Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution (review)

Readers of Technology and Culture should welcome this volume, which directly addresses the journal’s self-defining nexus. In this instance the conjunction should be reversed: the science and technologies placed at the heart of “urban modernity” are generally taken as understood; the main focus is on the cultural agents and agencies of the new ideology of scientific and technological progress.

There are five contributors, among whom Miriam Levin has editorial leadership, topping and tailing the volume with a brief introductory chapter and coda. Five substantive chapters make up the core, each devoted to a single prominent, modernizing city of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cast of authors is appropriately qualified, bringing to the task much collective expertise in cultural history and science and technology studies. Expertise is less apparent in urban studies: specialists in this field might seek more explicit differentiation of the urban functions of the chosen cities and their place in their national urban networks. Of the substantive contributions, Levin herself leads with a chapter on Paris—fittingly, as the French capital is a shining example to the elites of other cities. Sophie Forgan offers a study of similar length on London; hers is followed by somewhat shorter pieces on Chicago (Robert Kargon), Berlin (Martina Hessler), and Tokyo (Morris Low).

The chapters evince a commendable commonality of purpose and structure. Their main shared aim is to identify the urban elites who boosted science and technology as the principal drivers of the modern city. Some authors include aspects of the urban built environment and infrastructure, though the work does not set out to inform about the material and spatial development of the chosen cities. Otherwise, each chapter is structured in a uniform manner: the new urban movers and shakers and their forums are identified, and sections follow on museums, educational institutions, and exhibitions. The solidity of the structure is such that in the Chicago chapter, the Field Columbian Museum is discussed before the World’s Colum-bian Exposition that preceded and partly inspired it. In short, the volume, although multiauthored, has a lot more coherence than is usual in edited collections. Much credit for this must go to the editor, and to the modus scribendi through a series of workshops, rather than a single conference.

A collection of relative brevity on such a rich set of themes is bound to raise questions in a reviewer’s mind. Inevitably, there are some themes and topics that would repay further investigation. The introduction proposes a metaphor for the collection of like-minded industrialists, scientists, engineers, and public officials who promoted science and technology in these urban settings: they should be regarded as a “nebula” with specific urban elites as “luminous patches,” rather than a well-defined network of communicants. Perhaps further study might resolve a little more structure from this apparently amorphous entity: more by way of interurban exchanges of knowledge and visits of the kind mentioned by Martina Hessler with respect to the hatching of the 1862 Hobrecht Plan for Berlin, and covered much more systematically by Morris Low in the case of Meiji Tokyo. Low’s account understandably centers on concrete dealings between the Japanese and the West, whether renegotiations of treaties, visits to Western cities, or the hiring of foreign specialists.

The conceptual framework of the collection also prompts discussion. “Modernity,” for all its dominance in contemporary cultural theory, is a troublesome expression. Its relativity—and in consequence, its likely obsolescence in the historical long run—is one thing. To any contextualist historian of technology, it also raises a concern about the implied linearity of development. Some cognate concerns might be raised about the use of the term “Second Industrial Revolution” in the volume’s subtitle. Within the book, the expression is only mentioned as such in the introduction, the chapters on Chicago and Berlin, and the coda, and then in passing and without analysis. By inference from the introduction, it is intended...