We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2022
Taking its cue from the ‘material turn’ of recent years, this survey examines the connections between infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in north European cities in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that connections between these different constructs were fundamental not only to how cities functioned but how citizens themselves were imagined. As such, the survey critiques histories of welfare and citizenship that foreground the national and neglect the urban origins of the modern state. It does so by examining infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in smaller European nation-states such as Belgium, Denmark and Ireland rather than in the more familiar cases of Germany, France and Britain. Asking questions about the inter-relationship of infrastructure, welfare and citizenship, the survey suggests, offers an important way to reinterpret what the ‘modern city’ meant in twentieth-century northern Europe.
1 Turner, B.S., ‘Contemporary citizenship: four types’, Journal of Citizenship and Globalisation Studies, 1 (2017), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Turner, B.S., Rights and Virtues (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar.
2 Marshall, T.H., Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950)Google Scholar.
3 Esping-Andersen, G., The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar.
4 Bennett, T. and Joyce, P. (eds.), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (London, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For useful overviews, see Trentmann, F., ‘Materiality in the future of history: things, practices and politics’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 283–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunn, S. and Hulme, T., ‘Introduction: unravelling urban governance’, in Gunn, S. and Hulme, T. (eds.), New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe since 1500 (London, 2020), 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 See S. Schultz, K. and McShane, C., ‘To engineer the metropolis: sewers, sanitation, and city planning in late nineteenth-century America’, Journal of American History, 65 (1978), 389–411 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Tarr, J.A. and Dupuy, G., Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar; Picon, A., French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.
7 Examples include Moss, T., Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920–2020 (Cambridge, MA, 2020)Google Scholar; Gunn, S. and Townsend, S.C., Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan (London, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shove, E. and Trentmann, F. (eds.), Infrastructures in Practice: The Dynamics of Demand in Networked Societies (London, 2019)Google Scholar; Lopez-Galviz, C., Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris, and the Nineteenth Century (London, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thelle, M., ‘The meat city: urban space and provision in industrial Copenhagen, 1880–1914’, Urban History, 45 (2018), 233–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hein, C., ‘Oil spaces: the global petroleumscape in the Rotterdam/The Hague area’, Journal of Urban History, 44 (2018), 887–929 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Dikeç, M., ‘“The modern atlas”: compressed air and cities, c. 1850–1930’, Journal of Historical Geography, 53 (2016), 11–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hillier, J., ‘Implementation without control: the role of the private water companies in establishing constant water in nineteenth-century London’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 228–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Block, G. De, ‘Planning rural–urban landscapes: railways and countryside urbanisation in South-West Flanders, Belgium (1830–1930)’, Landscape Research, 39 (2014), 542–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Otter, C., The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatzis, K. and Coutard, O., ‘Water and gas: early developments in the utility networks of Paris’, Journal of Urban Technology, 12 (2005), 1–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Melosi, M.V., The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 1999)Google Scholar.
8 See for example Hulme, T., After the Shock City: Urban Culture and the Making of Modern Citizenship (Woodbridge, 2019)Google Scholar; Otter, The Victorian Eye; Joyce, P., The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003)Google Scholar.
9 Graham, S. and Marvin, S., Splintering Urbanism. Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Melosi, M.V., ‘Humans, cities, and nature: how do cities fit in the material world?’, Journal of Urban History, 36 (2010), 3–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 C. Lemanski (ed.), Citizenship and Infrastructure: Practices and Identities of Citizens and the State (London and New York, 2019).
11 Pooley, C., ‘Connecting historical studies of transport, mobility and migration’, Journal of Transport History, 38 (2017), 251–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 For example Bess, M., ‘Routes of conflict: building roads and shaping the nation in Mexico, 1941–1952’, Journal of Transport History, 35 (2018), 78–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moraglio, M., Driving Moderniy. Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943 (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ficek, R.E., ‘Imperial routes, national networks and regional projects in the Pan-American Highway, 1884–1977’, Journal of Transport History, 37 (2016), 129–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Høgselius, P., Kaijser, A. and van der Vleuten, E., Europe's Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (London, 2016)Google Scholar; Guldi, J., Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (Cambridge, MA, 2012)Google Scholar; Weber, E., Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (London, 1977)Google Scholar.
13 See for example Silva, H. Perreira, ‘Railway imperialism revisited: the failed line from Macao to Guangzhou’, Technology and Culture, 62 (2021), 82–104 Google Scholar; Moraglio, M., ‘Seeking a (new) ontology for transport history’, Journal of Transport History, 38 (2018), 3–10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Divall, C. and Revill, G., ‘No turn needed: a reply to Michael Freeman’, Journal of Transport History, 27 (2006), 144–9Google Scholar; Divall, C. and Revill, G., ‘Cultures of transport. Representation, practice and technology’, Journal of Transport History, 26 (2005), 99–111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Otter, C., ‘The technosphere: a new concept for urban studies’, Urban History, 44 (2017), 145–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Easterling, K., Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York, 2014)Google Scholar.
