Urbanism and the modern state: housing, morality, and governmentality in nineteenth-century Germany

This study documents the history of urban thought in Germany before urban planning emerged as a discrete field in the early twentieth century. Focussing on Berlin, it documents how cultures of urban expertise that appeared in a range of fields in the nineteenth century (including state science, political economy, folklore studies, moral statistics, and cultural history) helped mould urban planning ideas and housing policies. The study argues that this reorganization of knowledge about housing constituted a unique model of thought in Germany which held the lower-middle-class family to be the principal unit of urban society.