Conference at the GHI, May 15-17, 2008:
Flammable Cities:
Fire, Urban Environment and Culture in History
Conveners:
Greg Bankoff (University of Hull, UK)
Uwe Luebken (German Historical Institute, Washington, DC)
Jordan Sand (Georgetown University, Washington, DC)
Program:
Thursday, May 15
6:30 – 8:00 pm
Opening reception at the GHI
Friday, May 16
9:00 – 9:30 am
Introduction: Jordan Sand, Greg Bankoff, Uwe Luebken
9:30 – 11:00 am:
Panel I: Fire & the Early Modern City
Mark C. Molesky (Seton Hall University)
The Great Fire of Lisbon
Hrvoje Petric (University of Zagreb)
Urban Fires in Croatia and Slavonia during Early Modern Times
11:00 am – 11:15 am: Coffee break
11:15 am – 12:45 pm:
Panel II: The Governance of Fire
Samuel J. Martland (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, IN)
Valparaíso, Fire, and the Development of Municipal Government in Nineteenth-Century Chile
Jordan Sand (Georgetown University)
The Logic of the Burnable City: Property, Governance and Fire in Edo-Tokyo
12:45 pm – 2:00 pm: Lunch
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Panel III: Fire & Urban Morphology
Greg Bankoff (University of Hull)
A Tale of Two Cities: The Pyro-morphology of Nineteenth Century Manila
Ayodeji Olukoju (University of Lagos)
Fire Outbreaks in Metropolitan Lagos (Nigeria): Historical and Comparative Perspectives
Jason Gilliland (University of Western Ontario)
Fire and Urban Morphogenesis: Patterns of Destruction and Reconstruction in Nineteenth-Century Montreal.
4:00 pm – 4:30 pm: Coffee break
4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Panel IV: Fire, Fear and the Urban Imagination
Susan Donahue Kuretsky (Vassar College)
The Art of Firefighting: Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712) and his Great Invention
Kristen McCleary (James Madison University)
Flaming the Fears of Theater-Goers: How Fires Shaped the Public Sphere in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1880 to 1910
Cathy Frierson (University of New Hampshire)
Fire in Russian Cities
Saturday, May 17
9:00 – 11:00 am
Panel V: Containing Fire
Amy S. Greenberg (Penn State University)
From Conflagration to Controlled Burn: The Contested Evolution of Urban Fire Protection in British and Spanish North America, 1750-1900
Shane Ewen (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Constructing Modern Fire Brigades: The Case of Edinburgh’s Great Fire’ of 1824
Sara E. Wermiel (MIT)
Did the Fire Insurance Industry Help Reduce Urban Fires in the United States in the Nineteenth Century?
11:00 am – 11:15 am: Coffee break
11:15 am – 12:45 pm
Panel VI: The Impact of Fire
Andrea Henderson (Stanford University)
Points of Origin: The Social Impact of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
Dirk Schubert (Hafen City University, Hamburg)
The Hamburg Fire 1842
12:45 pm – 2:00 pm: Lunch
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Panel VII: The Politics of Fire
Nancy Haekyung Kwak (Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY)
The Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Birth of a Benevolent Singaporean State
Sofia Toufic Shwayri (University of Oxford)
Beirut on Fire: From Traditional Suqs to Modern Shopping Malls
Jérôme Tadié (Institut de recherché pour le dévelopment, Bondy, France)
Fires, Urban Environments and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta (1966-2007)
4:00 pm – 4:30 pm: Coffee break
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm: Final discussion