Mikael Hard and Thomas J. Misa, eds. Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (MIT Press 2008) [click on cover image for link to on-line city images and publication information]

Urban Technologies and the 20th Century City

This bibliography is done as a part of the "Cities" theme of the U.S.-European "Tensions of Europe" project.  It focuses mostly on U.S. topics and/or English-language works, published in the last two decades -- and cannot be separated from the European-language bibliographies compiled by the European members of the "Cities" theme.

 
 

Topics / Themes	Technocultural Narratives
1. Review essays, bibliographies, websites
2. Urban transport	The efficient city	TM
3. City planning	The planned city	HP
4. Energy systems	The networked city	HP
5. Water & Sewage	The piped city	HP
6. Production & Consumption	The wealthy city	TM
7. Waste & Refuse	The dirty city	HP
8. Architecture	The imposing city	TM
9. Social engineering	The differentiated city	TM
10. Intellectual & artistic milieu	The creative city	TM
11. Expert Society	The machinery city
12. Communication	The information city
13. Counter-movements	The sick city
14. Specific cities/ Miscellaneous

1. Review essays, bibliographies, websites

Programmatic essay outlining the "international cities" hypothesis (contra the Marxist urban-geography inspired "world cities" model, which stresses hierarchies, hegemony, and structures; e.g. Saskia Sassen's Global City [1991]).  Abbott emphasizes instead "the variety of roles and functions that cities can play within complex networks of global exchange" -- e.g. production cities (Manchester, Detroit), gateway cities (Dallas, Atlanta), and transactional cities (Miami, Honolulu).  Suggestive for transatlantic patterns outside the world cities of New York, London, and Tokyo.

Chicago Traffic <www.ai.eecs.uic.edu/GCM/CongestionMap.html>. [Real-time map of freeway travel times in Chicago-Milwaukee region.]

"Down the Drain: Chicago's Sewers" <www.chipublib.org/digital/sewers/sewers.html> [Chicago Public Library's on-line resources on the 'historical development of an urban infrastructure']

Finnegan, Ruth. Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. H-NET review

Gandy, Matthew.  "Urban Visions."  Journal of Urban History 26 #3 (2000): 368-379.

Essay review of "The Cinematic City" edited by David B. Clarke, "Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics" by Rosalyn Deutsche, "The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity" by Steve Pile, and "Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory" edited by Sallie Westwood and  Williams.

Gilfoyle, Timothy J.  "White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The New Paradigms of Urban History."  Reviews in American History 26.1 (1998) 175-204. MUSE

The most comprehensive and sophisticated historiographic essay on American urban history.  It covers the last twenty years of scholarship with references to previous, similar works.  The even more complete web site version is a virtual bibliography of the subject: <homepages.luc.edu/~tgilfoy/whitecit.htm>

Gillette, Howard, Jr. and Zane Miller, eds.  American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review.  Westport: Greenwood, 1987.

A useful volume of essays that cover the major subfields of American urban history.  It reinforces the often repeated conclusion that the search for a general theory of urban history is a hopeless task in comparison to the rich productivity of scholarship resulting from more eclectic approaches.

Konvitz, Josef W., Mark H. Rose, and Joel A. Tarr.  "Technology and the City." T&C 31 (1990): 284-94.

Short review essay first considers classic themes (Robert Park, L. Mumford, S.B. Warner): how technologies enabled cities to function more efficiently; city as plastic with relation to autonomous machines and systems; urban machinery as workings of inevitable progress.  Since the 1960s: how public and private choices affect urban and technological history; how politics and public policy shape the urban and technological scene.

Konvitz, Josef W.  The Urban Millennium: The City Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

Jackson, Kenneth T. "The Impact of Technological Change on Urban Form." In Joel Colton and Stuart Bruchey, eds. Technology, the Economy, and Society: The American Experience.  New York, 1987.

Johnson-McGrath, Julie. "Who Built the Built Environment? Artifacts, Politics, and Urban Technology," Technology and Culture 38 (July 1997): 690-96.

A smart review essay, identifying and synthesizing themes in the "shape and shaping of urban technology."  Review evaluates Fairfield's Mysteries of the Great Cities; Ford's Cities and Buildings; Rose's Cities of Light and Heat; and Carl Smith's Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief.  She is critical of Ford's 'impressionistic' study, stating he has cribbed passages with incomplete acknowledgment.  Rose's book is the only other one dealing with 20th century themes (see below under 4).

Maier, Charles S. "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era."  American Historical Review 105 (June 2000): 806-31.  H-COOP / see also online discussion

An important historiographic essay by a leading historian of 20th century Europe.  Compares "moral" and "structural" narratives in effort to comprehend the 20th century in world history.  Argues for a specific form of structural narrative, "territoriality" -- "spatially anchored structures for politics and economics that were taken for granted from about 1860 to about 1970 or 1980 but that have since begun to decompose.... -- a process partially and rather ahistorically captured by the notion of globalization")

Monkkonen, Eric H.  America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Perhaps the best general surveys of American urban history.  Monkkonen is especially sensitive to the role of technology and engineers in the making of the city.  A propitious blend of city building and social history in a highly readable narrative.

New York Roads <www.nycroads.com/>. [Maps, webcams, and historical documents (1928-80s) on NYC region's roads, crossings, exits; links to material on Robert Moses and city planning.]

Roberts, Gerrylynn K., ed. The American Cities and Technology Reader: Wilderness to Wired City. London and New York: Routledge/Open University, 1999.  H-NET review

Rodger, Richard.  A Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History.  Aldershot: Scolar/Brookfield: Ashgate, 1996.

Rose, Mark H.  "Machine Politics: The Historiography of Technology and Public Policy." The Public Historian 10 (1988): 27-47.

Surveys a "minority tradition" of scholars examining relationships between public policy and technological change.  Identifies four themes: (1) "technology charging" where government leaders have influenced the pace and direction of technical change, sometimes indirectly [Tarr, Hounshell, MR Smith]; (2) indirect deployment of government power to modify or even destroy technical systems [Tarr, Martin, Barrett]; (3) technology and politics as contingently related [Hughes, Armstrong and Nelles]; (4) technology as hidden politics [Winner, Seely, Koppes, McDougall].  Concludes with a strained attempt to explain the ecology of knowledge (labeling Hughes and Kranzberg as 'outsiders'?!).

Ruchelman, Leonard I.  Cities in the Third Wave: The Technological Transformation of Urban America.  Chicago: Burnham, 2000.  186 pp.

Staudenmaier, John M.  "Recent Trends in the History of Technology." American Historical Review 95 (June 1990): 715-25.

Stine, Jeffrey K., and Joel A. Tarr. "At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment." Technology and Culture 39.4 (1998): 601-640. MUSE

Tarr, Joel. "Urban History and Environmental History in the U.S.: Complementary and Overlapping Fields."  In Christoph Bernhardt (Ed.), Environmental Problems in European Cities of the 19th and 20th Century (New York/Muenchen/Berlin: Waxmann, Muenster), forthcoming. <www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/usurban.htm>

Three Cities Project <www.3cities.org.uk/> [Based at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham, the 3Cities Project is "an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the iconography, spatial forms and literary and visual cultures of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in the period 1870s to 1930s."]

Barrett, Paul. The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago 1900-1930.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.

Extended, close study of the "failure" of Chicago's public policy to devise a solution to urban congestion during the early automobile era.  Contrasts the heavily politicized surface- and streetcar systems, privately owned but regulated with ill-will and suspicion, with the "depoliticized" private car (believed to benefit all).  By the 1920s there emerged a de-centralized and car-friendly city, with wide boulevards, in which white-collar workers traveled by auto or train to the central business district. -- TM

A brilliant analysis of the ways in which public policy helped to determined the outcome of the technological competition between the private automobile and public transit.  This case study shows how massive public resources were poured into road construction while the streetcar companies were taxed and regulated to the point of bankruptcy.  -- HP

Bernick, Michael, and Robert Cervero. Transit Villages in the 21st Century. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.  H-NET review

Bianco, Martha A.  "Technological Innovation and the Rise and Fall of Urban Mass Transit." Journal of Urban History 25 (March 1999): 348-78.

