Technological Fun: the Politics and Geographies of Amusement Parks

Theoretical digressions aside, it is important to understand the geography of scientific communication within the city. It is by no means easy to draw a map of anarchist cultural institutions in Barcelona, which, to a greater or lesser extent, were involved in the debate of scientific ideas. Yet anarchists also inherited a federalist tradition which inclined them to decentralization. Anarchist cultural life could have been geographically complex and not limited to workers' official organizations. After 1910 the cultural fabric of anarchistsyndicalism grew into a network oriented towards the autonomous management of scientific knowledge. The management of scientific knowledge was a central aspect of an alternative political subculture which saw itself as completely rational, and in this way different from both bourgeois culture and, not without tensions, prevalent patterns of popular culture. The relationship between anarchism and science, on a global scale, has been largely overlooked by historians of science, Piotr Kropotkin's evolutionary thought being the sole exception.