Towns and Communication

Description

The advent of email and texting has dramatically changed the way we communicate. In essence, we have lost "touch" in our dealings with each other. This change may have been speeded by newer technologies, but telegraphs and telephones had a great impact in our perceptions of time and place. Before mass communication, the way we ordered and embedded knowledge and the possibilities of social interaction were defined by the extended human experience of living in towns. Can this experience be replicated with new technologies?

Sujets

• Histoire
• Telecommunications engineering

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781935603597
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Towns and Communication
Volume 1. Communication in Towns
First University of Akron Press edition, 2011.
ISBN : 978-1-935603-03-0
Distributed exclusively by The University of Akron Press in the United States and Canada.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First published 2009 in Croatia by Leykam international
Copyright 2009 by Leykam international
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the copyright holder
TOWNS AND COMMUNICATION
Volume 1. Communication in Towns
Edited by Neven Budak, Finn-Einar Eliassen, and Katalin Szende

North American Edition The University of Akron Press
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Derek Keene
Communications in medieval towns - Introductory Remarks
Howard B. Clarke
Lines of Communication in Medieval Dublin
Veronika Nov k
Places of Power: the Spreading of Official Information and the Social Uses of Space in Fifteenth-Century Paris
Thomas Riis
Les communications en ville: Danemark et Schleswig-Holstein au Moyen ge et l poque moderne
Finn-Einar Eliassen
Ferry services and social life in early modern Norwegian towns
Lauren ţ iu R ă dvan
Between free passage and restriction. Roads and bridges in the towns of Wallachia and Moldavia (16th-18th century)
Jean Pierre Poussou
Les problemes de circulation en centre-ville. L exemple de Bordeaux depuis le XVIIIe si cle
Jacinta Prunty
Networking Ireland in the nineteenth-century: the role of cartography
Frank Cullen
Harbour, rail and telegraph: the Post Office and communication in nineteenth-century Dublin
Snje š ka Kne ž evi ć
The Tramway and the Urban Development of Zagreb in the Period of Modernization
Richard Harrison
To Move With the Times We Cannot Have Lines : The Decline of Leicester s Tramway System, 1930-1950
Walter F. Lalich
Migrant development of communication space in Sydney
Mirela Slukan Alti ć
Traffic and its Impact on Morphological and Functional Urban Development: Case Studies of Bjelovar, Sisak, and Koprivnica
PREFACE
In September 2006 the International Commission for the History of Towns (ICHT) gathered for its annual assembly in Zagreb (Croatia). In order to prepare for this meeting, members of the Commission wrote and received emails or letters inviting them to come to Zagreb or to give a paper at the congress. They answered these invitations in the same way. They came to Zagreb by plane, by train or by car from all over Europe, even from Japan. In Zagreb they made a special round trip in a tramway to visit the city. By bus they visited other towns of Croatia. During this conference, the members had many talks with each other, but they also listened to some of their colleagues giving papers on the historical aspects of communication in towns and had structured discussions afterwards. Most of them had some difficulty understanding the Croatian language spoken all around them in the city, but speaking English or German or French was the easiest way to talk with one another.
Through this experience, the members of the Commission practised what communication means: exchanging information and opinions, written or oral, by letter or by electronic mail or by phone, but also by going from one place to another inside a town, from the airport to the center, from the railway station to the university hall, from Zagreb to Vara ž din, from Luxembourg, Vienna or Tokyo to Zagreb and so on. And a city, Zagreb, was either the starting point, or the target, or the place where these communications took place.
All of these aspects of communication were intended to be treated in a historical perspective during the conference that was organized during the annual meeting of the ICHT. This was the first of a three-year cycle beginning in 2006 with Internal communication in towns in Zagreb, continuing in 2007 in London with Communications between towns, and between towns and their hinterlands and closing 2008 in Lecce with Towns and long-distance and inter-continental communication . Those responsible for the scientific aspects of this cycle were our members Katalin Szende (Hungary) and Finn-Einar Eliassen (Norway) and the local organizer was Neven Budak. Having been elected president of the Commission in Zagreb, I am very glad to thank these colleagues for the good job they have done and, of course, all the contributors from inside and outside the Commission who have given papers on this theme. The innovative and multidisciplinary approach of the ICHT was recognized by the International Committee for Historical Sciences (ICHS), which accepted the theme City, Knowledge and Communication for a joint session at its International Congress to be held in Amsterdam in 2010.
