Libro

The material and energy flows that characterized the metabolism of preindustrial and industrial societies were organized through complex infrastructures based on interwoven social and natural elements. Analyzing infrastructures from many methodological and thematic perspectives, the present volume adopts an extensive periodization to identify the undeniable changes caused by industrialization and the persistence of pre-existing features and dynamics. The contributions range from the late Middle Ages to the 1990s and deepen historical characteristics of urban metabolism, the study of energy systems and their transitions, and the management and control of water resources.

These reveal the strategies societies and states adopted to transform and adapt their surrounding environment in a constant and challenging equilibrium of diverse interests, whose impact over time has had environmental consequences on a global scale.

Indice

Contents

Giacomo Bonan and Katia Occhi
The Hybrid Nature of Infrastructures 

I. Overview

Helmuth Trischler and Fabienne Will
Provocations to Environmental History and History of Technology: The Anthropocene

II. Urban Metabolism and the Transformation of Hinterlands

Georg Stöger
Urban Environmental Infrastructure in the Eastern Alpine Region. (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century) 

Claudio Lorenzini
From “Stues” to “Çates”. Infrastructures for Timber Transport in Friuli in the Early Modern Period

Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, Yaroslav Koshelev, Florian Manthey, Anna-Katharina Pelkner, Judith Schein, Christiane Uhlig
Uranium Stories. Making the Wismut Narrative Visible

III. The Multiple Scales of Enviro-Technical Systems

Giacomo Parrinello
Water as Infrastructure and the Scalar Mismatch

Frédéric Graber
The Ideal Public for Infrastructures. Towards a Long-Term History of the Environment-Infrastructure-Participation Nexus

Simone M. Müller
Dirty New Natures. Infrastructures and the Global Waste Economy

IV. Hybrid Landscape: Infrastructure of Water Control

Matteo Di Tullio
Coping with Water. Managing a Living Infrastructure in Early Modern Lombardy between Economy, Ecology, and Conflicts

Tim Soens
Slow Infrastructures, Flood Protection and Extreme Weather Events. A Historical Perspective

David Gentilcore
Decadent Infrastructure? Representations of Water in the Kingdom of Naples in the Early Nineteenth Century

V. Conclusion

John R. McNeill
Afterword: Reflections on Environmental Infrastructure 

Contributors

Parole chiave

• Environmental History
• History of Energy
• History of Technology
• Anthropocene

Recensioni

"…Bonan and Occhi achieve something truly remarkable with this edited volume. The contributions included therein vividly depict the diversity of various environmental infrastructure. Whether as trade routes, transportation pathways, irrigation channels, protective barriers or supply facilities, this infrastructure, as envirotechnical systems, opened and connected spaces worldwide, profoundly shaping the lives, work, and ecosystems of the communities residing within them across epochs. Thus, the volume also reflects the significantly expanded scope of infrastructure history within environmental history in recent years. Anthropogenic supply and distribution networks provide an excellent means of examining interactions between humans and their environment." Sebastian De Pretto, "Global Environment" 18 (2025), pp. 190-195, Open Access.