Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement
by Rosemary Wakeman, History, Fordham
(University of Chicago Press, 2016)

The typical town springs up around a natural resource—a river, an ocean, an exceptionally deep harbor—or in proximity to a larger, already thriving town. Not so with “new towns,” which are created by decree rather than out of necessity and are often intended to break from the tendencies of past development. New towns aren’t a new thing—ancient Phoenicians named their colonies Qart Hadasht, or New City—but these utopian developments saw a resurgence in the twentieth century. [more]

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Brand New  Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City
by Isabella Jackson, History, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
(Cambridge Press, 2017)

Shaping Modern Shanghai provides a new understanding of colonialism in China through a fresh examination of Shanghai's International Settlement. This was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854–1943), the International Settlement was beyond the control of the Chinese and foreign imperial governments. Jackson defines Shanghai's unique, hybrid form of colonial urban governance as transnational colonialism. The Council was both colonial in its structures and subject to colonial influence, especially from the British empire, yet autonomous in its activities and transnational in its personnel. This is the first in-depth study of how this unique body functioned on the local, national and international stages, revealing the Council's impact on the daily lives of the city's residents and its contribution to the conflicts of the period, with implications for the fields of modern Chinese and colonial history. [more]

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Brand New  Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City
by Andrew Diamond, History, Paris-Sorbonne (France)
(University of California Press, 2017)

Chicago on the Make offers a multi-layered history of the Windy City that fits within the same frame the microhistories of neighborhood formation and evolution, and the macrohistories of municipal politics and the structural transformations wrought by global capitalism. Its analysis contributes to the broader project of historicizing the evolution of urban societies during the neoliberal moment of capitalism, but, unlike previous accounts that have viewed the context of the mid 1970s as pivotal to a so-called "neoliberal turn," this new history of Chicago views neoliberalization as a process that unraveled gradually and unevenly over most of the twentieth century. [more]

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Global Urban History Blog

For our holiday greeting, Noteworthy salutes the intrepid threesome who bring us our very own Global Urban History blog: Editor-Professors Michael Goebel, Tracy Neumann, and Joseph Ben Prestel. If you want to give yourself the gift of global urban history this coming new year, sign up as a follower here. Among other things, you’ll be treated with Professor Cyrus Schayegh’s powerful and challenging recent post entitled Transpatialization: A New Heuristic Model to Think about Modern Cities.