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Global Urban History Project

Date: 1/6/2019
Subject: Noteworthy in Global Urban History
From: Guangzhi Huang



Vol. 13 January 2019.
Order these titles for your personal and university libraries.
Check out Global Urban History-related CFPs below.
 
Have you published something new in Global Urban History?
We'd like our members to know.
Contact Guangzhi Huang, GUHP Communications Editor with details.
 
New opportunity for 2019: Curate a GUHP-endorsed panel at a favorite conference!
Support your own proposal and GUHP at the same time.
Benefit from GUHP-sponsored outreach and publicity.
Interested? Please contact Carl Nightingale, Project Coordinator
 
GUHP is now a member-supported organization. To join visit our Homepage.
 
The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam
by Michael G. Vann, History, California State University, Sacramento, USA
& Liz Clarke, professional illustrator, Cape Town, South Africa
(Oxford University Press, 2018)


The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam tells the darkly humorous story of the French colonial state's failed efforts to impose its vision of modernity upon the colonial city of Hanoi, Vietnam. Part of the Graphic Histories series, this book offers a case study in the history of imperialism, highlighting the racialized economic inequalities of empire, colonization as a form of modernization, and industrial capitalism's creation of a radical power differential between "the West and the rest." On a deeper level, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt examines the contradictions unique to the French Third Republic's colonial "civilizing mission," the development of Vietnamese resistance to French rule, and the history of disease. Featuring forty-nine primary sources--many available in English for the first time--and three full-color maps, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt illustrates the ironic and tragic ways in which modernization projects can have unintended consequences. [more] 

GUHP profile: Vann
Author website: VannClarke

The Suburban Land Question: A Global Survey
Edited by Richard Harris, Georgraphy and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Canada
& Ute Lehrer, Environmental Studies, York University, Canada

(University of Toronto Press, 2018)

As part of the urbanization process, suburban development involves the conversion of rural land to urban use. When discussing the suburbs, most writers focus on particular countries in the northern hemisphere, implying that patterns and processes elsewhere are fundamentally different. The purpose of The Suburban Land Question is to identify the common elements of suburban development, focusing on issues associated with the scale and pace of rapid urbanization around the world. Editors Richard Harris and Ute Lehrer and a diverse group of contributors draw on a variety of sources, including official data, planning documents, newspapers, interviews, photographs, and field observations to explore the pattern, process, and planning of suburban land development. Featuring case studies from major world regions, including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, as well as France, Austria, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada, the volume identifies and discusses the peculiarly transitional character of suburban land.[more] 

 
GUHP profile: Harris,
Author website: HarrisLehrer
“Monumental Landscapes and the Politics of Place: The First Lenin to Fall” in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
by Kateryna Malaia, Architecture
University of Wisconsin Madison, USA
Vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, 139-156
 
On August 1, 1990, there was an unprecedented event in the Ukrainian town of Chervonohrad: a crowd gathered at the central square and, for the first time in the USSR, demolished a monument to Lenin. The demolition caused a political scandal and was the first of a chain of Lenin statue topplings all over Soviet Ukraine and beyond. Chervonohrad’s deconstruction is often compared to the array of Lenin statue demolitions that took place during the 2013-14 Ukrainian Revolution. Yet, this historic comparison does not answer the question: why was Chervonohrad, out of all the Soviet political centres and peripheral towns, meant to go down in history in this monumental way?[more]
 
 
CFP 2019 Urban China Research Network Conference
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China, June 21-23, 2019
 
The theme of the conference is “The Next Generation of Urban China Research - 20 Year Anniversary of UCRN."
 
To learn more about the details of the conference, please refer to the official CFP.
 
 
4th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference
Lagos in the World and the World in Lagos
Lagos, Nigeria – June 27-29, 2019
 
We welcome participation from any field of African Studies. Deadline is  January 20, 2019.
 
Panels seeking participants include:
  • War in the City: Violent Conflict in Urban Africa since the Precolonial Era
  • Expunging Colonialism: Africa, Africanists, and the Decolonization Debates

Visit the LSA website for additional information about the Conference.
RC21@Delhi Sep 18-21, 2019
In and Beyond the City: Emerging Ontologies, Persistent Challenges and Hopeful Futures
Deadline January 20, 2019.
 
Sessions seeking presenters include:
 
  • The Urban Spectre of ‘Global China’ and Critical Reflections on its Spatiality
  • The City as Employer: Re-imagining Urban Work and Belonging
  • Doing Urban Ethnography: New interdisciplinary and methodological approaches to comparative
    urban research
To learn more about the details of the conference, as well as the panels that are currently calling for abstracts, please visit the conference homepage.
To read back-issues of “Noteworthy in Global Urban History,” please click here.