ENVIRONMENT AND INFRASTRUCTURE : challenges, knowledge and innovation from the early modern period to the present

The material and energy flows that characterized the metabolism of preindustrial and industrial societies were organized through complex infrastructures based on interwoven social and natural elements. Analyzing infrastructures from many methodological and thematic perspectives, the present volume adopts an extensive periodization to identify the undeniable changes caused by industrialization and the persistence of pre-existing features and dynamics. The contributions range from the late Middle Ages to the 1990s and deepen historical characteristics of urban metabolism, the study of energy systems and their transitions, and the management and control of water resources. These reveal the strategies societies and states adopted to transform and adapt their surrounding environment in a constant and challenging equilibrium of diverse interests, whose impact over time has had environmental consequences on a global scale. Contents The Hybrid Nature of Infrastructures I. Overview Provocations to Environmental History and History of Technology: The Anthropocene II. Urban Metabolism and the Transformation of Hinterlands Urban Environmental Infrastructure in the Eastern Alpine Region. (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century) From “Stues” to “Çates” Uranium Stories III. The Multiple Scales of Enviro-Technical Systems Water as Infrastructure and the Scalar Mismatch The Ideal Public for Infrastructures Dirty New Natures IV. Hybrid Landscape: Infrastructures of Water Control Coping with Water Slow Infrastructures, Flood Protection and Extreme Weather Events Decadent Infrastructure? V. Conclusion Afterword: Reflections on Environmental Infrastructure Contributors