Session details

Organizer(s)

Dorothee Brantz (CMS, TU Berlin) and  Avi Sharma (CMS, TU Berlin)

Keywords

Seasons, Temporality, Urban Practice

Abstract

Many cities around the world are affected by seasonal changes. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall lend distinct atmospheres to cities in some climate zones, while wet and dry seasons shape urban life in other climatic regions. Urban seasons add another layer to the temporalities of cities but up to now they have not received much scholarly attention.

The proposed main session will explore seasonality in relation to questions of mobility broadly conceived. The panel will center on the concept of seasonality to better understand how recurring patterns shape the way people, goods, services, capital, and concepts circulate. We are equally interested in conceptual and empirical approaches towards seasonal mobilities as they affected the temporal rhythms and seasonal flows of people, animals, plants, goods, resources in and through cities. How did seasonal variations affect such rhythms and flows, how did they enable (but also at times hinder) urban operations? Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: the urban ecology of seasons, leisure and recreation, seasonal work, urban construction, the migration of plants and animals, urban infrastructural provisions, the arts, sports and fashion, the festivalization of cities, seasonal catastrophes and other environmental consequences of seasonal variations. We look for contributions from any time period and across geographic regions that address the impact of such seasonal variation on urban life. By urban life we mean both the everyday practices and institutional framings that undergird these practices and their mobilizations.

Papers

Hot Town: Summer’s Impact on Turn of the Century New York City

Author(s)

Kara Schlichting (Queens College, City University of New York)

Keywords

Seasons, New York City, Environment

Abstract

While urban historians have long recognized cities as constructed environments, my research adds the study of urban life, city planning, and environmental change by focusing on the intangible, impermanent, and often overlooked aspects of urban nature: climate and weather. Before the widespread adoption of comprehensive ventilation, heating, and cooling technologies in the mid-twentieth century, urbanites lived far more attuned—and exposed— to their city’s climate. This paper examines how the difficulty of regulating summertime heat and humidity drove new uses of outdoor spaces, from parks to fire escapes in pre-“climate-controlled” New York City. It considers resident and governmental responses to heat emergencies, the introduction of technologies like air-conditioning appliances, and scientific and citizen reckoning with the urban heat island effect. By the early 1900s urbanization had exacerbated summer temperatures due to the urban heat island effect. Pavement and brick buildings heat more quickly and store solar radiation in greater quantities than plants, soil, and water. The same urban form that housed residents and industry subjected New Yorkers to higher temperatures with fewer accessible reliefs. The poor suffered in heatwaves whereas better-off residents purchased comfort via additional ice or, later, air-conditioning appliances. The history of New Yorkers’ exposure to summertime heat reveals the challenges of government management of nature as well as the structures of climate-based environmental inequalities in the urban environment.

The Seasonal Cycle of Social In- and Exclusion in Urban Recreation: Amsterdam and The Hague, 1815-1890

Author(s)

Jan-Hein Furnée (Radboud University (Nijmegen))

Keywords

Urban Leisure Culture, Seasons, Social In- and Exclusion

Abstract

Over the last decades urban historians have come to understand how citizens spending their leisure time in public and semi-public spaces of recreation in various ways significantly contribute to the construction of urban social order by reinforcing, challenging and changing patterns of social in- and exclusion, both in terms of class, gender, ethnicity and other interacting axes of social difference.

With respect to nineteenth-century western cities, historians still tend to focus on specific categories and sites of leisure, such as theatres, cultural associations, parks or shopping streets, charting their specific mechanisms of social in- and exclusion and analysing how these evolved in the course of the century. In this paper, I will argue that in addition, we need to study how processes of in- and exclusion in various leisure sites were reinforcing and alleviating each other in the cyclical rhythm of the season.

Focusing on nineteenth-century Amsterdam and The Hague, I will demonstrate on the basis of qualitative sources and quantified data how in most indoor sites of winter recreation such as theatres, concert halls, cultural associations and ball rooms citizens intensified social interaction among separate, exclusive segments of urban society, while summer recreation in parks, zoo’s and other open air recreations each year again encouraged and enabled citizens to transgress the social boundaries forged in winter and to engage with people outside of their own coterie – with the yearly urban fair between the seasons and the occasional skating periods temporarily turning the social order upside down. Indeed, the structure of urban society, reflected and forged on sites of leisure culture did not just change in a linear way during the nineteenth century, but also – and more fundamentally – in a cyclical way, each season again.

