Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World

摘要

Most readers of this journal will be familiar with the history of fire in various rural and wildland settings. Following the lead of Stephen Pyne, environmental historians of fire have concerned themselves mostly with the political, economic, and social facets of fire landscapes and how historical actors came to reconcile fire's destructive and natural roles. This edited volume takes the historical study of fire to the streets, focusing on the built environments of urban spaces. In a series of tidy well-argued case studies of urban locations across the globe, the authors examine how fires large and small have shaped the world's cities. It turns out that the influence of fire in the building and rebuilding of cities has been significant beyond measure.