Layered Cities: Scale and Time in Global Urban History
GUHP3 México
La ciudad en capas: Escala y tiempo en la historia urbana global
UNAM – Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas Mexico City / Ciudad de México, June 21 – 22 de Junio, 2027 Global Urban History Project / Proyecto de Historia Urbana Global
The Global Urban History Project (GUHP) was founded in 2017 with the goal of supporting research at the intersection of global and urban history, where cities are both the products of and producers of larger-scale historical phenomena. For our third in-person conference, we invite scholars within and beyond the GUHP community to explore how urban spaces are produced across intersecting scales and temporalities, generating both continuity and rupture. We welcome studies that examine cities as palimpsests, as sites where social relations, political power, infrastructures, and urban environments are continually constructed, obscured, and reactivated over time. By bringing together perspectives from different regions and periods, the conference aims to link the intimate and the global, the material and the imagined. We welcome contributions that engage with questions of layers, multiple spatial and temporal scales, the built and natural environments, mobility, and infrastructures. We encourage experimentation with new narrative forms and methods that emphasize historical contingency, conceiving cities as accretive sites where environment, geography, and the elements of urbanity are continually reconfigured.
El Proyecto de Historia Urbana Global (GUHP, por sus siglas en inglés) se estableció en 2017 con el propósito de fomentar la investigación en el cruce entre la historia global y la urbana, entendiendo las ciudades como resultado y a la vez impulsoras de procesos históricos de mayor alcance. Para la tercera edición de nuestra conferencia presencial, invitamos académicos del GUHP y de otros ámbitos para explorar cómo los espacios urbanos emergen de la interacción de diversas escalas y temporalidades, produciendo tanto continuidades como rupturas. Acogemos estudios que examinen las ciudades como palimpsestos: lugares donde las relaciones sociales, el poder político, las infraestructuras y los entornos urbanos se construyen, se ocultan y se reactivan continuamente a lo largo del tiempo. Al integrar perspectivas de diversas regiones y períodos históricos, la conferencia propone articular lo íntimo con lo global, y lo material con lo imaginario. Damos la bienvenida a contribuciones que aborden problemáticas relacionadas con las capas urbanas y las múltiples escalas espaciales y temporales de la cuidad, así como con los entornos construidos y naturales, las ciudades y su área de influencia, la movilidad y las infraestructuras. Fomentamos la experimentación con nuevas formas narrativas y métodos que destaquen la contingencia histórica, concibiendo las ciudades como espacios acumulativos donde el entorno, la geografía y los elementos de la urbanidad se reconfiguran continuamente.
Call for Panel and Paper Proposals
and
Call for Applicants for the 2026-27 Cohort of the GUHP Emerging Scholars Program
Extended Deadline: Monday November 2, 2026 11:59 UTC
The conference committee welcomes submissions that include scholars at all career levels, including graduate students, and that address diversity. Submissions may address innovative approaches to urban history across geography and time periods.
Attendance: The conference will be limited to 150 participants. This will be an in-person only event. For opportunities to join future GUHP online events, please refer to the GUHP Dream Conversations in Urban History series on our website.
Language: Presentations must be in English or in Spanish.
Panel sessions vs. individual presentations: GUHP will consider both proposals for full sessions and for individual presentations. Sessions are limited to four presenters or three presenters and a discussant. The conference organizing committee welcomes creative session and presentation formats including roundtables, working sessions, and brainstorming sessions.
GUHP Emerging Scholars Program 2026-27: This call for conference presentations doubles as a call for application for the 2026-27 Cohort for the GUHP Emerging Program. See below for the program mission and additional application materials.
GUHP Travel Awards: GUHP can offer a limited number of Travel Awards to help scholars with lower-resourced institutions attend GUHP3 Mexico. Use your proposal for conference presentation to alert GUHP of your interest. See below for further instructions.
