The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Kuukuwa Manful It is commonly thought that Accra, like many other African cities, has an architectural “identity crisis”[1] because “if you look at the city, there’s nothing that tells you where we were, where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.”[2] This view, echoed in both academic and popular discourse, is held […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin By Tyler Carrington. Oxford University Press, 2019 An inquiry into the sometimes risky ways of finding love in the big city. The 1914 murder of […]
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This piece by Lily Corral is the sixth and final entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. Corral takes on the life cycle of the media industry, and shows how the architecture built by newspapers reflects the industry’s birth, heyday, and now legacy. Daily news comes to us in all forms. […]
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In this, our third entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Vyta Baselice takes us through the life cycle of concrete. To understand how this construction material moves from birth to death, Baselice has us travel from Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century New York City, before boomeranging […]
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Editor’s note: It’s the penultimate installment of Digital Summer School 2019! The editorial staff of the newly-launched site PLATFORM discuss why they chose the blog format and what challenges arise when you try to bridge the divide between architecture and politics. For all other DSS 2019 courses scroll down to the bottom for links. Knowing […]
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[Editor’s note: The Metropole would like to introduce a new digital forum for urbanists. Below, Hunter College Professor Matthew Lasner offers a brief introduction into the project, PLATFORM, followed by a more detailed explanation regarding exactly what the site and its editors hope to publish. Take a look!] Dear friends, I have some exciting news […]
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Call for Papers: 2020 Latrobe Chapter Symposium Race, Ethnicity, and Architecture in the Nation’s Capital In 2019, the Washington Post reported that the nation’s capital had the highest intensity of gentrification of any American city, with more than 20,000 African Americans displaced from low-income neighborhoods from 2000 to 2013. For architectural and urban historians, the […]
Read MorePeter L. Laurence Associate Professor of Architecture Clemson University School of Architecture twitter.com/peterlaurence facebook.com/becomingjanejacobs Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Much of my research has been concerned with the presence (and absence) of urbanism in architectural theory and in architects’ thinking in general. This led me, more than twenty years ago, […]
Read MoreWilla Granger PhD Candidate The University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on a dissertation that examines the material history of the American “old age home” during the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Few architectural historians have studied the […]
Read MoreDr. Rainer Schützeichel ETH Zurich, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Intellectual history alongside (and intertwined with) urban and architectural history has always caught my interest. At the moment, I am following this research interest firstly in a project that […]
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