Keeping the Lid on: Urban Eruptions and Social Control Since the 19th Century

Product Description Keeping the Lid on: Urban Eruptions and Social Control Since the 19th Century is the second CSP volume produced in association with CRIDAF. It is also supported by MIMMOC. We still have something called 'urban studies', as though urban settings were an exception to the rule, worthy of an eccentric's attention and amusing to the general public, when they are, and have been for a long time, in fact, the norm. Thus are they the stage on which most of our culture has been acted in the late modern period: the European population is 80 per cent urban. The contributors to this book have explored various aspects of urban imagination, so intimately related to a peculiar social environment. They are historians and geographers, linguists and cultural students. Their methodologies are very different, their sources poles apart and yet, they address the same object of study, though severally defined. The diversity of the appreciation of urban space, even within the same city, is one of the elements that make up the representation of a city, to its own inhabitants as well as to outsiders. But is it that more than a century of living in an urban environment has not yet fully reconciled Europeans to the loss of countryside life? Or is it that they enjoy sad and horror stories more than uneventful descriptions of bliss and happiness? Experiments have been made, of harmonious cities, full of light and gaiety in the eyes of their architects, and soon a butt for the hatred of their own inhabitants. Replacing excessive inequality with atrocious uniformity has not been the best legacy of public housing since it was first conceived of by Robert Owen. Perhaps cities are blamed for things that happen within their walls but are caused by something else than the urban factor. Perhaps cities are fascinating because anything can happen within their walls, the worst, certainly, but the best, possibly. Perhaps cities are charged with too many expectations, because they collect such a variety of talents and cultures. Perhaps, it is because of such a frustration that they move on. About the Author Francois Poirier was a lecturer at Universite Paris 8, before he was appointed to a professorship at neighbouring Universite Paris 13 in 1993, where he was head of CRIDAF, a research center, from 1998 to 2008. He has published extensively on issues related to British politics, English social and labour history, and Franco-British interaction. Logie Barrow, professor of British Studies at the University of Bremen, after a PhD at the University of London and two books on the British labour movement, has devoted the past 20 years to researching issues of public health, in particular the vexed question of small-pox vaccination in Britain. Susan Trouve-Finding, has been at Universite de Poitiers since 1987, first as a lecturer, now as a professor. She read French and History at the University of Sussex, where she defended a PhD on French primary school teachers in the early 20th c. She has published widely on social policy and politics, in particular on education and on family policy. She is the new head of MIMMOC, a research centre at Poitiers.