Alas, a mistitled essay: it is a case study of urban mass transit in Portland, Oregon, 1870-1930.  Argues that conflicting demands among transit's constituents -- transit employees, business groups, politicians, investors, riders -- caused mass transit's demise, though e.g. over-regulation, under-funding.  Discounts automobiles.

Bottles, Scott L.  Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Bottles modifies Bradford Snell's 1974 GM-conspiracy thesis (that Los Angeles Railway was killed after an 1944 takeover by American City Lines, which was backed by General Motors, Standard Oil-California, Firestone Rubber, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Truck, and which installed its own buses and forcibly retired the otherwise-viable rail system).  Bottles's evidence is that motor coaches [buses] were already in use from the 1920s, the decision to retire the trolleys was made in 1940 prior to the takeover, and that Angelinos were already car dependent -- 62% arrived in the central business district by automobile.  The reality was the trolley system provided poor service.  More generally, this is a detailed study of the "close association" of automobiles and sprawling urban form from 1900 to 1940s.

Borg, Kevin.  The 'Chauffeur Problem' in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology." Technology and Culture 40 #4 (1999): 797-832. MUSE

A case study of a little-appreciated problem -- the conflict during 1905-15 between owners of early automobiles and their hired drivers -- that is exemplary in its sensitive use of Anthony Giddens' notions (esp. the duality of structure and agency).  Borg's conclusion evaluates current theorizing in history of technology.

Brooks, Michael W. Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. xiv + 252 pp. H-NET review

A evocative cultural history of New York's subways, from the early schemes for public transit in the 1860s through the near present.  With its interpretation of media controversies, modernist art, public attitudes, and serious discussion of the crowd experience, fear of crime, and graffiti, this book complements Clifton Hood's excellent history (see below).

Condit, Carl W. The Railroad and the City: A Technological and Urbanistic History of Cincinnati.  Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.

A multidimensional "urbanistic" history of the interaction of railroad system with urban growth in the author's hometown.  Chapters on pioneer roads (to 1861), links with the South, terminal pattern (1850-1900), union terminal and transit plans; Cincinnati Union Terminal (1932).

Condit, Carl W. The Port of New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 and 1981): vol. 1: A History of the Rail and Terminal System from the Beginnings to Pennsylvania Station; vol. 2: A History of the Rail and Terminal System from the Grand Central Electrification to the Present.

In two densely written, data-packed books, Condit focuses on the urban "circulation technology" in New York, the "material and technical base that has determined the shape of most of the physical and aesthetic features of the city" [xi].  His approach spotlights the "interdependence of transportation and urban growth, life, and potentiality" [xii].  Volume 1: chapters on individual rail lines, depots, terminals, railroad electrification, and Pennsylvania Station.  Volume 2: chapters on Grand Central Station and electrification, freight terminals, the Pennsylvania and Grand Central stations through W.W.II, terminal system after 1945.  Includes plans and construction photos of Pennsylvania Station (1904-10) and Grand Central Terminal (1903-13).  The tables and footnotes are a mine of data.

Dienel, Hans-Liudger, and Helmuth Trischler.  Geschichte der Zukunft des Verkehrs: Verkehrskonzepte von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1997. T&C review

Hood, Clifton.  722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

A readable well-researched account of New York's subway (1880s-1953).  Three main themes: (1) changing political culture that lead to mass transit's rise, and fall; subway built with financing from the city and two private companies (not federal money), formation of the principal companies IRT, BRT, IND; ends analysis in 1953 with organization of unified New York City Transit Authority -- which set the stage for the system's physical deterioration and financial collapse in 1970s.  (2) subways as catalyst for urban spatial expansion  (including the opening of northern Manhattan, Bronx, through to Queens and Brooklyn; case study of Jackson Heights, Queens) and as source of New Yorkers' changing perceptions of the city (including quickening the pace of urban life, experiencing a new underground technological realm, traveling across the city, and aggravating gender, class and ethnic tension); and (3) its construction and engineering -- especially the building of the 1904 subway, geological obstructions, engineering plans, construction of Steinway tunnel from Manhattan to Queens.

Kay, Jane Holtz.  Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.  New York: Crown, 1997.  H-NET review

A journalist's breezy history of America's 20th-century obsession with the automobile, enlivened with anti-car polemics.  ("In Houston, a person walking is someone on his way to his car.")

Lewis, Tom.  Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life.  New York: Viking, 1997. H-NET review

Popular history of U.S. Interstate highway system: focused on 1950s to 1990s.

Ling, Peter.  America and the Automobile: Technology, Reform and Social Change.  New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martins, 1990.

McKay, John P.  Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe.  Princeton, 1976.

A classic study of the tramway industries of (mostly) France, Germany, and Great Britain (1890-1910).  Suggests that Europeans built tramways later than Americans owing to Europeans' "environmental-cultural-aesthetic requirements" placed on trolley builders.  All the same, Europeans, soon enough, experienced "an electric streetcar revolution" with heavy ridership.  Also deals with how government policy effected the provision of transport service to "those of modest means."

Examines the shift from rough, cobblestone streets to smooth ones paved with asphalt, concrete or brick using engineering community publications and city-by-city data.  Evaluation admits increasing scientific knowledge (about cement and asphalt), need of a 'complementary' technical innovation (cars, unlike horses, did not need cobblestones for traction while their tires destroyed loose gravel pavings); and the falling cost of asphalt, cheaper than brick by 1910.  Stresses, however, that the paving revolution owed to urban reformers' responses to the desire for street safety and socio-economic segregation (in suburbs).

McShane, Clay.  "The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals." Journal of Urban History 25 (March 1999): 379-404.

McShane traces the origins of green, yellow, and red traffic control signals back to British lighthouses in the mid-nineteenth century.  He shows how the timing of an essentially arbitrary decision can set standards on a global scale. -- HP

McShane, Clay. Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. RAH review

A remarkably sensitive approach to the history of technology.  McShane traces the impact of the automobile on the use and role of streets in urban life.  They were the location of a wide variety of neighborhood activities until the automobile turned them into exclusive pathways for traffic. -- HP

McShane, Clay. The Automobile: A Chronology of Its Antecedents, Development and Impact. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. H-NET review

Karsner, Douglas.  "Aviation and Airports: The Impact on the Economic and Geographical Structure of American Cities, 1940s-1980s." Journal of Urban History 23 (May 1997): 406-36.

Case examples of Tucson AZ, Tampa FL, and Detroit MI to show airport's "impact" on urban space.  For each city, the building of its airport -- often with military-backed expansion funding -- lead to commercial, "post-industrial" development in its proximity.

Papayanis, Nicholas. Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. H-NET review

While limited to an earlier period, 17th-19th centuries, the book does explore the notion of urban "circulation" as a quintessential element of urban setting: not only vehicles and people moving about the city, but also books, information, capital, labor, commerce, air sunlight and waste -- see Didier Gille's "Maceration and Purification" in _Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City_ ed. Feher and Kwinter (New York 1986)

Stilgoe, John.  Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

Focus on railroad's impact on non-rural landscape (the 'Metropolitan Corridor') 1880-1930s.  Chapter 1 "Gateway" focusing on New York's Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations is all about efficiency, system, and planning of passengers.  Chapter 3 "Zone" describes the industrial zone created by railroads in urban periphery.

