709: Memorie betreffende het halen en brengen van de sleutels van resp. naar de stadspoorten (begin 18e eeuw) 1700–1725)

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intended to be split between the guards of the gate and the local poor relief institution (Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1816). The connection to poor relief corroborates Pot’s theory on the connections between “passanten” and general poverty and begging policies. The night was not a static concept but changed throughout the year, dependent on seasons. There was a seasonality to the length of the night, which allowed for more barges during the longer lighter days of summer and less travel during winter (See Fig. 8.4). The daily number of boats was higher in summer than in winter though, considered the availability of daylight lasted longer (cf. Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1816). Travel by foot was especially impacted by seasons and weather, but so were barges. The landscape and local ecosystem played a role in the seasonality of barges, as the waterways needed regular dredging in winter seasons. The rhythm of transit thus differed between day and night and between

Fig. 8.4  Korte Mare in Leiden with barges to Haarlem. Paulus Constantijn La Fargue, “Korte Mare,” black and white drawing (1778), Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken

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seasons, as well as  for more cultural or event-based for local festivities, markets and fairs. And these rhythms also showed changes over time, as the earlier discussion of the introduction of the railways already showed. Authors like Peter Baldwin, Craig Kolosofsky, and Arun Kumar have stressed how the perception of the night changed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries (Casanova 2007; Baldwin 2011; Kolosofsky 2011; Kumar 2019). The introduction of systematic city lighting, initially by oil lamps, to be replaced by gas and later electricity, mediated the darkness of the night. Cities like Paris and London were among the first to install city lighting, initially with candles and oil lamps, which rendered the streets visible at night. Prior to the introduction of systematic city lighting, those going outside at night were supposed to carry a lantern. The lantern was a way of making themselves visible to others, showing that they intended no harm. The phenomenon of the invisible was connected to theft and other forms of crime or bad intentions (Kolosofsky 2011). Systematic city lighting shifted the focus from being seen to seeing, Kolosofsky argued, and made the night-time a time of leisurely activities for the middle classes. They would go out to operas or socialise in the evening. Kolosofsky and Baldwin, who studied the nineteenth century, termed this process nocturnalisation—the introduction of the night into the public sphere (Kolosofsky 2011; Baldwin 2011). Whereas the night before meant private time, spent inside the home, with the family, the installation of systematic street lighting changed the relationship of people with the night. There is some critique to this interpretation. Eespecially Kolosofsky’s work focuses mostly on the effects on the urban middling classes and provides little insights into the agency of other groups. Kumar and Baldwin instead discussed the effects on lower social classes and argued that this nocturnalisation also formed a sort of colonisation of the night. Lighting rendered the night into a productive time: people could continue their work (Kumar 2019). Kumar demonstrated how workers in nineteenth-century India reappropriated the night from a productive colonial space, into a time for studying as a strategy for upward social mobility. The technology of lighting mediated the nature of the night in cities, also in spaces of transit. This resonates particularly in the visibility of transient spaces. Inns and lodging houses, for example, had to put a candle in the windowsill. It enhanced their visibility for people walking past. It made them recognisable in the darkness as places of accommodation, for inhabitants and visitors alike. But it also rendered the facade of these spaces visible and made it possible to see what was happening at the doors of the

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inns and lodging houses. It reminds of the practice of carrying a lantern when going out at night, showing that one intended no harm. The connections found between the locations of committed crimes and the locations of inns in early modern Leiden and Amsterdam only continue to stress the tension between visibility and danger, as also indicated by the decision of the city council to start select the student neighbourhood with its “nightwalking” as the first neighbourhood to install city lighting.  This kind of visibility or recognisability of spaces of transit was not limited to the night. Inns had to install specific signs on the façade which stated that they were “vrij verblijf voor de reizende man” (literally translated as “free stay for the travelling man”). And a city ordinance of the early nineteenth century ordered barge drivers to ring a bell before departure from the city stops, so people would not miss the boat. Such sights and sounds made the concept of travel, mobility, and transit sensible within the city, for local inhabitants, visitors, and authorities alike. Technology formed a means of enforcing such visibility. Lighting facilitated the regulation and monitoring of spaces of transit. The gates of the city of Leiden, for example, were well-lit spaces. An 1823 register of the city lights indicates that the Wittepoort contained 13 lights “in and outside the gate”, and another 2 lights “on the stronghold”, in other words, on the gate building itself (Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken 1824–1827). The Wittepoort gate was located at the Noordeinde in the west, where barges to The Hague and Delft entered and left the city. There was also a gatekeepers’ house. The lighting register did not mention lights at all the Leiden had multiple functioning city gates in the late eighteenth century, like de Herenpoort, Hogewoerdsepoort, Koepoort, Marepoort, Wittepoort, Rijnsburgerpoort, Morspoort, and the Zijlpoort. Only five of these had city lights installed according to the register. Each of these lighted gates was located in one of the earlier defined spaces of transit, namely the city entrances of: • the Noordeinde connecting to the barges to Delft and The Hague (Wittepoort), • the Haven which was the general urban port (Rijnsburgerpoort), • the Doezastraat which was more of a market entrance (Koepoort), • the Mare with its barge connections to Amsterdam (Marepoort), • and, lastly, the Hogewoerd, with its barge connections to Utrecht (Hogewoerdsepoort).

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While the Wittepoort contained as many as 13 lights, the Marepoort, Rijnsburgerpoort, and Hogewoerdsepoort, all only had between one and four lights each. The Koepoort was an exception. It only had lights outside of the gate, according to the register. Eight city lights were installed on the gate, all of them on the exterior side. The visibility here was thus mostly on the part outside of the city walls.  Another of the gates with lights, the Koepoort, was in the south of the city. A mid-sixteenth century map shows that this gate was located at the point where the canal Vliet, connecting Delft and Leiden, entered the city, but the gate itself could only be transgressed by road. Interestingly, the Koepoort area was not a barge arrival area, neither was it part of the areas of permitted inns in the eighteenth century or did it have large concentrations of inns and lodging houses in the nineteenth century. Daniel Jütte spoke about this countryside part of early modern European city gates as different from the interior side of the gate. He states that the city side was intended to give inhabitants “a sense of security, while the country side was designed to proclaim the identity of the city or town to the world and to project both wall and gates as ‘icon[s] of power and permanence’ ” (Jütte 2014). The Koepoort lights, then, can be interpreted as city lights as a tool for visibility in the sense of safety and as a sign of prestige.

Conclusion The installing of city lights to fight night-walking, and the visibility of inns and lodging houses at night, corroborate Chris Otter’s theories on visibility and the culture of “inspectability” in the nineteenth century, of places being recognisable for citizens and police alike (Otter 2008, 99–134). But for migrant hosting, the guild systems for inn holders, as well as the charitable institutions of passantenhuizen, were based on principles of concentrating migrants in specific areas or limiting the time they stayed in the city. These form a continuity of early modern notions of controllability which several historians believed to decrease or disappear in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (De Vries 1978, 82–84; Spaans 1997, 80–82). For the city of Leiden, examples of passantenregisters have survived, which provide proof of the charity provided to travellers in the 1830s (Schepers 2022). The ways of regulating and monitoring migration underwent changes from designated buildings to more centralised monitoring with registers.

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Although I would not argue that technology and nature determined the changes in migration, mobility and the city around 1800, the landscape, the influence of transport revolutions, the darkness and danger of the night, and the process of nocturnalisation form examples of technonatural phenomena impacting spaces of arrival and transit. Including questions on the agency of infrastructure (cf. Guldi 2012), the impact of technology, the conditions posed by nature and how this impacts spaces and infrastructures are important contributions to the more recent “spaces of arrival” and “migration infrastructures” debates in migration history. A great deal of work has been conducted so far on migrant agency or for example on the migrant-state nexus. The more recent infrastructural and spatial theories show us the importance of studying the frameworks guiding migration and mobility (Xiang and Lindquist 2014; Meeus et al. 2019; Schepers 2021). In order to understand both, it is necessary to look further than human agency. Nature to some degree shapes travel, as discussed earlier with regard to the landscape, the means of travel, the changing seasons, or the influence of the night-time. Transport technologies and urban technologies like city lighting or gates are shaped by  or because of natural phenomena, or used to create a space of power or a space of regulation. As such, the technonatures approach underlines the importance of visibility and recognisability of spaces of transit and arrival in the city, and how they are related to controllability and containment. While trying to understand urban transformations, one cannot just focus on the city and its resident population. People in transit who spend a couple of days or sometimes a few weeks are a group of people who use a city, for whom facilities exist, who as a whole or as a group are monitored by the police and city council, etc. From this transient perspective, cities are not just a community of residents, but spaces that provide safety and warmth in the night, spaces for the exchange of goods, obtaining documents, or meeting people. They form a density of people and services that encompasses more than the local residents, more than the binary of natives and migrants. And here, this chapter has demonstrated how nature and technology influence arrival, how darkness poses perceptions of danger and threat, which resonate discussions of the migrant threat, and how city lighting was used as an instrument for inspectability. Based on this research, I would argue technonatures do not function as agents that determine migration history, but they do add new  perspectives to the debates on migration regulation and social control. They help to understand the access to space in the city and to study the exchanges and dynamics

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between migrants and the built environment.  In the words of Magaly Rodríguez García and Amandine Lauro, this chapter forms a contribution to understanding the “physical and symbolic places” transient migrants could occupy in society, as well as the “disciplinary and exclusionary nature of the environments they inhabited” (Rodríguez García and Lauro 2016, 34). Acknowledgment  The author would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their helpful suggestions, and Vera Sales, Beat Kumin, Rosa Salzberg, Felicita Tramontana, Jasper Segerink, the participants of the Passanten and Transient Migration workshop at Warwick University in 2021, and the researchers of BIRMM and SHOC of Vrije Universiteit Brussel for their comments on earlier versions or presentations of this paper. This research has been made possible by an IAS Fernandes visiting researcher fellowship at Warwick University and by funding of the Research Foundation Flanders.

