In July 2019, the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester hosted the first – though certainly not the last – Global Urban History Conference. This initiative was the work of the Global Urban History Project (GUHP) – a network of urban historians interested in adopting a global perspective on their own urban researches, as well as in the possibilities and implications of ‘globalizing’ the field of urban history more generally. The conference, organized around the idea of ‘The pursuit of global urban history’, was thus as much an interrogation of what it might mean to do urban history globally, and what forms this could take, as it was a showcase for the fruits of an emergent field of study. In conjunction with the remarkable range of papers presented – both geographically and conceptually – this made for a particularly lively and stimulating conference.
An impressive geographic scope was to be expected in a conference of this nature of course, but it was still refreshing to hear research into such a diverse range of urban contexts gathered together into one forum, with a laudable focus upon elevating the histories of oft-neglected cities and world regions. African urban histories and case-studies were the focus of two panels and a number of individual papers; there were dedicated panels on Japanese and Latin American urban histories; and numerous papers on lesser-studied, often smaller, cities across multiple continents. More familiar (to British ears at least) urban histories from western Europe, South Asia and North America were also complemented by a conscious effort to foreground some lesser-known European histories from the east, south and far north of the continent – the story of a largely abortive attempt to sell Finnish development expertise to Tanzania in the 1970s, or the multiple papers on Portuguese urbanism across both metropole and colony, stood out in this regard. Although some delegates were keen to stress that the intellectual focus of a globalized urban history should not simply be to expand and diversify a repertoire of urban case-studies, this nonetheless felt like important work in its own right, as well as a valuable step towards thinking comparatively – perhaps even globally – about shared or distinctive urban historical experiences.
It was with respect to identifying commonalities across space and time that the format and ideas behind this conference bore real fruit. We heard much about the global rise of modern, technocratic forms of urban management, with its origins in the hygienist fears and reformist impulses of the nineteenth century and its blossoming in the expansive social statecraft and physical planning of the twentieth. The place of cities within global imperial structures across the early modern and modern eras was another focus, with urban settings figuring simultaneously as means of colonial ordering and economic exploitation, and as disruptive, destabilizing spaces. A number of papers tracked the rise of anti-colonialism through the social and intellectual milieus of globally connected cities, while others focused on cities as generative spaces for a broad range of political movements and cultural forms. Some contributors eschewed the tangible global connections of empire, trade or transnational activism to think more about parallel urban processes and structural formations – segregation, gentrification or informal urbanism. Here, the historical discussions came closest to those taking place in adjacent, more structurally and theoretically inclined urban disciplines, and it was great to have some prominent geographers present to participate in these debates. But engagements with global-scale paradigms such as ‘planetary urbanization’ led inevitably to concerns about the erasure of local difference and historical specificity, and unease around the imposition of pre-determined – and potentially Eurocentric – normative categories.
A lively and wide-ranging plenary discussion offered the opportunity to take stock of the various pathways which had been sketched out, as well as to think carefully about future activities. There was something of a tension here between the impulse to delineate clearly the scope and intent of a global urban history, and the admirably open-minded and ecumenical mode in which the GUHP has been proceeding. Some contributors were keen that global urban history clarify its points of departure from previous intellectual projects, in particular the now well-established urban historical concern with networks, connectivity and flows. Others sought a more direct fusion with the field of global history (GUHP arrived in Leicester fresh from co-sponsoring a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the World History Association). However, global history's current intellectual identity crisis, tied to the purported rollback of globalization in recent years, was also noted. And there was resistance in general to any effort to formalize global urban history around a particularly presentist and homogenizing model of contemporary global urbanization. Such an approach, it was felt, would risk negating the unique histories of early and pre-modern urbanities (which were less well represented at the conference) as well as imposing a story of convergence and unity where we might just as easily see dissimilitude. Indeed, it was suggested by some that, had the conference focused more on the messy diversity of urban life ‘from below’ and less on the top-down techniques of urban rule, the resulting picture may have been rather different.
Despite such reservations, plenty of delegates did display a willingness to think about urban histories, structures and processes in comparative global terms, and the discussion yielded many interesting suggestions for how this might proceed. Practically, there was a clear recognition that such work could only take place collaboratively and would require sustained communication between historians working in traditionally discrete, often area-based, fields. The conference itself, along with GUHP's online network of researchers (now over 400 strong), and other innovations such as the Global Urban History Blog and a new publishing vehicle (Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History) were important steps here. It was suggested too that, in addition to reconvening the Global Urban History Conference every three years, there might usefully be an intermediate programme of smaller working groups, dedicated to exploring specific thematic concerns or world regions in greater detail, to serve as building blocks for larger-scale comparison and analysis. Here, anxieties about the selection of appropriate categories of enquiry and the imposition of implicitly western norms and forms were restated, although one would hope that after decades of discursive and deconstructive turns historians might have emerged better equipped to handle their own terminologies in a supple and self-reflective manner. Large-scale comparative thinking does require shared categories of enquiry, even if in the end these merely serve as malleable (and disposable) heuristic devices.
A number of delegates were keen to incorporate environmental concerns and perspectives within a globalized urban history – an idea underlined by Sunil Amrith's environmentally inflected revisiting of the global port city in the plenary lecture. Given how critical cities have been both in driving processes of environmental transformation and in structuring planetary patterns of resource-use, this felt like another important path along which global urban history might proceed. Overall the Global Urban History Conference was a novel, productive and enjoyable event, and the GUHP's future activities and outputs clearly hold much promise. As a field, global urban history remains an ambitious, flexible and thoughtful work-in-progress. This is no bad thing at all: it is important work, and makes the endeavour all the more interesting as a result.
