ABSTRACT
Over the last fifty years the history of modern cities has developed around two axes of interpretation, the first concerned with urbanisation as a process, the second with the city as the locus and progenitor of social identities. This chapter argues that both these interpretive approaches now offer diminishing returns. Resources for revitalising the subject are to be found, however, in approaches from historical geography and science studies that emphasise the concept of multiple logics as a way to grasp how modern cities function. In exploring these approaches the chapter analyses the co-production of the city through material as well as human agency, evident especially in the implementation of infrastructure systems such as water, electricity and roads across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The effect, it is suggested, is not only a more convincing account of how modern cities actually work but also a means to refresh the larger questions of urban history, including the idea of urbanisation as a key to understanding the dynamics of historical change and growth.
