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

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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).