Wachs, Martin, and Margaret Crawford, eds., The Car and the City: The Automobile, The Built Environment, and Daily Urban Life.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

An anthology covering a wide spectrum of topics on the impacts of the automobile on American life.  Many of the most prominent scholars in this subfield of the history of technology provide representative samples of their work, including Warner, Flink, Foster, and Bottles.  A good place for beginners to get an introduction to the subject and the scholars. -- HP

Contents: Wachs, Martin / . Crawford, Margaret / Introduction: The Car and the City. Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. / Learning from the Past: Services to Families. Jackson, John B. / Truck City. Corn, Joseph J. / Work and Vehicles: A Comment and Note. Rosenbloom, Sandra / Why Working Families Need a Car. Berger, Michael L. / The Car's Impact on the American Family. Scharff, Virginia / Gender, Electricity, and Automobility. Wachs, Martin / Men, Women, and Urban Travel: The Persistence of Separate Spheres. Gebhard, David / The Suburban House and the Automobile. Buckley, Drummond / A Garage in the House. Longstreth, Richard / The Perils of a Parkless Town. Flink, James J. / The Ultimate Status Symbol: The Custom Coachbuilt Car in the Interwar Period. Hess, Alan / Styling the Strip: Car and Roadside Design in the 1950s. Foster, Mark S. / The Role of the Automobile in Shaping a Unique City: Another Look. Bottles, Scott L. / Mass Politics and the Adoption of the Automobile in Los Angeles. Morales, Rebecca / Place and Auto Manufacture in the Post-Fordist Era. Crawford, Margaret / The Fifth Ecology: Fantasy, the Automobile, and Los Angeles. Novaco, Raymond W. / Automobile Driving and Aggressive Behavior. Myers, Barton / . Dale, John / Designing in Car-Oriented Cities: An Argument for Episodic Urban Congestion. Webber, Melvin M. / The Joys of Automobility. Adelson, Marvin / The Car, the City, and What We Want.]

Yago, Glenn.  The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and U.S. Cities, 1900-1970.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

A social-science analysis, using cross-national and cross-sectional data, of "how corporate power and state policy control [sic] urban development." (3)  Chapters on 20th century mass transit in German and U.S. cities; national transportation policies of the two countries; case studies of Frankfurt/Main and Chicago.  In Frankfurt, the boom in private cars occurs only in the 1950s.  Includes city/regional maps.

Barrett, Paul.  "Cities and Their Airports, 1926-1952." Journal of Urban History 14 (November 1987): 112-37.

A pioneering essay on the ways in which urban planners first thought about the siting of airports.  Barrett shows that they drew upon the model of the railroad terminals to call for placing the new transportation hubs as close as possible to city centers.  The coming of the jet airplane forced the planners to rethink their basic assumptions.

Beveridge, Charles E., and Carolyn F. Hoffman, eds. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmstead, Supplementary Series. Volume 1: Writings on Public Parks, Parkways, and Park Systems. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.  H-NET review

The seventh of twelve volumes of the papers of America's most renowned landscape gardener and city planner.  In this model of publication, Olmstead's familiar design ideas for greensward spaces take on new dimensions from his work in a large number of cities.  In addition, Olmstead’s social prescriptions for proper behavior in public spaces are conveniently found here.

Bosselmann, Representation of Places: Reality and Realism in City Design. H-NET review

Three case studies of the use of the computer-driven environmental simulation laboratory at Berkeley where Bosslemann serves as director.  He reports on projects to enhance the planning process by creating the visual and environmental conditions of downtown districts in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto.  Although aimed at planning professionals in terms of "objective" science, the book raises more questions about the visual representation and experience of urban space at the street level than it answers.

Diefendorf, Jeffry M. "Artery: Urban Reconstruction and Traffic Planning in Postwar Germany."  Journal of Urban History 15 (Feb. 1989): 131-58.

Eldredge, H. Wentworth, ed. 1975. World Capitals:  Toward Guided Urbanization. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Fairbanks, Robert B. For the City as a Whole: Planning, Politics, and the Public Interests in Dallas, Texas, 1900-1965. H-NET review / AHR review

An analysis of the use of the planning concept of "the city as a whole" during the first half of the twentieth century by the business elite of Dallas.  Fairbanks shows how it proved a convenient excuse to override racial and class concerns in the name of the public interest.  This popular idea may have been more useful as a rhetorical device than planning tool for solving problems.

Fairfield, John C. The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877-1937. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. xi 320 pp.  RAH review

An essay on the role of planning in giving shape to the American city.  Fairbanks contrasts the "republican" tradition of the nineteenth century against the "realist" tradition of the twentieth.  While the former tried to reform urban space to more democratic purposes, the latter simply accommodated market forces.  This account is limited, however, to the theoreticians of the city such as Robert Parks of the Chicago school and does not take into account the role of the myriad public and private decision makers who actually created the built environment.

Foster, Mark. "City Planners and Urban Transportation: The American Response, 1900-1940." Journal of Urban History 5 (May 1979): 365-96.

Foster, Mark S.  From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

One of the key books on American city planning in the twentieth century.  Foster frames the role of the automobile in shaping urban growth in broad perspective.  At the same time, he demonstrates how city planning became narrowed for the most part to traffic management.

Hise, Greg.  Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century Metropolis. (Creating the North American Landscape Series.) Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. H-NET review / AHR review

Hise demonstrates that the post-WWII city was less the product of chaotic sprawl than of continuities with planning ideas of the past stretching back to the garden city.  The concept of community planning and the movement for minimum houses played major roles in directing the growth of L. A. as a decentralized, regional metropolis.  This book makes a significant contribution to the history of planning and suburbanization.

Keating, Ann Durkin.  Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis.  Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988.

Development of Chicago's railroad-commuting suburbs 1870s-1900.  A focus on the interplay between real-estate developers and suburban governments.  -- TM

Miller, Zane L., and Bruce Tucker.  Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism. H-NET review

A sophisticated case study of successive generations of planning schemes for an inner city district.  Although most of them called for massive slum clearance during the first half of the century, political wrangling and financial shortfalls kept the wreaking ball at bay.  In the second half of the century, conflicting agendas of racial self-determination and historic preservation often resulted in a similar, political stalemate.  In telling this story, the authors expose many of the central dimensions of the discourse on urbanism in modern America.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. H-NET review / AHR review

One of the most important books on both American and European urban reform in the last quarter century.  This sweeping, comparative study of "progressivism" from the 1880s to the 1940s illuminates the ways in which ideas flowed back and forth across the Atlantic.  A seminal book that will continue to generate controversy for years to come.

Schubert, Dirk.  Stadterneuerung in London und Hamburg: Eine Stadtgeschichte zwischen Modernisierung und Disziplinierung [Renovation urbaine a Londres et a Hambourg: Une histoire urbaine entre modernisation et normalisation] H-NET review

Schultz, Stanley K.  Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

A book crucial for understanding the role of engineers in the creation of the modern, networked city.  They not only helped shape the process of city building but also the conceptual models and administrative bureaucracies that responded to the social and environmental problems of industrialization and suburbanization.

Sies, Mary Corbin.  "The City Transformed: Nature, Technology, and the Suburban Ideal, 1877-1917." Journal of Urban History 14 (November 1987): 81-111.

Sies, Mary Corbin, and Christopher Silver, eds.  Planning the Twentieth-Century City.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

A collection of leading edge scholarship on American urban planning.  The editors provide a terrific, historiographical essay on the state of the field, highlighting is strengths and weaknesses.  The chapters that follow attempt to fill in the gaps with an emphasis on the intellectual roots, social organization, and political process of planning.  Several of the essays provide insight on the post-1945 era of suburban sprawl and downtown decline.

Sorkin, Michael, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space.  New York: Noonday, 1992.

A radical perspective on the commercialization of urban space, the "malling" of the city.  A eye opening antidote to the rampant privatization of the city and its transformation into artificial, Disney-like places of corporate control.  From the militarization of downtown Los Angeles (Mike Davis) to the merchandising of historic New York City (M. Christine Boyer), these provocative essays bristle with outrage at the current trends of American city planning.

