Simon Gunn
University of Leicester, Centre for Urban History, Faculty Member
This session examines the long term shift away from productive activities in cities in an interdisciplinary and integrated way. The aim is to provide insight into the conditions of this shift beyond changing consumer preferences and... more
This session examines the long term shift away from productive activities in cities in an interdisciplinary and integrated way. The aim is to provide insight into the conditions of this shift beyond changing consumer preferences and economies of scale and agglomeration by taking into account transformations related to i.a. infrastructure, planning, policy making and technologies of governance.
While productive activities dominated the urban economic landscape in most of the pre-industrial period, modern (European) cities experienced a long term economic shift towards consumption, leisure, tourism, services and cultural industries from roughly the eighteenth century on. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the increasing dominance of non-productive activities in cities resulted in a rift between working and living and working and leisure, an increasing need for transport, spatial segregation, gentrification, etcetera. Today, urban policy makers and planners as well as other local urban stakeholders increasingly call for a return of physical production in the city. Proceeding from a preoccupation with sustainability and the short circuit economy, a more social economy and better labour market participation, they specifically point at the importance of such small-scale activities as craftsmanship and handwork, recycling and repairing, and urban farming and local food processing. The problem is that such a return is difficult to plan and steer, because it is contingent on many economic, geographic and infrastructural conditions.
Ideally, urban historians should be able to help out and provide insight, but they often fail to do so because they haven’t addressed these conditions head on. The shift towards consumption, leisure, services and cultural production is all too often seen as a natural process, resulting from changing consumer preferences (and the need for shops), technological evolutions (resulting in the concentration of productive activities in manufactories) or simply the penetration of Smithian economies of scale and agglomeration. Other such factors as infrastructure and architecture, transport systems, planning, and regulations and policy making have not been systematically addressed – and an integrated approach is altogether lacking. Our session therefore presents case studies in which the economic transformations in individual cities and urban districts are addressed with an eye at multi-causality, historical contingency and the broader issue of governmentality. Conceptually, we start from an approach in which such classic economic factors as consumer preferences, relative prices and the spatial distribution of capital are confronted with the city as a hybrid socio-technical and material-cultural assemblage in which economic transformations are deeply entangled with infrastructural, social, political, and cultural dimensions.
While productive activities dominated the urban economic landscape in most of the pre-industrial period, modern (European) cities experienced a long term economic shift towards consumption, leisure, tourism, services and cultural industries from roughly the eighteenth century on. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the increasing dominance of non-productive activities in cities resulted in a rift between working and living and working and leisure, an increasing need for transport, spatial segregation, gentrification, etcetera. Today, urban policy makers and planners as well as other local urban stakeholders increasingly call for a return of physical production in the city. Proceeding from a preoccupation with sustainability and the short circuit economy, a more social economy and better labour market participation, they specifically point at the importance of such small-scale activities as craftsmanship and handwork, recycling and repairing, and urban farming and local food processing. The problem is that such a return is difficult to plan and steer, because it is contingent on many economic, geographic and infrastructural conditions.
Ideally, urban historians should be able to help out and provide insight, but they often fail to do so because they haven’t addressed these conditions head on. The shift towards consumption, leisure, services and cultural production is all too often seen as a natural process, resulting from changing consumer preferences (and the need for shops), technological evolutions (resulting in the concentration of productive activities in manufactories) or simply the penetration of Smithian economies of scale and agglomeration. Other such factors as infrastructure and architecture, transport systems, planning, and regulations and policy making have not been systematically addressed – and an integrated approach is altogether lacking. Our session therefore presents case studies in which the economic transformations in individual cities and urban districts are addressed with an eye at multi-causality, historical contingency and the broader issue of governmentality. Conceptually, we start from an approach in which such classic economic factors as consumer preferences, relative prices and the spatial distribution of capital are confronted with the city as a hybrid socio-technical and material-cultural assemblage in which economic transformations are deeply entangled with infrastructural, social, political, and cultural dimensions.
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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... more
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.
