Vol. 26, December 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. | | Moscow Monumental. Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital
by Katherine Zubovich, University of Buffalo, USA.
(Princeton University Press, 2020)
In the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old metropolis was reinvented to embody Stalinist society. Moscow Monumental explores how the architectural works of the late Stalin era fundamentally reshaped daily life in the Soviet capital. This book tells a story that is both local and broadly transnational, taking readers from the streets of interwar Moscow and New York to the marble-clad halls of the bombastic postwar structures that continue to define the Russian capital today. [more] | | | | Building Socialism. The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam
by Christina Schwenkel, University of California, USA.
(Duke University Press, 2020)
Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In this book, Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. [more] | | | | "Seeing Like a Khedivate: Taxing endowed agricultural land, proofs of ownership, and the land administation in Egypt, 1869"
by Adam Mestyan, Duke University, USA.
Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, November 2020
Theories of state modernization rarely consider the relationship between sovereignty and government capacity. This paper focuses on the khedivate of Egypt, a semi-independent province in the Ottoman Empire. Its claim is that endowed agricultural land was a useful tool of fiscal modernization for the khedivial government. In order to support this claim, this study uses an 1869 endowment certificate of Hoşyar, mother of Khedive Ismail, to examine the regulatory context of endowed agricultural land. This case study thus contributes to the discussion about the compatibility of the Muslim endowment with modernization.
[Access the article here] | | | | The Archive Box #2 - Japanese Judokas, Brazilian Black Belts
The Archive Box is a series featuring global urban historians reflecting on their archival experience, and on the practical and theoretical challenges they faced while working with a variety of archives in different cities across the world.
While chronicling the encounters of Japanese fighters traveling across the urban centers of Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century, João Júlio Gomes dos Santos Júnior discusses the value of a history that does not pay lip service to nationalist narratives, offers advice on doing research in Brazil, and highlights the difficulties historians in the Global South face in accessing putatively global archives. [Access the article here]
| | | "Decolonisations"
A documentary by Karim Miské and Marc Ball
How to synthesize, in less than three hours, one hundred and fifty years of a global history which reactivates in the present day fractures and demands for justice? To retrace this hidden past which continues to concern each of us intimately, the filmmakers have chosen to weave chronologically large and small histories, continents and events. First, by telling the story from the point of view of the colonized, they take the opposite view of a historical narrative which until now, however critical it may be towards the crimes of colonization, reflects the gaze of colonizing Europe. Then, because to embrace the essential facts of almost two centuries in countries as different as, say, India and the Congo is impossible, they have chosen to shine the spotlight on a series of destinies and iconic fights—some famous, others unknown. [Access the film here]
| Related Networks and Events
| | Crisis Cities Symposium
Public Books and NYU Cities Collaborative
The 2020 crises have, above all, put a spotlight on the distinctive and often corrosive features of modern urbanism. Just as COVID-19 is particularly dangerous to populations with preexisting conditions, the virus has ferociously swept through urban areas because of their preexisting social conditions: the precarity of work; the unaffordability of housing; the depth of racial, ethnic, and class divides; a profoundly unequal global economy; and the failure of many governments worldwide to rise to the challenges. "Crisis Cities" is a public symposium on the 2020 crises and their impact on urban life, co-organized by Public Books and the NYU Cities Collaborative. [more]
| | | | Call for Papers: "The Coloniality of Infrastructure"
University of Basel (online), 12-15 January 2021.
This conference proposes to explore historical continuities in Africa’s relationship with Europe through the lens of infrastructure. What are the infrastructural histories that bind the unequal destinies of people together across continents, and how do these legacies shape contemporary lifeworlds and international relations? How does infrastructural violence shape international relations between Africa and Europe, and how is the legacy of Eurafrica manifested in the spaces of everyday life? [more] | | | |