Spann, Edward K. Designing Modern America: The Regional Planning Association of America and Its Members. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1996. AHR review

Stephenson, R. Bruce.  Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900-1995. H-NET review / T&C review

In a lucid and concise narrative style, a case study of the rise in the early twentieth century of a new type of city based on leisure and consumption rather than commerce and industry.  In large part, this book is about the planner John Nolen, his visionary design for the resort in 1923, its defeat then and later in various revised forms, and the accumulating consequences in terms of environmental degradation. Stephenson is best at describing the intricate hydrology of the St. Petersburg area and its inexorable destruction by a society blindly pursuing a vision of Eden built upon dreams of unlimited capitalist expansion and individual profit.  In effect, a tropical paradise was bulldozed and paved over, leaving a place that now looks just like everywhere else.

Wakeman, Rosemary.  Modernizing the Provincial City: Toulouse 1945-1975. H-NET review

Ward, David, and Olivier Zunz, eds.  The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900-1940.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.  Publisher's blurb.

Castaneda, Christopher J., and Clarance M. Smith.  Gas Pipelines and the Emergence of America's Regulatory State: A History of Panhandle Eastern Corporation, 1928-1993.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.  T&C review

In the 1920s, electric arc welding made possible the construction of long distance gas pipelines.  This book tells the story of the Panhandle Eastern Corporation through extensive oral interviews and company archives from its origins to the 1990s when federal policy uncoupled the transmission and sale of natural gas.  The authors’ viewpoint from inside the company clouds their perspective on the role of regulation in the development of the industry.

Cooper, Gail. Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment 1900-1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. H-NET review / AHR review

A case study in the social construction of technology, stressing the interplay among engineers, manufacturers and consumers.  Homeowners had their own ideas about comfort that often favored window units while equipment producers argued that scientific efficiency demanded central units.  Although Cooper provides little on the social impacts of this technology, she raises key questions about the "consumption junction" between engineering philosophy and human perceptions of the quality of life.

Fernandez, Alexandre.  Economie et Politique de l'Electricité à Bordeaux (1887-1956)  H-NET review

Frost, Robert L. (1991). Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946-1970. Cornell University Press.

Hecht, Gabrielle (1998). The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. MIT Press. AHR review <<TM>>

Hirsh, Richard.  Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry.  Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. / Isis review (Misa.pdf)

The rise of a "grow-and-build" strategy that captured utility managers' thinking from the 1890s to the mid-1960s, focusing on incremental technical innovation, falling costs, and seemingly limitless demand.  In the mid-1960s, however, Hirsh identifies the industry entered technological "stasis" where engineering limits to technology-won efficiencies cropped up.  Regulatory schemes gave incentives to high-capital investments (tying allowed rates to these rather than to costs).  But the march of increasing thermal efficiencies, from around 2% in the 1880s, plateaued around 33% in 1965.  Super-large 1000-MW plants, fossil fuel or nuclear, had excessive downtimes; superheated steam induced metallurgical nightmares; design-by-extrapolation (cf. -by-experience) led to technically flawed designs.  By the 1970s, Samuel Insull's technology-and-demand-driven utility world had ended. -- TM

Hirsh, Richard.  Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Utility System.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

The "inversion" of Samuel Insull's world (where utility managers used governmental regulation to consolidate their control over the regions and customers they served).  Hirsh builds his book around the passage in 1978 of the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act which (he writes) "opened the electric generation market to independent electricity power companies and ended the monopoly control enjoyed by regulated utilities." [p. 73]  The entrance of new parties (including "alternative" power generators), mainstreaming of conservation, growth of regulatory activism.  Discussion of local-, state-, and federal-level initiatives.  Little, per se, on cities -- but indispensable in understanding the recent history of the U.S. power system. -- TM

Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Award winning comparative history of the origins of electrical systems in Germany (Berlin), Great Britain (London), and the United States (Chicago).  Starting from very different social and political contexts, the systems evolve to a single pattern on a regional scale.  While some critics see the book as a classic case of technological determinism, others praise its structural analysis of large systems.

Mazuzan, George T. "'Very Risky Business': A [Nuclear] Power Reactor for New York City." T&C 27 (April 1986): 262-84.

Melosi, Martin V.  Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985.

A general survey of the history of energy in the United States.  Melosi supplies a useful starting point for the study of fuels and related technologies from the fire burning hearth to the nuclear power plant.  Along the way, he highlights some of the environmental impacts of America’s emergence as an energy intensive society.

Nye, David.  Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940.  Cambridge: MIT Press,  1992.

A model study of the social and cultural impacts of electrical technology on American life.  This well written, accessible book provides a highly nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the interactions between society and technology.  Using postmodern methods of deconstruction, Nye shows how electricity became the icon of progress in the American mind.

Platt, Harold L.  The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

A comprehensive case study of the social construction of technology.   Platt underscores the ways in which the utility business was shaped by consumer demand and why Samuel Insull was among the first to understand how to respond to it through clever sales campaigns.  The book traces the impacts of technology on everyday life in the home, shop, and factory, as well as on the growth of the suburbs.

Rose, Mark H.  "Urban Environments and Technological Innovation: Energy Choices in Denver and Kansas City, 1900-1940." T&C 25 (July 1984): 503-39.  <see following annotation>

Rose, Mark H.  Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. H-NET review

A comparative study of energy technologies in Kansas City and Denver under the leadership of utility executive Henry L. Doherty.  Rose paints a rich portrait of the relationships among the modern business corporation, its "agents of diffusion," and the mass of urban consumers.  One of the few histories of technology to integrate gas and electricity into a coherent story of the rise of an energy intensive society.

Tarr, Joel A., and Gabriel Dupuy, eds. Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

A path breaking collection of essays that compares urban technology in Europe and the United States.  Separate sections discuss transportation, water systems, waste disposal, communication, and energy.  Although the subject of each essay is an individual city or country, the collection as a whole provides a comparative perspective.

Tobey, Ronald C.  Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. H-NET Review / T&C review

A study of the New Deal’s efforts to spur economic recovery through the electrification of the home.  At the same time, President Roosevelt sought to use technology as tool of social engineering to improve the American standard of living.  An informative book on the ways in which politics can play an important role in giving shape to the built environment.

Troesken, Werner.  Why Regulate Utilities? The New Institutional Economics and the Chicago Gas Industry, 1849-1924.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.  H-NET Review / T&C review

An economic and political analysis of the gas industry in Chicago, using the institutional theory of regulation.  Troesken examines the interplay of policy and technology after the introduction of the water gas method in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  While this case study conforms to the theory, it does not prove it since other, alternative explanations are also possible.

Elkind, Sarah S.  Bay Cities and Water Politics: The Battle for Resources in Boston and Oakland. (Development of Western Resources.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1998. Pp. viii, 246. H-NET Review / AHR review

Although the two cities are very different in character and environmental setting, Elkind demonstrates how they pursued similar solutions to needs for more water.  Both looked to distant sources to satisfy growing demands and both engendered the creation of regional authorities and regionalism.  Eventually, however, these agencies became unresponsive to local consumers.  A fine study of political, urban, technological, and environmental history.

Fairchild, Amy, and David Rosner.  "The Living City: Engineering Social and Urban Change in New York City, 1865 to 1920."  Bulletin of the History of Medicine 73.1 (1999) 124-129. MUSE

Goldman, Joanne Abel. Building New York's Sewers: Developing Mechanisms of Urban Management. (History of Technology Series.) West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1997.  H-NET Review / T&C review

A case study in changing perceptions of municipal services from private luxuries to public necessities.  Beginning in the 1870s, New York’s bosses and reformers found common ground in supporting systematic approaches to building the networked city.  A strong study in the political and economic forces affecting the formation of public policy but weaker in the role of public health, medical science, and popular notions of health and comfort in this process.

