Nathalie Roseau participe à la 17ème conférence de l’European Association for Urban History, « City Networks in Europe and Beyond », qui se tient à Barcelone, du 2 au 5 septembre 2026.
Elle organise avec Christoph Bernhardt (Humboldt University), une session « Rethinking Modern Urban Infrastructures in the Light of the Anthropocene, 19th-20th century ».
Session Abstract
The contribution, over the last three centuries, of urbanization processes (technical, social, economic, political, cultural) to the “Anthropocene” – that is to say, the alteration of the biosphere by human activities, which is showing dramatic consequences for the planetary environmental boundaries – calls for a rethinking of approaches and subfields of urban history through the prism of the Anthropocene. Although the term “Anthropocene” is contested in public and scientific debates, the transdisciplinary controversies on this issue over the past two decades can help to reformulate research questions to urban history and to innovate established concepts in urban political, cultural and environmental history. In this perspective, the session focuses on urban infrastructures, and invites to reexamine the emergence and ecological footprint of urban networks (water, mobility, energy, waste, data, etc.) in their spatial and material scales, their socio-political configurations, and their human and non-human agencies. Contributions, grounded in empirical research, are expected to promote the interference of the fields of urban history and Anthropocene issues.
Cette session réunit les présentations de Giulia Scotto, Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, Sabine Barles, Etienne Dufour, Nathalie Roseau, Timothy Moss, Matthijs Degraeve, Erika Hanna, Dimitra Kanellopoulou, Charles Ambrosino et Antoine Brochet, Monika Motylinska et John Lagae, suivies d’une discussion finale de Carl Nightinghale.
Retrouvez le programme détaillé de la session sur le site de la conférence EAUH2026.
Nathalie Roseau présentera une communication « Consciousness and denial of/in the Anthropocene. How did New York envision its metropolitan future in the early 1970s ? »
Paper Abstract
The Anthropocene time (Chakrabarty, 2018) is a long-lasting history marked by competing reasons that are acknowledged when it is time to move on. One of its aporias concerns the notions of “consciousness” and “denial.” The rise of knowledge has continually taught us about the risks of upheaval and multiplied warnings. Yet, despite the predicted disasters, trajectories have followed their course and the “Great Acceleration” has pursued. The paper focuses on New York City in the early 1970s. This moment, fractured by the end of the Vietnam War, was also a moment of awareness of the planetary dimension of the world (photographed by the Apollo missions, from EarthRise in 1968 to Blue Marble in 1972) and its finitude (The Limits to Growth is published in 1972, followed by the oil crisis of 1973), while 1970 saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In New York, three major exhibitions presented the state and future of the metropolis, reflecting the socio-environmental catastrophe. In May 1970, the exhibition “The Rise of American Architecture, 1815-1915” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking back at the architectural heritage of the 19th century. In October 1972, the exhibition “Olmsted’s New York” at the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect and designer, with Calvert Vaux, of Prospect Park and Central Park. The exhibition toured the United States under the title “The New York that might have been.” The installation of scenographic devices immersing visitors in the scale of the creations and destructions that shaped metropolitan urbanism echoed CITYRAMA, inaugurated at the same time by the Museum of the City of New York, a multimedia device in which visitors were exposed to the city’s centuries-old history in 17 minutes. By focusing on the exhibitions through which New York represents and renews itself in this moment of lucidity, the article seeks to understand the mirror that opens onto the metropolis, that of an awareness of the environmental crisis. By scrutinizing this infrastructure of visuality through which the city envisions its future, we will seek to understand the enigma of clarification and blindness in which urban societies are caught.