Vol. 41, March 2023
Have you published something new in Global Urban History? Are you hosting a conference, workshop, or event? We'd like our members to know!
Email us with the details
Need to catch up on your Global Urban History?
The restructured GUHP website lists upcoming events, links to videos of past events, and a new Noteworthy in Global Urban History archive, filled with useful bibliographic details.
GUHP is a member-supported organization.
Join or renew your membership now | Announcing GUHP Essay Prizes for Emerging Scholars
Up to three GUHP Essay Prizes will be awarded annually to early-career scholars for unpublished essays associated with graduate and post-graduate work in the field of Global Urban History. Eligible applicants should be GUHP members and can include graduate students, post-graduate scholars not in a tenure-track position, or early career scholars in the first three years of a tenure track position at the time of submission. Scholars who work at institutions in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are especially encouraged to apply, as are scholars who work on periods before 1850.
Essays must be no longer than 8,000 words in English inclusive of citations, be based on original research, contain full citations to archival and relevant secondary sources, and engage with critical themes in global urban history. Essay topics can include studies of cities as creations and creators of larger-scale historical phenomena of all kinds - from empires and capitalism to global cultural communities and ecosystems; of connective, cross-border, ocean-, river- or borderland urban history; of comparative or connective urban histories; of urban environmental history; and/or studies that in general expand historical research to cities and urban regions that are underrepresented in the current urban historical literature.
The Prize Committee will use the following criteria for evaluating essays for the essay prizes and any honorable mention the committee sees fit to award: clarity and strength of the argument, significance, originality, use of evidence, and depth of engagement with critical themes in global urban history.
Applicants should submit a single PDF file containing the text of the essay with a header or footer on each page indicating author’s copyright and permission to circulate among GUHP Essay Prize Committee members only, followed by a 2-page cv containing contacts for references, via email to GUHP Prizes Committee Chair Li Hou by Friday Sept 29, 2023.
Winners will be announced by the end of 2023 on the GUHP website, in Noteworthy in Global Urban History, on the Global Urban History blog, and on social media. Each winner will receive a monetary award of US$100 and a certificate. Winners are highly encouraged to submit their essays for publication in an urban history journal.
| Upcoming GUHP Virtual Events |  | | Dream Conversation on Theory Of, For, and By Urban Historians “Trialogue”: GUHP Meets Uta-DO African Urban Studies Workshop
March 31, 2023, 1:00 UTC
This roundtable follows upon last year's discussions of "Urban Theory from the Global South" and inaugurates a multi-year, multi-disciplinary collaboration between the Global Urban History Project (GUHP) and the Nairobi-based UTA-DO African Cities Workshop -- an annual “venue for critical African urban scholarship development and collaboration.” Participants will seek to tackle an array of questions, including: How may historical scholarship contribute to ongoing debates on and solutions to majority-world urban challenges? How do these challenges invite widened perspectives on the global urban past?
- Moderators: Wangui Kimari, Uta-DO and Kenny Cupers and Carl Nightingale, GUHP
- Main Presenter: Kanishka Goonewardena, University of Toronto
Register for Zoom link
|  | Dream Conversation on Cities, Empires, and (Dis)Contents paper presentations
April 6, 2023, 12:00 UTC
- Sohini Chattopadhyay: “The urban in the history and sociology of science”
- Umit Firat Acikgoz: “The Problem of Continuity”
Dream Conversation on Cities, Empires, and (Dis)Contents paper presentations
May 4, 2023, 11:00 UTC
- Dries Lyna: “Institutional(ized) Inequality? Access to Justice in Cities across VOC Asia”
- Mohd Aquil: Medical panics and the restructuring of urban spaces in Colonial North India
- Taoyu Yang: “Multi-Imperial Entanglements and Spatial Configuration in Treaty-Port Tianjin, 1860s-1940s”
| | |
 | | Featured Publication
Intervention Symposium - Urban Theory from the Global South
Antipode Online, March 13, 2023
This issue of Antipode features the organizers and presenters at last year's GUHP event on Urban Theory from the Global South – watch it now on GUHP Vids!
