Vol. 62, January 2025
Have you published something new in Global Urban History? Are you hosting a conference, workshop, or event? We'd like our members to know!
GUHP is a member-supported organization.
| Member Spotlight: GUHP Emerging Scholars 2024-2025
GUHP is proud to announce the 2024-25 cohort of GUHP Emerging Scholars. These seventeen scholars will work with senior members of GUHP's Board and GUHP Emerging alumni to polish papers they plan to deliver at GUHP2 Berlin in July 10- 11, 2025. Look out for announcements of other public events involving these scholars in advance of the conference.
"Between the Vernacular and the Global: Architecture, Retail, and the Postmodernization of Urban Space in Late Socialism, 1970-1990"
Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek, PhD student, Central European University, Vienna
"The Sugar Gamble: Finance, Ecology, and Empire in Egypt’s Sugar Belt, 1890-1914"
Salma Abouelhossein, PhD student, Harvard University
"A Landscape of Speculation: Traders, Landlords and Urban Land in the Making of a Frontier Town of the British Empire, Guwahati, 1860s-1900s"
Himalaya Bora, PhD student, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
"Long nineteenth century Tunis and its first railway: A spatial analysis of the TGM (Tunis-Goulette-Marsa)"
Oumaïma Jaïdane, MA in history of architecture from Middle East Technical University (Ankara)
"Forever prime real estate? A global, long-durée history of Lebanon’s Political Economy of Urban Space, 1920-1975"
Jan Altaner, PhD student, History, St. John’s College, University of Cambridge
"Going beyond the urban edge: how sweet potatoes supported an indigenous village amid urban sprawl, 1935-2016"
Tania Knapp da Silva, PhD student, University of São Paulo
"Singapore’s Laboured ‘Green’ Landscapes and Contested Visions of ‘Sustainability’ in the Plantationocene"
Yannis-Adam Allouache, Ph.D., the National University of Singapore
"Old Wine in New Bottle? The Emergence of Neoliberal Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Refashioning of Traditional Labour"
Aruna Jayasena, PhD student, South Asian University
"Memories of disaster induced urban dispossesion: Gendered Experiences of Disaster Relocation and Urban Vulnerability in Chennai"
Suchismita Goswami, PhD fellow, University of Copenhagen
"Viewing Urban History through Informality: Metropolitan Manila’s Informal Settlements during the Marcos Sr. Period, 1965-1986"
Gabriel Gagno, M.A. and instructor, the University of the Philippines
"Urbanizing Peace: Coen Beeker in Sudan and Ethiopia in the 1970s"
Chen Chu, PhD student, MIT
"Colonizing the Future: Urban Imaginations and the Transnational Flow of Techno-Utopia"
Maxim Tvorun-Dunn, PhD student, University of Tokyo
"Crane-Built Socialist Cities: Industrialization, Mechanization, and Lifting Construction in the Early PRC’s Urbanization"
Jie Shen, PhD student, University of Tokyo
"Transformation of Istanbul’s Seashores: Relationship of State and Entrepreneurs in Urban Change of 1940s-1950s Turkey"
Deniz Can Keskin, MA student, Freie Universität and Humboldt-Universität
"Urban everyday conflict in the streets of Madrid during the interwar period: defining the boundaries of public space"
Pablo de Mora, PhD student, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
"“But the ‘Door’ Won’t Open”: Emotions as Method in Writing Urban Histories"
Hatem Hegab, PhD student, Freie Universität
"German villages in a German city: Marking the presence of German migrants from former Habsburg crownlands in interwar Vienna"
Pauli Aro, postdoctoral fellow, University of Vienna
|  | | Elements in Global Urban History: Foodways in the Twentieth-Century City
By Maria-Aparecida Lopes and María Cecilia Zuleta
(Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Foodways in the Twentieth-Century City explores a fundamental question through the lens of the modern metropolis: How did the experience of food and eating evolve throughout the twentieth century? In answering this query, this Element examines significant changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of food in cities worldwide. It takes a comprehensive view of foodways, encompassing the material, institutional, and sociocultural conditions that shaped food's journey from farm to table. The work delves into everyday practices like buying, selling, cooking, and eating, both at home and in public spaces. Central themes include local and global food governance and food access inequality as urban communities, markets, and governments navigated the complex landscape of abundance and scarcity. This Element highlights the unique dynamics of food supply and consumption over time....[more]
| | | | Elements in Global Urban History: Globalizing Urban Environmental History
By Matthew Vitz
(Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Globalizing Urban Environmental History melds the methodological prescriptions of global urban history, the innovative methods of environmental history, and the interdisciplinary field of urban political ecology to trace the contours of a global urban environmental history. I argue that a global lens fixed on material, political, and cultural flows, movements, and connections-all of which were founded upon the structural integration of urban spaces through capitalist expansion and empire-sheds new light on the histories of specific urban political ecologies, on the one hand, and large-scale urban patterns on the other. These patterns comprise shared urban environmental imaginaries, strategies of environmental governance, and a global urban physical and cultural landscape stitched together by the adoption of fossil-fuel energies....[more]
| | |  | | Urban Transformations in Sierra Leone: Knowledge co-production and partnerships for a just city
By Joseph M. Macarthy, Braima Koroma, Andrea Rigon, Alexandre Apsan Frediani, and Andrea Klingel
(UCL Press, 2024)
With a population over one million, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, faces serious challenges around provision of services, housing and infrastructure, all exacerbated by climate change. Already, a large share of the Freetown population lives in informal settlements and as many as 70 per cent of the city’s residents are employed on an informal basis. In 2015, the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC) was established to engage with urban challenges in Sierra Leone through research, capacity building and advocacy activities in areas such as health, land, housing and mobility. SLURC has become a platform for dialogue among urban stakeholders to negotiate the future of the city. Urban Transformations in Sierra Leone aims to share SLURC’s journey so far, articulating the key findings generated by its various research projects, while also reflecting on the partnerships it has enabled. By bringing together research from different sectors, the book makes a significant contribution to knowledge on Freetown, and demonstrates the potential of transdisciplinary work...[more]
| | |  | | Water Infrastructure as a Technology of Control and a Site of Negotiation in Nineteenth-Century Batavia, Netherlands Indies
By Mikko Toivanen
The Historical Journal (December 2024)
This article examines the social and political aspects of late nineteenth-century water management in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the Netherlands Indies. Through a detailed analysis of how a mixture of old and new water technologies featured in the city’s public debates and decision-making, it argues that water infrastructure served as a key site of social control over the city’s diverse population. From the 1870s onwards, deep-bore artesian wells linked to public hydrants were introduced to provide a reliable and hygienic supply of clean water. This was a response to long-standing concerns over the city’s waste-blocked canals and their deleterious health effects. The article shows how these technologies came to be entwined with new, punitive social norms, enforced through both formal regulations on water use and informal complaints over wastefulness; moreover, these norms had a clear racial dimension, being directed primarily against the city’s Asian communities and repurposing long-standing stereotypes...[more]
| | |  | | Local Government Reform and the Urban-Rural Relation: A Comparison of Leicester, the United Kingdom and Weihai, China
By Yuan Liang, Jinyuan Liu, and Guirong Kou
Journal of Urban History (November 2024)
Since the twentieth century, urban expansion has gradually become a global issue. As the first country to urbanize, Britain faced tense urban-rural relations caused by urban expansion after World War II. Similarly, in the twenty-first century, China, as the world’s largest urban entity, faces the same issue due to its rapid urbanization. Both countries have undertaken local government reforms to address this problem, achieving similar results at certain points in time. However, due to differing national contexts and political traditions, their processes and directions vary significantly. This article examines Leicester and Leicestershire in the United Kingdom, and Weihai and Wendeng in China, as cases for comparative study. It aims to analyze the similarities and differences in local government reforms and the evolution of urban-rural relations in these two countries, as well as the reasons behind the differences...[more]
| | |  | | Negotiating Urban Development in Africa: Transnational Communities of Embedded Support in Dar es Salaam
By Sylvia Croese and Wilbard Kombe
Development and Change (November 2024)
