This study deals with the relationship between communications networks and economic structure in medium-sized Swedish towns 1850-1970. Medium-sized towns have been defined as those which were ranked 4th-20th in terms of population at two points in time: in the year 1900, when industry had established a foothold and the most important railways had been built, and in the year 1970, at the end of the period studied. This means that the group studied comprises 22 towns. The communications networks which are examined are shipping, railways and roads. The economic structure is studied at various levels from economic sectors to sub-branches.Two measures have been constructed for the purpose of establishing the positions of the towns in the communications networks: accessibility and nodality. The former is calculated on the basis of distance from other towns and their populations. The latter is computed via quantification of the towns' access to the links of the respective networks and an assessment of the quality of these.Statistical relation analyses of correlation and regression type have been the principal method of analysis, which has been supplemented, however, by information culled from urban monographs and other studies.The study shows that there is a relationship between communications networks, primarily the railways, and the transformation of the towns' economic structures during the first half of the period studied. The predominant alignment of this relationship appears to be that the structural transformation precedes the expansion of the railways. Among the various economic sectors, the relationship between industry and the railways is the clearest. The relationship changes direction with the passage of time and can be divided into four phases:1.1850s - 1870s. The towns with strongest population and industrial growth attract railways to themselves and are themselves most active in expanding the railways. A weak correlation between accessibility of towns in the shipping network and industry dwindles away when the railways begin to expand.2.1870s - 1900. The relationship between industry and railways is two-way.3. 1900-1950.The building of the most important railways is completed. Industry continues to adapt to accessibility within the railway network.4.After 1950. The medium-sized towns begin to be deindustrialised as the service sector undergoes vigorous growth. The correlation between industry and railways weakens.On the other hand a supplementary study of conditions at regional level shows that railway expansion preceded structural change. In the rural parts of Sweden the railways were an important driving force behind urbanisation and industrialisation, and they created a special type of new population centre -"station villages", as they were called - which came to function as industrial focal points in the countryside. Many of these station villages rose to the status of towns later on.At lower levels of the economic structure the relationships between economic activities and communications networks are not statistically guaranteed as a rule. This is interpreted to mean that at first it was only large aggregates such as population density and total industry that were capable of influencing railway expansion. In similar fashion the railways later became a factor exercising influence primarily at the macro level, while at the micro level they formed only a base on which a number of other location factors were collected and evaluated before the individual firms reached their decisions. / digitalisering@umu

The Indigenous past is largely absent from settler representations of the history of the city of Toronto, Canada. Nineteenth and twentieth century historical chroniclers often downplayed the historic presence of the Mississaugas and their Indigenous predecessors by drawing on doctrines of terra nullius, ignoring the significance of the Toronto Purchase, and changing the city’s foundational story from the establishment of York in 1793 to the incorporation of the City of Toronto in 1834. These chroniclers usually assumed that “real Indians” and urban life were inimical. Often their representations implied that local Indigenous peoples had no significant history and thus the region had little or no history before the arrival of Europeans. Alternatively, narratives of ethical settler indigenization positioned the Indigenous past as the uncivilized starting point in a monological European theory of historical development. In many civic discourses, the city stood in for the nation as a symbol of its future, and national history stood in for the region’s local history. The national replaced ‘the Indigenous’ in an ideological process that peaked between the 1880s and the 1930s. Concurrently, the loyalist Six Nations were often represented as the only Indigenous people with ties to Torontonians, while the specific historical identity of the Mississaugas was erased. The role of both the government and local settlers in crowding the Mississaugas out of their lands on the Credit River was rationalized as a natural process, while Indigenous land claims, historical interpretations, and mnemonic forms were rarely accorded legitimacy by non-Indigenous city residents. After World War II, with new influxes of both Indigenous peoples and multicultural immigrants into the city, colonial narratives of Toronto history were increasingly challenged and replaced by multiple stories or narrative fragments. Indigenous residents created their own representations of Toronto as an Indigenous place with an Indigenous history; emphasizing continuous occupation and spiritual connections between place and ancestors. Today, contention among Indigenous groups over the fairness of the Mississauga land claim, epistemic differences between western and Indigenous conceptions of history, and ongoing settler disavowal of the impact of colonialism have precluded any simple or consensual narrative of Toronto’s past.

