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Wed 30 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 31 March
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 1 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 2 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 30 March 2016 16.30 - 18.30
U-4 URB02 Cities as Centres of Knowledge Creation in Early Modern and Modern Times
Aula 17, Nivel 1E
Network: Urban Chair: Peter Stabel
Organizer: Karel Davids Discussants: -
Karel Davids : Cities and 'Open Air' Sciences in the Early Modern Period: Antwerp and Amsterdam as Global Centres of Accumulation of Knowledge, 16th- 18th Centuries
Kapil Raj defines 'open air sciences' - following Michel Callon - as 'knowledge practices that necessarily involve negotiations between specialists and other heterogeneous groups in their very making and certification', in an 'extra-metropolitan context'. These practices include for example natural history, surveying, mapmaking and linguistics. In this paper, ... (Show more)
Kapil Raj defines 'open air sciences' - following Michel Callon - as 'knowledge practices that necessarily involve negotiations between specialists and other heterogeneous groups in their very making and certification', in an 'extra-metropolitan context'. These practices include for example natural history, surveying, mapmaking and linguistics. In this paper, I will examine relations between ‘open air’ sciences’ and cities in early modern Europe, taking Antwerp and Amsterdam as case studies. Antwerp and Amsterdam both for a long time long served as leading centres of accumulation of knowledge from many parts of the world.
The paper analyzes, first, how the creation, interchange and processing of knowledge in fields such as natural history, mapmaking or linguistics in European and outer-European contexts (especially Asia and the Americas) actually worked; secondly, how and to what extent metropolitan centres of accumulation such as Antwerp and Amsterdam were mutually connected; and finally, to what extent these centres operated as actors in their own right and to what extent they functioned as nodal points in networks of other institutional actors, such as trading companies, religious organizations and state agencies. (Show less)

Bert De Munck : Disassembling the City: a Historical and Epistemological View on the Agency of Cities
Current ideas about the ‘agency’ of cities are very much influenced by economists who point to agglomeration economies and the clustering of institutions, if not to the presence of ‘creative classes’ and a tolerant and diverse cultural climate. In this paper, such views will be historicized and denaturalized. It will ... (Show more)
Current ideas about the ‘agency’ of cities are very much influenced by economists who point to agglomeration economies and the clustering of institutions, if not to the presence of ‘creative classes’ and a tolerant and diverse cultural climate. In this paper, such views will be historicized and denaturalized. It will be examined how ‘urban agency’ was produced and fabricated in the long run, stressing the role of political philosophy and epistemic undercurrents. First, focusing on guilds and artisanal economic actors (which formed an important part of the urban fabric in a range of late medieval and early modern cities), I will describe the co-emergence of specific types of skills and knowledge and the urban as a community and body politic. Subsequently, I will argue that the city as an ‘agencement’ transformed drastically during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the transformations concerning both the political and economic identity of guild-based artisans and the city as a specific political community were contingent upon specific (epistemic and other) attitudes and practices related to matter and materiality. Thus this paper sheds new light on the relationship between economic personhood, political subjectivity, the agency of cities, and the production of knowledge. (Show less)

Oliver Hochadel, Agusti Nieto-Galan : Barcelona: an Urban History of Science and Modernity (1888-1929)
Historical investigation on the role of the city as a central place for knowledge production is still scarce. How did the urban space condition scientific practices in modern times (19th-20th centuries, in particular) – and the other way round: how did science change the everyday-life of citizens? Seminal work by ... (Show more)
Historical investigation on the role of the city as a central place for knowledge production is still scarce. How did the urban space condition scientific practices in modern times (19th-20th centuries, in particular) – and the other way round: how did science change the everyday-life of citizens? Seminal work by Miriam Levin, Martina Hessler, Mikael Hård and others has by and large focused on the metropolis, London and Paris being the main case studies. Yet the scientific culture in “peripheral” urban contexts in cities such as Barcelona requires further investigation. Moreover, the role of urban planners and reformers as scientific experts has been probably overemphasized, whereas other historical actors, which substantially shaped the urban everyday life, are probably underrepresented in our present scholarship.
Thus the aim of this paper is to show how the collective volume we have recently edited - on the urban history of science of Barcelona in the period between its two international exhibitions (1888-1929) - is an ideal example to fill these historiographical gaps. Through a detailed analysis of the elite science of the city and its capacity for social control, but also approaching counter-hegemonic scientific expertise and amateur networks, we have depicted a much richer image of the scientific culture of that city, in a crucial period of urban growth and demographic expansion, in the heart of its often contested “modernity”. (Show less)

Daniel Margócsy : La magie du Pont Neuf: the Circulation of Knowledge and Manners in 17th-century Paris
A young nobleman from the countryside comes up to Paris to make his career at the court, but soon ends up in a side alley of the city, beaten up by thugs, losing his coat and innocence in the process. This time, the familiar-sounding story is from an unknown French ... (Show more)
A young nobleman from the countryside comes up to Paris to make his career at the court, but soon ends up in a side alley of the city, beaten up by thugs, losing his coat and innocence in the process. This time, the familiar-sounding story is from an unknown French manuscript, titled La magie du Pont-Neuf. In part a picaresque novel, in part a courtly dialogue halfway between Castiglione’s The Courtier and Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, and in part a parlor book of conjuring tricks, La magie du Pont Neuf offers a trenchant analysis of how social status, proper behavior and the circulation of knowledge were negotiated in Paris in the early years of the reign of Louis XIV, the heyday of courtly, ‘civilized’ culture in the eyes of many historians. As Norbert Elias argued, early modern European states developed highly complex social structures over the centuries, which reduced interpersonal violence by establishing polite codes of behavior. By using La magie du Pont Neuf, and the urban culture of 17th-century France, as an example, I argue that the process of civilization also involved the complex renegotiation of the status of vernacular knowledges, and the establishment of mechanisms of exclusion for those who could not become ‘civilized.’ This was all the more true for 17th-century Paris, where quacks, street magicians, artisans, and aristocrats constantly rubbed shoulders on sites such as the recently built Pont Neuf. (Show less)

Simona Valeriani : Knowledge Formation between Centres and Peripheries: Medical Practitioners in Plymouth, Exeter and London in the 17th Century
Taking as a starting point William Durston, doctor of physics from Plymouth, this paper will analyse processes of knowledge formation, gathering and verification between London, provincial towns such as Exeter and Plymouth and the wider community of medical practitioners active in Devon in the second half of the 17th century.
With ... (Show more)
Taking as a starting point William Durston, doctor of physics from Plymouth, this paper will analyse processes of knowledge formation, gathering and verification between London, provincial towns such as Exeter and Plymouth and the wider community of medical practitioners active in Devon in the second half of the 17th century.
With a turbulent university career in Oxford, interrupted by the civil war, Durston moved to Ireland and then ended up practicing in Devon, being the son in law of a chemist from Exeter, who also was the mayor of the city for several years. In the 1660es Durston corresponded with the Royal Society and was involved in local disputes about knowledge validation, in form of a dispute over curing head injuries carried out with a surgeon from Plymouth, documented in polemic writings published in the 1680es. He is therefore an ideal case study to develop an understanding of the role played by cities and towns as nodes in a ‘web of knowledge’ involving also more rural areas and to consider the interplay between social, geographical and institutional factors in this context. (Show less)



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