GUHP membership: Membership in GUHP is not required to propose a panel or paper to the conference. If your proposal is accepted, you will be expected to join GUHP to register for the conference.
For further information: Please reach out to the Conference Program Committee at GUHP3Mexico2027@gmail.com with questions and ideas.
Note on Sustainability: The GUHP conference is committed to sustainability and carbon neutrality. The conference will offer vegetarian meals, recycle, and avoid single use plastic or printed materials. To the extent possible, we encourage all participants to chose transportation modes in keeping with the goal of carbon neutrality. To this end, the United Nations offers a carbon offset platform.
TO APPLY:
Submissions Format: Submissions must include the information listed below. Panels are limited to four presenters or three presenters and a discussant.
For the overall panel:
Panel Title Panel abstract (350-500 words) Panel format (if different from a traditional conference panel)
For each presentation in a panel or for individual presentation proposals:
Presentation title Presentation abstract (250 words max.) Presenter’s name, professional title, affiliation, and email address Presenter’s short bio (250 words max.)
For chairs and discussants (all panels must have a chair, who can double as a presenter OR a discussant; discussants are optional):
Name, professional title, affiliation, email address and Short bio (250 words max.)
For Applicants for a GUHP Travel Award:Please make a clear and explicit statement about your interest in a Travel Award as part of your paper or panel application. In panel proposals please communicate with panel organizers to clarify which applicants are applying for the Travel Award. All applicants for Travel Awards should include a short statement of need. For Applicants to the 2026-27 GUHP Emerging Program.
Eligibility: Graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and independent scholars, adjunct faculty or tenure track faculty up to three years past their doctoral degree may apply to join the conference as a member of the 2026-27 cohort of the GUHP Emerging Scholars program.
Why apply: Successful applicants will receive individual feedback on their conference proposal from a senior member of GUHP and will be invited to rehearse their presentation in a private online event in advance of the conference. In addition, they will be honored alongside other GUHP Emerging Scholars attendees at a special ceremony in Mexico City.
Application: In addition to applying for participation in the conference – either as a panel member or as an individual presenter – applicants should submit a short separate cover letter declaring their interest in this program. The cover letter should include the name and contact information of the PhD advisor or another scholar who knows the work well.
Deadline for submission: Please send your presentation proposal as a single PDF document to GUHP3Mexico2027@gmail.com by 23:59 UTC on Monday November 2, 2026. Applicants for GUHP Emerging should send the additional materials under their own name as a separate PDF by the same deadline.
GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History, July 10-12, 2025
Our 2025 conference took place at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany.
Since GUHP’s founding in 2017, it has supported scholarship that stretches the boundaries of the field of urban history. For our second in-person conference, we invited scholars to present work in English that further ‘Stretches the Limits of Global Urban History.’ Some of the questions we took up included, but were not limited to:
Geographically: How can global urban history elucidate or critique larger-scale spatial concepts such as “global,” “planetary,” “hinterlands,” and “world.” As incidents of war-time urbicide increase, how do we handle the dialectics of spatial creation and destruction? What new models of connectivity and integration can our field offer?
Temporally: What new temporal frameworks can global urban history explore and what can we gain analytically from them? How can global urban history rethink continuity, contingency, and disruption over time, including the longue duree?
Politically: How can global urban history help to explain inequalities of power, wealth, knowledge, and representation? How can it elucidate histories of race, ethnicity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, sexual liberation, and emotion?
Spatially: What new understandings of urban space and the built environment, urban planning and the natural environmental can global urban history offer? How can we rethink resource and energy frameworks in global urban history?
Methodologically: How do global urban historical epistemologies enhance or reinvent our engagement with the archives? What new cross-discipline collaborations can we pursue to make new interventions in urban studies?