15 Lemanski (ed.), Citizenship and Infrastructure; L.A. Staeheli, P. Ehrkamp, H. Leitner and C.R. Nagel, ‘Dreaming the ordinary: daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (2012), 628–44; L.A. Staeheli, ‘Political geography: where's citizenship?’, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (2011), 393–400; K. Hannam, M. Sheller and J. Urry, ‘Editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings’, Mobilities, 1 (2006), 1–22; N. Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford, 2004).
16 See for example C. McFarlane and J. Silver, ‘The political city: “seeing sanitation” and making the urban political in Cape Town’, Antipode, 49 (2017), 125–48; E. Swyngedouw, Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain (Cambridge, MA, 2015).
17 Hannam, Sheller and Urry, ‘Editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings’.
18 Though see M. Middell and K. Naumann, ‘Global history and the spatial turn: from the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization’, Journal of Global History, 5 (2010), 149–70; S. Gunn, ‘Spatial mobility in later twentieth-century Britain’, Contemporary British History (published online, 14 Jan. 2021).
19 N. Brenner and N. Theodore, ‘Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”’, Antipode, 34 (2002), 349–79.
20 J. Rutherford, ‘Unbundling Stockholm? The networks, planning and social welfare nexus beyond the unitary city’, Geoforum, 39 (2008), 1871–83.
21 See for example S. Banerjee, Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization (New Delhi, 2016); M. Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 2014); M. Kooy and K. Bakker, ‘Splintered networks: the colonial and contemporary waters of Jakarta’, Geoforum, 36 (2008), 1843–58; L. Bigon, ‘Tracking ethno-cultural differences: the Lagos steam tramway, 1902–1933’, Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (2007), 596–618; J. Broich, ‘Engineering the empire: British water supply systems and colonial societies, 1850–1900’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 346–65; T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).
22 See Lemanski (ed.), Citizenship and Infrastructure; L. Björkman, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Durham, NC, 2015).
23 D. Gosewinkel, Nation and Citizenship from the Late Nineteenth Century Onwards: A Comparative European Perspective (Brussels, 2008), iii.
24 For example see Swyngedouw, Liquid Power; D. Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006); L. Hannah, Electricity before Nationalisation: A Study of the Development of the Electricity Supply Industry in Britain (London, 1979).
25 D.T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 112. While ostensibly transnational, Rodgers’ study is centrally about the relationships between cities in Europe and North America. The quotation here is drawn from a chapter called ‘The self-owning city’.
26 P.-Y. Saunier, ‘Introduction’, in P.-Y. Saunier and S. Ewen (eds.), Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (Basingstoke, 2008), 1–18; A. Shaw, Municipal Government in Continental Europe (London, 1895), vi; S. Ewen and M. Hebbert, ‘European cities in a networked world during the long twentieth century’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 25 (2007), 327–40.
27 G. Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Princeton, 1993), 216.
28 T. Hulme, ‘Putting the city back into citizenship: civics education and local government in Britain, 1918–1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (2015), 26–51; C. Higham, The Good Citizen: An Introduction to Civics (London, 1934).
29 Hulme, ‘Putting the city back into citizenship’, 35.
30 I. Maver, ‘A (North-) British end-view: the comparative experience of municipal employees and services in Glasgow 1800–1950’, in M. Dagenais et al. (eds.), Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City (Oxford, 2016), 188.
31 D. Bruggeman and M. Dehaene, ‘Urban questions in the countryside? Urbanization and the collective consumption of electricity in early 20th century Belgium’, Planning Perspectives, 32 (2017), 309–32.
32 D. Schott, ‘Empowering European cities: gas and electricity in the urban environment’, in M. Hård and T.J. Misa (eds.), Urban Machinery: Inside Europe's Cities (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 176.
33 T. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification and Western Society 1880–1930 (London, 1983); Schott, ‘Empowering European cities’, 176–84.
34 K. Hoggart, ‘City hinterlands in European space’, in K. Hoggart (ed.), The City's Hinterland: Dynamism and Divergence in Europe's Peri-Urban Territories (Abingdon, 2016), 1–18.
35 Swyngedouw, Liquid Power.
36 G. De Block and J. Polasky, ‘Light railways and the rural–urban continuum: technology, space and society in late nineteenth-century Belgium’, Journal of Historical Geography, 37 (2011), 312–28; G. De Block, I. Schepers and J. Polasky, ‘Organising the home–work split by the urban–rural link: transport networks, mobility, and its socio-spatial (side-)effects in early 20th century Belgium’, paper at T2M conference, Oct. 2019.
