The Transition to Industrial Urbanism - 2nd millennium CE
Lecture 3 in a lecture series by Visiting Professor Roland Fletcher (University of Sydney), followed by the third workshop in the series.
Info about event
Time
Location
Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) Aarhus University, Moesgård Allé 20, 8270 Højbjerg, Denmark (Building 4230-232).
Roland Fletcher will give a lecture series, containing three lectures and three discussion-seminars during his stay at UrbNet.
Title of lecture series: Material Behaviour and the Dynamics of Settlement Trajectories from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Present.
- Lecture 1 (11 June 2019): Mobile Communities and the Transition to Sedentism - 15th to 3rd millennium BCE.
- Lecture 2 (18 June 2019): The Transition to Agrarian Urbanism - 4th millennium BCE to 1st millennium CE.
- Lecture 3 (25 June 2019): The Transition to Industrial Urbanism - 2nd millennium CE.
Abstract
The Transition to Industrial Urbanism - 2nd millennium CE
The transition to industrial-based urbanism has seemed self-evident and has been predominantly understood in terms of processes of socio-economic change. Concurrently, the conventional opinion is that industrial urbanism is characterised by a unique trend towards low-density, dispersed settlement patterns. What is readily apparent, however is that the transition to industrial-based urbanism is an intensely material phenomenon and that a trajectory to low-density, dispersed urbanism is not unique to industrialised societies. The transformations within the Interaction-Communication matrix which were required for the transition to industrial-based urbanism to occur embed the process within the specific material formation of European societies over the millennium preceding industrialisation. Instead of a determinate relationship between changes in sociality and the transition to industrial urbanism the process is rewritten as a collision of difference between social traditions and the unexpected consequences of new forms of materiality created for other purposes than their eventual role. The trend toward extended, dispersed, urban mega-complexes containing multiple denser nodes also becomes part of a general trajectory towards overall, lower-density settlement patterns at all scales of spatial organization, rather than a unique industrialising condition. This has implications for the future of industrial urbanism.