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Section: Main session Period: Modern/Contemporary In much recent writing on the city-and not just that by historians-social identities are assumed to have been formed in the public spaces of the city, such as the workplace, street, club,... more
Section: Main session Period: Modern/Contemporary In much recent writing on the city-and not just that by historians-social identities are assumed to have been formed in the public spaces of the city, such as the workplace, street, club, debating chamber or dance hall. Despite the acknowledged centrality of the family to social formation, little attention has been paid to the home as a site of social identification and cultural self-expression, especially in the modern city of the twentieth century. Yet popular social identities themselves frequently referenced the home and/or residential location (slum-dwellers, suburbanites, banlieusards, borgatari, pariolini). In this session we invite contributions that explore the diverse forms of 'home' in different urban settings. We want to ask, in what forms did the home (meaning not only the dwelling where individuals and families lived, but also its location and surroundings) express and/or shape the residents' social identity...
Los confl ictos sociales, el gobierno de la ciudad y las relaciones entre ésta y el estado eran algunos de los temas clásicos de la historia urbana cuando ésta se conformó en Europa y Norteamérica a mediados y fi nales del siglo veinte.... more
Los confl ictos sociales, el gobierno de la ciudad y las relaciones entre ésta y el estado eran algunos de los temas clásicos de la historia urbana cuando ésta se conformó en Europa y Norteamérica a mediados y fi nales del siglo veinte. Derivaron su atención del estudio de una variedad de temas-las calles ensangrentadas del París revolucionario, los grandes ayun-tamientos europeos, las luchas por la independencia de las ciudades frente a las autorida-des centralizadas (Sutcliffe, 1970; Chevalier, 1958; Pirenne, 1971; de Vries, 1984; Jackson, 1987; Dyos y Wolff, 1973). El poder resultaba integral al desarrollo de estos temas. Podría decirse que los poderes de y en la ciudad, suponían la base de la historia urbana. En los últimos años, sin embargo, los marcos conceptuales en los que se interpretan estos poderes han sufrido importantes transformaciones. El contexto geopolítico de las relaciones ciudad-estado ha pasado del nivel nacional al imperial o transnacional, la noción de gobiern...
ABSTRACT What difference did increasing spatial mobility make to British society between the 1950s and the 1980s? This article represents an historical response to the challenge of the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences. It brings... more
ABSTRACT What difference did increasing spatial mobility make to British society between the 1950s and the 1980s? This article represents an historical response to the challenge of the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences. It brings together the study of migration, personal mobility and transport to reflect on the ‘high-speed mobile society’ emerging in parts of Britain by the 1960s. The article analyses the very different forms of mobility evident in the period: flows of international and internal migration, patterns of residential mobility and commuting, the relationship between spatial and social mobility. It charts the changes to urban form stemming from mass automobility and the emergence by the 1970s of immobility as a focus of policy concern, located above all in the ‘inner city’. Integrating an awareness of movement (and, as its obverse, fixity) into contemporary British history, the article suggests, has the potential to throw new light on the categories of class, race and gender and debates about ‘affluence’, individualism and inequality which have characterised recent historiography.
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List of Figures List of Tables and Graphs Preface Note on Text and Translation Introduction: Automobility and the City Between East and West 1. Planning the Automotive City, c. 1920-1960 2. Civic Engineering: Roads Construction and the... more
List of Figures List of Tables and Graphs Preface Note on Text and Translation Introduction: Automobility and the City Between East and West 1. Planning the Automotive City, c. 1920-1960 2. Civic Engineering: Roads Construction and the Urban Environment 3. Automobility and Urban Form 4. Driving the Motor City: The Experience of Automobility 5. Pollution and Protest 6. Kuruma Banare: Turning Away from the Car? Conclusion Bibliography Index
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This is an introduction to a reprint of a major government report by Colin Buchanan, originally published in 1963. It is part of a series of such reprints currently undertaken by Routledge.
