The first publication coming out of my current research project is now available online.
Ubiquitous Mining. The Spatial Patterns of Limestone Quarrying in Late Nineteenth-Century Rhineland, in: Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 2012/10, 59-70.
Topology of Technology The interdisciplinary graduate program “Topology of Technology” at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, announces 5 doctoral fellowships, starting September 1, 2013, and running for a maximum of 3 years. The program is organized by teachers from the subjects of history, sociology, philosophy, mechanical engineering, computer science, sports science, and the planning sciences. It focuses on the relationship between technology and space—at present, in history, and in a possible future. It has four thematic foci:
- The Persistence and Routinization of Daily Life in Technical Surroundings
- The Formation and Limitations of Action in Spatial-Technological Settings
- The Planning and Design of Technologies in Spatial Contexts
- The Modeling and Simulation of Spatial Relations by Technological Means
The program (GRK 1343) is primarily financed by the German Research Council (DFG); see: http://www.dfg.de. Fellows receive a monthly stipend (bursary) of 1,365 euros (parents receive additional child allowances). There are no tax reductions; however, fellows have to finance their own health insurance. Since course work and seminars are carried out in both German and English, it is expected that applicants are able to read and understand spoken German. Fellows are expected to work together in our common office downtown Darmstadt and thus need to take up their residence in the city or the vicinity.
Applications are only accepted in electronic form. They should include (1) a CV, (2) scanned copies of academic diplomas, (3) a short description (max. 5 pages) of the planned doctoral dissertation, and (4) the names and addresses of two university professors who are willing to act as reference persons (please merge the documents into one single file in PDF format). Please send your application no later than May 31, 2013 to topologie@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de. Please make sure that it includes a personally formulated explanation why you are particularly interested in the topic of the program and to which thematic focus your research will, in the first instance, contribute. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact one of the directors: Petra Gehring (gehring@phil.tu-darmstadt.de) or Mikael Hård (hard@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de).
More information about the research and teaching program can be found under http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php?id=1921&L=2
On March 11th and 12th, the nstitut für vergleichende Städtegeschichte in Münster has organized a conference on post-1945 urban history with a special focus on planning. I will take part with a presentation on concepts of the “public” in urban planning.
The new website created and maintained by Celina Kress and myself on behalf of the Gesellschaft für Stadtgeschichte und Urbanisierungsforschung is now online.
We will post announcements, conference reports, and other information on current evnts in planning history.
Survived my first hobit presentation! hobit is the acronym for “Hochschul- und Berufsinformationstage” an information fair for prospective students here in Darmstadt. I had the honor to speak to a crowd of schhol children about the challenges and chances of studying history at TU Darmstadt. While of course there are plenty of good reasons to study here, it is extremely difficult to present them in a way that school children might become interested. Anyway, I gave my best…
New publication from my dissertation:
Disputed Transformations. Deindustrialization and Redevelopment of Cologne’s “Stollwerck” Factory, 1970–1980, in: Urban History 40 (2013), 156-173.
Abstract:
Urban development corresponds with economic shifts. In the second half of the twentieth century, when traditional forms of industrial production declined in many western cities, this posed new kinds of challenges. Cities were in need of a new economic base and at the same time had to cope with the abandonment of industrial sites. This article highlights the agency of local societies in shaping this process of deindustrialization and redevelopment. It interprets deindustrialization and redevelopment as a process of transformation which was open-ended and a matter of intense negotiation between diverging interests at the local level. In analysing the highly contentious case of the disused Stollwerck chocolate factory in Cologne, the article traces a complex set of site-specific factors of deindustrialization and redevelopment.
I am honered to be presenting at the upcoming conference “Windows upon Planning History” alongside the “big namens” in planning history.
The conference program has just been posted on H-Soz-u-Kult.
My review of Frank Uekötter’s “Am Ende der Gewissheiten. Die ökologische Frage im 21. Jahrhundert” has been published in the latest volume of Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. I still like this book, despite the fact that it isn’t strictly scholarly and despite the fact that I am not particularly interested in “reviving” the environmental movement. It’s just because I appreciate the aim of the book to use scholarly knowledge to intervene in political discussions - not something German historians usually do.
Ute Hasenöhrl wrote a review of the edited volume „All We Ever Wanted…“. Eine Kulturgeschichte europäischer Protestbewegungen der 1980er Jahre, which includes a chapter written by my colleague Susanne Schregel and myself on squatted houses and nuclear free zones.
Two successful conference applications in one day!
First, the session I am co-organizing with Nora Thorade at the upcoming European Society for Environmental History conference has been accepted. We will hold a session on “Sites of Resource Extraction”. Contributors are Sarah Elkind on oil drilling in Los Angeles, Jessica van Horssen on the town of Asbestos, Nora Thorade on Coal in Lower Silesia, and myself on Limestone. Visit our session at the ESEH conference in Munich this August: http://www.eseh2013.org
Second, my paper for the conference in Marburg “Knowledge about Natural Resources” has been accepted. Again, my contribution will deal with limestone and the complications of generating geological knowledge in a setting where the mining of resource at stake is not controlled by the state.
Completed my final report of the research grant by the Thyssen Foundation. Now I know that I spent 110 days in 14 different archives between October 2011 and July 2013 and that I was not able to find out much about actual practices of mining. Sometimes your sources do make you rethink your research design.
Started to teach the course “introduction to modern history” at TU Darmstadt this week. It consists of two sessions each week to introduce the basic historian’s skills to students mostly in their first semester. Its a lot of work, but so far it looks like it will be a lot of fun. Anyway, this kind of course is much more structured and comprehensive than most introductory courses back in the days when I studied. For most students this is probably helpful. The topic I am using as an example is “Industrialization” - broad enough to talk about most aspects of historical research and enough literature out there to draw from. Hopefully it will all fit together and my students will be able to produce great papers at the end of the semester.
My session report from the Historikertag in Mainz has been published on H-Soz-u-Kult. I reported on the session “„What’s the matter?“ Die Provokation der Stoffgeschichte” which promised to be extremely interesting and maybe controversial. In the end it was interesting, albeit for other reasons than I expected, but not nearly as controversial as I had thought.
H-Soz-u-Kult has published a report on the conference on industrial disasters which I contributed to with some preliminary results from researching lime quarries.
Thank you to everyone who attended our conference “Community Spaces: Conception – Appropriation – Identity” for the great presentations and inspiring discussions.
There was a remarkable coherency between the contributions. We discovered some (maybe not so surprising) aspects that seem to be typical for community spaces in housing estates - like the fact that community spaces were almost never completed but remained unfinished to be appropriated (or not) by inhabitants or users. The reasons for this seem to have not only been of economic nature bur have been rather varied - maybe a good starting point for further comparative research.
While we were able to find out a lot about the dualism and interconnections of the conception of community spaces on the one hand and their appropriation on the other hand, it was more difficult to grasps possible answers to the third part of the conference theme: “identity”. Maybe researching and interpreting identification processes will be the next challenge in our discussion of modernist architecture.
