This is the thirteenth 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 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]
| | |  | | 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]
| | | | "'A Tempest in a British Tea Pot': The Silk Letter and the Arab Question in Cairo and Delhi"
by Erin O'Halloran, History,
University of Oxford, UK
in Ed. Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy & Gearóid Barry
1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment
| | | | “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 Uurban 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”. China has entered a new era that is
characterized by the efforts to realize the “Dream of Beautiful China” along with
people-oriented urbanization, targeted poverty alleviation, and rural rejuvenation.
This new era presents both exciting new opportunities for China’s path toward
sustainable development and some daunting challenges. It is high time for urban
China scholars, especially the younger generation, to explore both theoretically and
empirically intriguing issues/questions for urban China’s future. This conference
would welcome papers from all social science perspectives including sociology,
anthropology, economics, demography, geography, history, management, political
science, public policy, urban planning and design, geography and urban studies.[more]
| To read back-issues of “Noteworthy in Global Urban History,” please click here. | |