ABSTRACT
Aspiring nineteenth-century cities like Berlin and Vienna sought to consolidate their metropolitan status through the establishment of science-oriented institutions. Natural history museums and zoos were among the most prestigious projects to serve scientific knowledge production and public education about human-animal relations. They illustrated how such scientific networks operated on a number of different scales ranging from local encounters all the way to global trade and how they, in turn, shaped the development of metropolitan centers. This chapter also examines the historical meaning of the concept ‘metropolis’ and how it relates to the notion of ‘thick space’. The author argues that metropoles were developed by bringing the (natural) world TO the city while at the same time using the metropole to represent the (natural) world IN the city.