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CHAPTER 9

At the Intersection of Expertise and Landscaping: How Technical Advisors Created New Nature Nina Toudal Jessen

Planning happens in the cross-section between ideals, needs, economy, and the physical environment. To change a specific place according to plans also involves the locals living there. In addition, planning reflects power structures at political and local levels. In particular when planning technical sites such as landfills, sewage plants, and heavy industry conflicts run high. Planning also has a history and a timeline. In Denmark, as in most Western European countries, national and regional physical planning was the result of the developing welfare state in the aftermath of World War II (WWII) (Newman and Thornley 1996). This chapter operates at a different scale than most studies of planning, as this is a study of land, soil, waste, farmers’ decision-making, planners, administrators, conservation laws, and administrative changes. The aim of the chapter is to discuss these

N. T. Jessen (*) Sustainability Science Centre, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_9

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elements that all blurred the lines between the two in a mid-size Danish municipality in the 1970s. This happened despite planning measures that should separate the urban and the rural. As such, the chapter argues for an understanding of planning as possibly blurring boundaries rather than upholding them. I follow the planning of a rural landfill to show an alternative waste story. Often, waste stories tell of urban metabolism, use of resources, and energy flow. They often include the development of large urban centres and their relations to both immediate surroundings and the broader hinterland (Köster 2017; Stokes et  al. 2013; Cooper 2009; Tarr 1996). Therefore, stories of waste centre on discarded materials and consequently follow human settlements and urban dwellings. In this sense, landfilling as a practice connects urban centre with the hinterland. This has been shown in case studies from all over the world. For instance, in studies of the many so-called rubble mountains [Trümmerberge], in German cities, which are the results of the collected rubble after WWII bombings, that now often function as urban green spaces without visitors paying attention to their material components (Weber 2019). In Melbourne, as Tim Edensor has shown, holes left after quarrying allow for first landfills, and then public green spaces (Edensor 2020). In Copenhagen, archaeologists continuously find medieval landfills during the excavations related to work on the recent metro construction (Cooper 2017; Andersen 2012; Colten 2017). Thus, the literature on waste shares a focus on urbanity. Landfills and landfilling exemplify what Verena Winiwarter and Martin Schmid conceptualised as socio-natural-sites (SNS), in the sense that landfills create places in the nexus between human practices and material possibilities. With Linda Nash, they suggest, “that the narratives of environmental history should emphasise that human intentions do not emerge in a vacuum, that ideas are often not clearly separated or separable from actions, and that human agency cannot be separated from the environment in which it develops” (Winiwarter and Schmid 2020, 38). Thus, it is evident that in relation to landscape and land use that changes the idea behind seemingly logical decisions may stem from the physical properties of a place as well as social and political interests. Hence, the idea to place unwanted items somewhere is spurred by the physical properties and not a decision taken outside time and space. Today, waste is global and material. As is well known, today discarded plastic bags, industrial by-products, and other products of human activities are found on the remotest parts of the planet. Urban geographers Neil

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Brenner and Christian Schmid suggested the concept of planetary urbanisation to discuss the fact that human activity now affects the entire planet, from the deepest parts of the Marian reef to the Himalayas (Brenner and Schmid 2015). However, while the term brings forth vivid images of the state of the planet and the global problem of waste management, as well as it adheres to the interconnectedness of global capitalism, the concept adapts only poorly to understand waste at local scales. Using the planet as scale makes actual analysis difficult, if not impossible, as a planetary scale does not allow an analysis of actions and interventions, nor to follow the processes of change. Therefore, this analysis builds on a local example, however, still comparable to many other Western European sites. A main argument with Brenner and Schmid, which I will follow in this chapter, is the idea of urbanisation as a process (Brenner and Schmid 2015). To concretise the process, I use the term blurring to explore how the rural and the urban converged in 1970s Denmark. The concept of blurring suggests a slow material change in rural areas by installation of technical facilities, and therefore landfilling functions as materially blurring the lines between urban and rural. The rural, I would argue, does not become urban in the eyes of neither planners nor neighbours, which is not to state that it doesn’t change. Using blurring as a conceptual entrance to examine rural changes keeps the focus on the material and technical changes to areas not perceived as urban. Thus, this chapter invokes the notions of the technonatures resulting in focus less about a return to pure nature and more about the physical consequences of power and scale. As sociologists David White and Christ Wilbert put, “Moreover, it is the built environment that appears to be emerging, for a growing array of activists and academics, as the central terrain over the battle for the contours of future natures and new forms of environmentalism” (White and Wilbert 2006, p. 100). To illustrate this point and its connections to landfilling as a technonatural process, I will bring forth a very local case study of the plans for a rural landfill in 1970s Denmark. For this chapter, the landfill planning and its use work as a prism through which we can examine how the urban and rural intertwine and create new places. My reading of the landfill as a site that blurs the urban and rural therefore is indebted to Sara Pritchard’s concept of the enviro-technical systems, which she defines as “environments and technologies that continually reshape individual parts of the system and the whole” (Pritchard 2011, 19). In this sense, the seemingly

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separated urban and rural spheres were reshaped and met through the planning and practices of landfilling. Thus, I explore how the rural-urban divide blurred through municipal waste management in a predominantly rural area and ask how the design of a controlled landfill shaped the relations between urban and rural anew. As I will show below, the industrial and technical installations bridged zoning legislation and created technical places in the midst of the rural. Consequently, the site also altered the neighbouring villagers’ sense of place and their relationship to past and lost landscapes. As Timothy Mitchell showed for early twentieth-century Egypt, bureaucracy does not exist in a vacuum outside the material world, but is deeply immersed in the concrete, physical world in which it operates (Mitchell 2002). The separation of the urban and rural thus took place both at a concrete, practical level through the daily waste management system and at a political and symbolic level, which was implemented from top down from state to municipality. The planning and construction of the landfill happened at various levels. Therefore, I present a three-fold history. First, I present the planning, environmental, and municipal reforms as key actors in shaping the urban-rural relations in 1970s Denmark. Here, I show how the new administrative divisions responded to already ongoing changes to rural areas. To exemplify this, the second part of the analysis turns towards the planning of a municipal landfill for the market town of Kalundborg between 1974 and 1979. During these years ongoing discussions between owners, the municipal technical administration, and environmental engineers show the processes behind landfilling as blurring the urban-rural divide. This part pays attention to how planners and owners envisioned the landfill before, during, and after its use. The landfill changed a disused gravel pit as well as its immediate surroundings. From being a rural site, the landfill eventually became a technical site made fit to its rural surroundings, thereby creating an artificial mountain of waste in a place that used to be a quarry. This part of the chapter specifically asks of the temporality of the landfill. Here, I focus on the site and its direct impact on the ideas and visions involved in the possibilities of recreating a past landscape. Thus, in this aspect, landfilling functioned not only as waste management but as welfare state landscaping as well (see also: Braae et al. 2020). Lastly, I turn to the site towards its closure in the early 1990s. While planning and deciding upon opening a landfill in the rural area had been almost without protests, its closure became contested among the

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locals and reflected a changed attitude towards municipal expertise and administration. This section shows the dilemmas that surrounded landscaping the landfill into a site, which would fulfil the plans envisioned twenty years earlier. Together, the three foci unfold how urban-rural blurring developed through planned and unplanned processes.

Zoning and Separation: Danish Land Use Until the 1970s For centuries, the dominant use of land in Denmark has been agricultural. Today, the Danish landscape is heavily cultivated with approximately 60% currently under cultivation. The rest is built up, forested, or shoreline (Arler et  al. 2015). However, since the early twentieth century, other usages such as industrial, technical, and recreational activities encroached on rural places and took up space in the Danish landscape as well. As in most of Western Europe, the urban-rural divide has diminished in Denmark during the past sixty years, with provincial towns spreading beyond their city limits as well as the massive construction of single-family housing in rural villages during the 1960s ([Naturfredningskommissionen af 1961] 1967; Møllgaard 1971; Gaardmand 1993). In this period, the widespread housing development of rural-urban fringes—often on previously agricultural lands—changed the use and aesthetics of the former rural areas, as well as made space for larger, less densely built-up towns (Busck and Kristensen 2014). Thus, the villages developed urbanised traits such as single-family houses with gardens, while legally and administratively still being understood as villages. At national level, the social democratic government instigated the Zoning and Planning Act in 1973. The zoning legislation required all municipalities to make local development plans for any new infrastructure, housing developments, or other alterations to the physical landscape. The zoning legislation separated the country into three categories: rural zone, town zone, and recreational/summerhouse zones. These three zones each had their rules and regulations. The rural zoning in particular foregrounded agricultural uses, thus securing farmland for the future and capping the sprawl of single-family housing on the fringe of old villages. As a result, the open farmland should be kept free of urban development. Thus, the zoning legislation was a governmental attempt at steering the housing

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and building development from further spontaneous sprawl, as well as meant to secure agricultural lands from industrial development. In the 1973-Planning Act, zoning became an active instrument for future-making processes. Setting up various zones for various activities was naturally nothing new, as it had been a used planning tool in Denmark since the 1930s (Gaardmand 1993). Although having had planning instruments as early as 1925, planning was not required until 1938, and by then only towns and communities with more than 1000 inhabitants needed a city plan. Thus, planning focused on towns and larger villages, without taking rural areas into considerations (Tuxen 1991, 4–5). The 1973-Planning Act therefore shows the apparent need for clarifying development in rural areas as well. Thus, while zoning already was an instrument used for public administration and physical planning, the new 1973-Planning Act underscored how planning should intentionally direction future land use. In practice, the 1973-Planning Act required municipalities and counties to draw plans for municipal and regional planning. These plans again needed to align with national planning strategies (Vaaben 2012). In contrast to past planning, the new planning thus included rural areas hitherto left out of land use planning. Aside from the municipal reform and the Planning Act, the 1974 Environmental Protection Act also added to the increased state control over land use decisions in the late 1960s. The law was the first Danish environmental law and aimed particularly at controlling directly visible pollution alongside obnoxious smells and freshwater pollution (Engberg 1999). By the 1970s uncontrolled landfilling caused worries among the public as one of many environmental issues raised in the public throughout the West during the decade (Kupper 2001; Warde et al. 2018). The public debates on environmental degradation, oil spillage, and air pollution resonated with international debates around environmental degradation, and as such the Danish Environmental Protection Act followed the regulations of other European countries (Weber 2019; Arnott 1985). The zoning legislation, the Planning Act, and the Environmental Protection Act all responded to changes spurred by uncontrolled housing construction and tipping of household waste in Danish rural areas. In a sense, planning thus became an articulation of processes already in motion at the time and reacted to these, rather than steering them. Thus, the processes already in motion in the rural areas were supposed to stop or be

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controlled under the new legislation; however, as I will argue, it only helped the municipal authorities to secure space for the landfilling. The parallel bodies of regulations meant to cap the urban sprawl by steering and controlling development in rural areas, as well as protect the environment against further degradation, in particular in cases of ground water pollution. Thus, the legislation was intended to steer future decision-­ making. As such, the new legislative bodies were attempts at controlling not only urban but also rural areas by placing both under municipal regulation, thereby enforcing their internal borders and securing a formal division between the urban and the rural. At once, no patch of land in Denmark was outside state or municipal control. This particularly became apparent when dealing with waste management, as I will show below in the case study of Kalundborg.

Blurring the Urban-Rural Divide in 1970s Denmark The town of Kalundborg in Western Zealand, Denmark, is a common Danish market town of approximately 15,000 inhabitants in the urban area and a rather large surrounding area. In the 1960s, heavy biotechnical industry in the shape of insulin producer Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals as well as the petrochemical firm Statoil settled in the town, alongside the phosphate-plant Superfos as well as hair product manufacturing factory Carmen Curlers. While not necessarily an early industrialised town in comparison to other Danish mid-size towns, industrialisation happened quickly and remains today a large hub for pharmaceutical and chemical production. Throughout the 1960s, the population of Kalundborg and its surrounding villages grew rapidly. The new industrial development spurred densification of both the city and its nearby villages. Most evident the urbanisation resulted in blurring the lines between the neighbouring parish municipality and the administrative and legislative borders of the market town. Thus, the town itself was and still is quite industrial for its size, with its surroundings being predominantly rural (Juul and Michaelsen 1987). As a result of the 1970-municipal reform, Kalundborg became the regional, administrative, and urban centre of Western Zealand, and thus responsible for waste management and physical planning. Because of the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, the town needed more efficient waste management to cover its needs and expectations of waste management from the public.

