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Review Essay TECHNOLOGY AND THE CITY J O S E F W. K O N V I T Z, MARK H. ROSE, AND I O E L A. TARR For at least a century the politics, business, and social discourse of urban Americans have depended on those technological systems that historians label infrastructure: waterworks, sewers, transit, port im provements, communications networks, and energy systems.1 Yet scarcely more than twenty years ago Roy Lubove could still lament that “the existing body of urban history offers a surfeit of narratives about cities, and an abundance of tales about life in cities; but it largely fails to explain the city-building process in relation to technol ogy and social organization.”2 During the past two decades, however, scholars have produced a large number of studies focused on the relationship between the city and technology. Later in this essay we Dr. Konvi i z. is professor of history at Michigan State University. His article “William J. Wilgus and Engineering Projects to Improve the Port of New York, 1900-1930“ (Technology and Culture 30 [April 1989]) is part of a larger study of Atlantic port cities during the world wars. Dr. Rose, a member of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Michigan Technological University, publishes in several areas of historiography as well as in the history of technology, politics, and urban change, including (with Bruce E. Seely) “Getting the Interstate Built: Road Engineers and the Implementation of Public Policy, 1955—1985” (Journal of Policy History 2 (January 1990]). He is the general editor of the Temple University Press monograph series Technology and Urban Growth. Dr. Tarr is professor of history and public policy and associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His book Technology and the Pise of the Networked City in Europe and America (coedited with Gabriel Dupuy) was awarded the Abel Wolman Prize by the Public Works Historical Society in 1989. 'Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870—1900 (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 217-50; Teaford, “Finis for Tweed and Steffens: Rewriting the History of Urban Rule,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 146—47; and Joel A. Tarr and Josef W. Konvitz, “Patterns in the Development of the Urban Infrastructure,” in American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review, ed. Howard Gillette, Jr., and Zane L. Miller (New York, 1987), pp. 195-226. 2Roy Lubove, “The Urbanization Process: An Approach to Historical Research,” in American Urban History: An interpretive Reader with Commentaries, 2d ed., ed. Alexander B. Callow, Jr. (New York, 1973), p. 663.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3102-0007$01.00 284 Technology and the City 285 will address that literature, focusing in particular on changing pat terns of topical choice and interpretive emphasis.3 At the outset, one must emphasize that the foundation studies in this held, many long out of print, remain useful on several counts. The intellectual frameworks articulated by pioneer scholars continue to exercise a powerful if frequently unperceived influence. Naturally, the value of works by pioneers in both urban history and the history of technology is not determined by whether they anticipated in detail the findings of contemporary scholars. These early works remain a vital part of historical literature because their authors brought a sense of connectedness to different historical topics, a sense that is often missing in contemporary works. They wrote about wholes, we write about segments. Hence, a historiographical essay such as this one allows us to glimpse a portion of our own intellectual and social history. Treatment of the literature in an evolutionary and topical fashion, then, permits several generalizations. First, historical study of tech nology and the city has focused on technologies that enabled cities to function more efficiently and that, in turn, often led to improvements in the quality of urban life. One result of this approach—and this is our second point—was that historians until recently have been fairly consistent in treating the city as something plastic, something capable of altering its own shape and functions in response to the imperatives of autonomous machines and systems. Third...
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