The Indigenous past is largely absent from settler representations of the history of the city of Toronto, Canada. Nineteenth and twentieth century historical chroniclers often downplayed the historic presence of the Mississaugas and their Indigenous predecessors by drawing on doctrines of terra nullius, ignoring the significance of the Toronto Purchase, and changing the city’s foundational story from the establishment of York in 1793 to the incorporation of the City of Toronto in 1834. These chroniclers usually assumed that “real Indians” and urban life were inimical. Often their representations implied that local Indigenous peoples had no significant history and thus the region had little or no history before the arrival of Europeans. Alternatively, narratives of ethical settler indigenization positioned the Indigenous past as the uncivilized starting point in a monological European theory of historical development. In many civic discourses, the city stood in for the nation as a symbol of its future, and national history stood in for the region’s local history. The national replaced ‘the Indigenous’ in an ideological process that peaked between the 1880s and the 1930s. Concurrently, the loyalist Six Nations were often represented as the only Indigenous people with ties to Torontonians, while the specific historical identity of the Mississaugas was erased. The role of both the government and local settlers in crowding the Mississaugas out of their lands on the Credit River was rationalized as a natural process, while Indigenous land claims, historical interpretations, and mnemonic forms were rarely accorded legitimacy by non-Indigenous city residents. After World War II, with new influxes of both Indigenous peoples and multicultural immigrants into the city, colonial narratives of Toronto history were increasingly challenged and replaced by multiple stories or narrative fragments. Indigenous residents created their own representations of Toronto as an Indigenous place with an Indigenous history; emphasizing continuous occupation and spiritual connections between place and ancestors. Today, contention among Indigenous groups over the fairness of the Mississauga land claim, epistemic differences between western and Indigenous conceptions of history, and ongoing settler disavowal of the impact of colonialism have precluded any simple or consensual narrative of Toronto’s past.

<p>This licentiate thesis describes and analyses the modern history of the socio-technical systems for urban water supply and sanitation in East Africa with focus on Uganda and Kenya. The key objective of the thesis is to evaluate to what extent the historic processes frame and influence the water and sanitation services sectors in these countries today. The theoretical approach combines the Large Technical Systems approach from the discipline of History of Technology with New Institutional Economics. Throughout, urban water and sanitation service systems are regarded as socio-technical systems, where institutions, organisation and technology all interact. The thesis consists of three separate articles and a synthesis in the form of a framework narrative. The first article provides a discussion of the theoretical framework with special focus on the application of Public Goods theory to urban water and sanitation. The second article describes the establishment of the large-scale systems for water supply and sanitation in Kampala, Uganda in the period 1920-1950. The third article focuses on the politics of urban water supply in Kenya with emphasis on the period 1900-1990.</p><p>The main findings in this thesis are that the socio-technical systems for urban water and sanitation evolve over long periods of time and are associated with inertia that makes these systems change slowly. The systems were established in the colonial period to mainly respond to the needs and preferences of a wealthy minority and a technological paradigm evolved based on capital-intensive and large-scale technology. Attempts to expand services to all citizens in the post-colonial period under this paradigm were not sustainable due to changes in the social, political and economic environment while incentives for technological change were largely absent. History thus frames decisions in the public sphere even today, through technological and institutional inertia. Knowing the history of these socio-technical systems is therefore important, in order to understand key sector constraints, and for developing more sustainable service provision.</p>

This doctoral thesis analyses the role of historical urban agriculture in a long-time perspective, through a combination of overarching surveys of Swedish towns and detailed studies of one town – Uppsala in east-central Sweden. The study shows how agricultural land – town land – of various sizes was donated to towns repeatedly during medieval times and in the 16th and 17th centuries. The study examines urban food production at three points in time, and concludes that grain production and, later, potato production as well was substantial in many towns, indicating high levels of urban self-sufficiency. This allows new perspectives concerning the interpretation of urban food provision, as urban dependency on countryside food production might have varied considerably between towns. In addition, the study shows how urban agriculture was connected to social welfare systems, in particular aiming at supporting urban widows. The results in this thesis provide an historical context to the increasing discussions about present-day urban agriculture globally, and identify a number of factors that may create or counteract opportunities for urban agriculture.

