Veranstalter: Kai Willms, U Basel/MWNO Resident Fellow; Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO)
Veranstaltungsort: Vilnius, Litauen
Deadline: 14.08.2026
This MWNO Fellow Workshop aims at situating the history of urban development in Northeastern Europe during the ‘long’ nineteenth century in the broader context of how cities in imperial peripheries became spaces for representation of the social and cultural hierarchies of the empire and for imperial projects of modernisation.
Paradigms of research in the urban history of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe have shifted significantly in recent decades. In the Cold War period, the dominant paradigm of social history was about cities as places of industrialisation and the emergence of a modern class society; inspired by Max Weber’s ideal type of the ‘European city’, social historians also explored the development of a civil society and practices of self-government in Eastern European cities. Due to difficulties in accessing archives beyond the Iron Curtain, Western historians tended to focus on metropolises such as Saint Petersburg and Moscow, for which more sources were available. With the cultural turn and the archival revolution of the 1990s, the interest shifted to multiethnic cities across so-called imperial peripheries. The questions of how the empire attempted to symbolically represent itself in such cities, how various ethnic groups competed for cultural hegemony and how urbanisation affected the process of nation-building moved to the forefront. Most recently, the impact of spatial and infrastructural development on social and cultural relations within the city, biopolitical aspects – including the development of healthcare, public hygiene, and the political regulation of sexuality and gender relations – as well as the relations between the city and its natural environment have received increasing attention.
Drawing on these recent paradigmatic shifts, this MWNO Fellow Workshop aims at situating the history of urban development in Northeastern Europe during the ‘long’ nineteenth century in the broader context of how cities in imperial peripheries became spaces for representation of the social and cultural hierarchies of the empire and for imperial projects of modernisation. In the Russian Empire, just as in Western European overseas empires, imperial administrators regarded peripheral cities as places where they could assert their supposed civilisational superiority by introducing European models of urban modernity – especially with regards to the development of urban planning and infrastructure. At the same time, such projects of a top-down modernisation could backfire if they created a social dynamic that challenged existing imperial hierarchies. This is particularly relevant for the Western borderlands of the Russian Empire, where such hierarchies could easily be contested: While some historians argue that even here the local population tended to regard urban ‘modernisation’ as a ‘Russian’ project, the self-imagination of the imperial administration as a ‘modernising’ force vis-à-vis a ‘backward’ local society was difficult to maintain in light of the region’s relatively high level of socioeconomic development. Focusing on the case of Kyiv, the historian Serhiy Bilenky has captured the dialectic of imperial and local agency in his concept of ‘imperial urbanism’, referring to both a “set of urban policies, interventions, and urban images applied by the imperial state to the city” and “urbanism as it was experienced by the residents themselves in their relations with the built environment, space, and one another” (Serhiy Bilenky: Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands. Kyiv, 1800–1905, Toronto 2017, p. 357).
The workshop explores the extent to which the dynamics of urban development in Northeastern Europe were specific in this regard. Northeastern Europe is often characterised as a region where the social and national ambitions of relatively small ethnic groups (Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Jews) competed with the attempts of rivalling empires (Russia, Prussia/Germany and, in the more distant past, Sweden and Poland) to secure their rule, as well as with the attempts of ethnic groups originating from these empires (Russians, Germans, Swedes, Poles) to defend their dominant social position. While such interethnic rivalries are typical of many cities in imperial peripheries, the situation in nineteenth-century Northeastern Europe – including the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Baltic Governorates and the Northwestern Krai – was unique in that the overarching framework of Russian imperial administration coexisted for a considerable time with older, Swedish and German legal traditions of relatively autonomous urban self-government until the Russian imperial state began to pursue a policy of at least partially homogenising urban affairs across the empire, especially in the final third of the nineteenth century. To what extent was urban ‘modernisation’ in the sense of sociospatial, infrastructural and biopolitical development in Northeastern Europe associated which such homogenising policies of ‘Russification’? What room was there, on the other hand, for the agency of local residents in creating their own visions of urban modernity? Due to our interest in the specificities of the region, we particularly welcome contributions that look at Northeastern Europe from the standpoint of comparative and/or entangled history.
The workshop will explore how these challenges of a changing urban life in nineteenth-century Northeastern Europe were discursively addressed, which practical solutions were found and how the political management of such challenges impacted the social and interethnic relations as well as the imperial hierarchies in cities of the region. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
– the challenge of demographic growth and adequate housing,
– the management of mobility within and beyond the boundaries of the city,
– the relationship between urban space, violence and policing practices,
– the politics of urban sanitation and healthcare,
– changing gender relations and biopolitics in the city,
– the relationship between the city and its natural environment.
The MWNO Fellow Workshop will take place on October 29th-30th, 2026 at the MWS Research Center Vilnius – a joint project of the German Historical Institute Warsaw (DHIW) and the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO). The organizers will cover the accommodation and travel costs (up to a maximum amount) for participants.
Proposals should include name, affiliation, title of the presentation, and an abstract (approximately 300 words), as well as a short biographical note, and should be submitted as a single PDF file to kai.willms@unibas.ch and events@mws-osteuropa.org by August 14th, 2026. Selected applicants will be notified no later than August 25th, 2026
Kontakt
kai.willms@unibas.ch; events@mws-osteuropa.org
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Julia Ziegler (2. Juli 2026). CfP: Imperial Urbanism in Northeastern Europe. Spaces, Infrastructures and Transimperial Entanglements in the Long Nineteenth Century. Stadtgeschichten. Abgerufen am 21. Juli 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/16i6i