“Anti-gentrification Campaigns and the Fight for Local Control in California Cities”
in New Global Studies
by Nancy Kwak, History, UC San Diego (USA)
Vol. 12, no. 1, Aril 2018, 9–20

Gentrification is integral to the functioning of global cities: international developers raze old housing and renovate industrial lofts for elite service workers seeking central-city accommodations. In the process, local real estate markets heat up and working-class residents find themselves priced out, displaced more often than not to peripheral sites of the global metropolis. In Californian communities in downtown and the east side of Los Angeles, the Mission in San Francisco, and Barrio Logan in San Diego, however, residents rejected this process of involuntary movement, instead arguing for the value of historically rich, rooted communities. In what appeared to be a wave of anti-global activism beginning in the 1980s, residents worked to regain control over their local communities through a variety of strategies including the deliberate deployment of local culture and arts, and the increasingly savvy use of media and public relations. With these tools, anti-gentrifiers asserted ownership without property titles, housing rights without mortgages, and community buy-in without cash deposits. Anti-gentrification movements thus constituted a direct challenge to the workings of the global city while also feeding into a global movement to restore political power to the grassroots.[more] 

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"Oil Spaces: The Global Petroleumscape in the Rotterdam/The Hague Area" in 
Journal of Urban History
by Carola Hein, Architecture, 
Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
February, 2018

As Middle Eastern cities weather the second decade of the twenty-first century, they face a number of challenges to their economic resilience, competitiveness, and internal stability. In this uniquely tense realm for the urban public, an understanding of the dynamics of decision-making processes, citizen power, and the rule of law is critical to the direction of policy in the future. In Order and Disorder, Luna Khirfan weaves a cross-national comparison of Amman and Cairo that dissects the many layers and complexities of urban governance. Through case studies on a diverse array of development projects and their associated challenges, the contributors demonstrate how three actors - the state, the market, and civil society - interact with each other within the same urban political space. [Full Text]


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Podcast: GUH Blog Editor Michael Goebel Speaks About His Work
on Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies
by Michael Goebel
Latin American Studies, Free University of Berlin (Germany)

How do nationalist ideas emerge, evolve, and spread? How do urban spaces and the migration of people factor in? Dr. Michael Goebel joins Steven to discuss the arc of his research, ranging from nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, to anti-imperialist activism in interwar Paris, to comparing urban inequality in specific global port cities between 1850 and 1950. He also comments on his interest.[Full podcast] 

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Centre for Urban History at Leicester

The Centre for Urban History (founded 1985) is a unique institution for the study of towns and cities. We see urban history as a meeting place where different disciplines come together to examine the city as a complex physical and social system in historical perspective. We share a dual perspective explaining how cities have evolved through time while promoting understanding of the historic environment today. The present focus of the Centre’s work is the urban history of Europe and Asia since 1700, encompassing local, national and international dimensions of the urban past. Our knowledge and expertise have a global as well as a local reach and we are strongly responsive to new areas of research. We aim to influence both scholarship and policy-making at the highest levels and to contribute to the development of cities in the future. Knowledge of the urban past generates knowledge for the present which has numerous applications in the areas of urban policy, heritage, sustainability and regeneration. Thus we not only promote excellence in teaching and research but seek to provide training, expertise and advice for future and current practitioners. Current staff research focuses upon the urban history of Britain, Ireland, Egypt, India and China from 1700 to 2000 and addresses the following themes: environmental urban history, concepts of urban heritage from 1700, colonial urban history, urban governance, oral history, the production of urban history from the eighteenth century, and the history of urban planning, housing and the built environment since 1750. [more]