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Following the new legislation, setting up a landfill necessitated planning and authorisation from the county as well as the Ministry of Environment. Therefore, in 1974, the technical department of the Kalundborg municipality engaged the environmental engineering company Enviroplan to plan their future landfill. The engineers at Enviroplan A/S specialised in environmental planning for municipalities, and they were engaged in waste management planning across the country from 1973 and onwards. They functioned as technical advisors in a field in which the technical department of the local municipality had little expertise. Thus, introducing the engineers into the municipal planning process created a new formalised private-public partnership. Just as Timothy Mitchell showed for dam building in early twentieth-­ century Egypt, the waste management planning of the minor Danish provincial town relied on and was shaped by new expertise, and it likewise  developed as a response to the lack of control (Mitchell 2002, 15). Examining the planning process for the controlled landfill in Ubberup [Kontrollerede losseplads ved Ubberup] shed light onto how expert knowledge functioned in shaping technological and environmental responses at local level. Planning the landfill cut across municipal, county, and national administrative layers, as well as it depended on the material properties of the soil and landscape itself. As such, the planning process shows the professionalisation of the local municipal administration. In particular, the technical advisors and consultants represent new functions at local level, which had hitherto been non-existing in rural areas. The process of planning the landfill happened in stages. It included a variety of actors at each stage, and as will be evident, these stages were interdependent and interconnected. The first step of planning was to seek a place for their future landfill. Here a disused gravel pit close to the little hamlet Ubberup (about 6 kilometres from Kalundborg) came into perspective. This first step in the planning process rested upon the area itself to prove secure for the landfill. To prove this, Enviroplan engineers conducted hydrologic and geologic examinations of the area around the gravel pit in Ubberup. These aimed at settling the strength and depth of the clay layers underground and mapping the ground water flow below the clay stratum. Impermeable clay stratums were crucial for preventing the polluted run-off water—the percolate—from seeping through the layers of the landfill, bringing with it various biological and chemical

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pollutants. The percolate is highly toxic and an unavoidable by-product from landfills, which occurs once waste and rainwater mix at a landfill (Rambøll 1975). Consequently, if these layers were of insufficient depth the percolate might seep into the lower-lying groundwater basins and pollute the ground water. The clay stratum was a large factor when planning the landfill, particularly in the eyes of the authorities above the municipal level. The technical department of the county as well as the Ministry of Environment could only accept the plans for the landfill once they proved the clay stratum impermeable (Enviroplan 1974). The initial geoelectrical examinations proved that the depth of the clay stratum underneath the former gravel pit was large and to a certain extent impermeable for the polluted. Using the natural layers of impermeable soils as ground water protection had already in 1959 become the first step in any controlled or planned tipping in Germany (Weber 2019, 264). Thus, with some delay, 15 years later, this knowledge also shaped planning and landscaping in Denmark. Building on the knowledge that the clay stratum was large enough to protect the ground water below the landfill, Enviroplan made a design for the landfill. Because of the secure stratums, the design and plans only needed to secure parts of the pit as well as the sides of the landfill with an additional layer of clay. The reinforcement of the sides and base through an extra clay base should prevent the percolate from seeping through the sides of the landfill. Adding to this, the contractors would have to install a reinforced polyethylene cover on the base of the landfill so that none of the percolate would seep through. In short, the base and the sides of the landfill created a bowl-like shape in the gravel pit, and a bowl, which would collect the polluted water and through drainage send it to a designated basin outside the landfill. From there the percolate would be purified and lead to the municipal wastewater treatment plant, which again led the wastewater into the sea (Enviroplan 1974). Thus, overall the layers served a critical function in the planning process, as the design depended on these naturally occurring geological layers, thus changing their status from clay to a vital element of groundwater protection. Adding the reinforced clay base and the polyethylene cover, the entire design became a technonatural hybrid of soils and plastics. In November 1974, the technical department of the municipality began contacting various authorities and interest groups for initial approval of their plans. Amongst these were the county conservation committee [Fredningsplanudvalg for Vestsjælland] and the county doctor [Amtslægen]

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whose approvals were needed in matters of health issues. Moreover, the plans were discussed at the administrative level in the county and in the political committee on technical and environmental issues [Miljø- og Teknikudvalget] (Vestsjællands Amtskommune 1975). In the political committee, members were elected politicians, whereas the other interest groups primarily consisted of bureaucrats. To the conservation authorities, the main concerns as to approving landfill were the risk of ground water pollution. Again, the clay stratum underneath the landfill was at the centre, as the authorities repeated and stressed the importance of their impermeability. Adding to the legal authorities, the Geological Survey of Denmark also required Enviroplan to ensure that the thickness of the clay layers was sufficient. If not, they recommended that the company would drain and purify the ground water from the deeper layers. The county doctor, in contrast, did not see any risk of contaminating the water and his main concern were the water supply facilities for the inhabitants in the vicinity of the planned landfill. He advised any well in the proximity of 300 metres to be sealed off. Opening a landfill in Ubberup therefore also resulted in the inhabitants being forced to join the municipal water work. As evident in this process, the many interested bodies worked from afar, and worked with technical assistance based on an understanding of the landfill at a theoretical level. Only later would the locals be invited into the planning process. Only when the geoelectrical surveys proved the clay stratum large enough for protecting the ground water underneath, the municipality settled on Ubberup as a site for the landfill. As such, it was the physical properties of the place that settled the decision. This line of thinking fits with traditional ways of landfilling before any kind of environmental protection, in which the physical properties—low areas, swamps, moors and disused mine shafts, marl pits and gravel pits—were filled up with waste (Weber 2014, 2019; Jessen 2021). In this sense, the new controlled planning involved new knowledge of possible pollutants and environmental consequences, while it continued old practices. The planners from Kalundborg agreed upon the Keldberg gravel pit as a suitable site, because it fulfilled a range of criteria. First, the landfill would not take up space in a cultivated area. Second, placing the landfill in a former gravel pit would be cheaper than alternatively expropriating farmed land. Combined, the two criteria follow the customary, agricultural tradition of reserving farmland for farming. It tapped into the fear of farmland shortage, which was growing between 1940 and 1970

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([Naturfredningskommissionen af 1961] 1967; Fritzbøger 2004). A fear was driven by both the expansion of urban areas and an anticipated population growth. Therefore, the gravel pit seemed appropriate as a site for the landfill. It had already been taken out of agricultural use, and as the soil consisted of gravel, sand, and stone, it was less valuable for farming purposes. By using the gravel pit as a landfill, the hill could once again be useful for human purposes. As farmers still owned the majority of the Danish soils, politicians and policymakers were wary of claiming useful agricultural land for non-agricultural and/or non-industrious purposes, which falls in the line with the historical (and still effective) weariness against interfering with agricultural land use. Lastly, to the county and the municipal technical department, the site in Ubberup was ideal both because of its being situated in reasonable distance to the town and because of its proximity to the county road, thereby making the site easily accessible for refuse collection trucks. In the documents, it comes across as an active decision for the landfill to be placed in Ubberup, but in practice, it was the gravel pit that lends itself to that decision. This part of planning the landfill shows how the Planning Act began shaping the way the authorities worked. Approval from the lowest level— the municipal—needed to be acknowledged and backed by the next levels—the county level until the national level. Again, it is worth remembering that Planning Acts refer to both the process of planning and the plans themselves (Tuxen 1991). Thereby, the process underlines the importance of understanding plans as both process and product.

Recreating Past Landscapes, Shaping the Future In January 1975, the municipality had obtained the preliminary acceptance from the environmental authorities in the county [Teknisk Forvaltning]; the municipal planners invited the six plot owners for a meeting. Thus, the municipal administration met with the plot owners of the Ubberup gravel pit, its neighbours, the mayor, and an engineer from Enviroplan A/S. The main topic of the meeting was the plan for the new landfill in Ubberup. As an argument for locating the landfill in Ubberup, the municipal planners presented to the owners and neighbours the idea that filling the gravel pit with waste and covering it with soil would recreate an “old, distinctive feature of this landscape” [Man kunne ved opfyldninger genskabe

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et gammelt, karakterfyldt landskabstræk] (Kalundborg Kommune 1977). The word, landskabstræk (landscape feature), does not exist in the Danish dictionary, but one has to understand it, as the now missing hill was distinct and valuable to people living in this area. Like later and current nature restoration projects, the future hill would rest upon an ideational landscape feature which was no longer visible or retraceable in the landscape but shaped anew. As such, the recreation of the hill would create a new hill from the remembrances of the former hill. When in use as a gravel pit, gravel was taken directly from the wall of the hill. The restoration of the hill therefore had to rest on re-establishing a hillside. Re-establishing former landscapes settles on a specific landscape at a specific time. Natural conservation inherently has a point of departure, which then becomes the standard or natural. In the case of the Ubberup landfill, the municipal planners settled on sometime before the intense gravel extraction. That meant bringing the area back to that of the commons around 1850, when the villagers had used the area for grazing their livestock (Jessen 2021). Though not bringing back this practice, the hill after its use as landfill was to visually look like the ‘original’ landscape. Therefore, at this point in the planning process, the planners stressed the visual and aesthetics of the landfill and put aside the technical aspects of groundwater protection as well as the municipal need for waste management. The engineers drew plans for fences and layout for shrubbery, which could conceal and hide the landfill and re-establish the past landscape. However, as the past land use had been communal grazing, the shrubs would rather cover the hills than leave them bare, as they had probably been during their use as commons. Thus, while planning to return to the past usage—re-establishing the hills as they had once been—the landscape architects in fact created a land cover type that reached back beyond its use as common to pre-historical times, in which Denmark was fully covered in forests and shrubs (Fritzbøger 2004). The aesthetics reflect an interest in nature conservation and an awareness of the damages that gravel extraction had caused. Therefore, the argument turns aesthetic, and historical in the sense, that by stressing the “old” and “distinctive” landscape, the hill is given a historical meaning, of which it hitherto had been void. Consequently, it points towards the hills as a specific place. Although it was an industrially used landscape, it also functioned as a local place, and a place to which neighbours, villagers, and farmers responded. The half-removed hill may have been understood as a scar, and it may have been perceived by villagers as something destroying

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the landscape, as was a common understanding of disused gravel pits (Vagn-Nielsen 1970). In the report from the meeting in 1975, owner of one plot in the gravel pit, local farmer Eskild Pedersen, underlined the passages regarding the recreation of the landscape (Kalundborg Kommune 1977). Likewise, later in his copy of the official development plan of the site, the paragraph suggesting how the landfill may recreate a past fringe landscape is marked with a cross. Eskild Pedersen’s doodles from 1975 to 1977 express an interest from his side in establishing a landscape that simulates a past landscape. Thus, while owning the land and accepting increased gravel extraction prior to the establishment of the landfill, Eskild Pedersen might have felt an impact from the local public discussions and debate around land use in the 1970s (Kalundborg Kommune, Teknisk Forvaltning 1975). The pencil crosses and underlinings Pedersen made in his copy of the report point towards an interesting clash of timelines. On the one hand, the gravel extraction took place in the present, and being an extra source of income for a farmer, it must have seemed natural to allow further extraction. Thus, the economic rationale for Pedersen (and possibly the other plot owners) must have been to secure the last economic benefit from this otherwise poor land. Of course, when accepting the municipal plans, they also agreed to sell their land to the municipality. On the other hand, the crosses and underlinings reflect a different timeline existing simultaneously among the owners. In this temporal understanding, the past landscapes were important to recreate. This timeline relates the past landscapes to the future landscapes, and it indicates a historical place-consciousness among the farmers. Thus, multiple temporalities existed for both planners and farmers alike. At the first meeting between the municipal authorities and the plot owners, it was emphasised that the area should be a public greenspace after additional treatment. As mentioned, the future greenspace pointed towards returning the hills to their “original” usage, as a common for the villagers. In hiding the past uses of the place, the landfill would over time create a new artificial nature, with the garbage hidden inside the new hill (Jørgensen 2013). Ideas like these resonate with later examples of so-­ called urban wastelands or abandoned areas which developed into biologically diverse sites (Gandy 2016, 437). In contrast, however, the site at Ubberup was a deliberately designed wasteland reshaping a former one. In these plans the urban and rural thus mixed so that the urban waste created

