About this Book

Abstract

In his introduction to the 1984 reprint of Georg Mehrtens’ classic, Der Deutsche Brückenbau im XIX. Jahrhundert, which was first published in 1900, Ernst Werner commented succinctly: “It is the fate of bridges that serve only the pedestrian simply to be overlooked in the chronology of bridgebuilding.” It was not until the new millennium that this began to change somewhat — not least because a remarkably large number of cities saw the beginning of a new era as an occasion to polish up their image with a “millennium bridge”. A bibliographic search on the subject of bridges carried out in the German National Library at the beginning of 2007 returned a total of around 2,500 publications. When the search term was restricted to footbridges, the catalogue produced 31 titles, of which a considerable number were bibliographic lists of essays and articles. The huge discrepancy in the results is partly explained by the fact that bridges have a great metaphorical and symbolic value, and thus appear in countless titles relating to politics and society. The literature on footbridges is sparse at an international level too. Apart from the published proceedings of two conferences and the fib guidelines of 2005, no attempt has yet been made to focus exclusively on this small and impressively varied type of structure. With this book, we hope to have made a modest start.