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Global Urban History Project

Date: 6/2/2018
Subject: Noteworthy in GUH
From: Global Urban History Project



This is the tenth in an ongoing series of profiles of GUHP members' work, highlighting the sheer breadth of scholarship in the field of global urban history.

Please consider ordering these titles for your personal and university libraries.

The series also salutes the work of networks and associations whose missions
overlap that of GUHP in significant ways.

Membership in GUHP is free of charge. To join visit ourHomepage



 
 

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
Author 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]

GUHP profile, Author website



 

 
 

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]


GUHP profileAuthor website

 



 
 

Brand New  "Down with the Walls! The Politics of Place in Spanish and German Urban Extension Planning, 1848–1914" in
The Journal of Modern History

by Anna Ross, History, Warwick (UK)
Vol. 90, no. 2, June 2018, 292–322

By 1914, photographers were producing stunning images of the built environment across Europe, including in Spain and Germany. In Spain, Jaime Murillo Rubiera and Mario Fernández Albarés started to photograph aspects of Madrid’s unfolding urban extension, which had begun in 1860 and progressed rapidly after 1875. Likewise, in Barcelona Joan Martí and Antoni Esplugas captured the dramatic improvements to the cityscape that began with defortification in 1854
and the adoption of an extension plan in 1860.[more] 

GUHP profile, Author website



“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, which have recently attracted considerable interest across the discipline and beyond. The article contextualizes this body of scholarship within larger trends in the field, both new and old. In the recent literature, port cities have predominantly been analyzed as “nodal points”, "gateways" or “hubs” within transnational and global networks. However, port cities can also remind us of the various efforts that have been undertaken 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 containerization and flight traffic moved the ports and shipping far away from the everyday world of most of us today, 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 our globalization today 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 profileAuthor website

To read back-issues of “Noteworthy in Global Urban History,” please click here.