Vol. 46, August 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!
GUHP is a member-supported organization.
| 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Up to three GUHP Essay Prizes will be awarded annually to early-career scholars for unpublished essays associated with graduate and post-graduate work in the field of Global Urban History.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.[more]
Application deadline: September 29, 2023 | Related Network Event Spotlight |  | | EAUH Online Symposium
Exchanges: European Cities and the Wider Urban World
September 6, 2023
A special academic event hosted by the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp
Convenors: Simon Gunn and Rosemary Wakeman
This one-day symposium focuses on cultural and material exchanges between urban Europe and the wider urban world. Our aim is to contribute to debates in global urban history by helping to situate European cities not solely as the locus of post/colonial power but also as sites of exchange. The symposium brings together early and senior researchers in a broad-ranging discussion and new thinking about urban Europe and other parts of the world. Event is free but registration is required.
Schedule
9.00-10:00 CET Start of Zoom meeting, have a coffee at home
10.00-10.15 CET Symposium opening
⁃ A warm welcome by the EAUH & CSG – Ilja Van Damme & Greet De Block (Centre for Urban History – Urban Studies Institute, University of Antwerp)
⁃ Opening remarks – Simon Gunn (University of Leicester) and Rosemary Wakeman (Fordham University)
10.15-11.00 CET Debating Exchanges 1
Astrid Swenson (University of Bayreuth) – Exchanges, adaptations and contestations in urban conservation across Europe and the Mediterranean
11.00-11.15 CET Coffee break
11.15-12.15 CET Exchanges Session 1: Regulating Modernities
⁃ Katherine Vyhmeister (University of Edinburgh) – From a European notion to a local phenomenon: Tracing the role of police in the production of local public works in late colonial Chile
⁃ David Schley (Hong Kong Baptist University/University of East Anglia) – Gendarmes, Bobbies, and Cops: The NYPD Looks to Europe
⁃ Nicole Davis (University of Melbourne) – ‘One of the Sights of the Colony’: Australia’s Nineteenth-century Arcades, Modernity, Consumer Culture, and Local/Global Connections’
2.15-1.00 CET Debating Exchanges 2
Marion Pluskota (Leiden University) – ‘Souvenir d’Amsterdam’: World exhibitions and migration of sex workers in the late 19th century
1.00-1.45 CET Lunch break
1.45-2.00 CET EAUH2024
Andrea Pokludova (University of Ostrava) – Presenting EAUH 2024, Cities at the Boundaries
2.00-2.45 CET Debating Exchanges 3
Michael Goebel (Free University, Berlin) – The Unmaking of Black Monserrat: Race, European Immigration, and Real Estate in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires
2.45-3.45 CET Exchanges Sessions 2: Urban Ideas
⁃ Eliane Schmid (University of Luxembourg) – (Re-)Building Marseille's Port and Parks: Socio-Spatial Differentiations, Public Policies, and Migration (1945-1973)
⁃ Fikriye Karaman (Samsun University, Turkey) – Ottoman Travellers’ Views of Education in European Cities in the Nineteenth Century
⁃ Kristian Taketomo (University of Pennsylvania) – Lost in Translation: The City in International Statistics
3.45-4.00 CET Coffee break
4.00-4.45 CET Conference Keynote Lecture
Peter Stabel (University of Antwerp) – The Blessings and Curses of Comparative History: Writing an Urban History of Medieval Europe and the Islamic World
4.30-4.45 CET Concluding remarks – Simon Gunn and Rosemary Wakeman
| | Urban Disasters
By Cindy Ermus
Cambridge University Press, 2023
This Element explores the history of urban disasters around the globe over the last three-hundred years. It introduces the reader to central concepts that help define the study of disasters, then moves on to explore the relationship between cities and disasters including earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, and epidemics. It asks, for example: How have cities responded in times of crisis, and what practices, infrastructures, and/or institutions have they introduced to prevent disasters from reoccurring? Who suffers most when urban disasters strike, and why? In what ways do catastrophes change cities? How, if at all, are cities unique from the countryside? [more]
| | | | Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure
By Dirk van Laak
The MIT Press, 2023
Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes.[more]
| | | | Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture before and after 1991
by Kateryna Malaia
Cornell University Press, 2023
Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room investigates what happens to domestic spaces, architecture, and the lives of urbanites during a socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late 1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet citizens.
