Shanghai, London and Paris through the looking glass

Imagining the future of cities is often an exercise that is based upon the imagining of future transport infrastructure. The article explores this connection historically by drawing parallels between London, Paris and Shanghai since c.1851. It focuses on the role that symbols and mythmaking play in the process of envisioning future transport and future cities. It raises questions about the continuities between contexts that are distant across space and over time and the extent to which such continuities might provide some insights into the many connections between cities, transport and mobilities

Digging up and digging down:urban undergrounds

This article explores the intersections between history, urban geography and archaeology in the context of the question “are we all archaeologists now?” Amongst scholars doing research around questions of space and place, increasingly consideration is being given to vertical architectures, including tunnelling infrastructures. The vertical stretch of human imagination and habitation, even upward, inevitably involves excavation that triggers encounters with material remains of the past. However, the construction of subterranean realms also creates archaeologies of the future. Here we outline the significance of a dovetailing of disciplines through vertical stretch

‘The Modern Atlas’:compressed air and cities c. 1850–1930

This article provides an overview of pneumatic technologies in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western cities. As urban centres continued to grow and expand in the nineteenth century, networks of compressed air were introduced to provide public utilities and private services in a variety of domains, ranging from postal services to beauty parlours. Previously used in mining and large construction works, pneumatic technologies seemed to rival electricity towards the end of the nineteenth century in the provision of urban utilities. Eventually, however, these technologies did not prove flexible enough to keep up with rapid urban population growth and the expansion of cities themselves, nor were they able to become glorious symbols of urban modernity. Through an overview of compressed air applications as used in urban centres, particularly Paris and London, the article provides an insight into the relationship between technological networks and urban modernities from the perspective of this relatively neglected urban network and technology

Metropolitan railways:urban form and the public benefit in London and Paris c.1850-1880

When the first section of the Metropolitan Railway opened in January 1863 in London, debates in Parliament emphasized the need to conceive of railways as a system of interconnected circles instead of the lines and termini that had been built since the 1830s. Similar debates took place in Paris around this time, although no plan was implemented before the opening of the Métropolitain’s first line in 1900. The use of geometric terms such as rings, circuits and circles proliferated throughout the process, illustrating new ways of connecting the railways, and, more importantly, embryonic ideas about how the two cities could use transport technologies for shaping their own growth. Doing so was dependent on how, where and why the notion of the public benefit was articulated. Railways encapsulated both constraints and possibilities for the transformation, real and imagined, that the two metropolises were to experience

Polis of the metro. The introduction of the city railway in nineteenth century London and Paris

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Past futures:innovation and the railways of nineteenth-century London and Paris

Innovation was central to developments in urban railway transport in nineteenth-century London and Paris. Innovation was often political, the result of an encounter between and across a range of actors, including railway entrepreneurs and their companies, railway engineers, civil engineers, architects, intellectuals, a range of authorities –local, municipal, metropolitan, regional and national –, and the rich mix of people affected by the opening of a new railway line: shopkeepers whose business would be affected by the scale of the works; landlords who were forced to deal with the noise, the pollution, and the viaducts across their properties; tenants displaced without recourse to much else beyond their own means, the largest majority consisting of the poor. My aim in this contribution is twofold. I want to open up the very notion of innovation to issues that cover at least three different and inter-related dimensions: the politics, the culture and the social concerns behind the opening of new railway lines in London and Paris. Secondly, I wish to show how the two cities coped, but also dealt with one of the most transformative forces of nineteenth-century Britain and France. An important part of that story relates to the different futures that were envisioned in the two cities, in response to specific concerns and determined by a particular set of conditions. This approach highlights the process of how innovations took place rather than the end result. My concern is therefore with the debates, ideas and challenges of getting to the object or point we call innovation, not the ready-packed model that we know circulates, widely and far

Cities, Railways, Modernities:London, Paris, and the Nineteenth Century

The book (294p., 14 new maps and 25 ill.) chronicles the transformation that London and Paris experienced during the 19th century through the lens of urban transport infrastructure. It challenges and refines two of the most dominant myths of urban modernity: a planned Paris and an unplanned London. Drawing together an extensive corpus of primary sources, many brought to light for the first time, the book provides new insights into the relationship between transport technologies and urban change, in particular the role of metropolitan railways in envisioning the future of cities in the long 19th century, of continued relevance today

The futures that never were:Railway infrastructure and housing in mid-nineteenth-century London and Paris

The article explores what we can learn from the plans for new urban transport infrastructure, specifically that of railways, and the provision of affordable housing for the working and poorer classes in mid-nineteenth-century London and Paris. It interrogates what the plans tell us about the histories of infrastructure, on the one hand, and the histories of London and Paris, on the other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are areas that urban historians and historians of infrastructure alike have tended to treat separately. The article provides in this sense useful insights into the specifically urban dimensions of the history of infrastructure in a manner that resonates with Gullberg and Kaijser’s approach to ‘landscapes of buildings’ and ‘landscapes of networks’, and which also recovers some of thinking of Robert Park, Ernst Burgess, and the Chicago School, for whom the ‘greater mobility’ and the ‘greater concentration’ associated with cities like Chicago at the turn of twentieth century were central to understanding ‘the ecological organization of the city’, a concept whose influence has been felt across a range of fields ever since. More specifically, the article highlights the significance of studying the imagined past futures of London and Paris as illustrated by the work of two key figures: Charles Pearson, who advocated housing artisans and the respectable working classes in connection to the plans of the first section of the Metropolitan Railway in London; and Fl. de Kérizouet, whose plans provided an alternative to the transformation inflicted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann’s extensive programme of public works. Their plans envisioned the future of London and Paris in a way that was more inclusive and consequent with the reality that a significant part of the population of the two cities experienced, notably the working class and the poor. They are part of the ways in which the future of the two cities was envisioned in the mid nineteenth century: to a degree they constitute a horizon of expectation in the sense that historian Reinhart Koselleck gave to the term, though here it is a horizon that hinges on visions of the future which are characteristically urban