Arthur P. Molella

The Eco-City as Urban Technology: Perspectives on Caofeidian International Eco-City (China)

Caofeidian International Eco-City, in North-East China, is among several large-scale new eco-city initiatives currently in development across Asia. Built from scratch across an area of 74 km2, with an expected population of 800,000 by 2020, the citys plan boasts an abundance of urban sustainability features, from integrated public transport services and advanced water and waste recycling systems, to public parks and an extensive wetland area. This article uses the historical and conceptual perspective of “techno-city” to analyze the citys urban technology features. It highlights the relationship between the city and its hinterland, discusses the focus on science and technology driving the citys concept, and explores the international, modernist design language used. In doing so, the analysis points to several key tensions and contradictions at work, including a disconnect between the citys green technology focus and the high-carbon heavy industry of the surrounding area, and a lack of engagement with the local culture and community. Caofeidian Eco-City exhibits several features of twentieth-century techno-cities, although these are re-cast within the twenty-first-century context of global climate change policy and Chinas ongoing rapid urbanization processes.

How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (review)

Invention, once a star subject in the history of technology, no longer shines as bright on academic horizons. This fall from grace was due in no small part to discontent with popular accounts of heroic invention and with what was once dubbed priority-itis––the romantic quest for canonical inventors. At the same time, the rise of sociological and contextual approaches left little room for individual inventors. But this restlessness has spread hardly at all in nonacademic domains, where the great majority of popular books, museum exhibitions, and historical sites still center on who invented what first, and seem quite contented to do so. Indeed, one occasionally detects signs of popular irritation with academic revisionism. Consider this excerpt from an amazon.com “customer review” of John Lienhard’s How Invention Begins:

Exhibiting atomic culture: the view from Oak Ridge

In the aftermath of World War II, residents of “nuclear cities” like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Americas atomic weapons were produced struggled to interpret the nations atomic history as well as their own stories, for themselves, for tourists and for other visitors. Once literally hidden cities, they remain steeped in Cold War culture and ideology, yet they face uncertain futures as weapons production needs change, hazardous waste dangers become more apparent and homeland security is threatened. “Atomic museums” established at these and other sites have become focal points of such dilemmas. Their evolving interpretations of Americas atomic heritage play a significant role in shaping public understanding of the Bomb.

At the edge of science: Joseph Henry, ‘Visionary Theorizers’, and the Smithsonian institution

Summary As first Secretary of the newly formed Smithsonian Institution, the American physicist Joseph Henry (1797–1878) was called upon almost daily to screen and evaluate scientific and technical proposals from outside investigators. Many of these investigators came from the fringe of the scientific community or beyond, and favoured ideas which deviated from current orthodoxy. Henrys policies toward this fringe group, a neglected aspect of the Smithsonians early history, are examined through extensive manuscript evidence.

At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (review)

mentally oriented phase of capitalist industrialization. As recapped here, these offer tantalizing but partial windows into grander scholarly studies. The high quality of these essays should offer something for everyone, although few readers will be interested in every selection. As evidenced in the section headings, the focus is almost exclusively on urban aspects of the synergy between invention and environment, for example on ways that houses, cities, industries, or urban parks have been or can be reconceptualized to take advantage of technological opportunities while serving environmental goals. This will make the book most useful in urban studies courses seeking a prominent environmental component. Issues involving ideology, agriculture, and natural resources, among other concerns, receive relatively little attention. But no text can comprehensively explore a topic as broad as the expansive title suggests, and the urban emphasis does enable readers to identify some recurring themes throughout the work. The multiple perspectives are both a strength and a weakness. The essays range from historical and technical analyses to prescriptions for policymaking, and the style, execution, and documentation are extremely inconsistent. The length of the essays ranges from less than ten pages to more than fifty. In some cases the actual content of the essay may be less valuable than the exposure it affords to a particular disciplinary perspective. Inventing for the Environment offers a set of provocative scholarly windows into an exciting and important topic, but it lacks the larger synthesis that would set such a work apart. Even though it is not greater than the sum of its parts, it still has much to offer.

Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

formed electrical shows for friends. Their supposed pleas that he repeat the Marly experiment caused Franklin to invent and publish the kite story. But this alleged motive is flimsy, if not whimsy. As Steven Shapin notes in A Social History of Truth, a lie exposed could, in the gentlemanly culture of natural philosophy, fatally tarnish one’s reputation. Why would the clever and ambitious Franklin run this risk when he could have devised other stratagems for satisfying his friends? On this obvious question Tucker is silent. Following Cohen, who showed that Franklin’s fame for his electrical researches gave him easy entré into the French court and thereby helped him secure crucial financing for the American Revolutionaries, Tucker concludes that “It might have been a kite, the story of a kite, the hoax that won the American Revolution” (p. 234). Appreciative of Franklin’s pivotal role in creating the new nation and respectful of his genuine scientific accomplishments, Tucker’s overall portrait of Franklin is sympathetic—perhaps too sympathetic. There is no trace of dismay over his protagonist having committed the ultimate scientific sin. Perhaps Tucker knows that he did not clinch his case against Franklin. After all, he furnishes no compelling motive for fraud, no grounds for believing that Franklin’s propensity for storytelling found expression in his scientific reports, no convincing argument that the kite experiment as he described it was impossible, and—above all—no smoking gun. Despite its lack of closure, Bolt of Fate is an engaging and provocative book that brings to light new archival evidence on the social and political dimensions of mid-eighteenth-century electrical technology.