Preliminary Programme

During the late nineteenth century, the material and social fabric of cities changed dramatically. Cities grew bigger and denser. New modes of everyday mobility were introduced. While trains dramatically influenced and altered the way people moved between cities and within larger agglomerations, omnibuses, trams, subways, bicycles and cars altered the way people moved within urban centres. While existing scholarship tends to focus on the introduction of new modes and technologies of mobility (e.g., Schivelbush 1986; Höhne 2015) we know next to nothing about the day-to-day experiences of the different modes of mobility, both old and new – especially after the newness of 'modern' technology had worn off. What we do know, tends to be based on high-end cultural sources, thereby limiting our understanding of how more ordinary urban dwellers gave shape to and experienced their movements through the city.
In this paper I want to reflect on the methodological difficulties and possibilities of using life writing as a source for the emotional history of urban space and mobility. Because most diarists are notoriously silent on the subject of everyday mobility (Pooley 2017), we need to approach their texts in inventive ways. In this paper, I will use a selection of London diaries from around 1900 to explore how both life writing and everyday practices of urban mobility could affect the ‘emotional’ sense of place of urban dwellers. (Show less)

Technical developments, social reforms, economic possibilities, and growing populations increasingly pushed and pulled people across the globe in the nineteenth century. Crossing multiple national borders, in search for a new home, migrants moving to the same city oftentimes gathered together. Memories of urban districts, defined by inhabitants from ethnic or religious minorities, are still vibrant, such as Jewish East End in London, or Irish Hell’s Kitchen in New York. But explorations of emotional practices reveal a discrepancy between the image of urban, migrant districts, and the migrants’ everyday experiences of the same districts.
Using the district of Södermalm in Stockholm as a case study, this paper analyses the role of emotions in constructing the contemporary, and today’s prevailing, idea that poor, Orthodox, and Eastern European Jews belonged to the slum and industrial suburb. With help from GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and quantitative analysis of Jewish residences, I propose that the digital methodology reveals an everyday spatial framework that diverges from narratives of Jewish Södermalm found in newspaper articles, oral interviews, and private letters. It is in this gap, between spatial practice and spatial representation, that we can understand the power of emotions in producing and reproducing long-lasting and influential tropes about migrants and the urban districts they settled in. This paper’s exploration of the Jewish community in Stockholm’s residential patterns and internal communication reveals the spatial inscription of emotionally driven power relations in migration groups moving to new urban settings in the twentieth century, as well as the possibilities of quantitative sources and digital methodology in understanding emotional practices in urban space. (Show less)

In Second World War British cities, the home came to be in flux like never before. Aerial warfare, as well as state policies such as property requisition, blurred the boundaries of the dwelling and unsettled the bond between citizens and the spaces they inhabited.
This changing relationship between Britons and their homes was regularly noted and examined by the sociological organisation, Mass Observation. Established in 1937, and steeped in the documentary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s, this organisation was explicitly concerned with uncovering the everyday feelings of ‘ordinary’ people (Hubble, 2006). The Mass Observation archive is thus a rich resource for the historian trying to explore not only the emotional codes of wartime Britain, but also the ‘messy and complex’ ways in which citizens actually navigated these dictates in their day-to-day lives (Langhamer, 2016).
In this paper, I will consider Mass Observation’s attempts to chart the emotional responses of urban Britons to fluctuations in their domestic environments. With reference to the organisation’s social surveys, interviews, covert observation reports, and diary collections, I will particularly focus on research which examined feelings about the loss of dwelling places in cities. This material demonstrates that the shifting relationship between citizen and home was a flashpoint for the negotiation and subversion of emotional codes. Moreover, it reveals how feelings about home-loss were frequently connected to questions of policy, such as reconstruction and town planning. This paper therefore aims to show not only how the built environment shaped the emotional lives of urban citizens, but also how this process worked in reverse. (Show less)