Feeding, Fueling, and Building the Foundations of Toronto: Sources for Exploring Historic Urban Metabolism

This is the eight and final 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 Andrew Watson In July 1896, Chicora, Oliver Mowat, and Ann Brown docked at Toronto Harbour. Each had come from a different corner of Lake Ontario bearing […]

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Urban Nightscapes and the Anthropocene

This is the seventh 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 Sara B. Pritchard Ryan Reft’s recent photograph, “Sorrento Italy at night” (Figure 1), opened the Network in Canadian History and Environment and Urban History Association Call for Papers […]

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Beyond Progress: Substations, Informality, and Environmental Changes 

This is the sixth 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 Yohad Zacarías S. Between 1920 and 1930, the Chilean Electric Company Limited, Santiago Municipality, and the Chilean government built 100 electric substations to transmit and distribute electrical power […]

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Reading the City Through Countermonuments of Ecology: From Mistaseni to Floodlines

This is the fifth 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 John Bessai  I used to study cities through their official monuments, statues and commemorative plaques. In the process, I started to understand cities through natural elements, including stones, […]

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Remnant Urban Prairie Teaches Lessons in Loss

This is the fourth 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 Carmen Gilmore In summer 2021, I volunteered with the Saskatchewan Native Plant Society to create a photographic wildflower brochure of the Saskatoon Natural Grasslands (the Grasslands). I’d become […]

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Finding the Flats: Or, the Cautionary Tale of Saint John West 

With sea levels rising, with flooding and storm surge becoming more intense and more frequent, our coastal cities are on the front line—literally—of the effects of climate change. But not only have we warmed those seas and powered those storms by our use of fossil fuels, we have also made our cities more vulnerable to these changes by building into and over tidewater.

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Member of the Week: Debjani Bhattacharyya

Debjani Bhattacharyya, PhD Professor and Chair for the History of the Anthropocene Department of History, University of Zürich Twitter: @itihaashtag  Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on a project tentatively titled “Climate Futures’ Past: Law and Weather Science in the Indian Ocean World.” Ranging from the eighteenth […]

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Choosing Perpetual Management: Urban Runoff and the Origins of its Mitigation

Editor’s note: This is the fifth post in our theme for January 2022, Urban Environmentalism. Additional entries can be seen at the end of this article. By Amanda K. Philips de Lucas Regulating Urban Runoff  Presently, cities across the United States battle a microscopic foe. The particulate matter of urban existence, during wet weather events, […]

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What Street Trees Tell Us About Our Cities – A Review of “Seeing Trees”

Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Sara E. Levine Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin by Sonja Dümpelmann is more than a history of street trees in two cities. It is about politics […]

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