Doctoral Project
Municipal Water and the Path to Urban Modernity in Berlin 1873–1920

Doctoral Project
Laila Seewang
Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder
Since 2014
 

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The creation of a cosmopolitan city was a driving concern for Berlin after its promotion to national capital in 1871. Financially enabled by the windfall of French indemnity and motivated to represent a modern German nation, a number of urban developments radically restructured the city in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. Infrastructural change was at the heart of this re-organisation which adapted second industrial revolution technology to service a newly-conceived public. Whereas cities shaped by first industrial revolution technology had been typically characterised by factories and trains, it is the introduction of electricity, gas, water and public intra-city transport on a public scale that revolutionised the daily lives of the majority of the urban population. This dissertation addresses how urban modernity in Berlin was effected at multiple scales through the water infrastructure projects built between 1873 and 1896 by the municipal administration. Taking the two waterworks – Wasserwerk Tegel and Wasserwerk Friedrichshagen – and the sewer system – the Radial System overseen by James Hobrecht – as case studies, infrastructure will become the lens through which to analyse urban development, political motivations, and social effects. The water projects, as many projects undertaken in the period of early public network services, created enormous impact beyond that of the network itself: from significant environmental change at the fringes of the city, to the construction of a -series of Neogthic pumping stations within the city, and finally the newly privatised rituals of modern, bourgeois hygiene.


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Laila Seewang