Urban Modernity

Abstract

How Paris, London, Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo created modernity through science and technology by means of urban planning, international expositions, and museums. At the close of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization marked the end of the traditional understanding of society as rooted in agriculture. Urban Modernity examines the construction of an urban-centered, industrial-based culture—an entirely new social reality based on science and technology. The authors show that this invention of modernity was brought about through the efforts of urban elites—businessmen, industrialists, and officials—to establish new science- and technology-related institutions. International expositions, museums, and other such institutions and projects helped stem the economic and social instability fueled by industrialization, projecting the past and the future as part of a steady continuum of scientific and technical progress. The authors examine the dynamic connecting urban planning, museums, educational institutions, and expositions in Paris, London, Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo from 1870 to 1930. In Third Republic Paris, politicians, administrators, social scientists, architects, and engineers implemented the future city through a series of commissions, agencies, and organizations; in rapidly expanding London, cultures of science and technology were both rooted in and constitutive of urban culture; in Chicago after the Great Fire, Commercial Club members pursued civic ideals through scientific and technological change; in Berlin, industry, scientific institutes, and the popularization of science helped create a modern metropolis; and in Meiji-era Tokyo (Edo), modernization and Westernization went hand in hand.

The spatial inscription of science in the twentieth century

“…21 At the same time, museums and exhibitions continued to belong to a set of "cultural innovations" that fed and put on display a "culture of change" oriented towards the future, considered as a characteristic of modernity, that they often sought to make palatable to populations. 22 But the great exhibitions of the mid-twentieth century departed markedly from earlier ones in that they promoted ideologies rather than technologies, a form of "propaganda warfare" that preceded or substituted for actual warfare between increasingly polarized models of society, as demonstrated by the Estado Novo efforts in Portugal or the fascist E42 exhibition project for Rome. 23 In the twentieth century, exhibitions of science and technology partook in the great political and cultural battles of the age.…”

La transformación de Santiago: un caso frustrado de intervención urbana a gran escala (1872-1929)

“…Y si bien este nuevo paradigma político, social, cultural y económico surge en la Europa occidental, será rápidamente incorporado, adaptado y recontextualizado en el Nuevo Continente (Larraín, 1997). En este marco, y particularmente respecto a los cambios de modelos que la modernidad traerá consigo, las élites urbanas desempeñarán un rol fundamental, puesto que tanto en Europa, durante la segunda Revolución Industrial (Levin, Forgan, Hessler, Kargon & Low, 2010), como en América Latina, durante las construcciones nacionales (Almandoz, 2013;Romero, 2014), se harán cargo de liderar importantes procesos que tendrán como principal objetivo el ideal de progreso. De este modo, las ciudades latinoamericanas, particularmente sus capitales, se articularon como escenarios fundamentales para demostrar su participación en el mundo moderno europeo (Gorelik, 2003), permitiendo a las élites gobernantes concretar de manera visual el proyecto nacional que intentaban impulsar y, a la vez, dar cuenta del estado de progreso que se había alcanzado con los años (Almandoz, 2010;Vicuña, 1996).…”