Gumprecht, Blake.  The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Creating the North American Landscape.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 369..  H-NET Review / AHR review

Hoy, Suellen.  "The Garbage Disposer, the Public Health, and the Good Life." T&C 26 (October. 1985): 758-84.

Jackson, John N.  The Welland Canals and Their Communities: Engineering, Industrial, and Urban Transformation.  H-NET Review

The story of the canal around Niagara Falls, the regional system of cities that arose along its banks, and the environmental consequences of linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Actually, Jackson tells a series of stories that parallel the original project (1824-1830) and several subsequent reconstructions down to its present role as part of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Heavy in narrative detail in comparison to historical analysis and context.

Porter, Dale H.  The Thames Embankment. Environment, Technology and Society in Victorian London.  Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1998.  H-NET Review / T&C review

Pothier, Louise, ed.  L'eau, l'hygiène publique, et les infrastructures.  Montreal: Groupe PGV, 1996. Pp. 84.  T&C review

Reid, Donald. Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991)

Tarr, Joel A., and Gabriel Dupuy, eds. (1988). Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.  (See above, section 5)

West, Graham.  Innovation and the Rise of the Tunneling Industry.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. [covers 1825 to 1985, international]

Adams, Stephen B., and Orville R. Butler. Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 270. AHR review

A "corporate biography" of AT&T's manufacturing arm.  After its emergence as the company's central manufacturing site, Western Electric's Hawthorn plant, became Chicago's largest single employer: with 14,000 workers by 1913 and 40,000 in the 1920s.  (The plant sponsored 40 employee bowling leagues.) But only cursory coverage of the relation of the plant to the city; thin treatment of the famous Hawthorne experiments (see Richard Gillespie's Manufacturing Knowledge).

Barrett, James R. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.  <<HP>>

Calder, Lendol. Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. H-NET Review

How Americans managed to borrow their way to material prosperity -- pawnbrokers, personal finance, installment selling (1850s-1930s)

Gorman, Hugh.  "Manufacturing Brownfields: The Case of Neville Island, Pennsylvania." T&C 38 (July 1997): 539-74.

Green, Nancy L.  Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York.  Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.  T&C review

A theoretically informed, deeply comparative study of the garmet-making districts of New York (Seventh Ave.) and Paris (the Sentier).  The "century" stretches roughly 1840s to 1960s, with many side glances.  Green crafts a narrative that engages a host of historical debates: the "nature" of industrialization, the relations between "mass" and "custom" manufacturing, the fickle turns of "fashion", flexible labor practices, union histories, the "waves" of immigrant groups, the multiple dimensions of gender.  Reading her 300-page text, with an additional 100+ pages of notes and bibliography, will substitute for her 1000-page doctorat d'Etat thesis.

Halpern, Rick. Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54.  Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 309. AHR review

Longer view than Barrett (1987): deals with emergence of Union stockyards (f.1865) and surrounding workers' communities, decline of craft and rise of mass production factories from 1880s (little mechanization, great division-of-labor); corporate consolidation around 1900; strikes in 1894, 1904, 1921; emergence of inter-racial, mass-production CIO union from 1937 to collapse of rail-dependent industry in the 1950s.

Roger Horowitz. "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!": A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90. (The Working Class in American History.) Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 373. AHR review

A union-centered history of meatpacking with case studies of Chicago, Kansas City, Sioux City. Decline of industrial unionism in meatpacking 1955-1990.

Strasser, Susan, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, eds. (1998) Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collection of conference papers, by well-known historians of consumer culture; the volume has comparative ambitions, but nearly all essays focus narrowly on one time/country; see chapter 3 (de Grazia) for some cross-national analysis.
pt. 1. Politics, markets, and the state. The consumers' White Label Campaign of the National Consumers' League, 1898-1918 / Kathryn Kish Sklar; Consumption and citizenship in the United States, 1900-1940 / Charles McGovern ; Changing consumption regimes in Europe, 1930-1970 : comparative perspectives on the distribution problem / Victoria de Grazia -- Customer research as public relations : General Motors in the 1930's / Roland Marchand ; The New Deal state and the making of citizen consumers / Lizbeth Cohen ; Consumer spending as state project: yesterday's solutions and today's problems / George Lipsitz ; The emigré as celebrant of American consumer culture: George Katona and Ernest Dichter / Daniel Horowitz ; Dissolution of the "dictatorship over needs"? : consumer behavior and economic reform in East Germany in the 1960's / André Steiner
pt. 2. Everyday life. World War I and the creation of desire for automobiles in Germany / Kurt Möser ; Gender, generation, and consumption in the United States: working-class families in the interwar period / Susan Price Benson ; Comparing apples and oranges : housewives and the politics of consumption in interwar Germany / Nancy Reagin ; "The convenience is out of this world" : the garbage disposer and American consumer culture / Susan Strasser ; Consumer culture in the GDR, or How the struggle for antimodernity was lost on the battleground of consumer culture / Ina Merkel ; Changes in consumption as social practice in West Germany during the 1950's / Michael Wildt ; Reshaping shopping environments : the competition between the City of Boston and its suburbs / Matthias Judt ; Toys, socialization, and the commodification of play / Stephen Kline ; The "syndrome of the 1950's" in Switzerland : cheap energy, mass consumption, and the environment / Christian Pfister ; Reflecting on ethnic imagery in the landscape of commerce, 1945-1975 / Fath Davis Ruffins
pt. 3. History and theory. Modern subjectivity and consumer culture / James Livingston ; Consumption and consumer society : a contribution to the history of ideas / Ulrich Wyrwa ; Reconsidering abundance : a plea for ambiguity / Jackson Lears.

Counters the standard account of suburbanization -- that (1) interurban transit and/or (2) the middle-class quest for the "rural ideal" was responsible for the suburbanization of L.A. -- while allowing this is true enough for San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.  Viehe finds, instead, that new suburbs in southern L.A. and northern Orange counties were located around oil wells or oil refineries.  "Suburban dispersal occurred because of the dispersed location of oil field and refining sites, and metropolitan fragmentation developed because the suburbs pursued different economic functions." [p. 6]  Contrasts "industrial" and "residential" suburbs.

Ward, Stephen V. 1998.  Selling Places : The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850-2000. Routledge; ISBN: 0419242406

Hoy, Suellen.  Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

A well written social history of the American passion for cleaning up.  Hoy covers a wide range of private and public efforts in the battle against dirt, with a special emphasis on women's roles.  Her narrative shows how a cultural ideal becomes translated into individual habits, social roles, and political agendas.

Melosi, Martin V., ed. Pollution and Reform in American Cities.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980.

One of the first books on the subject of pollution which covers a wide range of subjects from bad air to solid wastes.  Many of the essays were expanded into book length monographs.  Although somewhat outdated, it still provides a valuable introduction to this burgeoning subfield of history.

Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880-1980 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981).

A pioneering study of the cities' generation of tons of solid wastes and their efforts to get rid of it.  Melosi is particularly adept in drawing links between politics, technology, and environment.  He explains the evolution of public policies from one technological fix to the next, including incinerators and land fills.

Melosi, Martin V. The sanitary city: urban infrastructure in America from colonial times to the present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. AHR review

A monumental synthesis of the city's effort to create a healthy environment.  Starting with Edwin Chadwick’s movement in England, Melosi traces the growth of technological systems that  cleansed the water, air, and land in urban American to the present time.  A sweeping narrative that will remain the standard text on the subject for years to come.

Stradling, David.  Smokestacks and progressives: environmentalists, engineers and air quality in America, 1881-1951.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Strasser, Susan. 1999. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Metropolitan Books.

Tarr, Joel A.  Joel A. Tarr. The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective. Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996. H-NET Review

Viles, Heather. "'Unswept stone, besmeer'd by sluttish time': Air Pollution and Building Stone Decay in Oxford, 1790-1960." Environment and History 2 (1996): 359-72.  [impact of air pollution due to use of coal.]