The International Commission for the History of Towns (ICHT), affiliated with the ICHS, was founded at the International Congress for Historical Sciences at Rome in 1955 with the aim of facilitating contacts between urban historians and building up a number of research tools. Up to now the Commission has issued the Elenchus fontium historiae urbanae , national bibliographies on urban history, and historical atlases of towns. Following common criteria, these tools facilitate a comparative approach to urban history in time and space. I am sure that the present publication as well as those which will follow for the conferences in London and Lecce will contribute to making the Commission s work better known by scholars all over the world dealing with urban history.
Michel Pauly
Professor, University of Luxembourg
President of the ICHT
COMMUNICATIONS IN MEDIEVAL TOWNS - INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Derek Keene
This paper offers some reflections on medieval towns by way of an introduction to our larger theme. This is partly because I know the Middle Ages best, but also because knowledge of this early period continues to be relevant to our understanding of how communication in towns operates today. Moreover, I take a fairly long view of the Middle Ages, stopping only with the nineteenth-century beginnings of that phase of technical innovation which has revolutionised the ways in which we now exchange information and ideas. But, how radical is that revolution which began with the telegraph and the telephone? And have the older ways disappeared or lost their value? Many of those ways of communicating, of ordering and embedding knowledge, and of perceiving the possibilities of social interaction have been learned from the extended human experience of living in towns. Some of their strengths, rooted in haptic perception, have as yet been imperfectly replicated in new technologies. Had the peculiarly accident-prone banking house of Barings in the City of London paid more heed to such traditional modes of communication and surveillance a few years ago, it is possible that it would have avoided its Ultimate Collapse in 1995.
It is sometimes said that the core activity of the town is that of a market, facilitating the exchange between the agrarian products necessary to sustain urban populations and the services and manufactured goods supplied by the town. Even more fundamental, perhaps, are the risk avoidance strategies inherent in the very emergence of towns, driven by the need to secure food stocks or by the need for defence, strategies which may be articulated by powerful individuals or castes. Yet there seem also to be possibilities for less hierarchical modes of urban formation. A striking case for such a pattern of urban growth has recently been argued for Jenne-Jeno in Mali, which prospered for some 1500 years from the third century BC. This great metropolis seems to have arisen from complex collaborations between groups of equal standing but with complementary economic interests, out of which there arose settlement clusters which coagulated into what has been called a self-organising urban landscape lacking both citadel and temple. Perhaps more often, and certainly in the classical literature of the city, these strategies are associated with the concentration of power and the emergence of religious and political ideologies. Such coercive systems have been accepted, if unconsciously, in return for some expectation of peace, security and comfort in this world or the next. Whatever the mixture of forces in the formation of towns, all of them - political or religious coercion, networks of collaboration, or the market, which combines elements of both - require sophisticated forms of communication on the site. Thus we might identify communication as the most fundamental element in town life, and I shall structure my contribution around the different categories of communication that I ve just outlined. In practice, however, the political, authoritarian and religious aspects of communication in medieval towns are difficult to separate, so I shall tend to lump them together.
Towns and cities - even Jenne-Jeno - serve as instruments and symbols of order, peace and justice for the territories in which they are situated. One aspect of this involves communication with and through other, lesser towns. Venetian rule over the terra firma offers a fine example of this. But very often these expressions of order do not involve communication with other towns and so the ways in which they projected such ideas can usefully be explored as part of our subject today. As you approached a town, you were often made aware of the carefully demarcated landscape of jurisdiction and justice which surrounded it. Remnants of such landscapes often still survive today, but if a modern city projects a message it is more often a simple one of identity, as, for example, in its distinctive skyline. The earlier landscape, however, was both self-consciously external and expressed ideas of secular, public authority and also of the order supplied by G