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Global Urban History Project

Date: 10/4/2021
Subject: Noteworthy in Global Urban History
From: Global Urban History Project



Vol. 33, October 2021.
 
Have you published something new in Global Urban History? 
We'd like our members to know. Contact Ayan Meer with details.
 
GUHP is now a member-supported organization. To join or renew your membership, visit our Homepage.

GUHP Special Announcement
 
The Global Urban History Project's Dream Conversations get under way this month,
in conjunction with the UHA's Urban History Month.
Friday, 15 October, 2021, 7-9 PM EST (11PM-1AM UCT):
UHA Plenary: “The State of the Global City: Problems and Possibilities”

This plenary invites some of the leading voices writing on cities around the world, those who have been pushing at the boundaries of global history (from a variety of methodological and historiographical interests) by writing about modern 20th and 21st century global cities as both historians and public intellectuals. The panelists have each been asked to offer their thoughts on the state of global cities.
[more]
Wednesday, October 27, 10 AM-12:30 PM EST (2 PM-4:30 PM UCT): 
"
Readers Meet Author: Richard Harris's How Cities Matter"

INAUGURAL EVENT in Dream Conversation #1 Urban Theory Of, For, and By Urban Historians
In How Cities Matter, the first issue of the new series "Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History", Harris elegantly inventories and comments on so many of the theoretical concepts that urban historians have used over the past half-century or more.
[more]
Thursday October 28, 2021 3-4:30 PM EDT (7-8:30 UCT)
Roundtable on Cities and Inequalities
 
INAUGURAL EVENT in Dream Conversation #3 Cities and Inequalities
Event Co-Sponsored by the Urban History Association as part of Urban History Month.
[more]

Books
Capital Development: Mandate Era Amman and the Construction of the Hashemite State, 1921-1946
by Harrison B. Guthorn
(University of Chicago Press, 2021)
 
Amman has contended with a crisis of identity rooted in how it grew to become a symbol for the Anglo-Hashemite government first, and a city second. Despite its diminutive size, the city grew to house all the components necessary for a thriving and cohesive state by the end of the British mandate in 1946. However, in spite of its modernizing and regulatory ambitions, the Transjordan government did not control all facets of life in the region. Instead, the story of Transjordan is one of tensions between the state and the realities of the region, and these limitations forced the government to scale down its aspirations. This book illustrates how the growth of the Anglo-Hashemite state imbued the city with physical, political, and symbolic significance.[more]
Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality and the Urban Question
by Tom Slater
(University of California Press, 2021)
 
The book critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation. This book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest. [more]

Articles
"Informality, Temporariness, and the Production of Illegitimate Geographies: The Rise of a Muslim Sub-City in Ahmedabad, India"
by Tommaso Bobbio
Modern Asian Studies, Spring 2021
 

In recent debates in the field of urban studies, issues of informality, marginal settlements, and extreme poverty have often been analysed in relation to the dynamics that transformed spatial and social balances with respect to neo-liberal economic policies. In order to understand the emergence of areas considered informal—or illegitimate—this article aims to question the very validity of categories such as ‘informality’ when applied to analysing the transition from medium-sized urban centres to ‘mega-cities’ (a label that, in itself, blindly recalls the allure of modernization, technology, and development). 

[Access the article here]
"Classifications at Work: Social Categories and Dutch Bureaucracy in Colonial Sri Lanka"
by Dries Lyna & Luc Bulten
Itinerario, Summer 2021
 

Feeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the people recorded.  

[Access the article here]

Doctoral Theses
"Navigating Empire: Migration and Social Mobility of Jaffna Tamils, 1800-1948"
by Kristina Hodelin, Radboud University
 
Jaffna was home to large groups of Tamils who originally belonged to the Vellalar caste. They were converted and worked together with the missionary groups. Towards the end of the 19th century, more and more Christian Jaffna Tamil Vellala moved across the Indian Ocean to Malaysia. For her PhD research, Kristina Hodelin reconstructed the migration history of the Jaffna-Tamils in Malaysia, in order to answer the question of how religion and education influenced the sub-elitist position of these colonised subjects in the British Empire. ‘It is important to study this part of history because as migrants continue to move for educational and employment opportunities or are pushed abroad due to war and climate change, their drive for belonging allows us to question how a diaspora becomes accepted and gains privileges or faces alienation in the new locale’, explains Hodelin. [more]

Teaching Resources
Human Terrain
Visualizing the World Population in 3D
by Matt Daniels
 
Over the last 30 years, the scale of demographic change is hard to grasp...How does one visualize population density on a global and urban scale? [Access the interactive map here]

Related Networks and Events
Call for Chapters
"From the margins: Re-imagining Global Perspectives of Home"
 
One of the many unexpected outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a nearly global re-imagining of home. Western understandings of home as an intimate, personal space, and as a site of reprieve from the world of labor and public life were subverted, as national stay-at-home orders forced countless employees to reconfigure their homes, both architecturally and conceptually, into semi-public workspaces. Stark inequalities between those who were privileged enough to be able to work from home, those who were forced to continue to work in public spaces, and those who were unhoused altogether poignantly revealed the hierarchies of power associated with individuals’ differing relationships to home. The contingent, constructed, and power-laden nature of commonplace assumptions about home have arguably become more visible to us than ever before. [more]