In the quest to identify and clarify universal definitions of core concepts, examples from the Global South challenging Eurocentric narratives have too often been pushed to the side as marginal or exceptional. Parallel to these normative conversations, however, scholars of the Global South have, over the last 20+ years, been generating their own theories of “the city.” The pieces presented here seek to directly address this ongoing challenge by centering the work of emerging scholars from the Global South.[more]
- Urban Theory Futures are Turbulent, Vernacular, and Incomplete (and that’s okay) by Jennifer Hart (Wayne State University) and Stephen Marr (Malmö University)
- Doing Urban History in the Global South by Anwesha Ghosh (National Law School of India University)
- “We are all taxonomists”: Vernaculars of Geological Time from Southern Margins by Wangui Kimari (University of Cape Town)
- Researching (from) the Global South: Recasting Our Gaze through the Lens of Incompleteness by Prince K. Guma (University of Sheffield)
- A Look at the Global South’s Urban History through the Lens of Its Informal Neighborhoods by Rafael Soares Gonçalves (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
- Conclusion: Turbulent Urbanities by AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield)
|  | | Related Network Event Spotlight
UN Side Events at New York Water Week
Events organized under the auspices of Carola Hein and the UNESCO Chair of Water, Ports, and Historic Cities
UN of Rivers, March 19-23, 2023
This side event focuses on the role of rivers, deltas and estuaries worldwide in the sustenance of mankind. It explores their role in achieving SDG 6 and other goals and targets, for example, justice between upstream and downstream communities. It acknowledges the vulnerabilities and potential of water bodies. The side event calls for a transformative, socially and culturally inclusive approach acknowledging humans and non-humans. It combines local stories with global narratives in a multi-scalar approach, enabling design-thinking and artistic interventions for the implementation of the Water Action Agenda.
Water and Heritage, March 20-21, 2023
The Dushanbe Declaration of 2022, "Water for Sustainable Development", states that we need to "accelerate our efforts for coherent implementation of water-related goals and achievement of targets of the 2030 Agenda and aim at strengthening political and technical dialogue on water, including at the highest level." This urgent call for action happens on the brink of the UN Conference on the Midterm Comprehensive Review of the Implementation of the Objectives of the International Decade for Action "Water for Sustainable Development" to be convened in New York March 22-24, 2023.
Schedule and registration information | | City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport
by Romit Chowdhury
(Rutgers University Press, 2023)
In South Asian urban landscapes, men are everywhere. And yet we do not seem to know very much about precisely what men do in the city as men. How do men experience gender in city spaces? What are the interactional dynamics between different groups of men on city streets? How do men adjudicate conduct in urban spaces? Through ethnographic descriptions of copresence on public transport in Kolkata, this book brings into sight the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities.[more]
| | | |
Pandemic Urbanism: Infectious Diseases on a Planet of Cities
by S. Harris Ali, Creighton Connolly, and Roger Keil
(Wiley, 2023)
The authors reveal the social and historical context of recent infectious disease events and how they have variously transformed the urban fabric. They highlight the important role played by socio-ecological processes associated with the global urban periphery – suburban or post-suburban zones and hinterland areas of “extended” urbanization – changing mobility patterns, and new forms of urban governance and pandemic response. The book develops novel insights for post-pandemic urban governance and planning grounded in the quest for social and spatial justice.[more]
| | | | Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London
by Stephen Legg
(Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.[more]
| | | | Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth Century Australia
by James Lesh
(Routledge, 2023)
Integrating urban history and heritage studies, this book provides the first longitudinal study of the twentieth-century Australian heritage movement. It advocates for innovative and reflexive modes of heritage practice responsive to urban, social, and environmental imperatives. As the values-based model continues to shape conservation worldwide, this book is an essential reference for researchers, students, and practitioners concerned with the past and future of cities and heritage.[more]
| | | | Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History
by Mary M. Burke
(Oxford University Press, 2023)
This cultural history of centuries of Irish presence in the Americas that pays attention to New York, Boston, and especially Philadelphia, whose complex intra-Irish ethnic tensions is argued to have impacted the careers of both actress Grace Kelly and her father, John B. Kelly, Chair of the Philadelphia County Democratic Party from 1937.[more]