37 A.A. Laquian, Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions (Baltimore, 2005); J. Xu and A.G.O. Yeh (eds.), Governance and Planning of Mega-City Regions: An International Comparative Perspective (London, 2011); P. Hall and K. Pain, The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-City Regions in Europe (New York, 2006).
38 J. Palmowski, ‘The Europeanization of the nation-state’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 631–57; A. Van Wageningen, ‘2031: the year the city disbanded the state’, in A. Van Wageningen and V. Mamadouh (eds.), Urban Europe: Fifty Tales of the City (Amsterdam, 2016), 399–404.
39 Many of its key theorists are based at the Laboratory of Urbanism at Lausanne in Switzerland. P. Viganò et al., ‘Rethinking urban form: Switzerland as a “horizontal metropolis”’, Urban Planning, 2 (2017), 88–99; P. Viganò, C. Cavalieri and M. Barcelloni Corte (eds.), The Horizontal Metropolis between Urbanism and Urbanization (Cham, 2018).
40 U. Hannerz and A. Gingrich (eds.), Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities (Philadelphia, 2017), 1–46. For the beginnings of this debate, see F. Barth (ed.), Scale and Social Organization (New York, 1978).
41 Hannerz and Gingrich (eds.), Small Countries, 21; Giddens, A., The Nation-State and Violence (London, 1985), 119Google Scholar. See also more recently S. Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago, 2013), 1–18, 322–30.
42 Hannerz and Gingrich (eds.), Small Countries, 27.
43 Gislason, G., ‘In defense of small nations’, Daedalus, 113 (1984), 199–211 Google Scholar.
44 1900 populations: Belgium (6.7m), Ireland (4.5m), Denmark (2.4m), metropolitan London (around 7m). Today: Belgium (11.4m), Ireland (excluding Northern Ireland) (4.8m), Denmark (5.6m), metropolitan London (14m).
45 Present-day (2020) data from the EU: Belgium (~30k km2), Ireland (excluding Northern Ireland) (~70k km2), Denmark (~43k km2), United Kingdom (~242k km2), Germany (~357k km2).
46 Belgium in c. 1900 (https://lokstat.ugent.be): Brussels (184,000), Antwerp (273,000), Liège (158,000), Ghent (160,000), Mechlin (56,000), Bruges (52,000). Ireland in c. 1900 (1901 Census data (Preliminary Report, p. 11)): Dublin (350,000), Belfast (350,000), Cork (75,000). Denmark in c. 1900 (1901 Census data (www.statistikbanken.dk)): Copenhagen (480,000), Aarhus (52,000).
47 P. Hession, ‘Imagining the railway revolution in pre-Famine Ireland: technology, governance, and the Drummond Commission, 1832–39’, in R.J. Butler (ed.), Dreams of the Future in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool, 2021).
48 Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 45–51.
49 Irish Times, 13 Jul. 2015.
50 De Block and Polasky, ‘Light railways’; Block, G. De, ‘Designing the nation: the Belgian railway project, 1830–1837’, Technology and Culture, 52 (2011), 703–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51 Frandsen, S.B., ‘Danmark på langs og på tværs’, Temp, 18 (2019), 12–34 Google Scholar.
52 This is the case even though comparative and transnational focuses are now relatively well theorized; see for example N. Kenny and R. Madgin (eds.), Cities beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History (Farnham, 2015).
53 T. Hylland Eriksen, ‘After 22 July 2011: Norwegians together’, in Hannerz and Gingrich (eds.), Small Countries, 67–82; O. Löfgren, ‘The Scandinavian cluster: small countries with big egos’, in ibid., 83–104; and H. Wulff, ‘Greater than its size: Ireland in literature and life’, in ibid., 301–16.
54 T. Broes, ‘The art of horizontal urbanization: the urban questions of engineer August Mennes in the Antwerp agglomeration’, 153–60; Dieter Bruggeman, ‘Taking care of the residual fraction: the provincial projects for the electrification of Belgium in a perspective of urbanisation’, 161–8; and Y. Vanhaelen, ‘Centralization, decentralization, and metropolization: cultural attractors in Brussels Metropolitan Area’, in Viganò, Cavalieri and Barcelloni Corte (eds.), The Horizontal Metropolis, 239–46; C. Vandermotten et al., ‘Central Belgium: polycentrism in a federal context’, in Hall and Pain, The Polycentric Metropolis, 146–53; and C. van Egeraat et al., ‘Greater Dublin the Celtic Tiger economy: towards a polycentric mega-city region?’, in ibid., 187–96.