This article brings together recent debates in urban and development studies to illuminate the understudied politics and compromise involved in the rollout of globally funded urban development in Africa. The argument presented builds on a detailed analysis of the World Bank's urban development portfolio in Tanzania, with a specific focus on the Dar es Salaam Metro-politan Development Project, to draw attention to the disjuncture between rising urban investments and persistently low levels of city-level autonomy in urban Africa. Challenging views of cities as either active agents or mere subjects of urban development, the article focuses on the negotiation strategies that have been employed by donors and recipients alike to enable the continued disbursement of urban development funding. The pragmatic and non-confrontational nature of these negotiation strategies is illustrated by highlighting the role of a transnational community of urban development professionals who contribute to embedding local support for policy reform from within. It is argued that while this community has been key to enabling the massive growth of the World Bank's urban lending portfolio in Tanzania, it has also contributed to undermining effective local government reform, thereby reshaping conventionally assumed pathways and understandings of urban agency and development...[more] | | |  | (Un)Freedom in Global Perspective. Actors – Perceptions – Agencies
University of Innsbruck and online
February 3-4 2025
The international conference "(Un)Freedom in Global Perspective: Actors – Perceptions – Agencies" will take place on 3–4 February 2025, in Innsbruck. This event brings together scholars to explore the multifaceted experiences of individuals and communities characterized as "unfree," including those in slavery, captivity, serfdom, and imprisonment. Challenging static and binary concepts of freedom and unfreedom, the conference examines nuanced forms of agency within local, regional, and global frameworks of the early modern and modern periods. Through diverse case studies, the programme highlights overarching trends, offering comparative perspectives and fresh insights into historical continuities, transformations, and lived experiences of (un)freedom. Audience members are welcome to join virtually via the link provided in the attached program. If you are interested in attending the conference on-site, please register in advance by contacting Florian Ambach (florian.ambach@uibk.ac.at and Sabine Robic (sabine.robic@uibk.ac.at)....[more]
| | |  | Field Training School and Research Seminar: Urban Research Theory and Methods
Montecatini Terme, Italy
July 21-27 2025
This 7-day Training School is organised and hosted by the International Urban Symposium-IUS in collaboration with an international group of senior scholars from leading universities. The School is aimed at postgraduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral scholars and practitioners who are interested in research in urban settings and in empirically-grounded analysis. The School offers an interactive learning environment and opportunities to discuss the rationale and practices of traditional and new research methods and mainstream debates. The primary aim is to train participants in the ‘art’ of conducting ethnographic fieldwork, develop the link between ethnographically-based analysis and social theory and bring out the relevance of such analysis to the broader society. The School will address key contemporary urban issues, including: governance; legitimacy and legitimation; urban diversity; stereotypes and stigma; informality; healthy living; mega events and security; crisis, emergency and conflict; urban infrastructure; public space, vernacular landscape, heritage; application and challenges of new technologies (e.g., digital technologies and AI)....[more]
| | |  | International Summer School Towards Inclusive Global Histories
Växjö, Sweden
7-9 September 2025
The summer school will focus on three novel research fields within global history: Global Diplomacy, gender, and environmental questions. By framing approaches that emphasize different voices and alternative archives in terms of “global histories” in the plural, we aim to promote the inclusion of a broad range of voices, perspectives, and orientations within the field, while forcefully rejecting the possibility of insisting on a single, dominating story or grand narrative of global history. The summer school will offer plenary sessions by leading experts in the field and allow for hands-on methodological conversations among all participating scholars. Early career scholars will be encouraged to reflect on key methodological questions along the lines of the summer school themes with scholars from around the world. We invite contributions consisting of projects based on original research and empirically grounded PhD thesis work in progress. We encourage theoretical, methodological, ethical, and historiographical reflections on how to make global history more inclusive. Although the main language of the summer school will be English, individual presentations and panels in other languages can be accommodated...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CfP: Urban Humanities Global (Un)Conference 2
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, United States
October 16-18, 2025
The Urban Humanities Network warmly invites proposals for its second signature event, (Un)Conference 2, to be held at Washington University in St. Louis, October 16-18, 2025. Scholars, practitioners, designers, curators, and artists working at the intersection of design, urbanism, the humanities, spatial & environmental justice, and community-engaged scholarship are warmly invited to join...[more]