Earlier Conferences
The Pursuit of Global Urban History, 2019
A joint conference of the Global Urban History Project and the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
University of Leicester, July 11-12, 2019
Read more and see the call for papers
GUHP/CUH Leicester 2019: The Pursuit of Global Urban History
A Joint Conference of the Global Urban History Project and the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
John Foster Hall, Oadby Conference Centre, University of LeicesterWe originally asked presenters to pre-circulate papers after May 1. Given the higher than expected interest in the conference, it will be impractical for us to pre-circulate all papers. Please begin by referring to abstracts below. For those panelists who still desire to pre-circulate papers, please confer with your chairs to decide how you want to do this and who will act as point person for distribution. Contact us at guhp@globalurbanhistory.orgby May 1stwith your plans, and we can make a public announcement to other conference participants.
The Pursuit of Global Urban History:A Dialogue Between Two Fields
A Conference Organised by the Global Urban History Project and the Centre for Urban History, Leicester
Keynote speaker: Sunil Amrith, Harvard University
Leicester, 11-12 July 2019
The dramatic rise of global history has had a far-reaching impact on the production of historical knowledge. We are now asked to reflect on the global underpinnings of processes previously studied through the lens of the nation, the region and the local. Yet even as the call of the ‘global’ grows insistent, there have been attempts to reflect on what it means to undertake such an enterprise. The current issue of the Journal of Global History carries a spirited debate on the present and future of the field. These debates have significant ramifications for urban history, where the ‘global turn’ has begun to register an impact. A growing number of urban historians now draw upon the methods and discourse of global history in framing their research agendas. The emergence of the Global Urban History Project is an indicator of this growing synergy.
It is in this context that the Centre for Urban History at Leicester and the Global Urban History Project propose a conference to reflect on the implications for urban history of the ‘global turn’. The conference has three aims:
Concepts, Methods, Purposes The conference will consider the protocols of knowledge production that make possible the writing of ‘global’ history. Importantly, it asks: how do we tackle the problem of commensurability across time and space that is an essential basis for the writing of any global history? Accordingly, the organizers invite papers that engage critically with issues pertaining to the concepts, methods and sources that inform global urban histories. Questions include the following:
What are the conceptual underpinnings of a globalized urban history or an urbanized global history?
What are the methodological implications of pursuing histories that cut across global space? Must we search for new sources to do this work or simply re-read familiar sources?
What is the goal of this work, exactly? To produce globally aware microstudies, better comparisons, more connected analyses between individual cities, or new large-scale narratives of cities’ place in global history? If the last, how do we guard against the critiques of such narratives, that they represent mechanisms of totalization and homogenization or that they replicate Western triumphalism?
Intellectual Genealogies Secondly, the conference will engage with the intellectual genealogy of the current ‘global turn’ within urban history.
Given that urban historians have engaged in the past with questions of mobility, networks and flows, how new and radical is the current language of ‘connection’, ‘multi-scalar’, ‘transnational’, and ‘globalization’?
What are the epistemological and analytical differences between urban historians’ current interest in the global turn and previous analytical frameworks that animated urban history?
To what extent do we need to revise sweeping and abstract terms imported from the social sciences to suit global histories that foreground the notoriously contingent complexities of urban political, economic and cultural change?
The Global and the Urban
Thirdly, the conference seeks to explore how global history and urban history can mutually enrich each other.
To what extent can global history elucidate the dynamics of everyday urban life? Is it desirable to translate the dense analysis characteristic of so much urban history to the global scale, and if so how do we do it without being overwhelmed by viewing such large landscapes in that sharp a focus?
Can the density of political struggle at the urban level, for example, elucidate global history; do neighbourhoods, streets, squares and other urban spaces matter to historical phenomena that operate at the global level?
How does urban cultural production go global and does it have anything to do with its origins in cities? Is there a place for urban emotions or a history of urban sensory phenomena at the global level?
Can cities—or other spatial entities—be said to cause or create phenomena operating on a global scale?
