Vol. 35, December 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. | Latest News // GUHP Dream Conversations
|  | "Cities and the Anthropocene"
Upcoming Event
Thursday, December 16, 2 PM UCT
"Mutualism and Parasitism: Cities and Environments in the Anthropocene"
A Conversation between Historians, Geologists, and Climate Scientists
INAUGURAL EVENT in GUHP's "Dream Conversation" on Cities and the Anthropocene
Minal Pathak, Senior Scientist at the Global Centre for Environment and Energy, Ahmedabad University, and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz, Professors, Department of Geology, Leicester University and
Members of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences
Julia Adeney Thomas*, Associate Professor of History, Notre Dame University
Co-Chairs: Carl Nightingale, Coordinator, the Global Urban History Project; Toby Lincoln, Centre for Urban History, Leicester University
NOTE: This is a Readers meet Authors event. Registrants will receive two items to read in advance:
"Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response," Chapter 4 of the IPCC Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5º C
"Mutualistic Cities of the Near Future," by Mark Williams, Gavin Brown, Minal Pathak, Moya Burns, Will Steffen, John Clarkson, Jan Zalasiewicz, Julia Adeney Thomas, Chapter 12 of Julia Adenay Thomas, ed., Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2022)
In addition, especially for those interested in continuing the Dream Conversation we strongly recommend purchasing:
Julia Adenay Thomas, Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) (Available in e-book form).
We decided to begin our conversation with two forward-looking texts by scientists working on cities in the Anthropocene. Naturally the future is a tricky subject for specialists of the urban past. Our goal is to explore how global urban historians and environmental urban historians can deepen or contextualize themes in these texts and how our research might take further inspiration from efforts to confront the many perils we face as residents of a heavily urbanized planet as it enters/entered the Anthropocene Epoch.
To participate, sign up here.
Registrants will receive readings and a zoom link for the event from GUHP.
* Erratum: In a previous announcement the name of one of the presenters was misspelled. The correct spelling is Julia Adeney Thomas.
| | The Neomercantilists. A Global Intellectual History
by Eric Helleiner (Cornell University Press, 2021)
Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.[more] | | | | Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience
edited by Se Hoon Park, Hyun Bang Shin and Hyun Soo Kang
(Routledge, 2021)
There is a tendency to use the development experience of Asian countries as a reference point for other countries in the Global South. Korea's condensed urbanization and industrialization, accompanied by the expansion of new cities and industrial complexes across the country, have become one such model, even if the fruits of such development may not have been equitably shared. The chapters in this book critically reassess the Korean urban development experience from regional policy to new town development, demonstrating how these policy experiences were deeply rooted in Korea's socioeconomic environment and discussing what can be learned from them when applying them in other developmental contexts. [more] | | | | "Flows and Fixes: Water, Disease, and Housing in Bangalore, 1860-1915"
by Aditya Ramesh
Urban History, Fall 2021
Using the city of Bangalore as a specific instance, this article puts together the framework of metabolic cities and techno-spheres to show how ecology and infrastructure constituted colonial cities. Divided between the colonial cantonment governed by the British and the petah or native market town/village governed by the Mysore prince, colonial medics were concerned by numerous diseases affecting the city. Attempts to control the flows of water from the cantonment to the native town proved futile. Amidst famine like conditions from the 1870s, chronic water shortages affected the city. In the 1890s, the plague struck Bangalore. The plague affected the barracks, streets, neighbourhoods and homes.
[Access the article here] | | | | "The Urban Parks in Nanjing, 1900s-2000s: A Brief Introduction"
by Zhen Xu
Planning Perspectives, Summer 2021
During the twentieth century Chinese urban parks germinated and then flourished against the backdrop of fluctuating social and political contexts. This short-narrative outlines the history of Nanjing’s urban parks from the 1900s to 2000s. The establishment and transformation of urban parks in Nanjing is mainly attributed to the elite, authorities and planners’ interweaving involvements etching on the urban palimpsest and historical geographical features, conditioned by the unstably social-political process.
[Access the article here] | | | Akkasah
Photography Archive
Akkasah, the Photography Archive at New York University Abu Dhabi, is home to an archive of the photographic heritage of the Middle East and North Africa. Akkasah is dedicated to documenting and preserving the diverse histories and practices of photography from the region, and our growing archive contains at present over 33,000 images. Akkasah undertakes and supports research on Middle Eastern and North African photography, as well as on cross-cultural and transnational aspects of photography, through conferences, colloquia and publications. It also commissions new documentary projects from contemporary photographers that are archived alongside the historical collections, and it is establishing a special collection of photographic albums, as well as of original photobooks from around the world.[Access the archive here]
| Related Networks and Events
| | "Living Heritage and Urban Informalities: Perspectives from Southeast Asia"
LSE Southeast Asia Centre -- December 6, 2021
SEAC hosts this roundtable discussion, in collaboration with the Bartlett Development Planning Unit and the Urban Salon. Heritage making has often focused on the built form, at the expense of leaving out intangible heritage and everyday life of communities. Living heritage is a concept that enables to rethinking of urban futures based on multiple temporal trajectories and alternative epistemologies of what gets valued in the city and whose spatial practices are legitimized. [more]
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