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Urban mobility is one of the key aspects of urban planning and development. It plays an important role in the achievement of a resilient, inclusive and sustainable city. However, the complex interrelations of urban mobility,... more
Urban mobility is one of the key aspects of urban planning and development. It plays an important role in the achievement of a resilient, inclusive and sustainable city. However, the complex interrelations of urban mobility, transportation and other city dimensions implies the need of an interdisciplinary approach to understand and plan it. In this brief paper, we discuss the social aspects of urban mobility and inequality and how it has been addressed in the literature. We also show different ways of gathering data relevant for the understanding of urban mobility, their sizes, scopes, and nature. Finally, we aim to promote an interdisciplinary debate based on our academic literature review about the relationship of urban mobility with social variables such as poverty.
Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban... more
Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s. It takes as its case-study Birmingham, Britain's premier motor city, headquarters of the motor industry, and with heavy investment in roads, including the Inner Ring, Britain's first urban motorway completed in 1971. The article traces the collapse of the motor city ideal in Birmingham sparked by controversy over car pollution at Spaghetti Junction, the growth of roads protest, and the implication of the Inner Ring in municipal corruption. In so doing, it identifies the intersection of environmental, political, and economic factors that lay behind the volte-face in urban policy and compares Birmingham with other cities which witnessed similar revolts. It argues that the 1970s in Britain saw the end of a specific engineer...
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What difference do cities make? How the urban – and place more generally – have contributed to historical processes is one of the questions that continually confront urban historians. Should towns and cities be regarded as no more than... more
What difference do cities make? How the urban – and place more generally – have contributed to historical processes is one of the questions that continually confront urban historians. Should towns and cities be regarded as no more than the backdrop against which events and developments – industrialization, social conflict, war – are played out? Or do cities and urbanism more widely possess agency? Do they (as many urbanists claim) have an active part to play in shaping how historical processes eventuate, why things happened in this way here and that way there? If so, what precisely is the urban variable; how can we define and estimate it?
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The publication in English of Walter Benjamin's great unfinished work, Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) constitutes an important moment in world scholarship. Benjamin (1892-1940) was ostensibly concerned with Paris but his... more
The publication in English of Walter Benjamin's great unfinished work, Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) constitutes an important moment in world scholarship. Benjamin (1892-1940) was ostensibly concerned with Paris but his real purpose was to reflect on ...
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... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/3300. Title: History and cultural theory. Authors: Gunn, Simon A. Issue Date: 2006. Publisher: Pearson Longman. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/3300.... more
... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/3300. Title: History and cultural theory. Authors: Gunn, Simon A. Issue Date: 2006. Publisher: Pearson Longman. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/3300. ISBN: 0582784085. ...
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the sig- nificance and appeal of classical music across Western Europe, amount- ing to nothing less than a 'cultural explosion' in the words of the music historian... more
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the sig- nificance and appeal of classical music across Western Europe, amount- ing to nothing less than a 'cultural explosion' in the words of the music historian William Weber. This phenomenon ...
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An academic directory and search engine.
Urban history in Britain has been enjoying a revival of late. In the 1960s and early 1970s urban history inspired considerable commitment from those who followed in the footsteps of its leading proponent, HJ Dyos, and it fed into a series... more
Urban history in Britain has been enjoying a revival of late. In the 1960s and early 1970s urban history inspired considerable commitment from those who followed in the footsteps of its leading proponent, HJ Dyos, and it fed into a series of important debates about migration, urban ...
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... | Ayuda. Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (Book). Autores: Simon Gunn; Localización: American historial review. Clases I, ISSN 0002-8762, Vol. 107, Nº 4, 2002 , pags. 1294-1295. © 2001-2009 ...
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* I would like to thank Alison Hall, Patrick Joyce, John Seed and John Walton for com- ments on earlier versions of this essay. I F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scien- tific (London, 1892), Introduction. 2 For a sample see M. Wiener,... more
* I would like to thank Alison Hall, Patrick Joyce, John Seed and John Walton for com- ments on earlier versions of this essay. I F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scien- tific (London, 1892), Introduction. 2 For a sample see M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the ...