| | | | The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South
Edited by Harriet Harriss, Ashraf M. Salama, and Ane Gonzalez Lara
(Routledge, 2023)
This volume resituates and recenters an array of pedagogic approaches that are either produced or proliferate from the ‘Global South’ while antagonizing the linguistic, epistemological and disciplinary conceits that, under imperialist imperatives, ensured that these pedagogies remained maligned or marginalized.[more]
| | | |
La Forja del Extrarradio: La Construcción del Madrid Popular (1860-1936)
by Charlotte Vorms, translated by Juan Córdoba
(Comares, 2022)
El campo madrileño, entre el último tercio del siglo XIX y el primero del XX, fue el escenario donde se inventó otra forma de modernidad urbana que no es la que más reseñan los libros de historia. A ras de suelo, el de la meseta castellana, este libro reconstruye desde abajo la actividad de los hombres y mujeres que dieron origen a esta sociedad popular urbana. Muestra de qué manera sus interacciones con las autoridades públicas siguieron primero los cauces de organización del poder propios de la Restauración, y luego los de las movilizaciones políticas que condujeron al advenimiento de la Segunda República. La forja del extrarradio es también la de la ciudadanía urbana moderna.[more]
| | | | The Urban Spatial Pattern of the Pseudo-Colonial City in Southeast Asia: A Case Study of the Eastern Area of Bangkok, Thailand, during the Thai-Imperialism Period (1855-1932)
by Nicha Tantivess and David Edelman
Journal of Urban History, March 2023
This article discusses the urban spaces of the pseudo-colonial city via the urban transformation in the eastern area of Bangkok between 1855 and 1932. During this period, the Thai royal government was under pressure from colonialism in the Southeast Asian region. To prevent colonization of the country, the kings aimed to strengthen their economic and political powers through administrative reform, educational development, infrastructure construction, and land commodification. Thus, the urban spaces in Bangkok were significantly transformed.[more] | | | Workshops, Conferences, and Trainings | | Urban History Group Conference: Recovery and the City
University of Warwick, March 30-31, 2023
The theme at this year’s conference is the notion of recovery in the developing scholarship on urban history across all time periods. How, for example, do cities and those who live, work and govern there remember, and recover from, episodes and events that disrupt or reshape the economies, networks, cultures, societies and processes that characterise urban space and life? Furthermore, how might historians interrogate the notion of recovery, and related concepts such as renaissance and growth, decline and decay, to uncover the inherent assumptions, biases and limitations that lie at the heart of historical periodization?[more]
| | | | Refugee Cities: Symposium on the Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement
Columbia University, April 27-28, 2023
The Refugee Cities Working Group’s concerns lie at the intersection of urban studies on the one hand and, on the other, the humanistic and social justice-oriented study of the mass movement of people fleeing violence, war and forced removal. This symposium will focus on the impact of refugees on cities and urban processes, both in the present moment and as a historical phenomenon. A keynote lecture will take place on the evening of Thursday, April 27, with all other presentations scheduled throughout the day on Friday, April 28.[more]
| | | | Worlds Apart? Futures of Global History International Conference
Vienna, Austria, May 25-26, 2023
Taking recent criticism of global history as a starting point, the event seeks to discuss the future pathways of global history. Where is the field of global history headed and how can a more decentralized and diverse practice be achieved? What methods, narratives, and historiographical traditions need to be included to open the field to a broader range of scholars? What does a fairer global history look like?[more] | | | CFP: European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Conference, Cities at the Boundaries
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
EAUH invites scholars to discuss both the boundaries of social and economic development related to cities and urban agglomeration, as well as a wide array of topics related to cities which lay on geographic-, state-, as well as other borders. The EAUH 2024 specifically welcomes all topics related to the environmental problems and sustainable development of cities, such as post-industrial transformation, modernization of public infrastructure, and social housing.[more]
Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2023
| CFP: Lagos Studies Association panels at African Studies Association Meeting
San Francisco,November 30 - December 2, 2023
If you would like to participate in one of the Lagos Studies Association panels, send a 250-word proposal and short bio to
the Lagos Studies Association.
Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2023
| CFP: European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Online Symposium on Exchanges: European Cities and the Wider Urban World
Virtual event, September 23, 2023
The EAUH will hold a one-day online symposium focusing on cultural and material exchanges between urban Europe and the wider urban world, extending across all historical periods. Our aim is to contribute to the larger global urban history currently being written by helping to situate European cities, not solely as the locus of post/colonial power but also as sites of exchange. Exchange might include one or more of the following:
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Movements of people and goods
- Trade flows and relationships
- Cultural exchange: foods, street naming, statuary, etc.
- Transformation of technologies e.g. sanitation, across urban settings
- Architecture and planning: collaborations and influences
- The export and import of ideas between urban spaces
Above all, we are looking for presentations that stimulate new thinking about the relationship of urban Europe with other parts of the world. The conference committee welcomes proposals (max 300 words) from scholars at all career levels, including graduate students, and that address diversity. Notification of Acceptance: June 2023.
Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2023
| |
CFP: Workshop: Imagining Emancipation in the Atlantic World, 1750-1888
University of Exeter, June 2-3, 2023
The concept of emancipation has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Historians like Kris Manjapra and critical theorists such as Rinaldo Walcott have exposed the troubling extent to which the emancipation of enslaved people in the Atlantic world was a false dawn; a managed process that ushered in, at best, a partial freedom for Black and African diasporic people who continued to be subjected to various forms of unfreedom and white domination across post-slavery societies. But there exists an underexplored gap between how emancipation was imagined in colonial, metropolitan, imperial, and national contexts, and how it was eventually enacted. The workshop will prioritize a multiplicity of voices – both in terms of who is studied and in terms of the disciplinary background of who studies them. Our overall approach will be global, focusing on similarities, differences, and mutual influences when it came to imagining emancipation across the Atlantic world. We will ask: how did local or regional contexts shape interpretations of emancipation? How did ideas about emancipation travel across borders? How did proposals for emancipation draw inspiration from those developed in other contexts? How were ideas grown in specific contexts, or adapted and received abroad? Participants are not obliged to take an international approach, but our aim is to bring together researchers in ways that will emphasize and explore trans-Atlantic connections.[more]
Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2023
| CFP: Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Midwest World History Association
Roosevelt University (Chicago, IL), September 22-23, 2023
The Midwest World History Association is pleased to announce a call for paper, poster, panel, roundtable, and workshop proposals for its annual conference to be held at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois on September 22-23, 2022. The conference theme is “Outcasts, Pariahs, and Criminals: Histories of Others and Othering.” This theme builds off of last year’s “Difficult Histories” by highlighting the histories of and by those who have been othered. As many political leaders move to “shield people from feeling ‘discomfort’ over historic actions by their race, nationality or gender,” this theme is intended to invite presentations and discussions on how world historians at all levels – high school, community college, or university - can best create spaces within which to explore, share, teach and learn about contested topics.[more]
Deadline for proposals: May 15, 2023
| CFP: Gender & History special issue on the theme of gendered segregation/gendering segregation
Gender & History is an international journal for research and writing on the history of gender and gender relations, including (but not limited to) masculinity and femininity. This Special Issue will examine segregation, broadly understood, exploring how segregation has reflected and constructed gender across time and space. This Special Issue welcomes submissions from scholars studying any country or region, and any historical period, including the classical, medieval, early modern, and the modern. Special Issue Editors: Daniel Grey (University of Hertfordshire), Lisa Hellman (Bonn University), Julia Hillner (Lund University), Rachel Jean-Baptiste (University of California Davis).[more]
Deadline for proposals: May 31, 2023 | |