Submission deadline: January 31, 2025
|
Journal CfP: Shared Housing: New Approaches to Re-evaluating Everyday Life in East-Central and Southeastern Europe between the Late Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Massive migration movements made the urban centers of East-Central and Southeastern Europe grow at a dazzling rate around 1900. In rural areas, the reduction in labor required people in professional sectors, such as agriculture, to enter new communities of production. Due to housing shortages in the cities as well as the massive growth of urban populations and the need to make a living despite poorer earning opportunities and stronger competition in the local markets, people shared housing spaces in various ways. Yet, to date, there have been limited inquiries into the long history of shared housing in these regions of Europe. Furthermore, the dearth of studies concerning private everyday life in the historiography of these regions has created two asymmetries in the historical narrative. On the one hand, the history of housing has not yet been explicitly discussed from the perspective of “living” as a shared undertaking between unrelated people outside of familial environments. The present call for articles is aimed at surveying the field to create a collage of the newest approaches and findings within this area and consequently provide a state-of-the-art springboard from which to reflect on the dynamics that arose between people outside of public spaces and the less visible effects of the experience of shared living as a process and encounter on both urban and rural environments...[more]
Submission deadline: January 31, 2025
| CFP: Urban History Association Conference 2025
Los Angeles, California
October 9-12, 2025
The Urban History Association invites submissions for its 11th Biennial Conference in Los Angeles, California on October 9 - 12, 2025. The Conference Program Committee seeks proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, posters, workshops, retrospectives, lightning rounds, professional development opportunities, and many other kinds of sessions on any aspect of urban, suburban, and metropolitan history in the United States and globally. The conference theme, Metropolitan Majorities, reflects trends across the world: the ongoing population growth of cities and their metropolitan areas; the rising ethnoracial and cultural diversity of urban and suburban places; the increasing concentration of economic activities; and the contentious politics that have accompanied these changes....[more]
Submission deadline: February 1, 2025
| CFP Graduate Conference: “City Enigmatic: Rethinking Ancient Urbanism Across Disciplines"
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
April 4-5, 2025
Among archaeologists, the development and nature of ancient urbanism have been prominent academic topics ever since V. Gordon Childe proposed an ancient “Urban Revolution,” a profound period of social transformation in prehistory. However, in defining individual cities archaeologists only recently began moving away from purely descriptive approaches resembling Childe’s list of criteria in his oft-cited Town Planning Review article from 70 years ago. For the most part, the term “city” has remained “notoriously hard to define.” In many disciplines, a “city” is still recognized by the presence of a number of attributes common to other “cities” within the area of focus, without investigating the significance or even validity of these criteria. For its 2025 graduate colloquium, the Center for Ancient Studies at the University of Pennsylvania hopes to expose junior scholars to a diverse range of approaches towards understanding cities from fields and cultural areas outside of their specialization. In doing so, we hope that participants may gain an insight into what ancient cities really are, what differentiates ancient cities from modern ones, and what characteristics make the cities from their own area of focus truly unique...[more]
Submission deadline: February 4, 2025
| CFP: The Built Ocean EAHN Thematic Conference
Porto, Portugal
September 10-13, 2025
Architects require solid ground on which to base their practice, yet oceans have always been a key element shaping the history of architecture and the built environment. This themed conference aims to shift the focus of architectural history from the land to the sea. It will address the planet’s bodies of salt water either as areas of increasing urbanization (through the building of structures such as underwater cables, oil rigs, windmills, etc.), as connectors between space and cultures (navigation routes for people and resources, transported in the form of knowledge, labour, and materials), or as an ecosystem functioning, in connection with the land, as an essential life-support system (defining climatic patterns, providing resources from food to raw materials, and securing services from carbon sequestration to large-scale habitats). The conference aims to bring together scholars representing a wide range of interdisciplinary knowledge and sets out to cover a broad chronological scope, from deep history and archaeological sources to more recent accounts of ecological decline and potential futures. Where is the architecture of the sea? To what extent does the built environment impact saltwater landscapes? What reciprocal impacts do seascapes have on the built environment?...[more]
