Jens van de Maele - Böcker

This volume reflects the latest historiographical discussion about the decline, transformation, heritagisation, and re-invention of industrial cities in Europe during the late 20th century.It argues that the notion of “mediation” as it has been used in the history of technology helps to shed new light on the processes of understanding changes of industrial cities before, during, and after the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. The contributors investigate how different actor groups, such as scientists, union members, journalists, politicians, artists, and historians, mediated the understanding of decline, the anticipated future, and the heritage of industrial cities. The authors look at a wide range of European cities during different phases of decline and transformation.The book is aimed at scholars of urban history and industrial history, as well as contemporary European history, the history of technology, and deindustrialisation studies. The contributions also resonate with discussion in neighbouring fields such as urban studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology, and digital history.

This monograph examines the interrelationship between politics and modernist architecture in interwar Belgium, focusing on political, architectural, and administrative elites as propagators of new ideas of governance. While Belgium was strongly influenced by neighbouring France and Germany, it also developed its own avant-garde approaches to socio-political problems. In the second half of the 1930s, the country was the scene of a remarkable political and architectural experiment involving an ambitious plan for the large-scale construction of modernist government office buildings. These buildings were seen as essential to the development of a technocratic model of governance, aimed at strengthening the role of the executive and minimising the influence of parliament. More specifically, the “efficient” new office architecture was supposed to create a new type of “perfect” civil servant, whose loyalties would no longer lie with political parties, but with scientists and management experts. Such experts and scientists constituted a rising elite of homines novi with strong (though often veiled) political ambitions. As such, this book contributes to our understanding of political culture in the “age of extremes”.