‘Governance has been at the centre of European urban historiography for a century and more’ (p. xvii). So write the editors, Simon Gunn and Tom Hulme, at the beginning of this important publication. The central subject of urban history is, however, given a full conceptual redefinition here. It is one that takes into account the variety and dynamism in the means of wielding and replicating power, and that examines those individuals of civil society who function as a connection to the ‘institutional matrix’ (p. 9). The editors argue for greater incorporation of the model of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault into future urban research. Such a theoretical approach would prove strategically advantageous to research across the enormous diversity of European urban history. Gunn and Hulme have, among other things, the theoretical offerings of actor-network theory in mind. The editors thus seek to initiate a new paradigm of historical urban research: it can, in fact, no longer suffice to treat the history of power and governance in cities only as a history of city councils. Instead, the bargaining space and tactics of urban elites are to be investigated far more flexibly than before, and more broadly formulated at the conceptual level. Gunn and Hulme also argue that source material should be analysed with much more critical reflection than is usual. The political tendencies and cultural preconceptions of statistical surveys from the nineteenth century thus need to be clarified in much greater detail than has been the case so far. The explicit political character of seemingly apolitical technologies, such as the networking of cities through water pipelines, thus deserve as much consideration as the extensive inner-city road construction of the twentieth century.
The volume contains a total of ten rather more empirical and two highly theoretical contributions. The aspiration that this new approach should be a fully European one is not quite fulfilled: eastern and south-eastern Europe continue to be under-represented, though the geographic spectrum of the case-studies is more diverse than is usually the case. This is underscored by the case-studies on Ireland (Richard J. Butler), the Netherlands (Stefan Couperus and Dirk Jan Wolffram), Finland (Tanja Vahtikari) and Italy (Bruno Bonomo). Markian Prokopovych investigates the function of museums in the formation of national identity, taking the example of Krakow. By governance, the author understands ‘a set of more decentralised, complex and diffused forms of administrative regulation and policy’ (p. 65). Marion Pluskota addresses the governing of sexuality and the establishment of a moral order for numerous European cities of the early modern period, focusing on London, Paris and Amsterdam.
The established, but questionable, separation between early modern history and modern urban history is thus to a degree abrogated in this volume. Justin Colson demonstrates the great variability in the occupation of high office in the cities of the late Middle Ages. The author supplants the historiographically exhausted, formal ‘bottom-up’ perspective by questioning the ‘wider forms and experiences of power’ (p. 25), and thus widens the horizon in the direction of participatory practices: high office in the cities, for example in London, saw surprisingly regular turnover, and constant influx has also played a consistent role in maintaining flexibility. The most distinguished were, as Colson shows, often the wealthiest, and vice versa. Nevertheless, ‘the relationship between political office and wealth was complex and disputed in all contexts’ (p. 36).
In the section on ‘governmentality and the state’, Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago uses the example of a model settlement built in Madrid during the Franco era to demonstrate how severely the everyday life of its community was surveyed by the police. At the same time, its inhabitants (both public officials and workers) enjoyed social privileges, so there was at first no resistance at all to the dictatorship. In ‘Urban materialities: citizenship, public housing and governance in modern Britain’, Tom Hulme examines how the assembled structures and normative requirements of urban authorities impacted on living conditions in the social space of public housing. But inhabitants were able to oppose the city administration and enforce, by means of their own agency, improved living standards. Hulme thus takes as his basis a ‘pragmatic reading’ of Foucault's theories (p. 191). Gayle Lonergan and Kuzma Kukushkin, writing on the Russian ‘service city’ of 1703–40, discuss Foucault's concept of governmentality, using the example of St Petersburg, and show that it is not to be transferred simply to the Russian context. The force of the market and of civil society were here quite clearly subordinate to the obligations of the rigid national power (p. 173). Unlike in Foucault, the focus is not on the handling of scarcity, but rather on the continual expansion of Russian territory. Urban planning, too, was subject to these imperatives.
The volume closes with two chapters concerned with historiography. Moritz Föllmer emphasizes in ‘Urban individuality and urban governance in twentieth-century Europe’ the wide range of social actors from the consumer protests following the World War I and the concept of social integration espoused by Berlin's mayor Gustav Böß, to the ‘tolerated subcultures’ of Frankfurt and Amsterdam. To conclude, Simon Gunn presents in ‘Heterodoxies: new approaches to power and agency in the modern city’ the alternative approach of actor-network theory and establishes the paradigm of human and non-human agency in their interactive relationship. This is a high-profile, well-edited and ground-breaking volume that will certainly contribute to establishing a clear-cut standard for future urban research.
