Vol. 14, November 2019.
Have you published something new in Global Urban History?
We'd like our members to know. Contact Ayan Meer with details.
GUHP is now a member-supported organization. To join visit our Homepage. |  | | Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas
by Amy C. Offner, University of Pennsylvania, USA
(Princeton University Press, 2019)
In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs.
In this book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism. [more]
| | | | "Mapping Ottoman Cities: Socio-Spatial Definitions and Groupings (1450-1700)"
by Yunus Uğur, Istanbul Sehir University, Turkey.
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Summer 2018.
The Ottoman Empire's vast territory held more than one thousand cities with a population ranging from around 100 to more than 100,000 households. This essay aims to sketch out a typology of these Ottoman cities in terms of their three basic socio-spatial features to allow them to be studied from a comparative perspective vis-à-vis other Ottoman and world cities. Thus, the key research themes of this article are the similarities and differences, groupings and idiosyncrasies, and common trends and singularities of Ottoman cities. [Access the article here]
| | | | "Baku's Soviet Vnye: The Post-Soviet Creation of a Soviet Past"
by Heather de Haan, State University of New York at Binghampton, USA.
The Future of Post-Socialism: Eastern European Perspectives (2018), edited by John Frederick Bailyn, Dijana Jelaca, and Danijela Lugaric.
Focusing on neighborhood life in Soviet-era Baku Azerbaijan, this paper juxtaposes Soviet experience in Baku with the post-Soviet production of the concept of the “Bakuvian” as an ideal type—its own, supra-ethnic nationality. In unpacking the relationships that constituted Baku’s multi-ethnic fabric, the article draws particular attention to the interplay of Baku’s spatial materiality and its various neighborhoods’ gender codes, examining how these latter gave voice to particular ethnic and national identities. It shows how the “bakinets,” as an ideal type, elides tension between these particularities, serving as a dynamic and contested symbol of the city’s present and future.
| | | Berlin After the Wall - Then and Now
A Photo Series on Berlin, 30 Years Apart
The photographer Colin McPherson began documenting Berlin in the years after the fall of the Wall in 1989, looking at how the redevelopment of the city gradually and inexorably started rubbing out the physical traces of where the watchtowers, barbed wire and no-man’s land had previously existed.
In the summer of 2019, using copies of his original photos made in the early 1990s, he returned to Berlin to bring the project to a conclusion in time for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.
| Related Networks and Events
|  | A reminder that GUHP will be sponsoring a series of panels at the Moscow conference of the International Planning History Society this July 5-7. GUHP-affiliated scholars interested in proposing papers and panels should immediately contact Carola Hein, Rosemary Wakeman, or Hou Li and plan on submitting an abstract and a CV for each presenter by Friday November 22
The International Planning History Society (IPHS) was inaugurated in 1993 as a successor body to the Planning History Group, founded in England in 1974. The group endeavors to foster the study of planning history worldwide, and supports interest and place-based networks in the fields of planning history.
In July 2020, the IPHS will host its annual conference in Moscow. The 2020 conference calls for contributions investigating a broad range of topics in planning history relating to the theme of City Space Transformation: Renovation of the Urban Environment. Papers may cover topics including urban form, urban visions, comprehensive planning, planning legacy and heritage, cross-cultural exchange and colonization, and the concept and methodology of global/world planning history.
They are looking especially for studies which explore the planning history in Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as in East Europe and America to compare with plans, ideas, and projects implemented in the various parts of the world. They also seek to promote discussions on urban and regional planning history, in general, reflecting new topics, methods, and perspectives.
|  | Established in 2017, the Lagos Studies Association is an international, interdisciplinary organization of academic and non-academic practitioners whose interest focus on Lagos and its peoples. Its members include scholars, students, activists, artists, teachers, donors, policymakers, and development professionals.
The 5th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference will be held in June 2020 in Lagos, Nigeria. Its theme this year is Postcolonial African Cities at 60: Continuities and Discontinuities.
What is postcolonial about African cities since the 1960s? How have African cities evolved from their colonial past? Is there any correlation between decolonization on the one hand, and urban governance, artistic expressions, identity formations, and countless of other manifestations of daily existence, on the other? Why might the city form the basis of intellectual engagements within the expansive narratives of postcolonial state and nation-building? In what ways can the rhetoric of political, cultural, or epistemological decolonization improve our knowledge of African cities? How are cities that emerged since the 1960s different or similar to those with roots in precolonial and colonial eras? Did the postcolonial state engender a unique type of city or urbanization process?
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