Mobilier Urbain. Object-Culture and the Public Sphere in 19th Century Paris

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr. Salvatore Pisani; Professor Dr. Gregor Wedekind
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440038918

The research project is dedicated to the context of emergence, use and visual reception of Parisian Street furniture in the 19th century. Although Urban Studies has recently produced numerous publications on the question of urbanity and public space, the performance of street furniture about its levels of impact and visuality has hardly been in the focus of analyses so far. Above all, the system level, which was characterized in the 19th century by an innovative integration of administration, technology, industry, and art, did not receive due attention. Even in studies of central figures of the Parisian administration, such as the governmental director Adolphe Alphand or the architect Gabriel Davioud, it has been treated as a black box at best. This study aims to uncover the social premises, norms, and effects embedded in it. To determine the operative potential of street furniture in more detail, according to the starting point of the project, it is not enough to look at individual artifacts. Streetlamps, benches, newspaper kiosks, and poster columns, manufactured and installed in series, are to be taken as aesthetic components of a technical infrastructure that penetrated and modeled the early modern city. Central attention is therefore given to the ensemble concept of the artifacts, in which all elements are repeated. The repetition of objects and constellations in public space leads to pattern of action, making the mobilier urbain to be seen as the common that is shared. By analyzing street furniture from its production to the practices and routines of its everyday use to its perception in the visual media, the research project focuses on that network of complexities in which the espace partagé and the politically connoted concept of participation are placed. The theory-driven questions on the interconnection of classical aesthetics, technical infrastructure, and technocratic administration are tied back to the specific historical definition of the public sphere through broad research in the Archives nationales, the Archives de Paris, and the Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris. The request for a continuation is based on the one hand on the immense delay in the research work of about one and a half years, which was caused by the Corona pandemic, and on the other hand on the essential broadening of perspectives, which is owed to the interim results and the insight that the flip sides of public space as order, namely misplanning, system weaknesses and areas of conflict, also have their part to contribute to the history of urban modernity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants