20:30 Uhr
Paradigms of research in the urban history of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe have shifted significantly in recent decades. In the Cold War period, the dominant paradigm of social history was about cities as places of industrialisation and the emergence of a modern class society; inspired by Max Weber’s ideal type of the ‘European city’, social historians also explored the development of a civil society and practices of self-government in Eastern European cities. Due to difficulties in accessing archives beyond the Iron Curtain, Western historians tended to focus on metropolises such as Saint Petersburg and Moscow, for which more sources were available. With the cultural turn and the archival revolution of the 1990s, the interest shifted to multiethnic cities across so-called imperial peripheries. The questions of how the empire attempted to symbolically represent itself in such cities, how various ethnic groups competed for cultural hegemony and how urbanisation affected the process of nation-building moved to the forefront. Most recently, the impact of spatial and infrastructural development on social and cultural relations within the city, biopolitical aspects – including the development of healthcare, public hygiene, and the political regulation of sexuality and gender relations – as well as the relations between the city and its natural environment have received increasing attention. Drawing on the recent paradigmatic shifts, this MWNO Fellow Workshop situates the history of urban development in Northeastern Europe during the ‘long’ nineteenth century in the broader context of how cities in imperial peripheries became spaces for representation of the social and cultural hierarchies of the empire and for imperial projects of modernisation. To this end, it brings presentations on urban spaces and urban biopolitics in Northeastern Europe into dialogue with research on “imperial urbanism” in other borderlands of the Russian imperial space.