Over the past two decades, historians of science have sought to move beyond narratives centred on privileged figures and exceptional institutions. These efforts have been reinforced by a series of historiographical ‘turns’, one of the most influential being the spatial turn. By shifting the focus from people to places, historians have been able to treat infrastructures, practices and material settings as constitutive of knowledge, not merely as backdrops. This perspective has been shaped by classic works on metropolitan centres such as London and Paris, but also by the broader spatial and material histories of science associated with David Livingstone, Iwan Morus, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, Pamela Smith, Lissa Roberts and Kapil Raj.Footnote ¹ As Science in the City, and recent collections such as Bert De Munck and Antonell Romano’s Knowledge and the Early Modern City have shown, examining cities as canvases of scientific practice offers a decentralized, diversified and comparative perspective on knowledge making.Footnote ²

More recent work has pushed knowledge further by shifting the gaze to places outside the traditional centres of scientific prestige. Studies of Iberian, Central European and colonial contexts, as well as the debates initiated by the STEP network on Science and Technology in European Peripheries, have helped diversify our understanding of urban knowledge cultures.Footnote ³ They remind us that many metropolitan cities lacked celebrated academies or learned societies yet were nonetheless deeply shaped by scientific and technical infrastructures, from colonial gardens to public-health systems. At the same time, focusing on institutions often overlooked for their practical and economic functions – ports and arsenals, hospitals and municipal offices, to name but a few – has revealed how entangled knowledge was with governance, commerce and everyday life.

The three books under review approach these entanglements from different angles, periods and premises. Each takes seriously the idea that cities are central to the making of science, technology and medicine, though with varying levels of coherence and ambition. Together, they raise the question of how the history of science, technology and medicine should be written: not primarily through privileged institutions or by singling out eminent individuals who happened to reside in cities, but through the ways cities themselves shaped and sustained knowledge structures and cultures.

Lorenza Gianfrancesco and Neil Tarrant’s edited volume The Science of Naples: Making Knowledge in Italy’s Pre-eminent city, 1500–1800 brings into view a city largely absent from anglophone scholarship, highlighting Naples’s role in medicine and geology. By contrast, the monograph Metropolitan Science: London Sites and Cultures of Knowledge and Practice, c.1600–1800, coauthored by Rebekah Higgitt and Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, with Noah Moxham, reinterprets the British capital, shifting attention from elite institutions to infrastructures of trade, governance and craft that underpinned London’s scientific culture. Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo’s edited collection Science, Technology and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon (1840–1940) pursues a more programmatic agenda, developing methodological tools to study ‘ordinary’ cities, foregrounding invisibilities, material infrastructures and human–non-human relations.

Gianfrancesco and Tarrant argue that historians of science have tended to focus on academic structures and Northern European narratives of intellectual development, thereby overlooking ‘examples of intellectual activity that do not directly conform to this narrative of scientific development’ (p. 13). The Science of Naples seeks to correct this imbalance by drawing attention to the influential Mediterranean port city and the ways in which its geography and geology fostered disciplines such as medicine and geology in the early modern period.

Organized into three sections, the volume approaches Naples from institutional, environmental and international perspectives. Gianfrancesco’s essay on the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 reconstructs the catastrophe through manuscripts and printed accounts, highlighting its impact on both locals and visitors and showing how it prompted Giovanni Tommaso Giovino and colleagues to reassess ancient theories of volcanic activity. Gennaro Rispoli’s chapter on the Hospital of the Incurables, founded in 1522, connects the design of space and medical practice, illustrating how sculptures and allegories of the body integrated art, healing and science, a history now reinforced by the site’s transformation into a museum of medicine. Taken together, the essays illuminate Naples as a city whose unique geographical position and traditions sustained lively sites of knowledge exchange during the early modern period. Yet the collection’s contribution lies more in visibility than in interpretation. The chapters vary in focus and depth, and the introduction offers little beyond the claim that Naples deserves greater recognition in anglophone scholarship. As such, the book serves primarily as a valuable resource for case studies and as a prompt to integrate Naples more fully into the urban history of science, rather than as a cohesive analytical programme to add to urban history of science.

