Nathalie Roseau is taking part in the 17th conference of the European Association for Urban History, ‘City Networks in Europe and Beyond’, which is being held in Barcelona from 2 to 5 September 2026.
Together with Christoph Bernhardt (Humboldt University), she is organising a session entitled ‘Rethinking Modern Urban Infrastructures in the Light of the Anthropocene, 19th–20th century’.
Session Abstract
The contribution, over the last three centuries, of urbanisation processes (technical, social, economic, political and cultural) to the ‘Anthropocene’ —that is to say, the alteration of the biosphere by human activities, which is having dramatic consequences for the planet’s environmental boundaries—calls for a rethinking of approaches and subfields of urban history through the lens of the Anthropocene. Although the term ‘Anthropocene’ is contested in public and scientific debates, the transdisciplinary controversies surrounding this issue over the past two decades can help to reformulate research questions in urban history and to innovate established concepts in urban political, cultural and environmental history. With this in mind, the session focuses on urban infrastructures and invites participants to re-examine the emergence and ecological footprint of urban networks (water, transport, energy, waste, data, etc.) in terms of their spatial and material scales, their socio-political configurations, and their human and non-human agents. Contributions, grounded in empirical research, are expected to foster the convergence of the fields of urban history and Anthropocene studies.
This session features presentations by Giulia Scotto, Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, Sabine Barles, Etienne Dufour, Nathalie Roseau, Timothy Moss, Matthijs Degraeve, Erika Hanna, Dimitra Kanellopoulou, Charles Ambrosino and Antoine Brochet, Monika Motylinska and John Lagae, followed by a concluding discussion led by Carl Nightinghale.
You can find the detailed programme for the session on the EAUH2026 conference website.
Nathalie Roseau will present a paper entitled ‘Consciousness and denial of/in the Anthropocene. How did New York envisage its metropolitan future in the early 1970s?’
Paper Abstract
The Anthropocene era (Chakrabarty, 2018) is a long-standing period of history characterised by competing rationales that are acknowledged when the time comes to move on. One of its aporias concerns the concepts of ‘consciousness’ and ‘denial’. The growth of knowledge has continually taught us about the risks of upheaval and multiplied warnings. Yet, despite the predicted disasters, trajectories have continued along their course and the “Great Acceleration” has persisted. This paper focuses on New York City in the early 1970s. This period, marked by the end of the Vietnam War, was also a time of growing awareness of the planet’s scale (captured by the Apollo missions, from ‘EarthRise’ in 1968 to ‘Blue Marble’ in 1972) and its finite nature (*The Limits to Growth* was published in 1972, followed by the 1973 oil crisis), whilst 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, the landscape architect and designer—along 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 elements 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 installation in which visitors were introduced 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, this article seeks to understand the mirror that opens onto the metropolis: that of an awareness of the environmental crisis. By scrutinising this infrastructure of visuality through which the city envisions its future, we shall seek to understand the enigma of clarity and blindness in which urban societies find themselves caught.