The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Editor’s note: This is the first post in our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Can Gümüş-İspir and Marianne Dhenin When Egyptian engineer and administrator Ali Mubarak traveled to Paris in the 1860s, he took a much-anticipated tour […]
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Editor’s note: Istanbul is the Metropolis of the Month for September. This overview is the first entry for the month, you can read additional entries in this series, as they are published, linked at the conclusion of this post. I’ve only been to Istanbul once in my life, during the summer of 2003, just before […]
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Editor’s note: We kick off our January 2022 theme month on Urban Environmentalism with an exploration of how opposition to interstate highway construction through Overton Park in Memphis, Tennessee, provides a window into the nation’s development of environmental law. It is followed by a bibliography on urban environmentalism. “We stand now where two roads diverge. […]
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Editor’s note: March kicks off The Metropole’s coverage of its Metropolis of the Month: Miami. We begin with our usual overview/bibliography to be followed each week with at least one article on the city for the month. In Michael Mann’s 2006 film, Miami Vice, detectives Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs jump from pastel-hued 1980s television […]
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Catastrophe has long shaped cities. Calamities have come in many forms and for varying durations; they have inflicted great costs in lives, suffering, and wealth. Different sorts of urban disasters—terrorist attacks, floods, earthquakes, diseases—have elicited different responses, policy prescriptions, and behaviors. Cities cannot be reduced to capital flows; they are more than built environment. “[T]hey […]
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[Editor’s note: In anticipation of UHA 2020 to be held in Detroit, October 8-11, 2020, The Metropole is featuring Detroit as our Metro of the Month for January. See here for the CFP and here for info about and link to the UHA spreadsheet. The latter is meant to help urbanists find prospective panels and […]
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Movement, both unfettered and brutally curtailed, has long been central to Accra’s urban culture. From its days as a slave entrepot, through its decades as a colonial possession, well into its car-driven post-independence boom years, Accra has always been defined by movement–of the enslaved, by colonial administrators, of goods, and of postcolonial citizens. Take for […]
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“We had a beautiful day; the eagles came, and we couldn’t have asked for a better day to do what we had to do,” Konrad Sioui, grand chief of the Huron-Wendat Nation, told a 2013 audience after laying to rest 1,760 of the tribe’s ancestors in their final resting place at the University of Toronto. Dug […]
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In its section on Nigeria, Lonely Planet’s 1995 edition of its Rough Guide to West Africa advised that getting the most out of one’s visit to the country depended on avoiding “Lagos and the sprawling congested cities of Ibadan, Port Hartcourt, Enugu, and Onitsha.” Several years later, a 30th anniversary edition offered a more nuanced […]
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Editor’s note: In anticipation of next’s month’s #OAH2019/#OAH19 in Philadelphia, the March Metro of the Month is the City of Brotherly love. To get more info about the conference click over to the organization’s website, where you can also download the OAH’s program for the event. “You know how it works in South Philly. Our strength has always […]
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