Organizers: Oliver Hochadel (Institució Milà i Fontanals, CSIC, Barcelona), Eszter Gantner and Heidi Hein-Kircher (Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany).
September 26 & 27, 2016
This conference would like to question this assumption. Our methodological point of departure is that cities in Southern and Eastern Europe (our specific geographic focus) were part of an “inter-urban matrix” (N. Wood). Through the daily press, but also through other channels such as scholarly networks and professional contacts people were quite conscious of what was happening elsewhere in Europe. There are virtually no studies on the connections between peripheral cities, the exchange of knowledge and expertise and the formation of networks and collaborations. This workshop intends to open new perspectives on the exchanges in the areas of science, technology, medicine and urban planning between “urban peripheries” such as Barcelona, Budapest, Prague or Zagreb?
This workshop will focus on the assumed specificities of the urbanization in the South and East of Europe, characterised by different forms and modes of knowledge transfer. Peripheral – or emerging – cities understood that the experience of similar cities was much more helpful in solving their concrete problems than much of the metropolitan model. Therefore this workshop will try to reconstruct the mechanisms and strategies behind of choosing certain “best practices”, i.e. urban models that serve smaller cities. Therefore special attention might be paid to fields such as urban planning, sewage systems and public health, which played a crucial role in the modernisation of many “peripheral” cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This search for practical models will thus help to elucidate the networks between these urban spaces.
This conference will try and unveil the directions and channels through which knowledge was created and disseminated in these interurban networks. Conferences, research trips, lectures, private visits and correspondence would have to be investigated. The aim would be to render these transnational communities visible again, not least by bringing their practices and networks back to a tangible space: the city.
