"By placing technology at the center of its historical narratives, the volume provides original insights into some of the most crucial episodes of modern urban history. Its focus on the tension between circulation and appropriation also connects the work presented here with more general debates in the social sciences about the role of place in the context of modernization and globalization. Similarly, historians of science who are interested in the circulation of scientific knowledge and objects or, more specifically, the relation between knowledge and cities will be able to draw much inspiration from Urban Machinery." -- Jens Lachmund, ISIS.