 | Vol. 39, Summer 2022.
Dear Noteworthy readers: This past month, with much pride, GUHP marked its fifth birthday. Thanks to all who have supported conversations at the intersection of urban and global history across a tumultuous period in the history of scholarly discourse.
Thanks to both of our two first cohorts of Emerging Scholars who have shared their work with us, and to all of the scholars who shared their insights in our four Dream Conversations this past year. We look forward to continuing these events in the coming years. Finally, best wishes to Ayan Meer as he wraps up his role as GUHP’s communications specialist and turns to a culminating period of dissertation writing. This is au revoir but not adieu: we hope to feature his work soon, just as he has done for the work of so many other global urban historians over the past three years.
A new communications squad will be in touch in September with instructions on how to highlight new publications through GUHP. Meanwhile, don’t forget to update your profile on our site – and, as always, remember that we depend on your membership renewals to keep the lights on! We send all of you warmest wishes as you continue your valuable work.
| New Books by GUHP Members
| | Architecture and Development. Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958-1973
by Ayala Levin
(Duke University Press, 2022)
Focusing on the “golden age” of Israel’s diplomatic relations in and throughout the continent from 1958 to 1973, Levin finds that Israel positioned itself as a developing-nation alternative in the competition over aid and influence between global North and global South. In analyses of the design and construction of prestigious governmental projects in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia, Levin details how architects, planners, and a trade union--owned construction company staged Israel as a new center of nonaligned expertise. These actors and professionals capitalized on their settler colonial experience in Palestine, refashioning it as an alternative to Western colonial expertise. [more]
| | |  | | Earthopolis. A Biography of our Urban Planet
by Carl H. Nightingale
(Cambridge University Press, 2022)
This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and for ill. Carl Nightingale takes readers on a sweeping six-continent, six-millennia tour of the world's cities, culminating in the last 250 years, when we vastly accelerated our planetary realms of action, habitat, and impact. In Earthopolis we peek into our cities' homes, neighborhoods, streets, shops, eating houses, squares, marketplaces, religious sites, schools, universities, offices, monuments, docklands, and airports to discover connections between small spaces and the largest things we have built. The book exposes the Urban Planet's deep inequalities of power, wealth, access to knowledge, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. It asks us to draw on the most just and democratic moments of Earthopolis's past to rescue its future. [more]
| | | | Park, Tenement, Slaughterhouse. Elite Imaginaries of Buenos Aires, 1852-1880
by Antonio Carbone
(University of Chicago Press, 2022)
In the 1860s and 1870s, Buenos Aires was hit by a series of dramatic cholera and yellow fever epidemics that decimated its population and inspired extensive debates on urban space among its elites. The book takes readers into three intriguing spaces—the slaughterhouses, the tenements, and the park of Palermo—which found themselves at the center of the discussions about the causes of epidemic disease. The banning of industrial slaughterhouses from the city, reform of tenement houses, and construction of a major park promised to tackle the problem of disease while giving rise to new visions of the city. By analyzing the discussion on these spaces, the book illuminates critical spatial junctures at the crossroads of both local and global forces and reconstructs the interconnection between elite imaginaries and the production of space. [more] | | |  | | Properties of Rent. Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi
by Sushmita Pati
(Cambridge University Press, 2022)
We live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? This book looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into the Delhi's urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is 'rent' that could define this suburbanisation. 'Bhaichara', once a form of land ownership in colonial times, transforms into an affective claim of belonging, and managing urban property in the face of a steady onslaught from the 'city'. This book is a study of how vernacular form of capitalism shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city. [more]
| | | | Political Ecologies of Landscape.
Governing Urban Transformations in Penang.
by Creighton Connolly
(Bristol University Press, 2022)
Creighton Connolly uses ongoing urban redevelopment in Penang in Malaysia to provide stimulating new perspectives on urbanisation, governance and political ecology.
The book deploys the concept of landscape political ecology to show how Penang residents, activists, planners and other stakeholders mobilize new relationships with the urban environment, to contest controversial development projects and challenge hegemonic visions for the city’s future.
Based on six years of local research, this book provides both a dynamic account of region’s rapid reshaping and a fresh theoretical framework in which to consider issues of sustainable development, heritage and governance in urban areas worldwide. [more]
| | |  | South Asian Newspapers Archive
Centre for Research Libraries
With over 25,000 issues and nearly 200,000 digitised pages, the South Asian Newspapers collection chronicles 20th century South Asian conflicts as well as contemporary perspectives on independence movements, early statehood, and the extensive economic and social growth taking place in the region during this time. The collection covers several countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and features multiple languages such as Bengali, Dari, English, Nepali, and more. With reportage dating as far back as the 1850s, the South Asian Newspapers collection provides a wealth of coverage and perspectives on major regional and global events of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Open access to the South Asian Newspapers collection is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Center for Research Libraries and its member institutions. [Access the archives here]
| Related Networks and Events
| | Following the cancellation of the 2020 conference, due to the covid pandemic, and the cancellation of the 2022 event as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, the 19th IPHS Conference will be hosted by TU Delft in a hybrid format, with both online and in-person presentations. | | | | REMINDER: Deadline June 30
CfP - The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future
University of Leicester, 11-13 July 2023
From its origins, the Urban History Journal has been at the forefront of historical scholarship on the urban experience.The goal of this anniversary conference is to take stock of urban history as a discipline, its current theoretical underpinnings, methodologies and practices, and to consider its future goals and impact on the production of historical knowledge. Our hope is to spark a spirited debate on the concepts and approaches that inform urban histories and to reflect on new horizons for historical research on the urban condition. The organisers welcome a variety of sessions from traditional panels to roundtables, workshops, brainstorming sessions, film and digital presentations. We invite innovative thinking on how urban history is produced and shared as a scholarly endeavour.
Deadline for submission: June 30, 2022.
| | | | The British Academy Conference
The Gift of Architecture: Spaces of Global Socialism and their Afterlives
June 13-14, 2022
During the Cold War, the gifting of architecture was among the most visible manifestations of global socialism, or the multiple, evolving and often contradictory exchanges between the socialist countries and the decolonising world. In collaboration with local actors, Soviet, Eastern European and Chinese institutions designed, constructed and equipped hundreds of buildings in Ethiopia, Guinea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. This conference will gather architectural historians and anthropologists who will discuss the ways in which the dynamics of gift-giving impacted the design, construction and the afterlives of these buildings. [more]
| | | | Call for Papers - Southern Cultures
Black Geographies
Southern Cultures encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, Black Geographies,to be published Summer 2023. We will accept submissions for this issue through July 9, 2022.As Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson articulate about U.S. geography in Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life, “the maps are wrong.” In this issue, we invite submissions that upend dominant cartographies of the Global South, that ignore accepted spatial boundaries to tether spaces considered separate, and trace stories across spaces with names absented from current maps. [more] | | | | Landscapes of Injustices - Past Wrongs, Future Choices
Postdoctoral Fellowships
The Past Wrongs, Future Choices (PWFC) partnership invites applicants for a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria, Canada. Through the networks of a multi-sector international partnership, PWFC scholars will contribute directly to museum exhibitions and teacher resources on four continents to promote civic learning and democratic deliberation on a global scale. Applicants are encouraged to consider how their own existing program of research might fit into, and be enriched by, connection to and involvement in international and collaborative writing projects in association with PWFC.[more]
| | | |