Urban Life in Nordic Countries

Welcome to a presentation of the newly published book Urban Life in Nordic Countries by the books editor Heiko Droste and contributor Jaime Montes Bentura.

“The book investigates the particular urban history of the North from the 17th century until today in a comparative, Northern perspective. Urban Life in Nordic Countries is the result of a conference on ‘Urbanity in the Periphery’, held in Stockholm on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Urban History at Stockholm University, aimed at establishing the field of the urban history of the North and creating a network of urban historians of the North.”

This seminar will discuss transdisciplinary approaches to urban history presented in the recently published book Urban Life in Nordic Countries (Routledge 2024). The book’s editor, Heiko Droste, will introduce the book and his work at the Institute of Urban History. Jaime Montes will discuss his contribution chapter where he studies the maps of Stockholm and Umeå through their connection to a common web of towns and identifies four historical moments that explain the transformations, influences, and processes shaping the evolution of urban design.

Bios

Heiko Droste is a professor of urban history and Head of the Institute of Urban History at Stockholm University. PhD on late medieval and early modern town historiography (1994), he has studied the 17th-century diplomats (2006), the early modern news market (2018/2020), and other topics concerning the Swedish and Baltic premodern history. His current research interests focus on welfare cities and urban memory cultures, in particular nostalgia. He is also interested in the topic of rurbanity. Contact: heiko.droste@historia.su.se, https://skhi.se, https://heikodroste.com.

Jaime Montes Bentura is an architect and urban designer, lecturer at the Master in Sustainable and Urban Planning and Design at the KTH School of Architecture, and PhD student at the School of Architecture Madrid. He studies urban form as an evolutionary process and is interested in how history can inform urban design and how we can formulate the questions that define the design of a sustainable city. Contact: jmontes@kth.se, www.kth.se/profile/jmontes

The book is published by Routlage and is available for viewing online via the KTH Library Digital Services – see this link Urban Life in Nordic Countries