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layers of artificial matter, and the after treatment created the seemingly rural open landscape. At the 1975-meeting, the engineer from Enviroplan stressed that the nuisances—such as dust, obnoxious smells, and noise—would be fewer with this regulated landfill than with traditional, unregulated landfills. No longer would people accept waste disposal to happen randomly. This attitude regarding pollution reflects immediately perceptible aspects of the landfill, such as smells and noise. These nuisances created a landscape very much in the present for the villagers, as they would smell and hear the landfill. These concerns reflect both a general public attitude towards waste disposal and an official and administrative increased environmental awareness, which were possibly due to the Environmental Act from 1974. Moreover, the affirmation that nuisances would not occur reveals the projected control of the environment, which the engineers envisioned. However, real change in discarding and disposal practices did not occur. The municipal authorities still opted for following the practices that had previously worked, now, however, in a seemingly controlled and coordinated way. The plans for the landfill as well as the considerations voiced during the meetings all point towards the creation of a new type of place. While the area surrounding the gravel pit/landfill still was agricultural land and the owners still farmers, the future of the landfill—after its planned closure— would be that of recreational green space. A completely new type of land use in the otherwise intensely farmed area. At this point, the plans still only existed in the papers, drawings, and letters among the environmental authorities, Enviroplan, and the municipal technical department. The landfill they discussed was still a representation of the municipal wishes and the technical possibilities, and this rested heavily upon representations and translations of the site to cadastres, measurements, and technical drawings. These plans would eventually be transferred to the place itself, shaping the future landfill physically. Expert knowledge thus not only supported municipal decision-making through knowledge collection and dissemination in direct conversation with the municipal authorities but also through the representations it created. The visual aspects of the planning process therefore hint towards the future place of both the landfill and the subsequent greenspace. In a sense the future materialised in the plans. As noted above, dealing with the future polluted water was a major concern in shaping and designing the landfill. The requirements for this part of the planning process

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were very specific including specific measurements of the drainpipes, the pipes to the manholes, as well as the lids of these manholes, which needed to be installed for the purpose of later percolate controls. Moreover, planning included calculations and projections on the expected amounts of waste, the possible changes in future waste patterns, and the management of pollutants in the landfill (Cirkulære om miljøbeskyttelsesloven 1974). At this point, planning and later use converged. The envisioned design could thus not be separated from its future use. Overall, the technopolitics of the planners met the concerns of future land use limitations. Through the implementation of national regulations on land use and environmental protection, the landfill in Ubberup would become a designed place where the layout was planned beforehand, from the soil to the shrubs. In the paper plans, the transformation of the disused gravel pit into a landfill was a continuation of the processes that urban historian Chris Otter refers to as “anthromes”. That is biomes transformed by human activity (Otter 2019, 323. See also Otter, this volume). At first sight, the municipal plans for the landfill emerged from an envisioned need for waste management. However, in practice the proposed site—a disused gravel pit—lend itself to the imagination of the environmental engineers. Thus, the construction and the details surrounding the planning processes reveal the interconnectedness between ideas, actions and space, and future-making. The plans, local as they are, need to be seen in the light of the parallel processes in other European countries during the same period, which were characterised as welfare state planning (Galland 2012). Moreover, the initial parts of the planning process show how the Planning Act simultaneously separated urban and rural land, while still at local level municipal planners placed urban features in a rural area. Underlining all these processes was the constant focus on shaping the future landscapes and surroundings. However, as I have shown, the plans were indeed plans and still needed to unfold on site. Therefore, in the following section, I turn to the spaces of waste which developed once the landfill opened in 1979. As I show, the new landfill created a place that blurred the urban-rural divide and incorporated a technical site into the rural area.

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Protesting the Spaces of Waste After four years of planning and construction, the landfill in Ubberup officially opened in 1979. In use, the Ubberup landfill created a contact zone between the urban and the rural, as the discarded materials were collected in the urban areas and from the factories in Kalundborg and sent to the former gravel pit. As Heike Weber has stressed, “Dumps thus represent the spatio-material result of society’s incessant wish to render its waste invisible by banning it from populated regions to secluded spaces of less value, be it uncultivated land, gravel pits, or other places considered insignificant to be sacrificed” (Weber 2019, 265). In a densely populated and heavily cultivated country as Denmark, insignificant places, however, are hard to come by. As the discussions between the owners and the municipal planners show, the entire planning area was already owned or had been owned and was in some kind of use. Thus, altering the landscape not only meant shaping the immediate surroundings of the neighbours but also meant reconfiguring an area that the villagers had known and related to in various ways. The landfill itself became a working site and the daily coming and going of lorries made the area an active hub. When the waste was disposed of, it was covered with soil. Thus, visitors to the site as well as the caretakers witnessed the heaps and piles of garbage turn a seemingly empty space— the pit—into a hill once again. Only this time, the hill could be moulded, shaped, and moved around. While the waste changed the landscape, the site also became a nest for seagulls. Pictures from the time show large flocks of seagulls roaming the hill. Unlike the humans fenced out of the landfill, seagulls roamed free spreading garbage from the landfill to neighbouring fields. Thus, both at ground level the materials mixed—the soil and the garbage—as well as the airborne mix of materials and entities. The first official permit to landfill and use the area as a landfill expired in 1985, but the municipality applied for a renewal of the permit from the Ministry of Environment, extending the lifespan of the landfill with an additional ten years  (Kalundborg Kommune 1988). The official closing date then became January 1, 1995. While these dates were settled in 1985, already in 1993, the villagers began complaining over excessive amounts of waste being brought to the landfill. As the villagers began protesting the landfill, they did so by referring to the fact that the waste management company in charge of daily management stacked the waste in a way that did not fit the 1975-plan of the

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layout and elevation. The recreated hilltop turned out approximately fifteen metres taller than envisioned beforehand (Kalundborg Kommune 1990). What they had accepted as a necessity twenty years earlier had now become too visual and too obvious in their surroundings for them to accept the landfill as part of their otherwise rural area. Aesthetically, the visuals were just as important in 1993 as they had been when planning the landfill in 1975. However, in 1975, planting hedgerows and shrubs to hide the landfill had been satisfactory to the neighbours. The later protests, in contrast, were rooted in a new opposition between the rural and urban, which valued the visual aspects of the rural—in this case the open, treeless landscape and scenery. For the villagers, the area needed to appear rural, while the material sediments and layers of waste seem to have been insignificant for them (Kalundborg kommune, 433-00-00). The municipal authorities on their side cared less for the aesthetics and feelings of the villagers and were instead preoccupied with finding a solution for the situation that would keep them clear of financial issues with the private-public landfilling company, Novoren, who had the concession on the site. By closing the site prematurely, the municipality would have to compensate the company for loss of capacity and increased costs for transporting the waste to the next landfill in the municipality (Kalundborg Kommune 1990). In the eyes of the municipal authorities, the site was now foremost a technical necessity for maintaining waste disposal standards of mid-size rural municipality. The site’s location in the otherwise rural area was therefore no longer a hindrance for neither applying for extension of the permit nor expanding the site, when needed in the mid-1980s. Thus, for the municipality what was formerly a rural zone was now a technical area in line with the industrial, urban zone. For the neighbours, however, the landfill from the beginning spurred the idea of bringing back a past, no-­ longer existing landscape. Therefore, while German technology historian, Heike Weber, understands landfilling as a colonisation that naturalises the urban in the rural (Weber 2019, 263), this was never the case of Western Zealand between 1970 and 1994, as the landfill was never naturalised, but instead changed the relationship between the locals and the area that until the construction of the landfill had served several purposes—but had not been coded as a technological site. However, the professionally run landfill created a spleen between the locals and this new technologically created nature.

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Conclusion Using the plans for a controlled landfill outside the provincial town of Kalundborg, this chapter has investigated how the story of the landfill exemplifies the role technical experts came to play in changing the rural landscape in 1970s Denmark. The development, planning, and design of the landfill happened in the first years following a national municipal reform, which sought to enlarge and professionalise the municipal administration. As such the planning of the controlled landfill shed light on the relations between new bureaucratic ideas and technological possibilities. Thus, I have shown how public bureaucracy and private consultants created a new space in a rural area, and how this demanded a multitude of actors—human and non-human—involved in the making of this new urban-rural space. The landfill at Ubberup was in use until 1994. By 1994, an estimated total of 385,000 tonnes of waste was deposited at the site. From 1995 and onwards, the area remained circumvented with fences and inaccessible to the public. Only now a new activity took place. When the daily use of the landfill ended, it gave way to the after treatment, which should ensure proper reestablishment of the hills, as well as transform the area from a polluted and environmentally dangerous area to a recreational site (Kalundborg Kommune 1990). By moulding the waste and the layers of soil used for covering up the waste, the contractors and landscape architects created a landscape that on paper should resemble that of the 1895-topographical map which during the protests had come to serve as the baseline or the marker of the original shape of the hill. While thus alluding and mimicking the past landscape, the hill in fact was merely waste and new soils. In a sense, the blurring between the urban and rural became complete, because the most obvious human activity—the production of waste—now was hidden between tall grasses and shrubs. And thus, the site once again merged into a new shape and was given a new sense in the eyes of the municipality and the locals. While being a landfill the site went through various stages. First, it signified the future and promised controlled tipping without polluting the area. It then moved on to become a nuisance for the locals when the volumes increased, and it was filling up. Lastly, it became the symbol of municipal administrative arrogance for the locals, while for the authorities, it became a financial and political burden. These stages underscore the process of blurring the landscape. They show how a site changes in the

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eyes of the public, while the practices themselves continue. As mentioned, it was not until the waste became visible that the neighbours started complaining about the site. While the waste was still hidden, the landfill caused little worries. Moreover, landfilling continued the old practices of burying and discarding waste that had been in use for centuries. As I have shown, zoning legislation, alongside environmental protection acts, called for controlling changes to rural areas; however, the zoning legislation did not necessarily halt the urbanisation of the rural areas. Sites like the Ubberup landfill are more common than most people think. In Copenhagen, a large common is currently being developed for housing projects—a development under strong opposition from green NGOs; however, the green space is itself the result of landfilling during the first half of the twentieth century (Engberg 1999). Landfills thus offer perspective into what counts as a natural and perceived correct way of engaging with our surroundings. Through their materiality and the disposed material, they are contested places that remind us of our ever-increasing consumption (Rathje and Murphy 1992). The former Ubberup landfill now functions as an open greenspace with public access. On newer maps, its signature is no longer greyscale, technical site, but a bright green, which signals a grassy area. However, it will for decades onwards still be monitored for possible pollutants as well as leaking gases from the decomposing materials. In this very concrete aspect, the site functions as a third category—seemingly natural, but at heart modelled and shaped into its current shape by artificial components. Depositing waste is merely a way of storing discarded material. It is not a way of treating waste. It just sits there until it decomposes, which might require millennia, while pollutants slowly dissolve into the surroundings. As such, the landfill in Ubberup is just another example of the dizzying timelines involved in the histories of the technonatural and our enviro-­ technical surroundings. While we as environmental or urban historians refer to past histories and changes, the material composition of our object of analysis continuously transforms and changes. These material circumstances require us to constantly rethink both our analytical timelines and our scope. How can we say that this was in the past, when its effects come haunt us over and over again?

