Response to Misa

Thomas Misa is right to point out that my review of Urban Machinery does not meet his criteria of a good review. I tried to focus my review away from an internal approach, which would indicate its place in and contribution to the scholarly literature, and toward some of the larger issues that are explicitly raised by the book. This is another way to highlight its significance, lifting it above the category of a collective monograph. Urban Machinery, which is the fruition of a complex, multiyear research project on two continents, does strive to transcend the local and episodic, and it addresses an important topic, the question of the cross-border diffusion of techniques and ideas. In his letter to the editor, however, Misa does not address my comments on the interpretive paradigm concerning the role and impact of technology in the twentieth century, and the importance of questions about cost and investment that operate very differently from country to country, and decade to decade. Are cities becoming more alike, and if so, to what extent is this a matter of the design and adoption of the technologies used to support cities? Is there a European urban technology? I am much more skeptical that the evidence lies in favor of greater uniformity. It is only fair to ask whether the methods and questions that shaped the research agenda fully capture the decision-making that selected the machinery for cities. In my view the book takes us toward a better understanding, but in ways that also reveal gaps—methodological and conceptual—that need to be covered, and assumptions that need to be questioned.