Het verstedelijken van constructiegeschiedenis. De stad als assemblage van bouwpraktijken?

Although urban planning and urbanization are directly and closely interrelated with the everyday practice of building, little systematic research exists on the interface between construction history and urban planning history. This article explores what the reciprocal epistemological implications of intersecting construction history with urban planning history might entail. Or, in other words, which research paths open up and which questions arise when we begin to ‘urbanise’ construction history – and conversely, when we rigorously interpret urbanism and urbanisation as an assemblage of construction practices? In a first part, a number of conceptual lines of intersection between the history of urbanism and urbanisation and construction history are identified. By means of a number of preliminary ‘snapshot cases’ we then illustrate which ‘sources’, ‘actors’ ‘methods’ and ‘forms of knowledge’ may be mobilized to concretely articulate research at the interface between construction history and urban planning history. The article concludes by mapping the ambition to work in the overlap between urban planning history and construction history within the broader objectives and ambitions of a new EOS research project entitled Construction History Above and Beyond: What history can do for construction history.