A changing perception based on the appreciation for information in our era allows a broader idea and different understanding of life as a system driven by the flow of information. Simultaneously, our understanding of 'the' urban was broadened. It enabled us to perceive urban structures as living organisms beyond their physical manifestation and separated from human control. Like species, our cities are great products of evolutionary forces and contain invaluable information worth preserving.When writing about urban spaces, urban is understood as a system which is constituted not so much by built forms and infrastructures, but as a heterogeneous field that is constituted by intervention and lines of forces and action. These lines form the coordinates of an urban topology that is not based on the human body and its movements in space alone, but also on relational acts and events within the urban system. These relational acts can be economic, political, technological or tectonic processes, as well as acts of communication. The urban is therefore quite different from the physically defined spaces of events and movements.The focal point of this paper is to explore the relationship between the spaces of movement, the spaces of events and the relational systemic 'spaces'. It will be attempted to identify fundamental processes behind urban design. Rules are derived from connective principles in complexity theory, systems theory, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. / Department of Architecture

In the mid- to late 19th century, modern pipe-bound water and sewer systems proliferated in European cities, a development that has sometimes been regarded as a necessary result of a sanitary awakening and the progress of science and technology. By analyzing the introduction and subsequent expansion of water, sewerage, and excreta collection on the local level, in the Swedish cities Norrköping and Linköping, this oversimplified picture is questioned. The main problematique of this dissertation is why piped water supply and sewerage were introduced in these two Swedish cities at this particular time in history, and why the systems were subsequently extended. The actor-network theory (ANT) is used as an analytical tool. In the local context issues of governance, economy, technology, public health, and environment were brought to a head, and, if anything stands out, it is the complexity of introducing new technology. Despite the differences between Norrköping and Linköping in terms of topography and social and economic structures, the evolution of water supply and sewerage was on the whole similar. The existence of uniform scientific, technological, ideological, and cultural influences and of legislation at the national level, coupled with suburban growth, contributed to this development. There was more variation in excreta collection, because of the differences between the cities. Poor sanitary conditions, a river sensitive to pollution, and a strong public health network caused Linköping to introduce sanitary regulations much earlier than Norrköping and in Linköping WC’s were not as common.

Seventeenth-century Seville, one of early modern Spain's most populous cities and the mercantile hub of its imperial trade, endured repeated and severe flooding of the Guadalquivir River, events that have been largely overlooked by historians. Additionally, Seville's boom-then-bust history and the allure of the 'decline of Spain' thesis have ensured that the second half of the seventeenth century for both the urban and the national context remains similarly neglected. This thesis, by conducting research into the city's flooding from 1621 to 1700 presents an alternative narrative of continuity, at the same time as asserting the value to be gained from a historical study of the environment and disasters. I argue that urban responses - political and cultural - to disaster provide fundamental evidence of the impact of wider historical processes and structures. The asistente - the royal governor - of Seville likewise lacks sustained or detailed study. These men, as the king's appointees, had a vital role in the performance of the government of the Habsburg monarchy. The city's equivalent of the corregidor in other Spanish cities and towns, and previously understood as a legal and administrative official, the asistente was, I argue, responded to a broader set of political attitudes, which prioritised conservation and discouraged novelty. I also stress the hands-on and practical aspects to the post, which demanded a working appreciation of urban space. By connecting a study of royal government in one of the most significant of early modern Spanish cities to an environmental history of flooding, I address important gaps in the scholarship and suggest new avenues of research into the history of environmental disaster. Spanish 'decline' might be reinterpreted as a failure to deal with specific local environmental issues, and environmental disaster acknowledged as an issue of central political importance.