Wirth, John. Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution. (Development of Western Resources.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2000. Pp. xx, 264. AHR review

FROM THE REVIEW: This is a superb book that succeeds at many levels: as a history of lead smelting in British Columbia during the 1920s and 1930s and copper smelting in Arizona during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; as a history of the legal arguments used to protect industrial polluters before the 1970s; as a history of negotiations among the United States, Canada, and Mexico to reduce damage from sulfur oxide emissions; and as a history of the impact of the environmental movement of the 1970s and after on pollution abatement in North America.

Arnold, Lewis (1997). An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop and the World's Columbian Exposition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. xv + 353 pp. H-NET Review

Chicago's influence on European architecture in the late-19th century.  "Architects and critics ... found a new kind of building in Chicago [ugly, disquieting and crass office blocks which nevertheless served their purposes with unprecedented efficiency, convenience, and even comfort] ... valuing it as a by-product clarifying a process that had become confused in Western Europe." [p. 226]

Banham, Reyner (1986). A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900-1925. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

A detailed view (citing individual grain elevators, day-light factories, architect's notebooks) on the "causal, cultural, and conscious connection" between North American industrial building and classic International Style architecture of Europeans.  Persuasive readings of the American inspirations behind Gropius & Meyer's Faguswerke [1911-14]; Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture (1923), and the FIAT factory at Turin-Lingotto [1914-26].

Biggs, Lindy. The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America's Age
of Mass Production. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

An intellectual history of the quest, by engineers and factory designers, to understand the factory as a "master machine," a whole, rather than merely a location of individual workers and machines.  Contains three delightfully detailed, illustrated chapters on Ford Motor's Highland Park [1910-14], New Shop [1914-19], and River Rouge [1919-35].

Bradley, Betsy Hunter. The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

A book-length classification of industrial buildings, from the mid-19th century to the modernism of the 1930s.  Good on the architectural details of individual buildings/types; but little information on context, especially how factories related to urban development.

Chappell, Sally A. Kitt. "Urban Ideals and the Design of Railroad Stations." T&C 30 (April 1989): 354-75.

A Carl-Condit-inspired essay on how great railway stations affected urban form: examples discussed are Daniel Burnham's Terminal Station (Chicago, 1893) and Washington's Union Station (1903-7); and stations done by his firm's successors Union Station (Chicago 1914-20), Cleveland Terminal Group (1919-25), and Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Station (1927-34).  A complement to Condit's own writings on New York's Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations (see Condit's Port of New York -- listed above under theme 2)

Condit, Carl W.  American Building Art: The Twentieth Century.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.  427 pp.

A veritable textbook on American building types (1900-50s), with 134 illustrations.  An emphasis on structural problems and innovations; extensive footnotes.  Chapters on steel frame (skyscrapers); metropolitan railway terminal; steel truss and girder bridges; steel arch bridges; suspension bridges; concrete buildings, bridges, and dams; metropolitan parkways.

Condit, Carl W.  Chicago, 1910-29: Building Planning, and Urban Technology.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.  See also second volume covering 1930-70 [UCP 1974], with 115 illustrations.

A holistic history of Chicago's "urban technology" defined as "all those human activities that together provide the physical basis of organized community existence" -- chapters on the city in its natural setting, transportation network, Chicago Plan (adopted 1910), buildings of the commercial city (offices, industrial buildings and warehouses, theaters, hotels and apartments), public buildings and parks, and the structures and arteries of transportation.

Condit, Carl W.  American Building: Materials and Techniques from the Beginnings of the Colonial Settlements to the Present.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; 2nd edition 1982.

A compact volume focusing on the principal building technologies and their inventors/engineers from the 17th century onward.  Brief summaries of all the important types: from timber-framed buildings and timber-truss bridges in the early 19th century ... to steel framed skyscrapers, steel and concrete bridges, dams, concrete shells, and revivals of old materials in the 20th century.  An indispensable source for brief treatments of many, many famous buildings and structures; 112 illustrations.

Darton, Eric.  Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center. H-NET Review

Domosh, Mona.  "The Symbolism of the Skyscraper: Case Studies of New York's First Tall Buildings." Journal of Urban History 14 (May 1988): 320-45.

Suggestive if not compelling treatment of tall buildings as symbolic elements in New York's built environment.  Case studies of the publicity-seeking newspaper industry (Tribune Building 1875, Pulitzer's World Building 1890) and respectability-minded Metropolitan Life Insurance (buildings of 1893 and 1909: on the latter's Italian-inspired spire, "high and lofty, like a great sentinel keeping watch over the millions of policy holders ... stands the Tower." [337]).  Skyscrapers as expressions of individual prestige/status, corporate power, global capitalism.

Ford, Larry R.  Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skid Rows, and Suburbs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. H-NET Review / RAH review

An impressionistic "primer" on the relationship between architectural history and urban geography.  JJM's criticisms (see above review essay) seem on target: absent a thesis on the relationship, it's hard to evaluate Ford's particular choices of buildings, types, and illustrations.

Friedman, Donald (1995).  Historical Building Construction: Design, Materials, and Technology.
New York: W. W. Norton.

Friedman, himself a practicing structural engineer, wrote the volume to assist engineers and architects in planning structurally "elegant" reconstructions of historical buildings.  Yet all construction devotees will learn much from his immensely detailed discussions of the inside of buildings -- even though his treatment centers pretty exclusively on New York.  Chapters (in the 20th century) on fireproof building, steel framing, floor systems, curtain-wall systems, "modern" steel construction (since the 1920s).  Appendix D gives material properties for wrought iron, cast iron, and steel (1840s-1950) while Appendix E gives iron and steel column formulas for allowable stress (1848-1980).  These appendixes fairly cry out for comparative research (between different U.S. cities and between different countries) as a window into the circulation of engineering knowledge and as a subtle but pervasive "constraint" for tall buildings.  {see Misa's Nation of Steel, pp. 66-69.}

Gillespie, Angus Kress. Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999.  H-NET Review

A "cultural" American-studies history of New York's tallest buildings, twin 110-story towers (briefly, in 1973, the tallest in the world); valuable background on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (f. 1921).  Final chapter details 24 hours in the "life" of the buildings.

Ibelings, Hans (1997). Americanism: Nederlandse Architectuur en het Transatlantische Voorbeeld = Dutch Architecture and the Transatlantic Model. Rotterdam: NAI Uitgevers/Publishers.

Irish, Sharon.  "A 'Machine That Makes the Land Pay': The West Street Building in New York." T&C 30 (April 1989): 376-97.

Case study of the design, foundation, and real-estate considerations of Cass Gilbert's West Street Building (1905-7), a speculative office building.  So why the "ornamental exuberance"?  Cass himself wrote: "the machine is none the less a useful one because it has a measure of beauty, and that architectural beauty, judged even from an economic standpoint, has an income-bearing value."  The famous quote in the title comes from Cass Gilbert, "The Financial Importance of Rapid Building" Engineering Record 41 (30 June 1900): 624.

Konvitz, Josef W. "William J. Wilgus and Engineering Projects to Improve the Port of New York, 1900-1930." T&C 30 (April 1989): 398-425.

The article focuses on the latter, consulting career of Wilgus, best know as the chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad (to 1907).  Discusses his plans for harbor improvements, freight tunnels, belt lines, port authority, and regional planning.  A candidate for transatlantic research (he was well known and decorated by British engineering societies).

Landau, Sarah Bradford, and Carl W. Condit.  The Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865-1913.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Isis Review (Misa.pdf) /

Longstreth, Richard. The Drive-In, The Supermarket, And The Transformation Of Commercial Space In Los Angeles 1914-1941. H-NET Review

Marcuse, Peter.  "Reflections on Berlin: The Meaning of Construction and the Construction of Meaning." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, v.22, n.2., p.331, 1998.