While sharing the early modern focus with The Science of Naples, Metropolitan Science addresses the opposite challenge: how to rethink a city long at the centre of anglophone histories of science. Rather than revisiting the Royal Society or other elite circles, the authors direct attention to institutions where knowledge was inseparable from economic, political and bureaucratic imperatives. Their six case studies range from the Ordnance Office and the Mint to the Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Barber–Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre and the East India House.

These chapters demonstrate convincingly that knowledge in London was not confined to scholarly ideals but embedded in practices of testing, manufacture, regulation and training. The Ordnance Office and Arsenal, for example, emerged as hybrid environments where mathematicians, smiths and artisans collaborated, creating cultures of innovation shaped as much by war and state bureaucracy as by intellectual debate. The Goldsmiths’ Company Hall illustrates how spatial arrangements structured the regulation of expertise, securing sensitive information while providing venues for collective decision making. Across the volume, floor plans, maps and material traces render knowledge as a three-dimensional phenomenon, giving a spatial visualization of the opportunities created by proximity and controlled environments that enabled exchange, experimentation and credibility. The book’s strength lies in how it transforms London from a familiar site to a newly understood one. Although the methods could be applied to other cities as well, the case studies show that London’s scientific culture was inseparable from the unique infrastructures of craft, trade and governance of the English and later British capital. These were not peripheral supports to an elite sphere but constitutive of the city itself. As a result, the book shifts the historiography of London from a narrative of great men and institutions to one of infrastructures and practices, demonstrating how metropolitan science was woven into the city’s everyday workings.

With Science, Technology and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon (1840–1940), the focus shifts to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period marked by repeated regime changes in Portugal, from the Regeneration period through the First Republic to the Estado Novo dictatorship. At first glance, Lisbon appears as a city that lost scientific prominence, overshadowed by European centres such as Paris or Berlin. Yet the editors argue that such comparisons miss the point: ‘Berlin is no longer the disciplinary norm but its exception, Lisbon is the rule’ (p. 2). In other words, most European capitals did not boast extraordinary academies or renowned figures but were nonetheless deeply shaped by science, technology and medicine. The volume emerged from the Visions of Lisbon: Science, Technology and Medicine and the Making of a Techno-scientific Capital, 1870–1940’ (VISLIS) research project, which gives it a strong coherence. The chapters are organized into thematic sectioeach with short introductions, and together they pursue three axes – invisibilities, socio-technical imaginaries and urban connections. This framework ensures that methodological concerns are consistently tied to thematic investigations.

The case studies exemplify this approach. Ana Duarte Rodrigues shows how tree-lined streets, introduced as part of Liberal reforms, were not merely aesthetic but represented collaborations between engineers, architects and botanists, embedding expertise in everyday urban design. Cláudia Castelo’s chapter on the Colonial Garden and Agricultural Museum demonstrates how colonial commerce and ideology were inscribed into metropolitan institutions, culminating in their merger at the height of the Estado Novo’s imperial self-fashioning. Other contributions extend analysis to working-class neighbourhoods, pavements and even street dogs, showing how human and non-human actors, infrastructures and bureaucracies all participated in shaping the city’s scientific culture.

What makes this book distinctive is not only the breadth of its case studies but its programmatic ambition. It does not simply present overlooked sites; it proposes ways of studying them. By developing methods to analyse pavements, tree lines or animal interactions as objects of urban science, the volume expands the scope of what counts as knowledge making and of who counts as a knowledge actor. It thus provides conceptual tools for approaching cities that lack famous academies or celebrated intellectuals, repositioning ‘ordinary’ urban spaces as central to the history of STEM.