Submission deadline: February 4, 2025
| Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | Visiting Fellowships for Scholars from the Global South
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge
The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge is inviting applications for funded Visiting Fellowships for scholars from the Global South. The purpose of these Fellowships is to provide opportunities for scholars working at higher education institutions in the Global South to exchange ideas with other researchers based at CRASSH and elsewhere in the University of Cambridge and to draw benefit from access to the University’s collections and resources. It is hoped that these visits will lead on to future collaborations and exchanges. For 2026, CRASSH will partner with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Applications are invited from scholars whose research is connected to the theme of science, politics and justice. This invites projects that study the ethics, politics and history of scientific, medical and technical knowledge-making and the multiple ways in which science has been leveraged by various groups in pursuit of justice. This may include proposals that focus on the participation of scientific and medical experts and activists in projects of anticolonialism, antiracism, climate and environmental justice, disarmament, gender equity, indigenous rights, reproductive rights, the repatriation of heritage and ancestors, or scientific and medical literacy...[more]
Application deadline: February 24, 2025
| | |  | | Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship Program
The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is pleased to offer the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship Program to support advanced research at the Library’s flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Fellowships are open to Ph.D. candidates, post-doctoral scholars, and independent researchers with projects that would significantly benefit from research conducted onsite at the Schwarzman Building. Projects requiring access to original materials including manuscripts, archives, books, photographs, prints, maps, newspapers, and journals will be given preference, but all worthy projects will be considered. Applicants studying the humanities as well as those working in the visual, auditory/performing, and literary arts are welcome to apply. Projects focused on science, technology, psychology, public policy, education, and other areas are also eligible, but only if the proposed project is centered on humanities-related methodologies...[more]
Application deadline: January 20, 2025
| | |  | | Center for Research on Global Catholicism Fellows Seminar
Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University
The Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University is pleased to announce the launch of its second cycle of the Seminar Fellowship Program in 2025-2027 on the theme of “Global Catholicism in Local Spaces.” Successful applicants will be engaged in research projects related to the polycentric features of global Catholicism and their manifestations in local physical spaces. Inspired by the insights of the “spatial turn,” lines of inquiry should focus on the multi-layering of Catholicism with local cultures in distinct physical settings. The CRGC invites applicants at any academic rank, including ABDs, from any humanities or social science discipline to apply.
The Seminar will consist of eight fellows: four from academic departments at Saint Louis University; four from any university or academic institution (research library, museum, archives, etc.) in the United States or around the world. Six of the eight fellowships are reserved for scholars holding a PhD with active research and publishing agendas. The two remaining fellowships are reserved for advanced PhD students...[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2025
| | | | BHC Kaufman Fellowship Application Deadline
Business History Conference
The Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program supports research by emerging scholars in financial history, broadly conceived. Fellowships include monetary awards as well as support from the BHC community of scholars, which for decades has prioritized engagement with graduate students and early career researchers. The program is endowed by a generous gift from renowned economist Dr. Henry Kaufman (Henry & Elaine Kaufman Foundation, Inc). The program offers three kinds of awards: Research fellowships, Dissertation fellowships, and Post-Doctoral fellowships. To be eligible, applicants must be enrolled in or graduates of an accredited doctoral program....[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2025 | | | |