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Archival/Unpublished Material Enviroplan. 1974. Kontrolleret Losseplads i Kalundborg Kommune. Foreløbig Rapport over Hydrologiske Og Geologiske Undersøgelser i Keldberg-Rakkerbanke Området Med Henblik På Etablering Af En Kontrolleret Losseplads. Rådgivende ingeniører: Enviroplan. Kalundborg Kommune. 1977. Lokalplan Nr. 70 for et Område Ved Ubberup. Kalundborg: Kommune. ———. 1988. 433-00-00. Ubberup Losseplads. ———. 1990. 326-430-Affaldsplanlægning. Kalundborg Kommune. Rambøll, Hannemann A/S. 1975. Fælleskommunal Affaldsbehandling. Teknisk Økonomisk Redegørelse. Vestsjællands Amtskommune. Kalundborg Kommune. Teknisk Forvaltning. 1975. Notat Fra Møde Den 20. Januar 1975 Vedrørende Anlæg Af Ny, Kontrolleret Losseplads Ved Ubberup. Privat arkiv, Eskild Pedersen. Vestsjællands Amtskommune 1975. Fredningsplanudvalg for Vestsjællands Amt, and Vestsjællands Amtskommune, Teknisk Forvaltning. ‘Journalsag 8-70-5-323-1-1977’.

CHAPTER 10

Good and Bad Nature: Slum Clearance and Metabolic Poverty in Mid-Twentieth Century Copenhagen Mikkel Høghøj

In early March 1942, the Copenhagen Health Police was called to inspect the property of Borgergade 79 located in the notorious Borgergade-­ Adelgade quarter in central Copenhagen. The complaint had been lodged by a resident, Helga Hansen, who reported about frozen pipes in her house which resulted in a lack of access to water in her flat. On March 11, the health police inspected the property. Here, they spoke with the janitor who informed them that plumbers had been called multiple times during the winter to unfreeze the pipes. The janitor then referred the police to the owner of the house, engineer C.V. Jensen, who resided in the affluent Gentofte Municipality north of Copenhagen. On March 13, Jensen informed the health police that, according to the plumber, it was futile to unfreeze the pipes under the current conditions. The plumber explained that he had already thawed out the pipes several times during the winter.

M. Høghøj (*) National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1_10

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However, due to the severe weather conditions and the location of the pipes, the few remaining residents in the house were unable to generate sufficient water flow to prevent the pipes from freezing again immediately. Recognizing the ongoing issue, the health police revisited the house on March 16 and spoke directly with Mrs. Hansen who expressed her dissatisfaction with the lack of action taken by her landlord to resolve the problem (Copenhagen Police 1942). Meanwhile, on March 14, Jensen had sent a detailed letter to the health police, providing his perspective on the situation. In the letter, Jensen argued that a combination of technological, natural, economic, and political factors rendered it unreasonable to expect him to supply running water to the house under the current circumstances. While acknowledging his legal responsibility as landlord to ensure access to water, Jensen claimed that the given circumstances suspended him from that responsibility. Not only did the severe weather conditions of the harsh winter of 1942 serve a significant complicating factor, but the actions of Copenhagen Municipality further hindered his ability to fulfil his duties as landlord. Due to the imminent redevelopment plans for the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter, the municipal authorities had suddenly terminated most of the tenants’ contracts. With only two flats occupied, there was insufficient water usage to keep the pipes open, and this, combined with reduced rent revenues, made it challenging to maintain the water supply. Jensen also argued that the conduct of the municipal authorities had left the remaining tenants and residents in a state of despair and indifference, leading to an increase in vandalism in the area. The vandalism, such as the breaking of windows, made it difficult to maintain a sufficiently high temperature in the house to prevent the pipes from freezing. Jensen thus concluded that the financial discrepancy between revenues, and expenditures made it unreasonable to expect him to provide the same level of service as usual (Jensen 1942). Consequently, Mrs. Hansen was forced to wait for the spring to regain access to water in her flat. Thus, the case of Borgergade 79 exemplifies the political capacity of technonatures in shaping urban spaces of impoverishment in 1940s Copenhagen. The combination of various technonatural elements—the location and technical characteristics of the pipes, the freezing potential of water and the prevailing weather conditions—generated specific political controversies between different actors in the city, revolving around the delineation of municipal governance, the rights of tenants and the responsibilities of landlords. The pipes beneath Borgergade 79, in this sense, came

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to function as a tangible bone of contention in negotiating the boundaries between urban inclusion and exclusion. On a broader scale, the case also points to the metabolic exchanges and (dis)connections that constituted Borgergade 79 and the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter generally as spaces of poverty within the larger urban system of Copenhagen. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen, the impoverished status of so-called slum areas, including the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter, cannot be solely attributed to the socio-economic capacities of the residents. Rather, their impoverishment stemmed their disconnection from various infrastructural networks and amenities which placed them at a disadvantaged position in the urban metabolism.

Slum Clearance, Nature, and the Modern City In 1939, the Danish parliament passed the first national act for slum clearance (Bro 2000; Thomsen 2015). By adopting the term ‘slum’ as the official label for housing deemed unfit for human habitation, the act formalized slum as a distinct type of urban space in mid-twentieth century Denmark. In doing so, it signalled that this type of space, in a very material sense, had no place in emerging welfare society. Although the concept of slum was in many ways conceived as a construct to classify and thus eradicate urban spaces of poverty, it was also closely tied to the technonatural fabric and bio-social conditions of the modern city. Dysfunctional infrastructures, sanitary shortcomings and pervasive nature in the form of animals, pests, rain and dampness were all central not only for the public perception of slum as spaces of ‘bad nature’ (Kaika 2004a) but also for how these spaces interacted with the broader urban system of Copenhagen. In this study, I take such socio-natural entanglements as my empirical and analytical starting point to explore the material and cultural significance of nature in the production of urban space in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate that while the construction of urban slums on the one hand rested upon a discursive separation of what Maria Kaika has termed ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’ (Kaika 2004a, b), these spaces were at the same time materially enrolled in the socio-ecological networks that produced and reshaped Copenhagen’s urban metabolism during the formative years of the Danish welfare society. The history of the modern city is in many ways entwined with the history of the urban slum (Hall 2014, 12–49). In The Culture of Cities, Lewis Mumford specifically identified ‘the slum’ as one of the two main elements

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in the new urban complex of the industrial city (Mumford 1938, 161), equating slum with the impoverished and deteriorating working-class housing standards in industrialized European and American cities. Since then, the use of the term has expanded, and since the 1970s, the concept of slum has predominantly been used to label spaces of urban poverty in the Global South (Davis 2007; Mayne 2017; Nolan 2015). The concept of ‘slum’ is thus both ambiguous and contested. As Alan Mayne argues, the term is fundamentally a deceitful construct that misrepresents the complex realities of urban social inequality and stigmatizes the people that inhabit such places (Mayne 2017, 8–9). Nevertheless, as Mayne also acknowledges, it has its value as a historical category. Accordingly, in this study I aim to approach ‘slum’ as a historically specific type of space in the sense as it assembled and was conceptualized by various contemporary observers in mid-twentieth century Denmark. Although the concept of slum has a complicated etymology, there seems to be agreement that it dates back to early nineteenth century Britain where it quickly came to encapsulate the deplorable living conditions of working classes in industrialized British cities (Mayne 2017, 16–89). Historian W.G. Hoskins has alternatively suggested that ‘slum’ in fact originates from the word slump meaning ‘wet mire’, which is equivalent to the word slam in Low German, Danish, and Swedish (Hoskins 1955, 172–73). From this perspective, slums are undrained sites—physically and metaphorically—and thus compounds of social and natural elements. Envisaged through an urban modernist framework, it was precisely this entanglement of socio-natural elements that Danish planners and politicians aimed to separate or ‘undrain’ through the practice of slum clearance. Therefore, this chapter to some extent returns to Hoskins’ definition of slum, at least as an analytical entry point to understand the political capacity of nature in the urban environment. As Mayne puts it, during the nineteenth century urban slum developed into “an unambiguous marker of what was and was not appropriate to the modern urban world” (Mayne 2017, 42). As evident from seminal publications including Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives and Andrew Mearns’ The Biter Cry of Outcast London, slums became sites through which contemporary observers and reformers analysed the modern city, seeking to understand broader societal challenges in connection to poverty, social inequality, and hygiene (Schmidt og Kristensen 1986). While the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of urban slums in public imagination and discourse, the twentieth century became a period of

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urban reform and renewal. In this process, the concept of slum came to work as a powerful governmental tool in the name of social progress. The launch of not only slum clearance plans but also new ambitious schemes and subsidies for housing, which fundamentally reshaped cities and urban life in the mid-twentieth century, to a great extent emerged from the acknowledgement that the enviro-technical conditions of decrepit working-­class housing stock were intolerable (Hall 2014). However, the so-called urban slums of twentieth century Copenhagen were more than targets of governmental intervention. These spaces, their physicality, materiality and relationship to nature, also produced urban politics and imaginations more broadly. In this study, I investigate these entanglements with focus on three sites: First, I examine the role of nature in Danish urban slum clearance legislation. Second, I focus on how these spaces became defined through their location in the urban metabolism. Last, I analyse municipal housing inspections that aimed to regulate the physical condition of slum dwellings and the behaviour of the residents. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate how multi-scalar processes of technology, nature, and power intertwined and shaped urban spaces of impoverishment in mid-twentieth century Denmark.

