The López Piñero Institute for the History of Medicine and Science (joint centre of the University of Valencia and the CSIC), based at the Palau de Cerveró, announces the seminar "Urbanity Spoiled. Pollution in the City in and beyond the Age of Smoke", which will be held next Thursday, 7 February, at 17:00 at the conference room of the institute. The lecture, which is part of the series of activities called "Atmosferes toxiques: Salut ambiental i ocupacional en l’era industrial" (Toxic atmospheres: Environmental and Occupational Health in the Industrial Age), will be delivered entirely in English by Frank Uekoetter, member of the Rachel Carson Center of Munich.

The seminar will address urban air quality, so often discussed in the media. These are problems of the past that are still present today. Somehow, this is a problem that many industrialised societies face worldwide. Smog has become a problem in places where the concentration of population and factories is high. The lecture will go back to the efforts made to reduce the emissions of particulates in Germany, the U.S. and Britain, since the early nineteenth century to the present. Several factors have influenced and conditioned this environmental policy. The talk will offer some perspectives on the efforts carried out nowadays to improve air quality in Europe and worldwide.

Frank Uekoetter studied History, Political Science and Social Sciences at the universities of Freiburg, Bielefeld, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. After receiving his doctoral degree in 2001, he published numerous books and articles on environmental problems, such as The Green and the Brown. A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (2006) and The Age of Smoke. His research focuses on the confluence of history and environmental studies. After working for many years at the University of Bielefeld, in 2006 he moved to Munich, where two years later he joined forces with professors Christof Mauch, Helmuth Trischler and Martin Schulze Wessel in a successful bid to found an international institute for advanced studies. Known as the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, this institute has evolved into one of the most important hubs for environmental history and environmental research within the humanities. Currently, Professor Uekoetter works at the University of Birmingham (UK).