Vol. 19, April 2020.
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 or renew your membership, visit our Homepage. | | Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal
by Liora Bigon & Eric Ross
(Springer, 2020)
This book is the first to trace the genealogy of an indigenous grid-pattern settlement design practice in Africa, and more specifically in Senegal. It does so by analyzing how the precolonial grid-plan design tradition of this country has become entangled with French colonial urban grid-planning, and with present-day, hybrid, planning cultures. By thus, it transcends the classic precolonial-colonial-postcolonial metahistorical divides. This book has both a chronological and thematic rationale, aimed at enhancing Islamic Studies by situating sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanism within mainstream research on the Muslim World; and at contributing directly to the wider project of de-Eurocentrizing urban planning history by developing a more inclusive, truly global, urban history. [more] | | | | "Food Offenders: Public Health and the Marketplace in the Late Medieval Low Countries"
by Janna Coomans, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
in C. Rawcliffe and C. Weeda (eds.), Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe (Amsterdam University Press), 2019.
In the Low Countries, market squares were the sites of numerous threats to public health and efforts to contain them, notably the officials who inspected, guarded, and protected these spaces. This chapter explores the ways in which urban authorities and other corporate bodies attempted to police markets and improve levels sanitation, environmental health, and food safety. It utilises archival material from several Netherlands cities, including financial records and public decrees, bylaws, and the statutes of trade and craft guilds.
[Access the article here] | | | #guhpsyllabus
Given the times we are currently living in, we are compiling on Twitter a crowdsourced syllabus on global urban history and epidemics. Historians and urban scholars alike are encouraged to contribute on social media, or to send us suggestions via e-mail. [more]
| Related Networks and Events
| | Munich Centre for Global History Fellowship Programme, Summer 2021
Fellows will be based at the interdisciplinary Munich Centre for Global History. During their stay, they will work on a research project of their own choice. While the programme is open to all topics in global history or its neighbouring fields, we are particularly interested in proposals that engage with a new research focus on “global disconnections”. [more]
| | | Cindy Ermus, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas-San Antonio, has published an op-ed in The Washington Post on March 13.
Drawing analogies between the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and the Great Plague of Provence in 1720, she points out similarities in the political reaction, and warns readers against privileging market imperatives over containing the pandemic.
| | | Welcome to GUHP’s first President, Professor Carola Hein
Please join us in welcoming Professor Carola Hein as the first President of the Global Urban History Project. Professor Hein has served on the Project’s Board of Directors since its founding and has brought enormous energy to the field, both in her own work on Petroleumscapes, port cities, and oceans, but also in her work in forging GUHP’s close relationship with the International Planning History Society (IPHS), in addition to other vibrant networks. She has been tireless in linking global urban historians and public humanities projects and is a pioneer in open source publication. As Professor and Chair of the History of Architecture and Planning at Delft University of Technology, she has also supervised the work of numerous graduate students who have joined GUHP as members. She has won numerous awards and honors.
Professor Hein will serve a two-year term as GUHP President comprising 2020 and 2021 calendar years and, in collaboration with the entire membership, will take the lead in planning new events and programs.
As GUHP, like all academic associations, negotiates the very uncertain terrain that lies ahead, Prof. Carl Nightingale will remain as the Project’s Coordinator to assist Prof. Hein, the Board, the International Advisory Council, and GUHP staff in an executive director-type role.
| Please note that two conferences previously highlighted in "Noteworthy in Global Urban History" have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic:
The Lagos Studies Association conference in Lagos, Nigeria, June 25-27, 2020.
The International Planning History Society conference in Moscow Russia, July 5-8, 2020. | Interested in Organizing a GUHP Zoom Pro-Seminar?
| The announcement from Moscow very sadly also involves the cancelation of eight GUHP-co-sponsored panels that were organized by Professors Carola Hein, Rosemary Wakeman, and Li Hou. The list of the panels can be found on the GUHP website here.
Over the next few months, we will look into the possibility of running some of these panels and others as part of a series of GUHP ZOOM Pro-Seminars we hope to organize over the next year.
If you are interested in hosting one of these events, please contact Carl Nightingale at cn6@buffalo.edu. | | Erratum
In last month's edition of "Noteworthy in Global Urban History", we transcribed incorrectly the title of Sheetal Chhabria's 2019 book.
The correct title is Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay. Sincere apologies to the author and to our readers. | | | |