[more]
| | | | Creativity from Suburban Nowheres: Rethinking Cultural and Creative Practices
edited by Ilja Van Damme, Ruth McManus, and Michiel Dehaene
University of Toronto Press, 2023
Looking at suburbs as places of creativity gives rise to novel and thought-provoking narratives that typically run counter to the idea that suburbs are sites of "ordinary," "mundane," and "everyday" practices. Far from being geographies of "nowhere" – dull, materialistic, and monotone – suburbs are unpacked as being heterogeneous and historically layered places of living, work, and creation. Situating creativity in place and time, Creativity from Suburban Nowheres displaces mainstream understandings of creativity and widespread stereotypes commonly associated with the suburbs.[more]
| | | | Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin
by Andrew Brandel
University of Toronto Press, 2023
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.[more]
| | | | In the Streets of Le Cap: A Digital Mapping Project
by Carrie Glenn and Camille Cordier
Age of Revolutions, July 17, 2023
A new transatlantic digital humanities mapping project-in-the-works, In the Streets of Le Cap (streetsoflecap.com), will immerse researchers in this eighteenth-century port town and in dwellings like that owned by the Lemesles. Based on three surviving cadastres, the project will allow visitors to access for the first-time historical data on nearly every building in the town, administrative and religious insitutions excepted. Some of this historical data relates to the buildings themselves (value, building materials) while other data centers on those who owned or resided in these buildings. [more]
| | | Conferences, Workshops, and Events | |
Listening In: Conversations on Architectures, Cities, and Landscapes, 1700-1900
ETH Zurich, September 13-15, 2023
Who do we listen to when we write histories of architectures, cities, and landscapes? How many women authors can we find among our sources? How many of them are cited by those whose research we read? We argue that women and other marginalised groups have always been part of conversations on architectures, cities, and landscapes - but we have not had the space to listen to them. This conference is an invitation to reconstruct such conversations, real, imagined, and metaphorical ones, taking place in the 18th and 19th centuries, in any region, in order to diversify the ways we write histories. Taking the art of conversation, integral as both practice and form to the period in Western thought, and repurposing it to dismantle the exclusivity of historiography, this conference calls for contributions which bring women into dialogue with others.[more]
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2024 African Critical Inquiry Programme Workshop: Multispecies Stories from a Southern City
University of Cape Town, 2023-24
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2024 ACIP Workshop will be Multispecies Stories from a Southern City. The project was proposed by organisers Shari Daya and Pippin Anderson, both in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at University of Cape Town. It will take place in a series of gatherings across different sites in Cape Town, South Africa in 2023-2024. Information about applying to organize the 2025 ACIP workshop and for the 2024 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards will be available in November 2023.[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Colonialism and Development
Yearbook for the History of Global Development
The historical understanding of the multifaceted trajectories of development – as a set of contested discourses, as multiple institutional complexes and as a heterogenous repertoire of policies and practices – has evolved significantly in the past few years. We now have a rich literature that engages with the diverse contexts, dynamics and problems of development and its intersection with other major historical phenomena of the twentieth century, such as the institutionalization of international organizations, the intensification of urbanization and industrialization, the widening of globalizing dynamics and global integration, decolonization, and the emergence of the ‘Cold War’ and the ´Third World’. This volume aims to register many of these historiographical achievements specifically as they relate to colonialism offering a critical overview of existing scholarship and documenting its variety and richness, while also probing existing chronologies (e.g., the colonial/postcolonial) and geographies of development.[more]
Submission Deadline: August 30, 2023
| CFP: African Urban Echoes
The Flute
African urban space anthology The Flute is looking for submissions highlighting the tales of African cities. The anthology is looking to publish works in the genre of poetry and photography focusing on African urban spaces such as Lagos, Accra, Kinshasa, Lonligwe, Durban, Marrakesh, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Dakar, Luanda, Yaounde, and more.[more]
Submission deadline: September 1, 2023
| CFP: UTA-Do 2024 Cities Workshop
January 29-February 2, 2024
Dar es Salaam
Early-career academics, researchers, activists, and artists interested in urban theory in Africa: apply now to be a part of the third UTA-Do African Cities Workshop. The UTA-Do workshop aims to create a space where young scholars and those who are doing – art and activism and (non) academia – engage with academic debates and theories. The weeklong program is structured around theoretical inputs, discussion panels, writing sessions, field trips, and arts immersion activities.[more]
Submission Deadline: September 15, 2023
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CFP: The war of the waves revisited. Cultural and political uses of radio within contexts of domination
