help_outline Skip to main content
Global Urban History Project

Date: 12/16/2017
Subject: noteworthy in GUH
From: Global Urban History Project




This is the fifth 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

 
 
 

Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement
by Rosemary Wakeman, History, Fordham
(University of Chicago Press, 2016)

The typical town springs up around a natural resource—a river, an ocean, an exceptionally deep harbor—or in proximity to a larger, already thriving town. Not so with “new towns,” which are created by decree rather than out of necessity and are often intended to break from the tendencies of past development. New towns aren’t a new thing—ancient Phoenicians named their colonies Qart Hadasht, or New City—but these utopian developments saw a resurgence in the twentieth century. [more]

GUHP ProfileAuthor website

 
 
 

Brand New  Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City
by Isabella Jackson, History, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
(Cambridge Press, 2017)


Shaping Modern Shanghai provides a new understanding of colonialism in China through a fresh examination of Shanghai's International Settlement. This was the site of key developments of the Republican period: economic growth, rising Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese conflict. Managed by the Shanghai Municipal Council (1854–1943), the International Settlement was beyond the control of the Chinese and foreign imperial governments. Jackson defines Shanghai's unique, hybrid form of colonial urban governance as transnational colonialism. The Council was both colonial in its structures and subject to colonial influence, especially from the British empire, yet autonomous in its activities and transnational in its personnel. This is the first in-depth study of how this unique body functioned on the local, national and international stages, revealing the Council's impact on the daily lives of the city's residents and its contribution to the conflicts of the period, with implications for the fields of modern Chinese and colonial history. [more]

GUHP ProfileAuthor website

 

Brand New  Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City
by Andrew Diamond, History, Paris-Sorbonne (France)
(University of California Press, 2017)


Chicago on the Make offers a multi-layered history of the Windy City that fits within the same frame the microhistories of neighborhood formation and evolution, and the macrohistories of municipal politics and the structural transformations wrought by global capitalism. Its analysis contributes to the broader project of historicizing the evolution of urban societies during the neoliberal moment of capitalism, but, unlike previous accounts that have viewed the context of the mid 1970s as pivotal to a so-called "neoliberal turn," this new history of Chicago views neoliberalization as a process that unraveled gradually and unevenly over most of the twentieth century. [more]

GUHP profile, Author website

 
 

Brand New  "What is a settler-colonial city?"
Geography Compass

by David Hugill, Geography and Environmental Studies
Carleton University (Canada)
Vol. 11, no. 5 May, 2017


What is a “settler-colonial city” and how does it differ from other forms of imperial urban spatial organization? This article seeks to answer these questions by attempting to urbanize recent insights in settler-colonial theory. It begins by considering well-established theorizations of the “colonial city”—particularly those developed by geographers and urbanists in the 1970s and 1980s—in order to assess their suitability for analyses of contemporary settler-colonial milieu. Building on this discussion, the paper asks if and how the insights of settler-colonial theory offer new opportunities to renovate earlier theorizations in ways that are more explicitly relevant to making sense of the urban process in North America and other societies where colonists have “come to stay” and no formal process of decolonization has unfolded. [more]

GUHP profile, Author website


Global Urban History Blog

For our holiday greeting, Noteworthy salutes the intrepid threesome who bring us our very Global Urban History blog: Editor-Professors Michael Goebel, Tracy Neumann, and Joseph Ben Prestel. If you want to give yourself the gift of global urban history this coming new year, sign up as a follower here. Among other things, you’ll be treated with Professor Cyrus Schayegh’s powerful and challenging recent post entitled Transpatialization: A New Heuristic Model to Think about Modern Cities

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