The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Marta Gutman You wear a lot of hats! What are your many and varied affiliations? I am Professor of Architecture (History and Theory) at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of the City University of New York, and Professor of Art History and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Graduate Center of the City […]
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Hamilton, Peter E. Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by James Watson-Krips There are few places in the world quite like Hong Kong. Billed as “Asia’s World City,” it is today celebrated as much for its striking cityscape as its vibrant street […]
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For the final installment in our series on the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History, Alexia Yates presents the following essay-in-images that reflects on her recently published Element, Real Estate and Global Urban History. By Alexia Yates Between 1936 and 1941, the WPA Writer’s Program penned a study of New York City’s Black community. In […]
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The editors of the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History join Antonio Carbone, author of a forthcoming Element in the series, to talk about the volume, its relevance to COVID-19, and the direction Carbone’s research is taking next. Your Element is about pandemics—hard to be more timely! What was it like writing about pandemics while […]
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Mayor. Directed by David Osit. Rosewater Pictures, LLC, 2020. Reviewed by Maytal Mark City branding is not the topic one expects to dwell on in a documentary about Palestinian civil engineer and Ramallah mayor Musa Hadid. But Mayor director David Osit’s camera returns repeatedly to the visual symbol of the city’s prominent “WeRamallah” sign, built […]
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By Dan Garodnick As New York City gets ready to choose its new mayor, one community is watching the results with particular interest. Having recently seen a decade of tumult across two mayoralties, the residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village understand that the occupant of Gracie Mansion matters to their safety and security. […]
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The editors of the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History join Lila Caimari, author of a forthcoming Element in the series, to talk about the volume, its relevance in the contemporary news landscape, and how the Element fits into Caimari’s research more broadly. Your Element is about the history of journalism and the media. What […]
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Schwenkel, Christina. Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine Zubovich By 1973, a decade of repeated U. S. air strikes had left the northern Vietnamese city of Vinh in ruins. In the coming years, Vinh would be rebuilt with the help of […]
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Zubovich, Katherine. Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Zinaida Osipova While many people seek to understand why the Soviet Union fell apart, Katherine Zubovich focuses on one of its enduring successes—the seven skyscrapers designed under Joseph Stalin that still dominate Moscow’s landscape. […]
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By Richard Harris It is remarkable that few people take the trouble to show how cities matter. By ‘people’ I mean self-styled urbanists, those who write about cities, publish in ‘urban’ journals, and who for the most part, presumably, live in cities. And by ‘how cities matter’ I mean the ways in which the urban […]
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