City Seasons: On the Transatlantic Nature of Change in Urban Spaces around 1900 and 2000

城市有季节吗？是也不是。我们所有生活在欧洲和北美城市温带地区的人都知道，城市生活一年四季都在变化。奇怪的是，如果你寻找关于城市季节的学术研究，你几乎找不到关于这个话题的文献。因此，从城市学术的角度来看，城市似乎没有季节。为什么我们的城市经验和城市研究之间存在如此大的差异？本项目旨在克服这一差异，从两个不同的年份点（20世纪初和21世纪初）考察季节对西半球温带城市规划和日常实践的经验和概念影响，以追踪城市活动随季节变化的连续性和变化。在三个独立的项目（两篇论文，一篇PI专著）中，我们将分析季节对(1)工作和休闲的影响；(2)建成环境，主要是住房；(3)城市生态。每个项目都将从地理和时间的角度进行比较，并将官方规划实践与城市居民的日常生活并列。在地理上，我们专注于跨大西洋领域的大都市地区，最著名的是柏林、纽约和蒙特里萨。为了扩大项目的地理范围，我们计划组织一次“全球背景下的城市季节”国际会议。我们的项目寻求提供一个新的经验和概念基础，在城市研究中提供一个更持续的季节研究。我们希望我们的研究与城市研究中的广泛学科相关（历史、地理、生态学、民族学、社会学、STS和文化研究），但也有可能为那些对城市季节性当前态度的历史背景及其在都市环境中娱乐、住房和生态领域的应用感兴趣的从业者（建筑师、规划师、景观设计师、政策制定者）。此外，我们希望通过将我们的作品展示给更普通的观众，这些观众的城市生活经历受到季节变化的影响。为此，我们打算组织一个关于城市季节代表的摄影展（可能与摄影博物馆或C/O柏林摄影画廊共同努力，两者都位于CMS附近）。

Do cities have seasons? Yes and no. All of us living in temperate climate zones in European and North American cities know that urban life changes throughout the year. Curiously, if one looks for scholarship on urban seasons, one finds almost no literature on this topic. So from the perspective of urban scholarship, cities do not appear to have seasons. Why is there such a discrepancy between our urban experience and urban research? This proposed project seeks to overcome this discrepancy by examining the empirical and conceptual impact of seasons on the planning of and daily practices in cities in the temperate zones of the Western hemisphere from two distinct vintage points – the turn of the 20th and the turn of the 21st century – in order to trace the continuities and changes in urban engagements with seasonal variation. In three separate projects (two dissertations, one PI monograph), we will analyze the effects of seasons on (1) work and leisure; (2) the built environment, primarily housing; and (3) urban ecologies. Each project will be comparative from a geographical and chronological perspective, and it will juxtapose official planning practices and the everyday life of urban inhabitants. Geographically we focus on metropolitan areas in the transatlantic realm, most notably Berlin, New York, and Montréal. To broaden the geographical scope of the project, we plan to organize an international conference on "Urban Seasons in a Global Context." Our projects seek to provide a new empirically and conceptual foundations to offer a more sustained study of seasons within urban studies. We hope to make our research relevant for a broad range of academic disciplines within urban studies (history, geography, ecology, ethnology, sociology, STS, and cultural studies), but also potentially for those practioners (architects, planners, landscape architects, policy makers) interested in the historical background of current attitudes towards urban seasonalities and their application in the areas of recreation, housing, and ecology in metropolitan settings. Moreover, we hope to reach outside the academy by also presenting our work to a more general audience whose urban living experience is shaped by seasonal changes. To that end, we intend to organize a photography exhibition on the representations of the seasons in cities (possibly as a joint effort with the Museum of Photography or the C/O Berlin Photography Gallery, which are both located in the immediate vicinity of the CMS).