Enhanced by rich visual material and complemented by a digital mapping tool situating Lisbon’s STEM sites across time, the volume integrates local detail with broader historiographical innovation. More than the books on Naples and London, it establishes a methodological programme that could guide future studies of urban science. The result is a model for writing the history of science beyond exceptional cities, grounded in the infrastructures and everyday practices that made Lisbon – and many other capitals – techno-scientific organisms in their own right.

All three books demonstrate how science, technology, and medicine extend beyond individual actors or elite academic institutions, relying instead on infrastructures entangled in economic, political and civic life. Knowledge in these settings was not a separate pursuit but part of hybrid arrangements that both shaped and were shaped by the urban environment. Naples’s apothecaries and hospitals, London’s Mint and Ordnance Office, Lisbon’s pavements and tree-lined boulevards – each illustrates how scientific practices were rooted in spaces of everyday governance, commerce and expertise.

Yet their approaches diverge significantly. The Science of Naples is primarily a visibility project: it adds to an already growing literature on Neapolitan science by making anglophone readers more aware of the city’s role, rather than offering a new framework. Its claim that Naples has been overlooked is not without basis, but it risks overstating the point, since extended work by Maria Conforti, Paola Bertucci and Tommaso Astarita has already highlighted Naples’ significance.Footnote ⁴ The volume’s contribution lies less in historiographical innovation than in consolidating case studies for anglophone readers. It thereby exemplifies a mode of urban history in which the city functions mainly as a stage on which scientific episodes occur, rather than as an actor that structures knowledge itself.

By contrast, Metropolitan Science is a tightly structured monograph that reframes one of the most studied metropolises, successfully demonstrating how London’s epistemic infrastructures extended far beyond the Royal Society. Building on earlier studies by Deborah Harkness, Larry Stewart and Jim Bennett, the authors shift attention from intellectual elites to corporate institutions of trade, governance and craft.Footnote ⁵ Their case studies show how knowledge cultures emerged from the interplay of artisans, officials and mathematicians in institutional spaces, situating London’s scientific identity in the hybrid practices of its corporations. This reframing is also historiographical, demonstrating how even a canonical city can be reinterpreted once its infrastructures and spaces are treated as constitutive of knowledge cultures.

If Naples demonstrates the limits of treating the city as backdrop, and London shows how infrastructures can reframe even the most familiar metropolis, Science, Technology and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon goes further by offering a genuinely programmatic approach. It makes explicit what the other volumes only imply: that the city itself, in its pavements, gardens, bureaucracies and animals, without any explicit epistemic claims, still generates knowledge cultures. In this sense, the collection is not just another case study of a less prominent capital; it becomes a methodological model for writing the history of STEM in ordinary cities. By analysing spaces such as tree-lined boulevards or colonial gardens, and by showing how experts otherwise marginal to the canon created infrastructures that shaped everyday life, the book pushes the field into new terrain. In dialogue with the STEP debates and the wider literature on ‘second cities’,Footnote ⁶ Lisbon’s editors reposition the field by insisting that Berlin or Paris were exceptions, while cities like Lisbon were the rule.

Taken together, the three volumes chart a spectrum of historiographical approaches: recovery (Naples), reframing (London) and methodological redefinition (Lisbon). This spectrum reflects the state of the field: much urban history of science still treats cities as stages for events or biographies, but the most promising recent work – exemplified here by Lisbon and, to a different extent, London – insists on taking the city itself seriously as a historical actor. That shift resonates with a broader historiography stretching from Bruno Latour’s ‘centres of calculation’Footnote ⁷ to Pamela Smith’s The Body of the Artisan, and from Science in the City to Knowledge and the Early Modern City. Where Naples consolidates, London reframes and Lisbon redefines, the comparison shows that to move beyond exceptional figures and privileged institutions, the field must embrace approaches that analyse the infrastructures, spaces and everyday practices through which urban life itself produced and cultivated knowledge.