The nineteenth century marked a period of profound transformation for European cities. Industrialization, mass migration, and technological innovation turned modest towns into vibrant metropolises, generating both opportunity and disruption. Cities had to cope with the challenges of new technologies, the arrival of migrants, and the recurrent threat of epidemics, while becoming engines of social and economic mobility where new forms of work, education, and public health took shape.
In this project we study how the city of Munich, between 1823 and 1914, confronted these challenges. Using newly digitized, high-frequency individual-level archival data, we analyze how these forces interacted to shape the economic and social lives of urban residents.
We begin by studying the introduction of mass transportation as a technological shock that transformed the spatial and social structure of the city. We examine how occupations, businesses, and households reorganized across space, how patterns of accessibility reshaped neighborhoods, and how these changes affected opportunities for social mobility, as reflected in education and employment trajectories. We then investigate the integration of Munich’s Jewish population, a group long marginalized in earlier centuries but increasingly prominent in the industrial city. We study the initial conditions that determined their occupational specialization and eventual success: place of origin, religious current, residential segregation, human capital of ancestors. We also study assimilation strategies and identity choices, as evidenced by first name choices, human capital investments, and intermarriage. Finally, we analyze how investments in a core amenity – sanitation and clean water – redefined the social geography of the city. We analyze its consequences on child mortality, fertility choices, and human capital investments using linked individual data, and consider the confounding role of spatial sorting in this process.
By combining methods from economic history, urban economics, demography, and digital humanities, the project reconstructs the micro-foundations of urban transformation in unprecedented detail. Its originality lies in the systematic use of large-scale, individual-level historical data, rarely exploited at this depth in European history. Our goal is to provide an evidence-based understanding of how cities adapt to technological and demographic shocks. These insights speak directly to contemporary debates on sustainable urbanization, inequality, and public health.