Mumford, Eric.  The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Neumann, Dietrich (1995).  'Die Wolkenkratzer kommen': deutsche Hochhäuser der zwanziger Jahre: Debatten, Projekte, Bauten.  Braunschweig: Vieweg.

Orum, Anthony M. City-Building in America. Jablonsky review; Varady review

Parsons, Kermit Carlyle, ed.  The Writings of Clarence Stein: Architect of the Planned Community.  H-NET Review

Peters, Tom F.  Building the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.  535 pp. T&C review

A brilliantly illustrated account of the rise of "building as a process" and instances of "technological thinking" in the 19th century (even the footnotes have illustrations).  Peters gives informed and detailed discussions of specific projects, people, and structures: the Thames and Mont Cenis tunnels, Conway and Britannia bridges, Suez Canal, Sayn Foundry, Kew Palm House, Crystal Palace, Eiffel Tower and Galerie des Machines (1889); Langwies Viaduct and Panama Canal.

Randall, Frank A.  History of the Development of Building Construction in Chicago.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; second edition, revised and expanded; original 1949.

The most detailed print source on approx. 1,000 of Chicago's buildings, updating the first edition.  New period VI covering 1950-98 includes several hundred brief descriptions -- with references to primary printed sources (in technical and architectural literatures).  Dry reading but a goldmine.

Relph, Edward C.  The Modern Urban Landscape: 1880 to the Present.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

A discussion of "why cities look as they do" -- reflecting their architecture, planning, technology and cultural circumstance; reviewed in T&C 30:456.

Russell, James S. "Sony Center, Berlin - Technology-driven urban bravura in Berlin's Sony Center." Architectural Record 188, no. 11, (2000): 126-39.

Sagvari, Agnes, and International Council on Archives. Executive Committee. 1980. The Capitals of Europe: a guide to the sources for the history of their architecture and construction = Les Capitales de l'Europe : guide des sources de la architecture et de l'urbanisme [editor-in-chief, Agnes Sagvari]. Munchen; New York: Detroit: K.G. Saur; distributed by Gale Research.

Simon, Roger D.  The City-Building Process: Housing and Services in New Milwaukee Neighborhoods, 1880-1910.  H-NET Review

Slaton, Amy. Reinforced concrete and the modernization of American building, 1900-1930.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. (forthcoming June 2001: publisher blurb)

Smith, Terry (1993). Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Stieber, Nancy.  Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam: Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900-1920. H-NET Review

Taylor, John, Jean G. Lengellé, and Caroline Andrew, eds. 1993. Capital Cities / Les Capitales:
Perspectives Internationales / International Perspectives. Ottawa:  Carleton University Press.

Vale, Lawrence J. 1992. Architecture, Power, and National Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Williams, Rosalind.  Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

Willis, Carol. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) 

Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the dream : a social history of housing in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. 

Wright, Gwendolyn. The politics of design in French colonial urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Zukowsky, John (ed.). Chicago Architecture, 1872-1922: Birth of a Metropolis.  Munchen: Prestel-Verlag; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1987.

A sumptuously illustrated source on Chicago's classic skyscraper era.  See esp. the section "The European Connection" with essays by Thomas J. Schlereth "Solon Spencer Beman, Pullman, and the European Influence on and Interest in his Chicago Architecture" (173-88); Elaine Harrington "International Influences on Henry Hobson Richardson's Glesner House [1885-87]" (189-208); Richard Guy Wilson "Chicago and International Arts and Crafts: Progressive and Conservative Tendencies" (209-28).  See also Roula M. Geraniotis "An Early German Contribution to Chicago's Modernism" (91-106); Henry Loyrette "Chicago: A French View" (121-36); Robert Bruegmann "When Worlds Collided: European and American Entries to the Chicago Tribune Competition of 1922" (303-18).

Zukowsky, John (ed.). Chicago Architecture and Design, 1923-1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis.  Munchen: Prestel-Verlag; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1993.

Many key topics, mostly architecture.  On Europe see Dennis P. Doordan "Exhibiting Progress: Italy's Contribution to the Century of Progress Exposition [1933-34]" (219-32).

Baldwin, Peter C.  Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930. Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. H-NET Review

Baylor, Ronald H. "Roads to Racial Segregation: Atlanta in the Twentieth Century." Journal of Urban History 15 (Nov. 1988): 3-21.

A case study on the "use of highways and roads as a planning tool to segregate" racial minorities in Atlanta.

Blakely, Edward J., and Mary Gail Snyder. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997. xi + 209 pages. H-NET Review

Cohen, Lizabeth. "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America." American Historical Review (October 1996): 1050-81.

A beautifully crafted essay by a very smart historian.  Detailed treatment of the tensions between New Jersey's near suburbs and the city over shopping and working.  Includes a deft treatment of class, gender, and ethnicity in the context of the story of suburbs.  Shopping centers made historically compelling!

Diefendorf, Jeffry M. 1993. In the Wake of War:  The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Kenneth T.  Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

A masterful synthesis of the history of suburbia in America that remains the basic text on this important topic.  Jackson not only draws on a wide variety of secondary sources, but also makes some insightful, original contributions.  Among these, his analysis of the role of government agencies such as the Federal Housing Authority in "red-lining" the city, while subsidizing the growth of subdivisions at the urban fringe, has stimulated a new generation of scholarship.  -- HP

Jackson, Kenneth T. "All the World's a Mall: Reflections on the Social and Economic Consequences of the American Shopping Center." American Historical Review (October 1996): 1111-21.

Joerges, B. (1999).  "Do Politics have Artefacts?" Social Studies of Science  29 #3: 411-31.

Rebuts Winner's well-known thesis on the bus-blocking bridges of Long Island.  [See also Joerges, Bernward. 1999. "Die Brücken des Robert Moses: Stille Post in der Stadt- und Techniksoziologie," Leviathan, 27, pp. 43-63.]

Southworth, Michael, and Eran Ben-Joseph.  (1997.)  Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities.  New York: McGraw-Hill.

Historical treatment of street designs and patterns in shaping (especially) residential patterns.  Examples are drawn mostly from the U.K. and U.S., with side glances to older European streets.  Their long-term view allows the authors to persuasively describe three historical eras: the walking and shopping city of the 19th century; the grid-, boulevard-, freeway-, and parking-based automobile age (in which 50% of cities' surface-area are devoted to the automobile); and, the authors assert, the coming of new pedestrian-friendly streets heralding a turn away from the automobile's dominance.

Winner, Langdon (1980).  "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"  Daedalus 109 #1: 121-36.

A legendary tale of how technology shaped society: the story is Robert Moses designed low-lying bridges to keep bus riders (read poor African Americans) out of his new "Jones Beach" recreation site.  [This essay has been reprinted in numerous collections, including Winner's own The Whale and the Reactor (University of Chicago Press, 1986).]

Woolgar, S., and G. Cooper (1999). "Do Artefacts have Ambivalence? Moses’ Bridges, Winner’s Bridges and Other Urban Legends in S&TS."  Social Studies of Science. 29 #3: 433-49.

On the whole, an essay designed to irritate historians who believe in evidence.  Advertises, but does not deliver, solid proof that -- contra Winner -- there were buses running to Jones Beach.  Woolgar, hewing to his resolute text-centered reflexive world, could not at the last moment "find" the bus schedule. {see also Joerges 1999}

Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: a history of intellectual life in New York City, from 1750 to the beginnings of our own time. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1987.

Bluestone, Daniel.  Constructing Chicago.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Bluestone argues against a materialistic "city of big shoulders" interpretation of Chicago, in which money drives all, stressing instead the role of cultural aspiration and elite-society ideals in the making of late-19th century Chicago.  Beautifully illustrated chapters on parks, churches, skyscrapers (1880-95), civic and cultural buildings (1850-1905), and the civic lakefront.