RadioMorphoses thematic issue n°11
This thematic issue will gather researchers working on radio in contexts characterized by domination. Although it will especially welcome articles focusing on the uses of radio in colonial settings, in situations characterized by racial domination or ethnic domination, proposals relating to the wider field of domination (social, cultural, gendered, etc.) can be considered. The central question at the basis of this volume will analyze the dynamics binding together radio, community and power; either in aiming to reproduce social hierarchies or to contest it.[more]
Submission deadline: September 18, 2023
| CFP: Modern Infrastructural Histories and the Global South panel
World Congress of Environmental History
Oulu, Finland, August 19-23, 2024
How can viewing the history of infrastructure from the Global South change our thinking about the making of modern environments? This panel aims to bring together scholars to discuss the diverse histories of modern infrastructure in the Global South, from the plantation to the internet cable. This panel is part of the work towards a proposed new handbook for the global history of modern infrastructure. The organisers invite contributions from scholars at all career stages working on any aspect of the history of infrastructure in the Global South from the 1700s to the present.[more]
Submission deadline: September 18, 2023
| CFP: Constructing climate coloniality in Africa: Histories, knowledges and materialities panel at the World Congress of Environmental History
Oulu, Finland, August 19-23, 2024
This panel interrogates the historical emergence of climate coloniality in African former colonial contexts. It draws upon a diversity of colonial experiences to examine the multidirectional relationships between ‘Western’ and local weather and climate knowledges and material practices.[more]
Submission deadline: September 18, 2023
| CFP: Borders, Infrastructures, and Placed in the Modern City (Session M11)
Sixteenth Conference of the European Urban History Association
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
This session explores the urban dimension of infrastructural development over the last two-hundred and fifty years, both in terms of how infrastructures have transformed cities and how urban dynamics have shaped infrastructure. This brings together histories of matter, energy and people to produce entangled histories of cities as environments.We welcome scholars working on these themes from across the world and at all career stages, in order to compare and explore the impact of the movements of goods and commodities on space across a wide variiety of urban contexts across the modern period. We would be delighted to receive proposals from scholars working with new sources or pioneering approaches, working in environmental humanities, digital history, social history, histories of technology and infrastructure and beyond.[more]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2023
| CFP: Tange transnational – Japanese futures for European cities (Session S22)
Sixteenth Conference of the European Urban History Association
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
Modern ideas about urban futures easily transcend national boundaries. However, until the 1950s, urban theory and architectural design concepts invariably originated in Europe or in the US, and the resulting global flow of ideas was mainly unidirectional "from the West to the rest." Around 1960, the flow finally began to change direction when Tange Kenzō (1913-2005) became the first non-Western architect whose ideas were received globally. This resulted in a variety of influences, ranging from inspirations for certain single buildings or megastructures designed or built by European architects to the actual realisation of cities or parts of cities in Europe by Tange‘s office (e.g., Skopje, Bologna). The panel aims at examining Tange's influence on European architecture and urban planning in a comprehensive way. We aim to understand why he became accepted as part of the Western-dominated global avant-garde of architects, and how his ideas and projects have shaped European discourses on urban futures.[more]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2023
| CFP: Architecture, Villages, and their Entangled Histories: Rural-urban Encounters in the Islamic World (Session S15)
Sixteenth Conference of the European Urban History Association
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
The historiography of architecture and urbanism in the Islamic world has mostly focused on cities and urban communities. This panel invites papers, which explore the making of villages and rural forms of governance over space in the Islamic world in interaction with urban centers and communities.[more]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2023
| Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | Cities in Historical Perspective Grants
Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest
The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University is pleased to announce a new funding opportunity to support public-facing historical projects related to the theme of “Cities in Historical Perspective.” The Center will fund up to five projects that creatively illustrate how historical study can further public understanding of cities in the present moment by creatively engaging with the broad range of questions, concerns, policies and practices raised by the study of the role of cities in history, and how historical study can further public understanding of the present moment.[more]
Application deadline: September 3, 2023
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