Vol. 28, February 2021.
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. | | Interurban Knowledge Exchange in Southern and Eastern Europe, 1870-1950
edited by E. Gantner, H. Hein-Kircher, O. Hochadel
(Routledge, 2020)
Around 1900 cities in Southern and Eastern Europe were persistently labeled "backward" and "delayed." Allegedly, they had no alternative but to follow the role model of the metropolises, of London, Paris or Vienna. This edited volume fundamentally questions this assumption. It shows that cities as diverse as Barcelona, Budapest, Lviv, Milan, Moscow, Prague, and Zagreb pursued their own agendas of modernization. The solutions they gleaned from other cities were eclectic to fit the specific needs of a given urban space and were thus often innovative. Yet in the period around 1900, this transnational municipalism often clashed with the forging of urban and national identities, highlighting the tensions between the universal and the local.
| | | | Fractured Forest, Quartzite City. A History of Delhi and Its Ridge
by Thomas Crowley, Rutgers University, USA.
(Sage, 2020)
A sprawling megacity of nearly twenty million people, Delhi has forgotten its ecological history, a key part of which is the Ridge, often referred to as Delhi's ‘green lung’. At various points, Delhi has been a crucial hub of politics, warfare, trade and religious expansion on regional and global levels. Placing Delhi’s environment at the front and centre of its unique history, the book tells the tale of the Ridge, which resonates far beyond the boundaries of India's capital. The Ridge offers a crucial vantage point for viewing these historical and geographical interconnections. Its trees can't be separated from the stones below them, nor the cities that rose and fell around them. Only with this perspective does a clear picture of the Ridge—and Delhi as a whole—emerge.
| | | | "Conflating Blackness and Rurality: Urban Politics and Social Control of Africans in Guangzhou, China"
by Guangzhi Huang, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, USA.
Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, 2020
In April, 2020, amid widespread fear of the novel coronavirus in China, local authorities in Guangzhou cracked down on the city's black population, resulting in mass evictions of Africans. The incident raises several questions about racism in China. How should we interpret this heavy-handed treatment of black people? What motivated such operations? In this article, Huang explains social control of Guangzhou's African communities as a problem of municipal politics. What underlies the government's heavy handed approach, he argues, are those communities' ties to rurality, which constitute a roadblock in the city's urban upgrade.
[Access the article here]
| | | | The Archive Box #4 - The Worlds of the Paris Commune
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.
From the Parisian barricades to the Kabyle insurrection that same year, Quentin Deluermoz takes us through a discovery of the local and global archives of the Paris Commune, and argues in favor of a history that embraces different methods and approaches, to do justice to intense events reverberating across multiple scales. [more]
| | | The National Geographic Cartographic Archive
Over the National Geographic magazine’s 130-year history, maps have been an integral part of its mission. Now, for the first time, National Geographic has compiled a digital archive of its entire editorial cartography collection — every map ever published in the magazine since the first issue in October 1888. [more]
| Land Conflict Watch
Land Conflict Watch is a data-research project, which seeks to map and analyse ongoing land and resource conflicts in India. The project is undertaken by a network of researchers spread across India, who combine academic rigour with factual reportage to collect data that answers questions about land conflicts and their impact on the environment, industrial investments and people. [more]
| Related Networks and Events
| | International History Forum, The Graduate Institute Geneva
March-May 2021
The International History Forum (IHF) is a regular series of discussions convened by the International History Department at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies to discuss a variety of global questions from a multiplicity of historically-informed perspectives. This semester's programme features Megan Vaughan, Nicolas Vancel, M'hamed Oualdi, Julia Tischler, Noam Maggor, and Ogechukwu Williams. [more]
| | | | Archival Source - "The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata"
Oceanic Exchanges
The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata is an open access guide to a selection of newspaper databases around the world. Its initial selection is limited in scope, being comprised of the ten databases. Nonetheless, it aims to form the foundation of a wider mapping of collections beyond its current geographic focus. It brings together their histories and digitisation choices with a deeper look at the language of the digitised newspaper, the evolution of newspaper terminology and the variety of metadata available in these collections. [more]
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