ABSTRACT
All metropolises connect people, cultures, and practices of knowledge. In addition to being major cities, they represent communication hubs accessible by multiple publics from different fields and spaces of knowledge. Building bridges and circulating among these various spheres of science and the public, go-betweens and mediators served as cultural translators and played a key role for the spatial concentration of knowledge in urban environments. Using the example of nineteenth-century Vienna, the chapter examines popular scientific societies, spatial transformations of the city and their impact on the development of knowledge-based public spheres. Focusing on speleology (cave study), a field of research that emerged at the margins of science and the public sphere primarily in Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century, and on two personalities who operated as go-betweens in this field, Adolf Schmidl and Franz Kraus, the chapter also investigates the function of spaces in-between for the communicative setting and the dissemination of scientific knowledge in metropolises.
