Brand New  River Cities, City Rivers
Edited by Thaïsa Way, Landscape Architecture,
University of Washington, USA
(Harvard University Press, 2018)

Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river. In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future. [more]

GUHP profile, Editor website

Brand New  Jerusalén, la ciudad imposible: Claves para comprender la ocupación israelí
by Meir Margalit
The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Israel
(Catarata, 2018)

Jerusalén is centered on the mechanisms put into practice by Israel in east Jerusalem during the last decade in order to reinforce the occupation and keep the Palestinians subjugated. It examines the manner by which this population reacted and was co-opted into the Israeli system. The analysis is centered on the deep changes wrought during the mayoralty of Nir Barkat (2008-2018). The book analyses the manner in which the conflation of the local consciousness of
the residents, who after 50 years of occupation became resigned to Israeli occupation, with the political instability within the Palestinian authority due to the Fatah–Hamas schism, the threats originating from Islamic fundamentalists in the neighboring countries, and the international processes put in motion by the moving of the American Embassy to Jerusalem, require a new paradigm to help define this new sui-generis situation. This book, therefore, deals with both ends of the stick: with Israeli policy, and with the reactions to it on the part of the Arab population. [more]

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More Argentine Than You: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants in Argentina
by Steven Hyland Jr., History and Political Science
Wingate University, USA
(The University of New Mexico Press, 2017)

Whether in search of adventure and opportunity or fleeing poverty and violence, millions of people migrated to Argentina in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the late 1920s Arabic speakers were one of the country’s largest immigrant groups. This book explores their experience, which was quite different from the danger and deprivation faced by twenty-first-century immigrants from the Middle East. Hyland shows how Syrians and Lebanese, Christians, Jews, and Muslims adapted to local social and political conditions, entered labor markets, established community institutions, raised families, and attempted to pursue their individual dreams and community goals. By showing how societies can come to terms with new arrivals and their descendants, Hyland addresses notions of belonging and acceptance, of integration and opportunity. He tells a story of immigrants and a story of Argentina that is at once timely and timeless. [more]


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“Ankerpunkte der Verflechtung: Hafenstädte in der neueren Globalgeschichtsschreibung” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft
by Lasse Heerten, Global History,
The Free University of Berlin, Germany
Vol 43, no. 1, March 2017, 146-175

This article undertakes a critical survey of the literature on port cities and contextualizes this body of scholarship within larger trends in the field. In the recent literature, port cities have predominantly been analyzed as “nodal points” or "gateways" within transnational and global networks. However, port cities can also remind us of the various efforts to control, limit, or prevent unwanted forms of mobility and entanglement, and thus help historians to develop empirically grounded global urban histories by providing a concrete narrative focal point. Moreover, port cities were the foremost sites where globalization could be experienced in the age of steam. Before the advent of containerization and flight traffic, ports were situated in the heart of rapidly growing urban centres, defining the economic life of these cities and global trade and transport. The current interest in port cities in the past is spurred by contemporary globalization -- but because it is so different from that of the steam age, and the port cities of this past have ceased to exist. [more]

The article is one of the first outcomes of the project "Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, the German Empire, and the Making of a Global Port", financed by the German Research Council. 

In the project, Lasse Heerten uses the port of Hamburg to develop a history of perceptions of global (and transnational, national, regional) entanglements within a setting of a rapid urbanization, thus combining global and urban history in what will develop into his second book. Together with Daniel Tödt, he organized an international workshop on "Imperial Port Cities". See their reflections on the workshop.

GUHP profile, Author website

Viscous Space: to Offshore Physicality of the North Sea between Solid and Liquid
Conference co-sponsored by GUHP 
June 20-22, 2018, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Urbanization processes coupled with shifting oceanic cycles have dramatically changed cities and landscapes in and around the North Sea over the centuries. However spatial pressure within the interpenetrating urban and ecological North Sea systems has reached unprecedented levels. How can the spatial disciplines address this condition? The conference gathers North Sea specialists from different disciplines and locations, as well as scholars who position their case-study within a wider historical, geographical or sociocultural context. We argue that it is vitally important to examine the spatial realm of the sea as a cultivated artefact in order to understand its past and therefore to imagine its (sustainable) future. Such an examination requires a combined cross-disciplinary effort to re-conceptualize the sea as the essential founding space of the region and an agent of urban development. How have historical processes of ocean urbanization reshaped our regional economic, social, cultural, and human environments both at sea and on land? [more]