Urban history

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Urban history is a field of history that attempts examine the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanisation. The approach tends to be multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like local history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography and archaeology.

At least four major approaches to the field of urban history can be identified.

Contents

[edit] History of Urbanisation

The history of urbanisation focuses on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate themselves in urban localities over time, and on the social and cultural contexts of cities and towns.

This includes examinations of demographics concentration, urban structures or systems approach, and behaviourial aspects of urbanisation.

Major works representing the history of urbanisation:

  • For the demographic aspects, one standard work is Eric Lampard, The Urbanizing World, in H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, eds., The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 1 (1973), pp. 3-58.
  • Demographic, economic, and systems analysis is provided in Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, From the Dawn of History to the Present(1988).
  • Cultural and physical connections are analyzed by Lewis Mumford, The City in History(1961).
  • Architecture and urban form are related in Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History(1991).
  • The place of cities in the process of state formation in Europe is examined in Charles Tilly and W.P.Blockmans, eds.,Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800(1994).
  • Some important works on the history of the earliest cities and ancient urbanization processes are:
  • Trigger, Bruce G. (2003) Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. Cambridge University Press, New York.
  • Van De Mieroop, Marc (1999) The Ancient Mesopotamian City. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
  • Hyslop, John (1990) Inka Settlement Planning. University of Texas Press, Austin.


[edit] Urban Biography

Urban biography is the history of one particular place. This is the most popular form of urban history as far as the general public is concerned. Urban biographies attempt to relate the many complex facets of a city - such as transportation, municipal government, physical expansion, society and social organization - to the larger context of the whole city. The city itself gains a distinct collective personality, and becomes more than just a setting for historical events.

Some significant urban biographies:

  • S.G.Checkland, The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875-1975(1981)
  • Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam, The Life of a City(1972)
  • Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo; 1001 Years of City Victorious(1971)
  • Franklin Tokler, Pittsburgh, An Urban Portrait(1986)
  • Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siecle Vienna(1981)
  • Christopher Hibbert, London, the Biography of a City(1969)
  • John Russell, London(1994)

[edit] Thematic Urban History

A variety of themes (economic, social, architectural, etc) can be examined in the context of cities. Much like microhistory, thematic studies often investigate a larger historical question by examining one city.

London, England, for example, has been used as the focus to investigate a host of different topics:

  • James Alexander, The Economic Structure of the City of London at the end of the 17th Century, Urban History Yearbook(1989), pp. 47-62
  • Peter Borsay, The London Connection: Cultural Diffusion and the 18th Century Provincial Town, London Journal19 (No. 1, 1994), pp. 21-35.
  • Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century(1993).
  • Donald Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London(1979).
  • H.J.Dyos, The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London, in David Cannadine and David Reeder, eds., Exploring the Urban Past, Essays in Urban Historyby H.J.Dyos(1982), pp. 154-78.
  • Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward, A Guide to the Architecture of London (1983).

[edit] Urban Culture

The study of the culture of cities and the role of cities in culture is a more recent development which provides untraditional ways of "reading" cities. The basis for much of this approach stems from an post-modern theory including the literary theory of Jacques Derrida and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz. One example is Alan Mayne's The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914(1993), a study of how slums were represented in the popular press in Sydney, San Francisco, and Birmingham. Mayne argues that slums were social constructions, and that these representations led directly to the contemporary schemes of slum clearance and city improvement.

[edit] Images of the City

The city has long stood as one of the most potent symbols of human capacities and nature. As the largest and most enduring creation of human imagination and hands, and as the largest and most sustained site of human association and interaction, the city has been seen as a marker of what humans are and of what they do. This signification has almost always been shaded with ambivalence. In old legends, epics, and utopias, cities (both actual and symbolic) appeared as places of exceptional but also contradictory meaning. Troy, Babel, Sodom, Babylon, and Rome were viewed, in Western cultures, as standing for human power, wisdom, creativity, and vision, but also for human presumption, perversion, and fated destruction. Images of the modern city restated this ambivalence with fresh intensity. Great modern cities like London, Paris, Berlin, and New York, have repeatedly been portrayed as sites of opportunity and peril, power and helplessness, vitality and decadence, creativity and perplexity. This contradictory face of the city has appeared so often in Western thought as to suggest an essential psychological and cultural anxiety about human civilization, an anxiety about humanity’s relation to their created world and about "humanity" itself. This is especially true of the “modern” city, filled with human artifice and moral contradiction.[1]

[edit] Further reading

  • Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (especially essay “Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century” (English edition: Cambridge, )
  • Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, 1981)
  • Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982)
  • David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, 1985)
  • Richard Rodger, Urban History: Prospect and Retrospect, Urban History, 19 (April, 1992), pp. 1-22.
  • Sam Hays, From the History of the City to the History of the Urbanized Society, Journal of Urban History, 19 (Aug. 1993), 3-25.
  • Lynn Hollen Lees, The Challenge of Political Change: Urban History in the 1990s, Urban History, 21 (April, 1994), pp. 7-19.
  • Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)
  • Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ See especially, Carl Schorske, "The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler," in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), Lewis Mumford, "Utopia, The City, and The Machine," Daedalus (Spring 1965): 271-92; Philip Fisher, "City Matters: City Minds," The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Buckley (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton, 1981), Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982); David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, 1985); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992); Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, Eng., 1996); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

[edit] Sources

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