Nicolas Kenny

The feel of the city : experiences of urban transformation

Introduction - The Body Urban Chapter 1 - Comparable Cities Chapter 2 - Image Makers Chapter 3 - Encounters with Industrial Space Chapter 4 - Home for a Rest Chapter 5 - Street Scenes Conclusion - Keeping in Touch

From body and home to nation and world: the varying scales of transnational urbanism in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the twentieth century

The vast transformations that shaped western cities at the turn of the twentieth century were the product of global processes and interactions. Drawing on the cases of Montreal and Brussels, this article argues that underlying these broad dynamics were questions and preoccupations pertaining to more localized and personal scales of the body and the home. Concentrating on the discourses that circulated in these distinct, yet analogous cities, the article shifts the focus of the transnational approach from specific contacts between individuals and places, to the wider web on which circulated the ideas and initiatives that reshaped peoples living environment.

City Glow: Streetlights, Emotions, and Nocturnal Life, 1880s–1910s

Proliferating streetlights generated complex emotional responses in modern cities. Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of the emotions, this article argues that examining the feelings of pride and prestige associated with technological innovation, but also of anger and fear when light was lacking or unpleasant, reveals the intimate nature of urban dwellers’ relationship to their environment. Street lighting is often studied as part the networks of infrastructure that gave cities their contemporary form, or as elements of the commercial expansion that made them centers of consumerism. At the intersection of these trends stood the emotional experiences of those seeking to lay claim to the urban night. If the cultural significance of emotions varies according to historical circumstances, comparing the tensions, politics, and atmospheres of streetlights in distant places like Montreal and Brussels suggests that the rapidly changing urban environment of the period produced its own distinct emotional regime.

Je Cherche Fortune: Identity, Counterculture, and Profit in Fin-de-siècle Montmartre

This paper examines the Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre during the 1880s and 1890s. Isolating themselves on a hilltop to the north of the city, a defiant community of painters and poets left the busy macadam below to position themselves physically and symbolically at the apex of anti-bourgeois, countercultural sentiment. Known for its subversive character, Montmartres legacy appealed to these passionate and creative youths, and their appropriation of a semi-rural district on the fringes of the metropolitan centre of modernity symbolized their desire to escape stifling cultural traditions. Particularly revealing are the ways in which their art and literature represented at once a deeply interior questioning of identity as well as a loosely unified movement of cultural protest. By the turn of the 20th century, many of these artists and writers had been tamed by the commercialization of their nonconformity, but Montmartre remains a powerful site for the memory of its influential social and cultural transgressions.