Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

Georg Stöger, “Urban Environment in Everyday Life, 18th and 19th century”
11 March 2021, 16:00hrs CET, on Zoom
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In this online lecture I will speak about the changes of urban environment during the 18th and 19th century. So far, most historical studies have dealt with specific environmental issues (e.g. water supply and waste water disposal, environmental pollution and hygiene), and they mostly focused on big cities and on the second half of the 19th century, when urbanization and industrialization in Central and Western Europe took off. In my research project I’ve dealt with a middle size town (Linz in Upper Austria) and tried to study change and persistence in a long term perspective. I was explicitly interested in the collective and individual practices in everyday life that shaped (and were shaped by) the urban environment. In this respect the work of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre on everyday life and on the production of space offers interesting starting points for an analysis of actors and their logics.

Georg Stöger is Associate Professor in economic, social and environmental history at the University of Salzburg. Recent research interests include the pre-industrial recycling and reuse of goods and materials, different facettes of urban environmental history and the debate on the pre-modern and modern standard of living.