The program for the conference “Wahrnehmung, Kommunikation und Bewaeltigung industrieller Katastrophen vom 18. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Bergbau - Chemieindustrie - Kernenergie” in Konstanz has been published. I will contribute a presentation on the strategies and policies that prevented disasters in the lime mining industry.
My conference report on the young researchers’ conference of the Gesellschaft für Stadtgeschichte und Urbanisierungsforschung has just been published in the latest issue of the Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte.
Tagungsbericht: GSU-Nachwuchstagung und Workshop „Stadt und Moderne“, Darmstadt (22.-23.9.2011), in: Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte 2011/2, 105-107.
“Lime-land”, Wuppertal-Dornap
Submitted a proposal for the Förderinitiative Interdisziplinäre Forschung at TU Darmstadt together with Maren Harnack, Mario Tvrtković and Tobias Wolf. The proposal is now off and on its way. If we succeed we will receive a nice little grant to explore processes and chances of identification with the built environment of large scale housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s.
Working on a contribution to the 2013 Volume of the Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte. The article is based on a presentation I gave in Bern last May at a conference on “habitation”. The article on citizens’ initiatives’ strategies for low income housing is going to be along the lines of the presentation, with some considerable amendments relating to the prevailing market conditions. This point was stressed in the discussion following the presentation and I am thankful for the suggestions.
Eva-Maria Roelevink has written a report on the conference on ”Industrialisation in European Regions” that took place in Bochum last November. It is interesting and in a way pleasing to read what she writes about my presentation there: “Einen Abstraktionsschritt weiter ging SEBASTIAN HAUMANN (Darmstadt), indem er programmatisch die Frage verfolgte, inwieweit ‘Materialität’ und ‘soziale Konstruktion’ im Verhältnis stehen. […] Obgleich Haumann sich seiner eher unkonventionellen Sichtweise im Kanon der bisherigen Regionalisierungsdebatte bewusst ist, folgerte er „Regionen“ im Zusammenhang ihrer materiellen Umwelt zu definieren.”
Spent most of the day revising a collaborative grant proposal on the architectural potential of 1960s/70s mass housing.
Working on a review for the American Historical Review. To my own surprise i have been invited to write a review for AHR - of course, it’s only a review, but it is nonetheless the AHR. Anyway, a manageable workload for these days between Christmas and New Year.
Presented first bits and pieces of my research results at our history department’s colloquium. I have tried to present an outline of what remains to be written over the next couple of years and read some short exemplary passages of what I have written during the last week. The prospects were grand - to say the least - but it felt good. Criticism was extremely productive and motivating!
The Society for Urban History and Urbanization (GSU) is again awarding a prize for recently completed PhD dissertations in the field of urban history.
Started to write down and organize some ideas on my surface mining project. there still is a lot work to do in the archives, but after collecting material for two months and presenting the ideas several times over the last weeks, I feel like it is time to take the effort and start writing - even if it is preliminary only.
Presented at the conference on Industrial Regions in Bochum yesterday. The whole conference seems to be dominated by economic historians. On the positive side, I am getting another insight into how economic history deals with space. On the negative side, these attempts to describe regions from an economic perspective are for the most part not very innovative and often not very convincing. It is mostly “container” space and it is easy to make out the flaws of such concepts, even when focussing on economic history. But on a whole, the conference made me think about my own work on surface mining again.
yesterday I took part in a meeting at the Deutsche Bergbaumuseum. A group of institutions that are working in the filed of the history of technology and planning history is currently digitizing parts of their archival holdings. The documents will be available as high resolution images on the internet. The documents they will pull together seem to be very heterogenous, ranging from sketches used to construct V2 missiles in the 1930s to landscape plans prepared in the GDR. I was invited to comment on what the overall use for scientific research interested in space could be in working with these documents.
Went through the first decades of the Zeitschrift für praktische Geologie starting in 1893 at the Bergbau Bibliothek in Bochum today. Even though I found disappointingly little on lime or lignite mining, I found that this journal is an interesting source. I was especially struck by the many contributions that are apparently part of a colonialist agenda. Many notes about resources being discovered in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It would probably be worth going through the journal more systematically - if i only had the time to do so…
Visited the construction site at Wuppertal’s Döppersberg last night. It is a fairly large and complex project to redevelop the area between Wuppertal main station and the inner city. What makes it so remarkable is that it is located on a steep slope (the station sits on a hillside). They have already started taking away the very top of the hill that the station used to border in order to make space for a new central bus station.
While the plans look quite attractive, it is a bit sad that Wuppertal will lose its unique station square and tunnel connecting the station with the inner city. The old (and now still existing Döppersberg) is a landmark of neglected modernism. It is a unique experience. leaving the main station and walking down this narrow, run down and yet busy tunnel-system - it will soon be gone.
