The Making of Grimsby’s Dock Tower: The Entanglements of Infrastructural Relations

January 12, 2026.Reading time 10 minutes.

This is the third post in Urban and Environmental Dialogues, our January collaboration with the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). For other entries in the series, see here. By Sam Grinsell On the 18th of April, 1849, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (husband of Queen Victoria) laid the foundation stone of the Royal Docks, Grimsby. The […]

The Sidewalk as an Environmental Threshold

January 8, 2026.Reading time 12 minutes.

Sidewalks mark the aesthetic line between nature and civilization. They are the city’s environmental hinge, mediating between natural forces and social ideals of a civilized order. Through Chicago’s history, specifically during the City Beautiful movement and the civic interventions that followed, sidewalks have revealed how urban reformers sought to “harden” the city against what they perceived as disorder.

Engineering Nature, Igniting Risk: LA’s Fires and a Century of Landscape Manipulation

May 27, 2025.Reading time 45 minutes.

Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles as our theme this month. This is our fifth post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city […]

San Diego’s South Bay Annexation of 1957: Water Insecurity, Territorial Expansion, and the Making of a US-Mexico Border City

February 21, 2024.Reading time 43 minutes.

Editor’s note: In anticipation of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History’s (SACRPH) 2024 conference to be held in San Diego on the campus of the University of California San Diego, The Metropole’s theme for February is San Diego. This is the third of four entries for the month. For more information about […]

Topography and Poverty — A Review of “Urban Lowlands”

June 3, 2021.Reading time 7 minutes.

Moga, Steven T. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Henry C. Binford This fine book weaves together several strands of United States urban history over the period from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning is an examination […]

Member of the Week: Carl Nightingale

November 12, 2019.Reading time 12 minutes.

Carl Nightingale Professor of Urban History Department of Transnational Studies University at Buffalo Coordinator, Global Urban History Project Board Secretary, People United for Sustainable Housing, PUSH Buffalo. Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? While writing my book on segregation, I got interested the relationship between urban history and other forms of […]

Remembering and Forgetting in Toronto’s Ravines

September 23, 2019.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Jennifer Bonnell Flying into Toronto, I am always struck by the density and reach of its urban tree canopy. In addition to the mature trees of its leafier, privileged neighborhoods, the city wraps itself around the forested, forking ravines of three major river valleys: from west to east, the Humber, Don, and Rouge River […]