Thirty-Seventh Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology: “Reusing the Industrial Past,” Tampere, Finland, 10–15 August 2010

The historic industrial city of Tampere, Finland, hosted 350 attendees of the thirty-seventh symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), held in conjunction with the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), and Worklab, the International Association of Labour Museums. Participants explored several themes, among them twenty-six panels covering playing with technology, the social history of military technology, energy use versus the environment, railway heritage, and the transformation of industrial environments. Over sixty more panels covered topics including technology and music, museum interpretation, waterscape heritage, gender and technology, maritime heritage, and electrical history.

An industrial town since the early nineteenth century, Tampere provided participants with interesting examples of industrial architecture, much of it now adapted for reuse as offices, shops, and restaurants. The town’s large brick buildings set against the river that once provided the power for the many factories made an appropriate setting for the conference (fig. 1). Sessions over two days took place in the Finlayson center, the city’s oldest factory complex and home to the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas. With many session rooms changed only minimally since the textile machines had been removed, a more appropriate venue for a conference on reusing the industrial past would be hard to imagine.

Fig. 1.

Mill pond in central Tampere.

In stark contrast, the venue for the symposium’s other three days was in the main building of the University of Tampere. The halls and meeting rooms were fine examples of 1970s Finnish design, cool and elegant. The main auditorium particularly provided a striking setting for Håkon With Andersen’s Kranzberg Lecture “Reusing the Industrial Past: The Challenges of Interpretations” and other keynote talks. Anna Storm (Sweden), winner of the ICOHTEC Prize for Young Scholars for her doctoral thesis “Hope and Rust: Reinterpreting the Industrial Place in the Late Twentieth Century,” discussed the industrial heritage of two Swedish company towns, and Patrick Martin (United States), president of TICCIH, discussed the role industrial archaeology played in enhancing conservation and interpretation of the West Point Foundry Preserve in Cold Spring, New York. Later Pertti Haapala (Finland) addressed the role of industrial Tampere in global history, and Jyrki Laiho (Finland) spoke about challenges facing the modern city of Tampere.

The coming together of ICOHTEC, TICCIH, and Worklab made for diverse sessions, and we can report only on a small number here. Among the most interesting themes was “Playing with Technology,” in which a series of papers focused on the interrelationship of play (broadly defined) and technological development. A good example was Nikolaus Katzer’s (Germany) talk on Soviet sport. He traced the relationship between Soviet conceptions of modernity, sports, and the use of industrial and scientific management to create a system that led to international success in sporting competition, and he made clear that Soviet sport was driven by different values than sport in Western countries. In particular, Soviet society saw modernity as closely related to industrial development, so policies and programs that brought industrial concepts to bear on sport problems were welcomed. Katzer’s central argument was that consideration of the differences between Soviet and Western sport is a fruitful way to help understand the core cultural values of these societies.

Other “Playing with Technology” presenters included Hans-Joachim Braun (Germany), who also investigated sports in the Soviet Union. His topic, the influence of cybernetics on soccer games in the USSR and Eastern Europe, expanded on his earlier work on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concepts being applied successfully to soccer. ICOHTEC’s vice president, Dick van Lente (Netherlands), discussed the experiences of an author of hobby books and journals in postwar Netherlands and how his contribution to technology-based tinkering and playing was based on his brutal experiences during the Nazi occupation of that country. Carroll Pursell (Australia) investigated attempts of the American playground movement to transform and functionalize children’s play based on Taylor’s ideas of efficiency at the turn...