The European Cities and Technology Reader is divided into three main sections presenting key readings on: Cities of the Industrial Revolution (to 1870), European Cities since 1870 and the Urban Technology Transfer.

Urban Machinery investigates the technological dimension of modern European cities, vividly describing the most dramatic changes in the urban environment over the last century and a half. Written by leading scholars from the history of technology, urban history, sociology and science, technology, and society, the book views the European city as a complex construct entangled with technology. The chapters examine the increasing similarity of modern cities and their technical infrastructures (including communication, energy, industrial, and transportation systems) and the resulting tension between homogenization and cultural differentiation. The contributors emphasize the concept of circulation--the process by which architectural ideas, urban planning principles, engineering concepts, and societal models spread across Europe as well as from the United States to Europe. They also examine the parallel process of appropriation--how these systems and practices have been adapted to prevailing institutional structures and cultural preferences. Urban Machinery, with contributions by scholars from eight countries, and more than thirty illustrations (many of them rare photographs never published before), includes studies from northern and southern and from eastern and western Europe, and also discusses how European cities were viewed from the periphery (modernizing Turkey) and from the United States.ContributorsHans Buiter, Paolo Capuzzo, Noyan Din�kal, Cornelis Disco, P�l Germuska, Mikael H�rd, Martina He�ler, Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, Andrew Jamison, Per Lundin, Thomas J. Misa, Dieter Schott, Marcus StippakMikael H�rd is Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology. His books include The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (coedited with Andrew Jamison; MIT Press, 1998). Thomas J. Misa is ERA-Land Grant Professor of the History of Technology at the University of Minnesota, where he directs the Charles Babbage Institute. His books include Modernity and Technology (coedited with Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg; MIT Press, 2003).

This text explores one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human society - the transition from rural to urban ways of living. It covers a range of urban technologies, including new building materials and designs.

Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.

As the need to confront unplanned growth increases, planners, policymakers, and citizens are scrambling for practical tools and examples of successful and workable approaches. Growth management initiatives are underway in the U.S. at all levels, but many American "success stories" provide only one piece of the puzzle. To find examples of a holistic approach to dealing with sprawl, one must turn to models outside of the United States. In Green Urbanism, Timothy Beatley explains what planners and local officials in the United States can learn from the sustainable city movement in Europe. The book draws from the extensive European experience, examining the progress and policies of twenty-five of the most innovative cities in eleven European countries, which Beatley researched and observed in depth during a year-long stay in the Netherlands. Chapters examine: the sustainable cities movement in Europe examples and ideas of different housing and living options transit systems and policies for promoting transit use, increasing bicycle use, and minimizing the role of the automobile creative ways of incorporating greenness into cities ways of readjusting "urban metabolism" so that waste flows become circular programs to promote more sustainable forms of economic development sustainable building and sustainable design measures and features renewable energy initiatives and local efforts to promote solar energy ways of greening the many decisions of local government including ecological budgeting, green accounting, and other city management tools. Throughout, Beatley focuses on the key lessons from these cities -- including Vienna, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Zurich, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin -- and what their experience can teach us about effectively and creatively promoting sustainable development in the United States. Green Urbanism is the first full-length book to describe urban sustainability in European cities, and provides concrete examples and detailed discussions of innovative and practical sustainable planning ideas. It will be a useful reference and source of ideas for urban and regional planners, state and local officials, policymakers, students of planning and geography, and anyone concerned with how cities can become more livable.

"Cycling Cities is a richly illustrated volume analyzing 100 years of urban cycling‒policy, use, and practice in 14 European cities in 9 countries. Why did some capitals and business centers became real cycling cities and others not? The book has gained traction in the news. Cycling Cities traces how policymakers, engineers, cyclists, or community groups campaigned—and made a difference since the early twentieth century. Cycling Cities covers: The Netherlands: Amsterdam, Utrecht, Enschede, Eindhoven, South-Limburg; Belgium: Antwerp; Denmark: Copenhagen; Germany: Hannover; Sweden: Stockholm, Malmö; Switzerland: Basel; United Kingdom: Manchester; Hungary: Budapest; France: Lyon. The richly illustrated book includes photos (ca. 100); tables (ca.100); graphs (11); maps (10); and info graphics (9) Cycling Cities is for everyone interested in sustainable urban mobility. It is an invaluable resource for the growing global community of policymakers, social groups, students, and teachers. Cycling Cities marks the launch of a major international research program for Sustainable Urban Mobility (SUM).Cycling Cities highlights:Daily cycling practices-from commuting to touring, Cycle infrastructures-from bicycle lanes to bike parking, Bike users-from activists to tourists, Policymaking-from politicians to traffic engineers." from book website.

In recent years, the conservation of neighborhoods in American cities has risen to a high priority on the national agenda. The policy of demolishing whole neighborhoods in the inner city, whether to replace them with luxury apartments or massive public housing projects, has been largely abandoned, and the return of the middle class, seeking housing bargains in the neighborhoods they fled years ago, has hastened the process. Europe has much to teach the United States about urban conservation: it was a pressing public concern there when in this country conservation was mainly a matter of protecting wildlife and wilderness areas. The twenty-two essays in this volume—while discussing the conservation experiences of major European cities that are of considerable interest in their own right—present a preview of some of the struggles and solutions that are emerging on this side of the Atlantic as the conservation movement grows and extends into more and more urban districts. "Urban pioneering" and "gentrification" are becoming increasingly common in this country as the middle class seeks—in the face of energy shortages and slower growth, especially in housing—to reclaim the core cities that so many had once abandoned for suburbia. The first part of the book is concerned with the conflicts and struggles that have occurred over urban redevelopment in such cities as Venice, Brussels and Bath. The essays in the second part of the book describe a number of conservation efforts and strategies in cities such as Bologna, Stockholm and London which have attempted integration of social and physical conservation. The emphasis throughout is on conservation in specific neighborhoods—some historic districts, others humble working-class residential areas, a few both at once—rather than on conservation at the metropolitan scale. The separate essays range over such diverse topics as the impact of large-scale development projects on the existing city, the conservation of city centers and historic neighborhoods, the protection of monuments, the eviction of low-income migrants, examples of gentrification, amenity and conservation legislation, participatory action groups, social conservation strategies, and the education of children in urban conservation. The editor, in his extensive introduction, brings all these themes together setting them in the postwar history of European planning, and discussing issues such as the effects of tourism on old cities, the current crisis for modern architecture and planning, conflicting views and styles of conservation, the processes of pioneering and gentrification, and the relevance of this experience to the United States. The illustrated case studies center on the cities of London, Bolton, Bath, Elsinore, Stockholm, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Brussels, Grenoble, Bologna, Rome, Venice, Split, Athens, and Istanbul.