How to Participate The organizers invite proposals for individual presentations (20 minutes) and for panels of 3-4 papers where a theme is explored in detail. We especially encourage applications from scholars working on topics before 1850 and beyond Europe and North America
Participants will be expected to provide full texts of papers by 1 May 2019. Scholars interested in proposing a presentation should send an abstract (max 250 words) and a two-page CV by 31 October 2018 to Sally Hartshorne, sah86@leicester.ac.uk
NOTE: GUHP and CUH will do what we can to minimize expenses for the conference and will also seek to ri.ase funds for bursaries and a continuation of GUHP’s Travel Award Program for junior scholars. More on that soon. However, most conferees should plan to budget about £ 150 for basic conference fees in addition to transport and lodging (which will be available at reasonable rates at the conference site itself).
Cities in Global Contexts: The Caribbean as Crossroads, 2019
The 28th Annual Conference of the World History Association organized jointly with the Global Urban History Project
San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 27-29, 2019
Read more and see the call for papers
GUHP/WHA San Juan 2019: Cities in Global Contexts, The Caribbean as Crossroads
Call for Papers
The 28th Annual Conference of the World History Associationorganized jointly with the Global Urban History Project
San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 27-29, 2019
The World History Association is pleased to invite individual paper or organized panel proposals for its 28th Annual Conference, a joint meeting with the Global Urban History Project, to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 27–29 June 2019. The conference provides an ideal opportunity to interact with an international community of world history scholars, teachers, and students. Proposals for panels, workshops, roundtables, and individual papers are welcome on topics related to the conference themes—Cities in Global Contexts and The Caribbean as Crossroads—or on other topics of general interest to world historians. The WHA and GUHP both promote interdisciplinary conversations about scholarship and teaching, so work in anthropology, political science, literature, art, the natural sciences, and other fields is welcomed and encouraged.
For the “Cities in Global Contexts” theme, we seek panels by world historians who have taken up urban topics, panels by urbanists attracted by the challenges of global research, and panels that bring these two groups together. We are also interested in strengthening professional networks that cross between these two fields, so conference attendees who wish to do so will be able to join GUHP as part of their conference registration. For the “Caribbean as Crossroads,” we seek panels that address the long history of this region, from the first settlements in c. 5000 BCE to the 2017 hurricanes. Needless to say, panels that address both the “Cities in Global Contexts” and the “Caribbean as Crossroads” themes will be especially welcome!
Proposals may take several forms: – organized panels of (generally) three panelists and one chair, plus, optionally, one discussant; – round tables with four to six participants, which involve five-minute opening statements from participants and then conversational dialogue with the audience; – workshops on specific teaching or research techniques or practices; – individual papers (15–20 minutes in length); or – meet-the–author sessions, in which the authors of recently-published books discuss their approaches and methods and engage in discussion.
Organized sessions—full panels, round tables, and workshops—receive priority in the program and receive earlier notification of acceptance. Individual papers, if accepted, will be arranged into suitable panels by the Program Committee, but these will receive later notice of acceptance.
Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS), 2018
GUHP sponsored 14 panels and meetings at the Biannual Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS)
Yokohama, Japan, July 16-18, 2018
Read more about the sponsored panels
GUHP-Sponsored Panels and Meetings at the Biannual Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS) Yokohama, Japan, July 16-18, 2018
MONDAY July 16 Room 6, 10 am (note changed time): GUHP Organizing Meeting. All GUHP members and GUHP-Sponsored Panelists are Encouraged to Attend
Room 6 Session 1 (11:15AM-1:00PM) Panel 7. Planning Community without Planners Chair: Nancy Kwak
Guangzhi Huang Astute Planners: How Urban Villagers in Guangzhou Converted Their Neighborhood into an African Market
Mohd Aquil Indigenous Civics: Indigenous Elites and the shaping of Allahabad city in colonial India
Heide Imai Urban Ordinaries – Vernacular Landscapes as Places of Diversity, Difference and Displacement
Li Hou, Guanning Zhao, Jihuan Li, Xin Kai, Xufeng Qiu and Kaiping Zhang The Paradox of Community Planning in Shanghai Quyang New Village: providing better service space in a formally micro-rayon in three decades
Room 7 Session 2 (2:00PM-3:45PM) Panel 11. Between Empires and Nations: Urban Change in Twentieth Century China and Taiwan Chair: Christian Hess
Toby Lincoln Postwar Urban Reconstruction in China, 1938 – 1958
Koji Hirata Building a Socialist Industrial City: Factory, City, and Countryside in Mao’s China
Liza Wing Man Kam From Shinto Shrines to Martyr Temples and others: ‘Religious’ Space, Rituals and their shifting political Symbolism as Enunciation of Power(s) in Taiwan since the Post-war Era
Xiaogeng Ren, Baihao Li and Diwen Shi Western Imitation in modern China’s urban planning practice between the Late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic of China
Room 6 Session 2 (2:00PM-3:45PM) Panel 8. The Global Petroleumscape in East Asia (East Asian Petroleumscapes (Part 1)) Chair: Carola Hein
Ben De Vries The Battle For Oil in the Dutch East Indies: Plaju, the pearl in the crown of the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij in the turmoil of the 1940s
Li Hou Production First, Livelihood Second: the Life and Death of Worker-Peasant Villages in a Chinese Oil Field
Penglin Zhu The Daqing Oil Cluster: From petroleum hub to sustainable future Room 6 Session 3 (4:00PM-5:45PM) Panel 9. At the crossroads of oil flows and international planning exchanges (East Asian Petroleumscapes (Part 2)) Chair: Rezvan (Rose) Sarkhosh
Stephen Ramos Oil’s Quiet on the Western Front: Planning the Persian Corridor
Carola Hein The Global Petroleumscape, Spatial and Represented: A Tool for Understanding Planning Practice
Rezvan Sarkhosh Shaping Ahvaz’ transnational oil modernity; at the crossroads of oil flows and international planning exchanges
Mohamad Sedighi and Elmira Jafari Localizing Transnational Architectural and Urban Ideas in Iran’s Oil boom Era
TUESDAY JULY 17 Lecture Hall, Session 4 (9:15AM-11:00AM) Panel 25. Adaptation and Resiliency of Socialist Planning in Transitional Economies: China, Hungary, Poland, and Russia Chair: Li Hou
Panel Co-Sponsored by the Global Urban History Project Daniel Kiss The ‘socialist post-socialist’: Urban planning in Hungary during the first two decades following its 1989 regime change
Piotr Bujas, Alicja Gzowska, Łukasz Stanek and Li Hou Planning Transition Beyond Socialism: From Poland to China and Back
Zhendong Luo and Biyao Zhu Local Adjustment with Path-dependence: the Governance Structure Shift and Spatial Responding in Chinese Third-front City since 1980s
Fedor Kudryavtsev and Li Hou Sotsgorod (Socialistic city) of Today and Tomorrow: Soviet Legacy in Common Trends and Challenges of Contemporary Urban Development and Planning in China and Russia.
Room 6 Session 4 (9:15AM-11:00AM) Panel 37. The Global History of Urban Renewal Chair: Sujin Eom
Panel Co-Sponsored by the Global Urban History Project Dorothy Tang
Thousand-Hectare Metropolitan Playground: Visions for Johannesburg’s Gold Mining Belt Meng-Tsun Su
Imagining a Meshwork of Urban Nature – Lawrence Halprin and Panhandle Parkway in the San Francisco Jiewon Song
Contesting Urban Authenticity on a Global Scale: Heritage, Regeneration and Redevelopment in Singapore and Tokyo Yeung Yeung Fok
Remaking Hong Kong Heritage and Identity: Post-Colonial Urban Renewal Planning and Heritage Policy Agenda
Room 6 Session 5 (11:15AM-1:00PM) Panel 38. Historicizing the Global City Chair: Sebastian Schmidt Comment: Carl Nightingale
Beate Loeffler How to create a global city? Tokyo’s modern development (1860-1930) as a possible case of reference.