L'histoire de Metz est, au Moyen Âge, indissociable de celle de ses cours d'eau. La première partie porte sur les relations étroites qui unissent la cité, la Moselle et la Seille. La ville est tout d'abord replacée dans son environnement fluvial. Son développement est reconsidéré sous l'angle des interactions avec la dynamique fluviale. Les formes multiples et intensives d'exploitation du milieu fluvial, pourvoyeur de ressources, sont ensuite évoquées. Elles impliquent de nombreux aménagements du cours d'eau et de ses berges qui transforment le paysage riverain. Les rivières constituent malgré tout, à travers des phénomènes extrêmes comme les crues ou les débâcles, un facteur de vulnérabilité pour la ville. Au-delà de l'adaptation de la société à ces phénomènes, les actions et les aménagements anthropiques peuvent être également envisagés comme des facteurs aggravants.Les enjeux, les défis et les rivalités liées à la maîtrise et à la gestion de la rivière sont au coeur de la deuxième partie. Ils se manifestent dans des domaines aussi divers que le franchissement des cours d'eau, le contrôle du trafic fluvial, l'encadrement de la pêche, la gestion des moulins, ou encore la défense de la cité. L'affirmation du pouvoir municipal, qui s'illustre par des mesures législatives et politiques, mais aussi par une implication croissante dans les affaires et les conflits liés aux cours d'eau, constitue un fil conducteur incontournable.La troisième partie aborde les relations entre les Messins et leurs rivières sous l'angle social et culturel. Au-delà des métiers étroitement liés au cours d?eau, comme les pêcheurs et les bateliers, ou des habitants des quartiers riverains, se dessine une véritable culture de la rivière partagée par une grande partie de la société messine. Elle passe par l'expérience, la perception et la connaissance des cours d'eau, et laisse une trace dans les domaines de la littérature, de la religion, de la symbolique ou de la justice. / The history of Metz in the Middle Ages is closely linked to the rivers that run through it. The first part focuses on the close relationship between the city, the Moselle river and the Seille river, which are tightly entwined. The town is first portrayed in relation to its fluvial environment. Its development is reconsidered in the light of its interactions with the river dynamics. The various and intensive forms of exploitation of the river environment which provides resources are then tackled. Many changes are made to the watercourse and the banks of the rivers, which in turns transforms the local landscape. Through extreme phenomena such as floods or debacles, rivers are however a cause for vulnerability for the city. The anthropic actions and alterations are not just the adaptation of society to these phenomena, they can also be seen as aggravating factors.The second part explores the stakes, challenges and rivalries connected to the rivers control and management. They concern river crossing, inland navigation, fishing regulations, mills management or even the defence of the city. The way municipal power asserts itself, through political and legislative measures but also a growing involvement in river matters and conflicts, can be seen as a central issue.The third part discusses the relationship between the inhabitants and the rivers from a social and cultural point of view. A real river culture emerges, not only reserved to the nearby residents nor to trades such as fishermen or boatmen. The largest part of the population shares experience, perception and knowledge of rivers, expressed through literature, religion, symbolism or justice.

Cette recherche propose d’analyser comment Marseille a été filmée, à travers un corpus de films qui y ont été tournés entre 1921 et 2011, dans une double perspective combinant l’approche socio-historique et l’approche esthétique des images cinématographiques. Le temps long (presqu’un siècle) permet d’analyser depuis des films de fictions, des documentaires et des productions télévisuelles, les processus historiques et les constructions mémorielles propres à Marseille. Focaliser l’attention sur ce qui échappe au premier regard, les arrières plans, les détails, ouvre à une recherche qui étudie les rapports entre ville, cinéma, histoire et mémoire. / This research proposes to analyse Marseille filmed, through a corpus of films that have been shot from 1921 to 2011, on a dual viewpoint combining the socio-historical and the aesthetic perspectives to moving images.This vast time frame (which spans almost a century) allows an analysis of the historical processes and memory constructions shaping the city of Marseille, based on films of fiction, documentaries and télévision productions. Focusing the attention on what is not visible at the first sight, the backgrounds, the details, opens to a research that studies the relationships between the city, cinema, history and memory.