Good and Bad Nature as Technologies of Power During the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘home’ was reshaped as both an idea and a material space in the Western urban world. Ideologically, the urban bourgeoise sentimentalized the home as a safe haven for the nuclear family, contrasting it with the buzzling public life and temptations of the modern city (Frykman og Löfgren 1987; Lützen 1998). Materially, the home—though only for a small fraction of urbanites in the nineteenth century—became equipped with modern infrastructural technologies for water, heating, and eventually, electricity. These developments were deeply intertwined with new Victorian norms for bodily hygiene and gender that relied upon easy access to these new infrastructural services in the private sphere of the home (Smith 2007, 200; Kaika 2004b). As Maria Kaika argues, it was exactly this dialectic of social and natural processes that constituted the modern home (Kaika 2004a, 52). On the one hand, the home became discursively constructed as independent from and in opposition to nature as a shelter from cold, rain and pollution. On the other hand, commodified nature in the form of clean water for drinking and bathing over time became an essential prerequisite for the construction of the familiar

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space of the modern home. Visually hidden outside and beneath the home, nature thus entered the sphere of everyday life through new devices such as taps and radiators that conveyed new cultural and symbolic meanings. According to Kaika, this seemingly contradictory relationship between social and natural elements, which constitutes the modern home, is predicated upon a discursive separation of ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’: “Good nature (purified water, conditioned air, electricity etc.) became part of (and a basic precondition for the construction of) the protected inside of the modern home. At the same time, the domestically metabolized bad nature (dirty water, polluted air, sewage) became part of the outside, ‘the other’, the antipode to the comfortable, protected inside of the home” (Kaika 2004b, 270). This imagined distinction, however, becomes challenged when technology breaks down and water suddenly stops running from the taps or light switches stop working. In such situations, the connections between the house and nature become uncomfortably apparent and the home suddenly transforms from the most familiar of spaces into a deeply uncanny space (Kaika 2004a, 66–72). In the case of modern Copenhagen, as I will demonstrate below, this distinction between ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’ actively guided the public authorities’ conceptualisation of urban slums as fundamentally ‘uncanny’ spaces. This distinction influenced both urban legislation and everyday inspections of these spaces, demonstrating how the notions of good and bad nature actively came to work as technologies of power. The distinction can moreover serve to illuminate the multifaceted role of nature in the modern city. From the inter-war years onwards, public authorities on both municipal and national level launched ambitious plans striving to reconnect the Danish capital with nature (Christiansen 2016). These efforts materialized in the construction of public parks, green spaces, and beach parks around the capital which conveyed certain cultural relations between metropolitan nature and the human body (Mentz 2016; Henriksen 2016; Høghøj 2022). Such planning projects discursively positioned nature in stark contrast to certain aspects of the modern city, particularly the cramped inner-city tenements that came to epitomize the modern city’s disconnection from nature. However, as will be unfolded below, it was in fact the presence of various socio-natural entanglements that constituted these spaces as ‘slums’ both in public imagination and across Copenhagen’s socio-material geography. To capture the multifarious and sometimes contradictory role of nature in processes of

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city-­making, I adopt a metabolic rather than a functionalist reading of urban space (Gandy 2004; Swyngedouw 2006; Heinen et  al. 2006). Approaching the production of urban slums through the notion of urban metabolism involves attending to the ways in which these spaces produced and were produced through the circulation and exchange of resources, capital, people, and infrastructures. In this sense, the circulation of socionatural processes, which in many ways allow the modern city to function, can help us to better identify and delineate the social and material position of slums within the broader urban system of mid-twentieth century Copenhagen.

Good and Bad Nature in Danish Slum Clearance Legislation Although local slum clearance projects had been implemented since the late nineteenth century (Tapdrup Mortensen 2004), the enactment of the national act for slum clearance in 1939 represented a formalization of the Danish state’s responsibility to provide adequate housing for its city dwellers. This act, along with related acts for urban planning and subsidies for new housing, was part of a broader governmental project to utilize urban spatiality and materiality as tools of governance for municipal and national authorities. The act was preceded by preparatory work conducted between 1935 and 1938 which was subsequently published in a governmental report (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938). Besides proposing a legislative framework and practical procedures for slum clearance, the report included various demographic and social analyses of the housing standards in Danish cities and especially Copenhagen as well as a survey of slum clearance legislation in various European countries. As such, the report demonstrates how Danish slum clearance legislation was shaped by local, national, and transnational influences. Danish governmental authorities, on the one hand, based their assessments on specific analyses of the socio-material conditions of Danish cities. On the other hand, by adopting the term “slum” as the official label for housing deemed suitable for demolition and redevelopment, the report actively reproduced international definitions and conceptualizations of urban poverty. Acknowledging the broad and somewhat ambiguous character of the term ‘slum’, the report strived to propose a more operational definition. It defined a slum area as “a residential area that due to the design, condition,

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and location of its buildings is harmful for humans to live in health-wise” (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 29). Besides issues of overpopulation and fire hazards, the degree of harmfulness was determined on the basis of seven criteria that, I suggest, all revolved around the relationship between ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’. According to the act, an adequate dwelling had to provide protection against dampness, cold or heat; give access to daylight; ensure good access to fresh air in every room; provide adequate options for heating; have access to good and clean drinking water; have adequate drainage facilities for wastewater; and have easy access to WC or sufficient toilet rooms (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 9). In contrast, urban slums were thus composed of dwellings that did not meet one or several of these seven requirements. As noted above, the Interior Ministry’s report and recommendations were informed by various investigations into housing conditions in Danish cities. While some investigations focused on broader economic and demographic developments, others addressed the relationship between the physical state of urban housing and the health conditions of the residents. In this context, one investigation, conducted by the Danish Health Authority, grouped the hygienic factors affecting the health conditions of the residents into six categories which included population density, the size of dwellings, construction quality, cleanliness, food handling and the role of the surroundings (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 117–25). Like the seven criteria for an adequate dwelling, these five categories all addressed the presence of ‘bad nature’—and particularly ‘bad water’—as a crucial determinant of the health quality of a dwelling. Since access to clean water in both the dwelling and housing complex was identified as essential for various hygienic practices including bathing, laundry and food handling, problems with filthy water marked a health threat for the residents. Especially inadequate drainage facilities for wastewater and emissions from urban industries could result in the pollution of water for domestic use which heightened the risk of the outbreak and spread of various forms of infectious diseases. Moreover, due to the poor and worn-down physical state, which characterized the impoverished part of Copenhagen’s housing stock, bad water also entered the dwellings in the form of dampness creating an unhealthy indoor climate that further weakened the residents’ resilience against various diseases (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 119–20).

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Thus, the first Danish slum clearance act was predicated upon a distinction between ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’ which particularly revolved around the presence or absence of different water hybrids including drinking water, wastewater, and dampness. By defining urban slums based on their incapability to, on the one hand, provide residents with access to clean drinking and bathing water, purified air, and sunlight while, at the same time, keeping wastewater, bad weather and faeces at a distance, the act actively used the distinction between good and bad nature as a threshold to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy housing. In doing so, the legislation as well as the body of preparatory work, which lay behind it, also allude to the broader entanglements of socio-natural elements through which bad nature produced and was produced by the urban built environment. Problems with bad water were rarely isolated, but they also connected and activated other forms of ‘bad nature’. The porous boundaries between inside and outside resulting from the permeation of water created, for example, an ideal living environment for various animals and organisms including rats, slugs, cockroaches, bedbugs, lice, and fleas that co-inhabited these spaces and contributed to spreading both infectious diseases and certain urban imaginaries of slum housing in the broader public.

Metabolic Poverty: The Redevelopment of the Borgergade-Adelgade Quarter With the enactment of the 1939-act, ‘urban slum’ became more than a conceptual lens for understanding and analysing urban poverty. By categorizing the notion of slum into three specific types of urban areas, the Interior Ministry’s report from 1938 transformed the category into physically localizable sites in the modern city characterized by specific technonatural entanglements. The first category included the so-called central slums, which were located in the old city centres and had deteriorated over time due to the lack of maintenance and modernization. The second category encompassed working-class tenements built in the late nineteenth century to house the vast influx of rural workers to the city. The third category consisted of temporary and illegally built shanty towns on the urban peripheries (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 29–30). The notorious Borgergade-Adelgade quarter serves as a particularly rich case for understanding the metabolic enrolment of slums in the urban system of Copenhagen  (Fig. 10.1). Located between Rosenborg Castle

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Gardens and the royal caste of Amalienborg in central Copenhagen, this quarter had been instrumental in the development of the first slum clearance legislation. Not only did the quarter epitomize the notion of central slum, but the Interior Ministry’s report from 1938 heavily relied on data from this specific area. Consequently, the slum clearance act was not only designed to demolish slum areas in general but also specifically to deal with the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter. A local commission within Copenhagen Municipality was already formed in 1939, and in December 1941, the first concrete plans aiming to demolish all buildings in the area and replace them with new housing, industry, and infrastructure in modernist style was presented to the city council (Copenhagen City Council 1943, 1289–1409). Although the first houses were already demolished in June 1942, the entire project was not completed before the late 1950s due

Fig. 10.1  Map visualizing the high housing density which characterized the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter. Located in: Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission. 1957. “Boligtilsyn og Sanering. Betænkning afgivet af Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission. Bind 2: Lovudkast og bilag” (Copenhagen: The Ministry of Housing, p. 108).

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to the lack of building materials and general housing shortage following World War II (Thomsen 2015, 65–77). Consisting of mostly shabby houses built in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century, the Borgergade-Adelde quarter was characterized by all the material deficiencies that constituted a slum area, according the 1939-act. The area was immensely overpopulated and full of fire hazards due to dense arrangement of front houses and back houses and inadequate staircase conditions (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 78–100). Moreover, the houses in the area were largely disconnected from the Copenhagen’s infrastructural networks and thus unable to access different forms of good nature. In comparison to the average standards of Copenhagen, the houses had poor access to both water and electricity (Tables 10.1 and 10.2). While 66% of all dwellings in Copenhagen had easy access to W.C.s in 1930, this only accounted for 20.9% of the dwellings in the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter. In terms of electric lighting, the average standard of Copenhagen had reached 91.2% in 1925, yet in the Borgergade-Adelgade quarters only 55.7% of the dwellings enjoyed this privilege. These numbers point to the uneven distribution of infrastructural services across the geography of mid-twentieth century Copenhagen and thus to the disadvantaged position that the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter occupied in this enviro-technical network. In the central parts of Copenhagen, modern infrastructures had not been part of the urban fabric from the outset, and the municipal implementation of these networks was incremental. In this process, poor neighbourhoods such as the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter lacked behind the rest of Table 10.1  The total number and percentage of dwellings in the Borgergade-­ Adelgade quarter with access to W.C. and electric lighting  in 1930 and 1925 respectively. (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 88) Borgergade-Adelgade

One-room flat Two-room flat Three-room flat Four-room flat or more Total

W.C (1930)

Electric lighting (1925)

Number in total

Pct. of total

Number in total

Pct. of total

70 154 122 159 505

8.2 20.0 21.4 68.8 20.9

309 441 405 194 1349

36.2 57.3 71.2 84.0 55.7

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Table 10.2  The total number and percentage of dwellings in the city of  Copenhagen  with access to W.C. (Copenhagen Municipality 1936, 49)  and electric lighting  (Copenhagen Municipality 1926, 49–50)  in 1930 and 1925 respectively Copenhagen

One-room flat Two-room flat Three-room flat Four-room flat or more Total

W.C (1930)

Electric lighting (1925)

Number in total

Pct. of total

Number in total

Pct. of total

5649 53110 34641 25854 137880

28.0 57.4 69.9 84.8 66.0

9836 64487 36210 17935 154967

70.1 90.0 96.0 97.1 91.2

the city and thus became ‘infrastructureless islands’ decoupled from the material networks that provided an increasing part of Copenhagen’s population with access to good nature. The uneven access to urban infrastructures also illustrates how the circulation of utilities such as water and electricity was tied to the spatial flow of capital and money. From one perspective, the houses in the BorgergadeAdelgade quarter were sites of speculation for landlords and developers who profited from the high demand for housing generated by the widespread housing shortage which allowed them to avoid both maintaining and investing in various technical amenities. From another perspective, the municipal plans for clearing and redeveloping the area were also underpinned by more than social concerns for the residents. As recurring negotiations in the city council demonstrates, the municipal authorities were also driven by broader economic concerns. The redevelopment plans presented on a city council meeting in December 1941, for example, were highly focused on connecting the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter to the infrastructural system of Copenhagen through new car-friendly road systems and better technical housing standards, thus transforming the area into a site for future economic growth. At the same time, as the social democratic Mayor Viggo Christensen also emphasized, this could help stimulating the societal economy by providing new jobs and opportunities for especially architects and construction companies (Copenhagen City Council 1943, 1289–1409).

