After having completed this book, we, the 18 authors, look at Barcelona differently. We thought we knew the city most of us live in pretty well. Yet the sheer richness of Barcelona’s scientific culture around 1900 we helped each other to discover provides us with a lasting thrill. For quite a number of years many members of our local history of science community had come across a host of different ‘urban’ aspects in their research projects. What seems obvious now needed time to mature. In our local seminars, but also in many of the papers presented at international conferences the role of the urban space as an active agent in shaping scientific knowledge became more and more explicit. We realized that a common project addressing the interactions between science and the city in Barcelona was called for to bring those numerous individual research agendas together. In times of scarce research funds and our local research institutions being savaged by ‘the crisis’, we needed to find new models of collaboration to embark on a large-scale project and to overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries. In March 2012 we founded together with José Pardo-Tomás and Alfons Zarzoso the ‘Barcelona Laboratory Science and the City. Scientific Culture in the City, 1868–1939: Sites, Actors and Practices’. This Laboratory was to serve as a base to launch a number of projects directed both at local and international audiences, at scholars and the general public: the gathering of relevant sources, the building of databases, the organization of academic meetings and the fostering of international collaborations, research projects and subsequent publications but also outreach activities, such as guided city tours, exhibitions and public lectures.
One of the projects of our Laboratory is this book. Its time frame is traditional, as it addresses the four decades between the two international exhibitions in 1888 and 1929, the formative period of modern Barcelona. Yet it was our intention to present new case studies and topics and to explore little known sources, urban spaces and actors. This ambitious endeavour required sheer manpower and we were fortunate to be able to count on so many colleagues from our local community. For each topic chosen we asked two historians – often a senior and a junior scholar – to research and write the article together. We, the two editors, also committed ourselves to pen the introduction together. In other words, this book was conceived from the beginning as the project of a team. Pre-circulated papers of increasing length were discussed at three workshops held at the Institució Milà i Fontanals (IMF-CSIC) in 2013 and 2014. We all cherished the fruitful exchange seeing the project – and the book – becoming more intriguing and intellectually stimulating each time. Apart from the authors many colleagues were present at these workshops contributing with constructive criticisms and comments that substantially improved the volume. We are grateful to Annette Mülberger, Fernando Vidal, Miquel Carandell, Clara Florensa, Jon Arrizabalaga, Xavier Roqué, José Luis Oyón, Enric March and many others. An advanced draft of each article was sent out to two referees (see the individual chapters for their names). We would like to thank all 22 of them for most valuable criticism and numerous helpful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to the anonymous referee of the entire manuscript for his or her scrupulous reading and precise suggestions for improvement, that reflected an impressive understanding of all the topics addressed. And of course we would also like to thank the editors of the series for their support and input.
In recent years we presented parts of this project at several international workshops and conferences. We organized the sessions: ‘Science in the Public Sphere: Barcelona 1888–1936’, at the 4th European Society for the History of Science Conference, in Barcelona in November 2010; ‘Technological Cityscapes: Barcelona around 1900’, at the 39th ICOTEHC Conference, in Barcelona in July 2012; ‘Urban Peripheries? Science in “Second Cities” around 1900’, at the 9th STEP Conference in Lisbon; ‘Ciència i ciutat: una història urbana de la ciència: Barcelona 1888–1929’, at the 13th Trobada d’Història de la Ciència i de la Tècnica, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, both in September 2014. In June 2014 and thanks to the support of Neale Watson, we held the Third Watson Seminar on the History of Material and Visual Science in Barcelona: ‘How to Write an Urban History of Science: New Approaches and Case Studies’. We benefited enormously from the discussion with our colleagues from abroad. They helped us to sharpen our historiographical framework and to design a comparative approach for the urban history of science. We thank all the speakers and participants of these conference sessions and workshops for their stimulating contributions.
The project has been also funded by the ICREA-Acadèmia Research Prize, which one of us (ANG) was awarded in the period 2010–2015. The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness contributed by financing the following research projects: (HAR2009–12918-C03–02) (subprograma HIST): ‘Science and Expertise in the Public Sphere: Barcelona (1888–1992)’; (HAR2012–36204-C02–02) ‘Scientific Authority in the Public Sphere in Twentieth-Century Spain’; and (HAR2013–48065-C2–1-P) ‘Science and the City. Natural History, Biology and Biopolitics in the Divided City: Barcelona and Buenos Aires (1868–1936)’. In addition, our History of Science research group in Barcelona: ‘Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern Catalonia (18th–20th centuries)’, has been funded since 2009 by the Catalan Government as a ‘Grup de recerca consolidat i finançat’ (SGR2009–887) (2014 SGR 1410).
A note on spelling: around 1900 the use of the Catalan language progressively became more widespread in the public sphere, in politics, administration, and the media, a sphere that had been dominated nearly exclusively by the Spanish language since the eighteenth century. What is more, Catalan grammar was not standardized until the 1920s. Therefore the period covered by our volume is characterized by a certain linguistic ‘confusion’, for example, with respect to the spelling of the first and second names of historical actors, of place names and institutions. Our ‘solution’ is to reflect as far as possible the spelling of the Spanish and Catalan primary sources – and thus the mix of languages and spellings.
Much urban history of science remains to be explored. We very much hope that the case studies of this volume and the historiographical framework in which they are developed will stimulate further research – on Barcelona and many other cities. The comparative potential of this historiography seems enormous to us. It would require though not only transdisciplinary but even more so transnational collaborations.
Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan
Barcelona, February 2015