Vol. 20, May 2020.
Have you published something new in Global Urban History?
We'd like our members to know. Contact Ayan Meer with details.
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To join or renew your membership, visit our Homepage. | | Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change
Edited by Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle Gournay, and Robert Freestone
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
In the history of planning, the design of an entire community prior to its construction is among the oldest traditions. This book explores the twenty-first-century fortunes of planned communities around the world. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the editors and contributors examine what happened to planned communities after their glory days had passed and they became vulnerable to pressures of growth, change, and even decline. Beginning with Robert Owen's industrial village in Scotland and concluding with Robert Davis's neotraditional resort haven in Florida, this book documents the effort to translate optimal design into sustaining a common life that works for changing circumstances and new generations of residents. [more] | | | | "The community settlement: a neo-rural territorial tool"
by Gabriel Schwake, TU Delft, Netherlands.
Planning Perspectives, February 2020
The Israeli Community Settlements are small-scale non-agricultural villages that consist of a limited number of families and a homogenous character. This method began to be used by the Israeli government and its different planning agencies during the 1970s as a tool to strengthen the state's territorial and demographical control over the Israeli internal frontiers of the Galilee, the West-Bank and along the Green-Line. Unlike earlier settlement methods that relied on ideological values such as labour, agriculture, redemption, identity and integration, as part of the nation-building years, the Community Settlements promoted a more individual and neo-rural lifestyle. [Access the article here] | | | "Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana"
by Joseph R. Hartman (University of Missouri, USA)
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, September 2019
This article examines Havana's urbanization under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925–33), focusing on the largely unrealized plans of French urbanist Forestier. The Machado regime's building campaign spoke to modern aspirations of Cuban independence and nationhood, but also to enduring colonial paradigms of race, power, and urban space. Interpreting the history of Havana's urbanization requires taking a critical view of Cuba's colonial heritage. [Access the article here]
| | | From the Global Urban History Blog
| A New Governor Arrives in Batavia: Public Ceremony in a Colonial City
Recently, notable works have sought to provide more nuanced representations of the variety of urban life in colonial settings by focusing on phenomena like emotions or cosmopolitan communities. In this blog post, Mikko Tovainen (University of Edinburgh) suggests an approach to colonial urban history that interrogates the meanings that people gave to the urban spaces they lived in, and one that zooms in on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized through a careful analysis of public events and celebrations. Such events, though often directed from above, were only possible with the participation of different communities, and always open to contestation. A case study drawn from his current research on nineteenth-century Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, serves to highlight these issues. [Access post here]
| | Global Detention Project
The Global Detention Project (GDP) is a non-profit organisation based in Geneva that promotes the human rights of people who have been detained for reasons related to their non-citizen status. The GDP’s activities inlcude: (1) providing policy-makers, civil society actors, and human rights institutions with a source of accurate information and analysis about detention and other immigration control regimes; (2) developing and maintaining a measurable and regularly updated database that can be used to assess the evolution of detention practices, provide an evidentiary base for advocating reforms, and serve as a framework for comparative analysis; (3) working with academics and practitioners to develop policy relevant scholarship about detention systems; and (4) collaborating with advocacy organisations to document policies and practices. [more]
| | | | Geographies of the Lockdown in Barcelona
With the confinement of the more than 1.5 million inhabitants of Barcelona to their homes and the control of the streets by the police, public space has been canceled. Now, the house is the only environmental condition experienced by the citizens and, therefore, urban planning must consider housing so that public space continues to exist. The following thirteen maps aim to describe the housing conditions and their inhabitants in Barcelona during the lockdown. This is a necessary first step towards a better understanding of the inhabited housing market thanks to a data infrastructure that is partly public as well as private. It is time to reconsider the role that housing should play in urban planning and social integration. [more]
| | | Related Networks and Events
| | Call for Applications
Eight ACADEMY IN EXILE Fellowships, 2020-22
Academy in Exile invites scholars at risk to apply for 24-month fellowships at the Free University in Berlin. Eligible are scholars from any country, with a PhD in the humanities, social sciences, or law, who are at risk because of their academic work and/or civic engagement in human rights, democracy, and the pursuit of academic freedom. [more]
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