55 Campbell, J.L. and Hall, J.A., The Paradox of Vulnerability: States, Nationalism and the Financial Crisis (Princeton, 2017), 1–6, 27–62, 63–106 Google Scholar. See also within this sub-field Katzenstein, P., Corporatism and Change: Austria, Switzerland and the Politics of Industry (Ithaca, NY, 1984)Google Scholar; and more recently Alesina, A. and Spolaore, E., The Size of Nations (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar.
56 Joyce, The Rule of Freedom; Hillier, ‘Implementation without control’; V. Taylor and F. Trentmann, ‘Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city’, Past & Present, 211 (2011), 199–241; M. Gandy, ‘Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city’, City, 8 (2004), 363–79; Gandy, The Fabric of Space; E. Swyngedouw et al., ‘Urban water: a political-ecology perspective’, Built Environment, 28 (2019), 124–37; M. Thelle, ‘Stofskifte under tryk – vandets infrastruktur og rum i København’, Temp, 18 (2019), 79–97; M. Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (London, 2004); M. Guardia, M. Rosselló and S. Garriga, ‘Barcelona’s water supply, 1867–1967: the transition to a modern system’, Urban History, 41 (2014), 415–34; T. Moss, ‘Divided city, divided infrastructures: securing energy and water services in postwar Berlin', Journal of Urban History, 35 (2009), 923–42.
57 The phrase is Patrick Joyce's, Rule of Freedom, 73–5; see also R. Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London, 1994), part 3.
58 Copenhagen Municipality, Statistisk Aarborg for København, Frederiksberg Og Gjentofte Kommune 1919 (Copenhagen, 1920), 34; Copenhagen Municipality, Statistisk Aarborg for København, Frederiksberg Og Gjentofte Kommune 1926 (Copenhagen, 1927), 49.
59 For an overview of the connections between the welfare state and Danish urban and housing policies in the mid-twentieth century, see H. Bro, ‘Velfærdsstaten og boligen’, in T. Knudsen (ed.), Dansk Forvaltningshistorie II. Stat, forvaltning og samfund. Folkestyrets forvaltning fra 1901–1953 (Copenhagen, 2000), 565–613.
60 The Interior Ministry's Building Commission of 1940, Det Fremtidige Boligbyggeri: Betækning Afgivet af Indenrigsministeriets Byggeudvalg af 1940 (Stuttgart, 1945), 33.
61 Ibid. , 33
62 Ibid. , 31.
63 Trentman and Taylor, ‘Liquid politics’; Hillier, ‘Implementation without control’.
64 Trentmann and Taylor, ‘Liquid politics’, 238.
65 See for example P. Lundin, ‘Mediators of modernity: planning experts and the making of the “car-friendly” city in Europe’, in Hård and Misa (eds.), Urban Machinery, 257–81; Gunn, S., ‘People and the car: the expansion of automobility in urban Britain, c. 1955–70’, Social History, 38 (2013), 220–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; N. Spurling, ‘Making space for the car at home: planning, priorities and practices’, in Shove and Trentmann (eds.), Infrastructures in Practice; Ortolano, G., Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Ortolano, Thatcher's Progress.
67 Høghøj, M., ‘Planning Aarhus as a welfare geography: urban modernism and the shaping of "welfare subjects" in post-war Denmark’, Planning Perspectives, 35 (2020), 1031–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Gunn, S., ‘Ring road: Birmingham and the collapse of the motor city ideal in 1970s Britain’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), 227–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
69 N. de Coninck-Smith and M. Rüdiger, ‘Typehus, energi og familieliv i 1950’erne og 1960’erne’, in N. Finn Christiansen et al., Ole Lange – fra kætter til koryfæ (Copenhagen, 2007).
70 Wetherell, S., Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain (Princeton, NJ, 2020), 91Google Scholar.
71 Ibid. , 110–12.
72 C. Johnson, ‘District heating in Belgrade: the politics of provision’, in Shove and Trentmann (eds.), Infrastructures in Practice, 102–14.
73 Amin, A., ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture & Society, 31 (2014), 137–61Google Scholar.
74 Holston, J., Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, 2008)Google Scholar; Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M., Acts of Citizenship (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Graham, S. and McFarlane, C., Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context (Abingdon, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amin, A. and Thrift, N., Seeing like a City (Cambridge, 2017)Google Scholar
75 Lemanski, C., ‘Infrastructural citizenship: spaces of living in Cape Town, South Africa’, in Lemaksi, C. (ed.), Citizenship and Infrastructure: Practices and Identities of Citizens and the State (Abingdon, 2019), 8–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Cowman, K. et al. (eds.), Gender in Urban Europe: Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship, 1750–1900 (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prak, M., Citizens without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c. 1000–1789 (Cambridge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Barry, A., Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline (Chichester, 2013), ch. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
77 Hulme, ‘Putting the city back into citizenship’.