Turning Life into a Spiral – Seasonality in Setting the Pulse of Lifestyle in the Finnish Cities of the 20th Century

Author(s)

Timo Myllyntaus (Turku School of Economics)

Keywords

Finnland, Seasons, Everyday Life

Abstract

Aristotle crystallized that time is not the same as change, although there is no time without change. So, in everyday life, we measure time empirically with the amount and quality of change. If our attention is fascinated by the captivating events that happen around us, time seems to be fluttering, but if nothing happens, and especially if our passionate wish is not fulfilled, time seems to be creeping. In Western countries, time is thought to go from the origin to the end in a linear fashion. Most often, time is represented by a horizontal line. The 18th century Enlightenment doctrine created a new notion that the time ahead was to be seen as a rising trend because the future was expected to be better than the past. When theorists and historians (G.W. Hegel, K. Marx, M. Weber, T. Parsons, W.W. Rostow) began to form holistic theories of modernization from the 19th century onwards, many of their scenarios were based on the concept of gradual development. Thus, according to these phase theories, development proceeds in stages.

The Western concept of time has been described as one-dimensional and individual-centred. It is precisely measurable and inevitably progressing one process. However, it is not the universal or only concept of time. The Mediterranean, African and South American conceptions of time differ in their multidimensionality. In these people-centric and communal cultures, time is not seen as an exact phenomenon, but as a multidimensional chain of events, consisting of many processes. In these cultures, when the more things are happening at the same time, the more satisfied citizens are.

Reactive Asian cultures have shaped the third great concept of time. They associate time with nature and changes in it, such as sunrise and sunset, celestial movements, and seasons. Time is seen to rotate the circle endlessly, but the circles are not the same, but the circles are interlaced as spiral spring turns. This way of thinking is considered to be the most characteristic of the reactive cultures that Japan, China, Turkey and Finland represent. Even when thinking of themselves, Finns take time as their starting point and seem to position themselves in the spiral of time. We tend to ""listen to the time"" and live in the rhythms of the day and the season. When we say we enjoy winter, we thus express that we have internalized that season in our souls and have become friends with it.

As a case study of Finnish time, the paper deals with the seasonal life rhythm of Finnish cities in the 20th century. Each of the four distinctly different seasons had its own work tasks, cuisines, hobbies, amusements and celebrations. Notably, the suburban cycle was a combination of old rural culture and habits as well as seasonal practices in large cities. Until the end of in the nineteenth century, Finnish cities had given an almost equal weighting for the four seasons. In contrast, in the 20th century, some cities were intentionally or unintentionally labelled as winter cities (Rovaniemi, Kemi) or summer cities (Hanko, Turku, Savonlinna). Those seasonal stamps have gradually become parts of the identity of those cities.

The Challenges of Seasonality in the Operation of the Roman Sewers 1870-1890.

Author(s)

Salvatore Valenti (University of Venice)

Keywords

Seasons, Water Flow, Sewers

Abstract

Although rain is almost absent from the iconography of nineteenth-century Rome, this element was very present in the everyday life of the city, in particular during the autumn. Indeed, in 1862-1877 the average depth of rain per year (748.2 ml) was superior in Rome then, for instance, in London. However, this value had significant seasonal fluctuations. For example, a huge difference separated the wettest month of the year (November 110.44 ml) from the driest one (July 16.78). These variations between dry summers and wet autumns/winters created quite a few problems to the Hydraulic Service of Rome.
In fact, since 1870 the city experienced an urban growth that was accompanied by a process of renewal and building of new vital infrastructures to sanitise the urban space like sewers. Sewers operation in nineteenth century Rome faced two contradictory challenges. On one hand a lack of water during the summer and an overabundance of this element in autumn/winter with consequent flooding of the lowest parts of the city.
The purpose of the paper is to provide analytical insight on how seasonal variations in the depth of rain - and on the flux of water more generally - affected the operation of the sewers of Rome in late nineteenth century, and how the Roman Hydraulic Service tried to cope with these challenges.