Bender, Thomas, and Carl E. Schorske, editors. Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930. New York: Russell Sage, 1994.

CONTENTS: Covering New York : journalism and civic identity in the twentieth century / Neil Harris -- The artist's New York : 1900-1930 / Wanda M. Corn -- Avant-garde and conservatism in the Budapest art world : 1910-1932 / Éva Forgács -- The novel as newspaper and gallery of voices : the American novel in New York City : 1890-1930 / Philip Fisher -- The role of Budapest in Hungarian literature : 1890-1935 / Miklós Lackó -- Historical perspectives and national cultures / Carl E. Schorske and Thomas Bender. Budapest and New York compared / Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske -- Transformations in the city politics of Budapest : 1873-1941 / Zsuzsa L. Nagy -- Political participation and municipal policy : New York City : 1870-1940 / David C. Hammack -- Uses and misuses of public space in Budapest : 1873-1914 / Gábor Gyáni -- The park and the people : Central Park and its publics : 1850-1910 / Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweig -- Class and ethnicity in the creation of New York City neighborhoods : 1900-1930 / Deborah Dash Moore -- St. Imre Garden City : an urban community / István Teplán -- Immigrants, ethnicity, and mass culture : the vaudeville stage in New York City : 1880-1930 / Robert W. Snyder -- The cultural role of the Vienna-Budapest operetta / Péter Hanák -- The Budapest joke and comic weeklies as mirrors of cultural assimilation / Géza Buzinkay.

Charney, Leo, and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. (1995). Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life.  Berkeley: University of California Press. T&C Review

CONTENTS: Tracing the individual body : photography, detectives, and early cinema / Tom Gunning -- Unbinding vision : Manet and the attentive observer in the late nineteenth century / Jonathan Crary -- Modernity, hyperstimulus, and the rise of popular sensationalism / Ben Singer -- The poster in fin-de-siècle Paris: "that mobile and degenerate art" / Marcus Verhagen -- "A new era of shopping" : the promotion of women's pleasure in London's West End, 1909-1914 / Erika D. Rappaport -- Disseminations of modernity : representation and consumer desire in early mail-order catalogs / Alexandra Keller -- The perils of Pathé, or the Americanization of the American cinema / Richard Abel -- Panoramic literature and the invention of everyday genres / Margaret Cohen -- Moving pictures: photography, narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1871 / Jeannene M. Przyblyski -- In a moment : film and the philosophy of modernity / Leo Charney -- Cinematic spectatorship before the apparatus : the public taste for reality in fin-de-siècle Paris / Vanessa R. Schwartz -- Effigy and narrative : looking into the nineteenth-century folk museum / Mark B. Sandberg -- America, Paris, the Alps : Kracauer (and Benjamin) on cinema and modernity / Miriam Bratu Hansen.

Fuller, Kathryn H.  At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+248.  T&C review

Lowen, Rebecca S.  Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. T&C Review

Morrison, James (1998). Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors.  Postmodern Culture Series. Albany: State University of New York Press. ix + 311 pp. H-NET Review

Scott, William B., and Peter M. Rutkoff.  New York Modern: The Arts and the City.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. First chapter.

Slyck, Abigail A. Van.  Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920.  H-NET Review

Roth, Matthew W. "Mulholland Highway and the Engineering Culture of Los Angeles in the 1920s." Technology and Culture 40.3 (1999): 545-75. MUSE

The politics, construction, and city-engineering identity behind a 22-mile twisting highway built, seemingly, without a "rational" urban-development goal in mind.  The road instead served for years as a monument to Bill Mulholland, builder of the mammoth L.A. Aqueduct (opened 1913) that carried water 233 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains.  A nice case study of how temporary coalitions (e.g. city engineers, real estate developers, city politicians, and "the public" as a rhetorical construct) result in durable artifacts. -- TM

Schultz, Stanley K.  Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. (See above, section 3)

Seely, Bruce E.  Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

The emergence of engineers -- especially at the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads -- as "experts" in public policy and in the details of its execution; covers 1890s to 1956, including "good roads" movement, progressive period, highway research, urban road building in 1930s-1950s.  Details the political rise of the engineer as "objective" expert.  -- TM

Smith, Cecil O., Jr., "The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in France." AHR 95 (June 1990): 657-92.  <TM>

Bens, Elsa de, and Manfred Knoche, eds. (1987) Electronic Mass Media in Europe: Prospects and Developments: A Report from the FAST Programme of the Commission of the European Communities.  Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel.

Boyer, M. Christine. Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communications.  New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. Pp. 245.  T&C review

Castells, Manuel (1995). The Rise of the Network Society. Information Age vol. 1. Blackwell. [See also Castells, Manuel (1998). End of Millennium. Information Age, vol. 3. Blackwell. ]

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin.  Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. H-NET Review

Kubicek, Herbert, William H. Dutton, and Robin Williams, eds. (1997) The Social Shaping of Information Superhighways: European and American Roads to the Information Society. St. Martins Press.

Lipartito, Kenneth.  "When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890-1920." AHR 99 (Oct. 1994): 1074-1111.

Mueller, Milton L. Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System. H-NET Review

Fabulous Ruins of Detroit <www.bhere.com/ruins/> [Detritus from the industrial age]

Greenberg, Stanley.  Invisible New York: The Hidden Infrastructure of the City.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.  Photos with introductory essay.

"The most intense images of Stanley Greenberg's historical record are, for many, the
 ones we may least wish to see. These are the photographs of the ruins of our
 technological past. Such places, once busy but now dead and empty, lie scattered
 around almost every American city of any age. We refuse to acknowledge them and
 their existence slips beneath our vision... Greenberg leads us to these sites and
 makes us look at the documents of the forced march of technology; his photographs
 raise necessary questions not only about technological obsolescence, but also
 about civic responsibility and corporate culpability -- the agents that conspired to
 create these places." -- Thomas H. Garver, from the Introductory Essay

Stephens, Hugh W. The Texas City Disaster, 1947.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. T&C review

Wilson, Elizabeth.  The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

A feminist celebration of the emancipatory potential of the city, and a stiff critique of various anti-urban stances (utopian, postmodern, traditional architecture).  Draws on fiction, history, urban reform, Modern architecture -- and focuses attention on the largest, "world" cities.

14. Specific cities / Miscellaneous

Borneman, John. 1991. After the Wall:  East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books.

Borneman, John. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins:  Kin, State, nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clare, George. 1990. Before the Wall:  Berlin Days, 1946-48. New York: Dutton.

Darnton, Robert. 1991. Berlin Journal, 1989-1990. New York: Norton.

Elkins, T.H. 1988. Berlin Spatial Structure of a Divided City. London and New York: Methuen.

Friedrich, Otto. 1972. Before the Deluge:  A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s. New York: Harper and Row.

Frigyesi, Judit. Bela Bartok and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest. H-NET Review

Gitelman, Lisa. "Negotiating a Vocabulary for Urban Infrastructure, or, the WPA Meets the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Journal of American Studies 26 (Aug. 1992): 147--

Hall, Sir Peter. 1998. Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon Books.

Hamann, Brigitte.  Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship. H-NET Review

Harvey, David. 1985. Consciousness and the urban experience: studies in the history and theory of
capitalist urbanization. Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press.

Häußermann, Hartmut, and Elizabeth Strom. 1994. Berlin: The Once and Future Capital. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18 (2):335-346.

Lankevich, George J.  American Metropolis: A History of New York City.  H-NET Review

Miller, Donald L. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 704 pp. RAH review

O'Connor, Thomas H. Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970.  H-NET Review

Rast, Joel.   Remaking Chicago: The political origins of urban industrial change.  DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Smith, Carl. Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xi + 395 pp.  RAH review

Verne, Jules. 1996. Paris in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Random House.

Winter, Jay and Jean-Louis Robert, eds. Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919.  H-NET Review
 
 

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