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In total, the redevelopment of the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter entailed the demolition of 260 houses (Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission 1957, 157). In replacement, the streets were widened and several new buildings—typically in modernist style—for businesses, industry, and housing were constructed. Most notably, this included the eight-storey housing complex Dronningegården. Designed by renowned architects Kay Fisker and Eske Kristensen, the complex enclosed a green square and offered 481 dwellings as well as rooms for shops and communal events. In practice, however, few of the residents from the former Borgergade-Adelgade quarter benefitted from these transformations. As part of reforming the Danish slum clearance legislation 1959, the Ministry of Housing published two reports in 1957. The second report included an evaluation of the redevelopment of the Borgergade-­ Adelgade quarter that, besides evaluating the entire redevelopment process including the usefulness of the 1939-act, documented the reallocation of the residents (Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission 1957, 151–62). In replacement of their dwellings, Copenhagen Municipality had acquired the right of first refusal on 700 dwellings on newly built social housing estates located in the southern part of Copenhagen. Still, the vast majority of the residents ended up moving to other ‘slum areas’ mostly in the inner-city. The report estimated that while only 27% of the former residents had moved into social housing estates or other dwellings of improved quality, 67% had reallocated to housing of similar standards as the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter. According to the report, these moving patterns were caused both by the residents’ poor financial situation and, in some cases, by their deviant lifestyle that tied them to the inner-city of Copenhagen (Den af boligministeriet den 22. oktober 1949 nedsatte kommission 1957, 159). The case of the Borgergade-Adelgade thus demonstrates how urban poverty in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen became constructed as more than a socio-economic phenomenon. Through slum clearance legislation and politics, poverty became socio-naturally and materially engraved into the urban geography and thus constituted as an enviro-technical phenomenon. What characterized the societal position of the Borgergade-­ Adelgade quarter was not merely the economic capacity of the residents, but rather the relations and exchanges between economic, technological, and socio-natural processes that shaped the area as an assemblage of ‘bad nature’. Thus, such processes situated the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter— in a highly material sense—at a disadvantaged position within Copenhagen’s urban metabolism.

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Socio-natural Entanglements as Means of Discipline: Adelgade 87 As demonstrated above, the distinction between good and bad nature played a formative role in both the conceptualization of ‘slum’ in Danish urban legislation and the interaction of these spaces with the broader urban system of Copenhagen. In practice, this distinction also guided municipal inspections and regulations of these spaces on a smaller scale. In many regards, the slum clearance act of 1939 continued and expanded work which was already executed locally in many Danish cities. In Copenhagen, the police had since the mid-nineteenth century employed a specific taskforce, the so-called health police, to ensure that the municipal health statutes were complied with (Bonderup 2020). In addition to wide range of tasks including the supervision food handling and venereal diseases, the taskforce conducted inspections of dilapidated housing to uphold cleanliness standards and prevent the outbreak of epidemics. In 1920, the municipal authorities of Copenhagen expanded this work by employing a unit within the health commission responsible for supervising the urban housing stock. In 1940, this unit was then transferred to the newly formed municipal housing commission following the slum clearance act of 1939. Based on complaints—typically filed by landlords or the residents themselves—both the health police and municipal unit for housing inspections supervised the impoverished part of the urban housing stock. As the housing commission was responsible for remedying various deficiencies or reallocating residents, the health police’s inspection reports were typically forwarded to the municipal unit for housing inspections. They then inspected the flats or houses with focus on the seven criteria outlined in the 1939-act. If a given house did not meet these criteria, the municipal inspector had the authority to prohibit the use of the house for dwellings until the shortages had been remedied. Yet since neither the slum clearance act of 1939 nor the governmental circular distributed to Danish municipalities with guidelines to implement the act provided detailed standards for these criteria, it was the responsibility of the local authorities to interpret these categories in practice (The Interior Ministry 1940) (Fig. 10.2).

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Fig. 10.2  Scheme used by Copenhagen Housing Commission to inspect poor housing on the basis of the seven criteria for slum which were outlined by 1939 slum clearance act. Located at Copenhagen City Archives. Archive for The Housing Commission’s Secretariat

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Fig. 10.3  The house of Adelgade 87. Located at Copenhagen City archives

Located in the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter, the house of Adelgade 87 (Fig. 10.3) provides a rich example to understand the ways in which good and bad nature intertwined with technologies of local governance. This house, consisting of eight flats in poor quality, required the attention of both the health police and the municipal inspectors on numerous occasions during the 1940s and early 1950s. Besides a general investigation of the material conditions and social composition of the house conducted in 1941, seven different cases demanded the public authorities’ attention, and each case involved multiple visits. As part of the redevelopment plans for the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter, the municipality of Copenhagen acquired all the houses in the area. Since all demolition of housing was prohibited in 1942 due to the prevalent housing shortage (Thomsen

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2015, 73), the municipality came to serve as official landlord of the tenants until the redevelopment plans were resumed in the mid-1950s. Therefore, the municipal authorities had the official mandate not just to prohibit the use of the flats as dwellings but also to evict tenants who did not live up to the required behavioural standards. In the Danish slum clearance legislation, questions relating to health had been closely connected to notions of hygiene. Thus, access to clean drinking water, adequate toilet facilities and proper drainage for wastewater all related to the role of water in everyday routines for cleanliness and personal hygiene. As the legislation aimed to ensure more equal access to such facilities across the urban housing stock, it did not focus on the ways in which the urban dwellers implemented these technologies in their daily lives. Although the slum clearance reports addressed the questionable moral standards prevalent among the residents in areas such as the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter (The Interior Ministry’s Commission for Slum Clearance 1938, 40–41), it did not link this specifically to the socio-­ natural conditions of the dwellings. In the municipal inspections, however, the distinction between good and bad nature also became a moral question and linked to the behaviour and bodily hygiene of the residents. In the case of Adelgade 87, this dynamic was particularly evident in the inspections of Mr and Mrs. Mørch who rented a flat on the fourth floor. The first report about the couple was filed by the health police in July 1943 (Copenhagen Police 1943a). After several follow-up inspections by both the health police and the municipal housing inspector, the couple were finally evicted in February 1945 (Copenhagen Municipality’s Housing Department 1945). The recurring theme in all the reports concerned the couple’s lack of cleanliness in terms of their bodily hygiene, handling of foods and the general untidiness of the flat. In this context, particularly their misuse of domestic technologies for bodily hygiene caused concern. In a report from September 1943, the health police found several paper wrappings with human excrements in the kitchen (Copenhagen Police 1943b), and in December 1944, the municipal housing inspector discovered that the couple used a bucket, which was placed on the floor in the kitchen, to urinate in. When the bucket was full, they emptied in the sink which, according to the inspector, leaked, causing a stench that disturbed the neighbours (Copenhagen Housing Commission 1944). Both the health police and municipal inspector repeatedly notified the Mørch-couple that their continued tenancy presupposed a significant change in behaviour. As no notable improvement occurred, the couple

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was eventually evicted. Thus, the couple’s inability to separate good and bad nature in the home came to work as a strong marker of immoral behaviour that prompted governmental intervention in their domestic lives. In other words, they were expected to live in accordance with certain ‘infrastructural ideals’ even though the flat, which they inhabited, did not itself provide adequate infrastructural amenities. Though the Mørch-couple represents an extreme example, they nonetheless illustrate how the distinction between good and bad nature served as a means of disciplining the residents in the Borgergade-Adelgade quarter. However, as other examples demonstrate, this distinction could also be utilized by the residents themselves as a tool to acquire a better dwelling. In Adelgade 87, several inhabitants complained about problems with ‘bad water’, linking the presence of especially dampness to their poor health conditions (Copenhagen Police 1943a, 1951, 1952a, b; Copenhagen Housing Commission 1949). In a case from the spring of 1952, a hospitalized man complained that he had contracted tuberculosis due to dampness in the dwelling. He then successfully plead that his wife and children, who still occupied the dwelling, could be reallocated to new housing of a higher standard (Copenhagen Police 1952a, b). Although such examples might seem insignificant within the larger framework of twentieth century urban development, they point to the small-scale interactions through which laws and institutions of urban governance translated into and were formed through everyday life. As such, they reveal how the shifting entanglements of nature, technology, and power shape both the urban built environment and the people who inhabit these spaces.

Conclusion In this study, I have demonstrated how residential spaces of urban poverty in mid-twentieth century Denmark emerged and functioned as technonatural assemblages. From one perspective, the study has shown how the distinction between ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’ became formative for the ways these spaces and their inhabitants were defined, approached, and managed by the public authorities in mid-twentieth century urban Denmark. From another perspective, urban slums were also materially inscribed in a broader urban metabolic system. Exhibiting the multifaceted character of urban poverty in twentieth century Denmark, these spaces illustrate how poverty was not just socioeconomically structured but also a highly enviro-technical phenomenon. Urban slums spatialized

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poverty but not simply as distinctly delineated zones or ‘islands’ of impoverishment. Rather, their impoverishment stemmed from their disadvantaged localisation in the urban metabolism which was produced through their connection to and disconnection from the various infrastructural networks. Thus, this study has shed light upon the intricate interplay between technonatural factors, political dynamics, and the socio-economic conditions that shaped urban spaces of impoverishment in mid-twentieth century Copenhagen, underscoring the importance of considering the broader urban system and the systematic factors contributing to the disadvantaged status of such areas. At the same time, however, the so-called urban slums of mid-twentieth century Copenhagen also exhibit the multifaceted and complicated role of nature in the modern city. Although the development of slum clearance legislation and schemes was clearly underpinned by the ambition of separating technology and nature through modernist planning, the concrete redevelopment schemes, the municipal housing inspections, the institution of the health police, the daily practices of the residents and the presence of various forms of bad nature all point to the deep imbrications of technology and nature in the urban environment. Thus, by unravelling the anatomy of this urban assemblage, I have tried to connect the history of these spaces to a broader urban environmental history that seeks to comprehend the inherent presence of nature in the modern city. Besides demonstrating how good and bad nature could mobilize various urban actors in different ways and align with broader societal values including hygiene and morality, the urban environmental history of urban slums also displays the multi-scalar processes through which the socio-material fabric of everyday life can produce urban politics and legislation more broadly. Consequently, they offer alternative interpretations of the intricate relationship between power, technology, and nature in the modern city.

