Mitchell G. Ash is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Vienna, Austria, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

This book presents new research on "thick spaces" of scientific research and processes of interurban and transnational knowledge transfer and exchange in Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - infrastructural preconditions for the explosion of creativity known as "Vienna 1900."

1. Metropolitan Scientific Infrastructures and Spaces of Knowledge in Vienna, 1848-1918: An Introduction Part 1: Historiographical Overviews 2. Metropolitan Natural Histories: Inventing Science, Building Cities, and Displaying the World 3. Periphery and Metropolis: Some Historiographical Reflections on the Urban History of Science Part 2: Focus on Vienna 1: Technical and Science-Based Infrastructures, 1850-1875 4. The Beginnings of the "City Machine": Infrastructure Expansion and International Technology Transfer in Vienna, 1850-1875 5. Metropolitan Geology and Metropolitan Collections: Turning Vienna into Stones in the Nineteenth Century Part 3: Comparative Studies and Metropolitan Networks, 1870s-1910s 6. Polar Waters in Metropolitan Space: Circulating Knowledge about the Ice-Free Arctic Ocean in Hamburg and Vienna 7. Academic Geography and its Networks in Vienna and Berlin: A First Comparative Study 8. Capital Collections, Complex Systems: Vienna, Berlin, and Ethnographic Specimen Exchanges in Transnational Fin de Siècle Scientific Networks Part 4: Focus on Vienna 2: Sciences and Publics 9. Talking About Popular Science in the Metropolis: Learned Societies, Multiple Publics and Spatial Practices in Vienna (1840-1900) 10. Science-Oriented Popular Education: Heterotopic Learning Venues for Scientific Knowledge in Vienna, 1887-1918