Guadalupe Garcia An Early Modern Caribbean: Havana
Akihiro Kashima A Viewpoint of “Diversity Creation” in the Planning History Research: Another Interpretation of Urban Planning Technique in the Spanish Colonial Period
Room 6 Session 6 (2:45PM-4:30PM) Panel 39. Global Cities, Urban Space, Ethnic Mobility and Intercultural Integration Chair: Weiliang Zhang
Weifang Lu Social Housing and the Emerging of Greater London: the Case of Becontree Estate
Weiliang Zhang The Chinese people were imagined in the eighteenth century London: on the study of Oliver Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World or letters from a Chinese philosopher, residing in London, to his friends in the east”
Ming Zhu Milan-Madrid-Mexico: Global Urban network and cities in Spanish Empire
WEDNESDAY JULY 18 Room 6 Session 7 (9:15AM-11:00AM) Panel 58. Planning History and Megaevents: Part 1, Planning, Design and Event Spaces Chairs: John R. Gold and Margaret Gold
Jennifer Minner and Martin Abbott How Urban Spaces Remember: Memory and Transformation at Two Expo Sites
John Gold and Margaret Gold Pestilence, toxicity and all the fun of the fair: brownfield sites and mega-event spaces Sergio Fagerlande
Tourism in the slums of Rio de Janeiro: An analysis of the urban impacts in informal areas caused by recent public interventions for the big sports events hosted by the city Fabiana Izaga, Sérgio Fagerlande and Rachel Coutinho Marques Da Silva
Porous boundaries in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas: Community based initiatives, urban mobility infrastructure, tourism and environmental issues in the urbanization of fringes as a socio-spatial means to reconcile the favela with the city
Room 6 Session 8 (11:15AM-1:00PM) Panel 59. Planning History and Megaevents: Part 2, Olympic Legacy Chairs: John Gold and Margaret Gold
Tomoko Tamari Star Architects, Urban Spectacles and the Global City: Exploring the Case of the Tokyo Olympics 2020
Anne-Marie Broudehoux Extraterritoriality in the Olympic City of Exception: The Case of Rio de Janeiro 2014-2016
Juliet Davis Obsolescence and Transformability in London’s 2012 Olympic Site
Lecture Hall Session 9 (2:00PM-3:45PM) Panel 56. Western Planning in Asian Treaty Ports Chairs:Carola Hein and Yanchen Sun
Hang Lin Western Modernity Interwoven with Chinese Traditions: Lives and Identities of an Emerging Cosmopolitan Society in Late Nineteenth Century Shanghai
Jessa Dahl From Entrepot to Treaty Port: Nagasaki’s Networks of Transnational Exchange and the Nineteenth Century Global Order, 1859-1899
Yili Zhao, Kun Song and Yanchen Sun Historical Analysis of Public Transportation Development in Modern Tianjin
Yanchen Sun, Carola Hein, and Kun Song Planning Modern Cities in China: Regulations of Concessions in Tianjin (1860-1945)
Room 6 Session 9 (2:00PM-3:45PM) Panel 60. Sites of Exchange: The Confluence of Global Networks and Local Interests in the Planning of Financial Centres Chair: Li Hou
Raphael Languillon The use of high rise buildings in financial centers as real estate companies’ massive weapons – the case of Mitsubishi Jisho’s strategy through times
Uta Leconte World Trade Architecture. The Twin Towers and Global Financial Centers.
Sben Korsh Imperial Sediments: Planning the Urban Land Development of Hong Kong’s Exchange Square (1980-84) Robert Cowherd
Spatial Operations of Finance in 17th century Batavia and Amsterdam
Room 6: 4 pm GUHP Wrap-Up Meeting All GUHP members and GUHP-sponsored panelists are encouraged to attend
