201022 - Presentation of the book Remaking Berlin: A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920-2020 (MIT Press, 2020)

Seminar Cities are back in town

Thursday 22 October 2020, 5.30 – 7 pm, Sciences Po, Webinar (Compulsory registration)

Timothy Moss will present the conceptual framing and findings of his recently published book on Berlin’s urban infrastructure between 1920 and 2020. This analysis of 100 years of energy and water infrastructure history has revealed significant limitations to the two most common conceptualizations of sociotechnical trajectories: path dependence and transitions. Whilst they each can explain certain phenomena at certain points in time, neither prove fully suited to capture the complex dynamics, non-linear developments, alternative trajectories and hybrid configurations that can become apparent when taking a long-term perspective on technological urbanism. His talk will build a bridge between historical and contemporary perspectives on urban infrastructural change, drawing on scholarship within the fields of STS, history of technology and human geography for inspiration and on Berlin’s turbulent twentieth-century history for illustration..

Speaker: Timothy Moss, Humboldt University, Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys)

Timothy Moss is Senior Researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he leads the research group Urban Infrastructures and Human-Environment Relations. He is also Honorary Professor at the Leibniz University Hannover. Tim’s research is distinctive for connecting historical studies of infrastructure with contemporary debates on sociotechnical and urban transitions. He is particularly interested in the processes by which energy and water infrastructures reflect and reproduce the multiple geographies, power relations and socio-materialities of a city.

Discussants: Jonathan Rutherford, Ecole des Ponts ParisTech – LATTS, and Giacomo Parrinello, Sciences Po, CHSP

For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr
 
Compulsory registration