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Technology and Culture 42.1 (2001) 146-147



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Book Review

Energie und Stadt in Europa: Von der vorindustriellen "Holznot" bis zur O¨lkrise der 1970er Jahre


Energie und Stadt in Europa: Von der vorindustriellen "Holznot" bis zur O¨lkrise der 1970er Jahre. Edited by Dieter Schott. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997. Pp. 207. DM 68.

In August 1996 the third international conference on urban history took place in Budapest. One theme, "the European city and energy," concerned the role of local government in energy supply, tracing this role, in European perspective, from the late Middle Ages to the recent past. Dieter Schott's book presents the proceedings of that conference and seeks to further research on this topic. Municipal authorities have had widely differing reactions to difficulties and challenges in their energy supply. If the eight contributions to this book have one common denominator, it would be that local conditions--historical, geographical, economic, and political--have had a profound effect on energy policies. Questions of energy supply were seldom isolated from the larger context.

Until the rise of power from coal and gas in the late eighteenth century, [End Page 146] the availability of wood and running water were classical determinants of urban activity. The point of departure for Schott's book is the so-called wood crisis. On the basis of a critical analysis of local source materials, Joachim Radkau maintains that this was not the problem that historians have assumed it to be. Concerning the changeover from wood to coal, William Luckin shows that perceptions of the consequences of this change were linked to the rise of the public health movement, which emphasized the contrast between the "dirty, smokey city" and the "clean, undisturbed countryside" around it.

In a process that took less than a century, the dynamics of energy supply shifted dramatically. Mechanical transportation and local policies became the new determinants of industrial activity. Other essays in Energie und Stadt look at the introduction of electrical power and its dependence (in the sense of the spread of its network) on local factors. Jean Lorcin demonstrates how, in the case of the French industrial city St. Etienne, the introduction of electricity was linked to municipal social and economic structures that called for a policy favoring competition in power supply. Alexandre Fernandez elaborates on this perception, showing that between 1880 and 1930 local interests gradually lost out to the economies of scale of larger power networks. The circle is further expanded by Uwe Kühl, who compares the role of cities in fostering electrification in France and Germany, and points to the relative legal and political weakness of municipal governments in France as a factor explaining the slower pace there. Gerhard Melinz's comparison of electrification in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest provides some support for this notion by assessing the leeway local governments had in interpreting their role in the emerging modern industrial-capitalist society. In his own case study, Schott demonstrates how local electrification policy in Mannheim became a dominant factor in its development from a riverine port to an industrial city. Finally, by looking at energy supply and local government in the Netherlands, Marjolein 't Hart demonstrates that, a century later, national policies had taken precedence as the dominant force in energy supply.

These essays offer new and interesting notions about the nature of municipal influence on energy supply, and in so doing they evoke new questions for research. It must be noted, as an aside, that the scholarly German used by most of the authors calls for serious effort in extracting the knowledge concealed in sentences that meander on and on. The contributors are therefore to be commended for including summaries in English and French as well as German, although their clarity leaves something to be desired.

Marc L. J. Dierikx



Dr. Dierikx is program director of development cooperation studies at the Institute of Netherlands History in the Hague.

Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

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