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Index

A Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 7, 10, 58 Adams, Robert, 28 African American, 159 Agamben, Giorgio, 37, 58 Agency, 2, 4, 7–13, 16 Agglomeration, 12, 23–27, 29–33, 35–40, 67, 71 Ahmad, Adil, 128, 132 Algaze, Guilermo, 25, 28 Amsterdam, 175, 176, 179, 186 Angkor Wat, 31, 32 Anthrome, 35, 36 Anthropocene, 6, 7, 9, 47, 77, 79–81 Aristotle, 48, 49 Assemblage, 10, 11, 53, 58, 229, 234, 235

Barles, Sabine, 6, 9, 10 Bathroom, 52, 54–57 Bender, Thomas, 10, 11, 65 Bernhardt, Christoph, 5 Bio-social, 17 Blue Nile, 125, 129, 133, 135, 138 Bonneuil, Christophe, 4, 7, 47 Borgergade-Adelgade quarter, 217–219, 225–229, 232–234 Brantz, Dorothee, 5, 13 Braudel, Fernand, 4, 9 Brenner, Neil, 24, 25, 34, 35, 38, 39, 196–197 Britain, 133 British Empire, 131, 134 Built environment, 127, 130, 135, 136, 139, 146, 147, 197, 225, 234 Bureaucracy, 198, 212

B Babiker, Bushra, 128 Baldwin, Peter, 185 Barad, Karen, 130

C Cambodia, 31, 36 Camp, 24, 26, 33, 36–38, 40 Capitalocene, 80

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Thelle, M. Høghøj (eds.), Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46954-1

239

240 

INDEX

Carson, Rachel, 4 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 10, 47, 59 Chicago, 3, 46 Childe, V. Gordon, 24, 27, 28, 30, 34, 39, 70 Cholera, 101 Cincinnati, 149, 153–157 City gates, 173, 176, 177, 180, 182, 183, 186–188 City lighting, 185, 186, 188 Cleanliness, 224, 230, 233 Climate crisis, 6, 7, 9, 47 Colonial, 125–141 Conservation, 195, 203, 204, 206 Copenhagen, 13, 17, 45–59, 217–235 Corbin, Alain, 75 COVID-19, 3 Cronon, William, 3–5, 46 D da Cunha, Dilip, 129, 130 Dams, 146, 147, 154, 156 Danube, 91, 93, 105 de Certeau, Michel, 53 de Munck, Bert, 10 De Vries, Jan, 170, 176, 182, 187 Declensionist narrative, 3, 4 Deep history, 10, 12 Deindustrialization, 157, 161 Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 11, 58 Denmark, 16, 195, 197–206, 210, 212 Devices, 11, 15, 16, 50, 51, 54, 57, 146, 147 Diamond, Jared, 68, 69, 81 Dispositif, 58 Duchy of Austria, 91 Dutch Republic, 168, 171 E Edgeworth, Matt, 87, 88 Egypt, 4, 15, 129, 131–134, 140

Ellis, Erle, 33 Engineering, 202 Entanglement, 2–4, 6, 13–16 Environmental history, 3, 4, 6, 46, 88, 90 Environmental humanities (EH), 7, 128 Environmental protection, 204, 209, 213 Enviro-technical landscape, 146 Enviro-technical system, 197 Episteme, 48 Everyday life, 222, 234, 235 Expertise, 195–213 F Farías, Ignacio, 10 Farrington, Ian, 25 Fletcher, Roland, 31, 32, 38, 40 Flood protection, 147, 151–153, 155, 160, 161 Floodwalls, 2, 8, 14, 15, 145–161 Fluvial landscape, 91 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 48 Foucault, Michel, 66 Fressoz, Jean-Babtiste, 4, 7 G Gandy, Matthew, 5, 6, 13 Gans, Herbert, 25, 40 Gender, 172, 181 Global capitalism, 197 Good and bad nature, 217–235 Gottmann, Jean, 32 Guattari, Félix, 10, 11 Guldi, Jo, 168, 169, 172, 173, 177, 188 H Hailey, Charlie, 36, 38 Haraway, Donna, 7, 8, 127

 INDEX 

Hartog, Francois, 2, 9 Haumann, Sebastian, 7, 8, 13 Health, 217, 218, 224, 230, 232–235 Hegel, G.W.F, 4, 6 Heinen, Nik, 5 Heritage, 159 Hinterland, 25, 31, 35, 36 Hodder, Ian, 24 Homo sapiens, 29, 35, 39 Horden, Peregrine, 23, 24 Hoskins, W.G., 220 Hybrid, 63–83, 87, 114, 225 Hybrid gaze, 2, 8, 10 Hydraulic infrastructure, 90, 93 Hydro-energy, 89, 90, 95, 99 Hydrology, 146, 147 Hydropower, 101 Hygiene, 220, 221, 233, 235 I Industrialization, 90, 112 Infrastructure, 5, 14–17, 89–91, 93, 98, 101, 102, 106–113, 167–189, 219, 223, 226–228 Ingold, Tim, 127, 129, 131, 140 J Jameson, Frederic, 70 K Kaika, Maria, 5–7, 53, 54, 219, 221, 222 Kalundborg, 16, 198, 201, 202, 204, 210, 212 Keil, Roger, 5, 7 Khartoum, 125–127, 131–133, 135–140 Khmer Empire, 31 Knoll, Martin, 7 Knot, 129–132, 139, 140

241

Kolosofsky, Craig, 185 Kumar, Arun, 185 Kümin, Beat, 175 L Landfill, 8, 16, 195–199, 202–213 Landscape, 7, 16, 168, 171, 172, 176, 177, 184, 188, 196, 198, 199, 202, 205–212 Landscaping, 195–213 Latour, Bruno, 8, 10, 11, 64 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 4 Lefebvre, Henri, 12, 24, 34, 35, 39 Legg, Stephen, 54 Leiden, 170–176, 178–184, 186, 187 Line, 125–141 Linienwall, 104, 105 Lodging houses, 172–175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 185–187 Low Countries, 16, 167–189 Low-Density Urbanism (LDU), 31, 32 M Malm, Andreas, 7, 9 Mares, Detlev, 7 Massey, Doreen, 127 Materiality, 2, 9, 14 Mayne, Alan, 220 Mbembe, Achille, 11, 135 Mearns, Andrew, 220 Megalopolis, 25, 32, 33 Melosi, Martin, 4, 5, 46, 47 Mesopotamia, 28, 30, 39, 70 Metabolic network, 49–51 Metabolic poverty, 217–235 Middle Ages, 87–115 Migration, 168–172, 181, 182, 187, 188 Migration history, 169–172, 188 Mills, 92–101, 104

242 

INDEX

Mississippi, 149, 151, 152 Mitchell, Timothy, 4, 198, 202 Mobility, 16, 168–173, 177, 182, 185, 186, 188 Modernity, 3, 10, 128, 135, 145, 146, 146n1 Mol, Annemarie, 11, 58 Morten, Timothy, 7 Multiscalar, 8 Multispecies urbanism, 65–67, 73 Mumford, Lewis, 45, 46, 219, 220 Municipal, 198–203, 205–212 Municipal housing, 221, 230, 233, 235 N Nash, Linda, 196 Natural zone, 15 Necropolitics, 135, 140 Neolithic, 27–30, 33 Neolithic fatalism, 68 The Netherlands, 168, 175 Networked city, 101, 114 New Cultural History, 4 Nielsen, Palle, 1, 2 Nile, 125–134, 141 Nissen, Hans, 28 Nocturnalisation, 16, 185, 188 Nuclear family, 221 O Ohio, 149, 151, 153, 158–161 Ohio River, 15, 145–161 Ohio Valley, 149–153 Omdurman, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135–137 Otter, Chris, 51, 187 P Palaeolithic, 30, 40 Paris, 6

Passanten, 170–173, 178, 182, 184 Phronesis, 48, 49, 53, 59 Phronologies, 45–59 Planetary agglomeration, 23–40 Planetary urbanization, 34, 36, 39, 72, 197 Planning, 195–198, 200–206, 208–212 Plantationocene, 80 Plumber, 51–53 Politics of nature, 3, 6 Pollution, 75, 200, 201, 204, 208 Pooley, Colin, 169, 188 Posegger, Siegfried, 147 Post-colonial, 127, 128, 140, 141 Post-phenomenological, 8 Poverty, 219, 220, 223, 225, 229, 234, 235 Power, 8–13, 15, 16, 127, 128, 131–135, 137, 140, 141, 221–223, 234, 235 Praxeology, 11 Pritchard, Sara, 197 Public health, 101, 108 Purcell, Nicholas, 23, 24 R Railroad, 112 Railway, 2, 14, 125–141, 168, 170, 175, 176, 178, 185 Resilience, 76, 79 Revolution, 24, 27, 34 Rhine River, 176 Riis, Jacob, 220 River, 88–102, 106–115, 125–141, 176 Riverfronts, 146, 154, 155, 157–159, 161 Riverine landscape, 89, 90 River Nile, 15, 128, 130 Rosen, Christine, 4, 5 Rural-urban, 198, 199

 INDEX 

S Said, Edward, 11 Salzberg, Rosa, 169, 170, 172–175, 180, 181 Sanitation, 108 Scale, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15 Schmid, Christian, 197 Schmid, Martin, 6, 196 Schönbrunn, 98, 103, 104, 106 Schott, Dieter, 5, 10 Settlement, 23, 25, 27–30, 32, 33, 38–40 Simon, Zoltan, 2, 9, 47, 48 Slum, 219–227, 229–231, 234, 235 Slum clearance, 17, 217–235 Social history, 171 Social housing, 229 Socio-ecological sites, 146 Socio-natural entanglements, 219, 222, 230–234 Socio-natural site (SNS), 196 Socio-nature, 63 Soens, Tim Soens, 8, 10, 13 Sörlin, Sverker, 47 Spatial syntax theory, 178 Steevens, G.W. Subaltern, 171 Sudan, 15, 125–141 Swyngedouw, Erik, 5, 6 T Tarr, Joel, 4–5, 47 Taylor, Vanessa, 54 Techne, 48 Technoantures, 146 Technology, 1–8, 11–16 Technonatural, 168, 172, 182, 188, 197, 203, 213 Technonatural knot, 127 Technonatures, 1–17, 46, 59, 66, 125–141, 147, 171, 188, 218

243

Technopolitics, 209 Techno-river, 87–115 Technosphere, 24, 35, 67, 68, 72, 74, 80, 81, 146 Temporality, 8–12 Town planning, 136, 137 Toyka-Seid, Michael, 10 Tram system, 49, 50 Tramways, 50 Transit, 167–189 Transport, 167–169, 171, 173, 175–177, 182, 188 Trentmann, Frank, 54 Tsing, Anna, 2, 7 Turner, Ralph, 45 U The ultimate sink, 47 United States (US), 149, 152, 153, 158 United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), 152–155 Urban bourgeoise, 221 Urban ecology, 5 Urban environment, 220, 235 Urban environmental history, 3–5, 8, 12, 13, 235 Urban geography, 5 Urbanization of nature, 5 Urban landscape, 14 Urban metabolism, 5, 6, 17, 89, 219, 221, 223, 229, 235 Urban nature, 2, 12, 14 Urban planning, 223 Urban political ecology (UPE), 5–7, 67, 72–74 Urban poverty, 17 Urban revolution, 24, 27, 28, 30, 34 Urban-rural, 16 Urban-rural divide, 198, 199, 201–205, 209

244 

INDEX

V Venice, 174, 175, 180, 181 Verhoeven, Gerrit, 169, 170, 177 Victorian home, 53, 55, 58 Vienna, 14, 91, 95, 98, 101, 104–110, 112, 113 Visibility, 177, 180, 185–188 W Wallace-Wells, David, 68 Waste, 5, 16, 75, 77, 195–198, 200, 203–205, 207–213 Waste management, 197, 198, 201, 202, 206, 209, 210 Water, 5–8, 13, 14, 45–59, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93–95, 98–115, 125, 128–130, 132–134, 139, 145–147, 149, 151, 156, 176, 182, 201–204, 208, 217, 218,

221, 222, 224, 225, 227, 228, 233, 234 WC, 52, 224 Weber, Heike, 196, 200, 203, 204, 210, 211 Welfare society, 59, 219 White, Damian, 3, 4, 6–8 White, David, 197 White Nile, 125, 129, 133 White, Richard, 4, 46 Wien River, 14, 87–115 Wilbert, Chris, 3, 4, 6–8, 197 Williams, Raymond, 3 Winiwarter, Verena, 6, 14, 196 World War II, 153 Worster, Donald, 147 Z Zoning, 198–201, 213