ABSTRACT
The multiple ways in which urbanization and the rise of modern science have enabled one another have attracted increasing attention from historians of science as well as urban historians. Less well researched until quite recently has been the case of Vienna, the capital city, cultural metropolis, and scientific center of the Habsburg Empire. The claim advanced here is that the establishment of a network of large-scale, state-funded scientific research projects after 1848, coupled with the reform of existing academic institutions, and the later emergence of privately funded research institutes and popular scientific associations, led to the creation of a metropolitan infrastructure in the sciences and in the city of Vienna itself that was a precondition of the well-studied cultural phenomenon known as ‘Vienna 1900’. To help conceptualize this development and link it with current research in urban history and metropolitan studies, the concept of “thick spaces” (Brantz et al. 2012) is introduced, and implications of varied meanings of the concept of space for this topic are considered.