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Europe's history since 1945 has most commonly been seen through the prism of international politics and economic change, from post-war reconstruction to late twentieth-century deindustrialisation. Urban history has been tangential to... more
Europe's history since 1945 has most commonly been seen through the prism of international politics and economic change, from post-war reconstruction to late twentieth-century deindustrialisation. Urban history has been tangential to these accounts. Hence Leif Jerram's call to arms in his bookStreetlife, published in 2011: ‘it is time to put thewhereinto thewhatandwhyof history’. The history of Europe's twentieth century, Jerram declared, happened ‘in the streets and factories, cinemas and nightclubs, housing estates and suburbs, offices and living rooms, shops and swimming baths of Europe's booming cities’.
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... The bulge under Melissa's gingham smock is another little Public Schoolboy, destined for the admin-istrative grade of the Civil Service, a place in a merchant bank or a Headship of Chancery in some embassy.∑≥ The key to the... more
... The bulge under Melissa's gingham smock is another little Public Schoolboy, destined for the admin-istrative grade of the Civil Service, a place in a merchant bank or a Headship of Chancery in some embassy.∑≥ The key to the continuity of this upper middle class, in ...
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The article considers the relationship between the middle class and urban place in England. Using the concept of identity, it examines changes in the meaning of the term ‘middle class’ between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth... more
The article considers the relationship between the middle class and urban place in England. Using the concept of identity, it examines changes in the meaning of the term ‘middle class’ between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century and how these changes were related to the configuration of urbanity. In the earlier twentieth century, it is argued, state and nation replaced the urban as the principal referent for middle-class identity.
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Urban history in Britain has been enjoying a revival of late. In the 1960s and early 1970s urban history inspired considerable commitment from those who followed in the footsteps of its leading proponent, HJ Dyos, and it fed into a series... more
Urban history in Britain has been enjoying a revival of late. In the 1960s and early 1970s urban history inspired considerable commitment from those who followed in the footsteps of its leading proponent, HJ Dyos, and it fed into a series of important debates about migration, urban ...
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* I would like to thank Alison Hall, Patrick Joyce, John Seed and John Walton for com- ments on earlier versions of this essay. I F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scien- tific (London, 1892), Introduction. 2 For a sample see M. Wiener,... more
* I would like to thank Alison Hall, Patrick Joyce, John Seed and John Walton for com- ments on earlier versions of this essay. I F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scien- tific (London, 1892), Introduction. 2 For a sample see M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the ...
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This article examines the impact of the theoretical currents associated with the postmodern turn of the 1980s and 1990s on the teaching of history in universities in England and Wales. Emphasising the centrality of teaching to... more
This article examines the impact of the theoretical currents associated with the postmodern turn of the 1980s and 1990s on the teaching of history in universities in England and Wales. Emphasising the centrality of teaching to historians' own professional identity, the article uses ...
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The publication in English of Walter Benjamin's great unfinished work, Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) constitutes an important moment in world scholarship. Benjamin (1892-1940) was ostensibly concerned with Paris but his... more
The publication in English of Walter Benjamin's great unfinished work, Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) constitutes an important moment in world scholarship. Benjamin (1892-1940) was ostensibly concerned with Paris but his real purpose was to reflect on ...
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The first half of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the sig- nificance and appeal of classical music across Western Europe, amount- ing to nothing less than a 'cultural explosion' in the words of the music historian... more
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic rise in the sig- nificance and appeal of classical music across Western Europe, amount- ing to nothing less than a 'cultural explosion' in the words of the music historian William Weber. This phenomenon ...
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What was new about social history in its pioneering phase in the 1960s and 1970s? Answers to this question tend to focus on its objects of enquiry: the attention given to neglected social groups and the opening up of fresh fields of... more
What was new about social history in its pioneering phase in the 1960s and 1970s? Answers to this question tend to focus on its objects of enquiry: the attention given to neglected social groups and the opening up of fresh fields of study, such as crime and popular culture. ...
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1. J Br Stud. 2010;49(4):849-69. The Rise and Fall of British Urban Modernism: Planning Bradford, circa 19451970. Gunn S. Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. PMID: 20941877 [PubMed - in process].
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MILES OGBORN is professor of geography at Queen Mary, University of London. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published... more
MILES OGBORN is professor of geography at Queen Mary, University of London. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of ...