Abstract

Dorothee Brantz is a professor of urban environmental history and the director of the Centre for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her research interests include urban environmental history, the history of war and peace, and the different temporalities of the urban.

Do seasonal changes matter in urban environments? From our own experiences as urban dwellers, we would certainly say “yes they matter”. Looking at urban scholarship, however, they do not seem to matter at all. In historical scholarship, the seasons seem to belong to countryside living not city life. This talk will advance an argument that the seasons are actually a central aspect of urban living. Using Spring as her empirical focus, Dorothee will show how the seasons were articulated in a transnational context during the height of the industrial era around 1900 and also in our current post-industrial age. She will ask how a focus on seasonality can aid our understanding of everyday life, the impact of natural forces on the urban environment and even our understanding across cultures. On a conceptual level she will demonstrate how the seasons can help us to gain a more differentiated understanding of urban temporalities and their impact on the life of cities in different climate zones.