Urban history

Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
The history of urbanization focuses on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011). The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is not urban history.
Comparative studies
Only a handful of studies attempt a global history of cities, notably Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961). Representative comparative studies include Leonardo Benevolo, The European City (1993); Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450-1750 (1995), and James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru. eds. Edo and Paris (1994) (Edo was the old name for Tokyo).
Architectural history is its own field but occasionally overlaps with urban history.
The political role of cities in helping state formation—and in staying independent—is the theme of Charles Tilly and W. P. Blockmans, eds., Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800 (1994). Comparative elite studies—who was in power—are typified by Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti and Ioanna Laliotou, eds. Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940 (2008) . Labor activists and socialists often had national or international networks that circulated ideas and tactics.
Great Britain
In the 1960s, the historiography of Victorian towns and cities began to flourish in Britain. Much attention focused first on the Victorian city, with topics ranging from demography, public health, the working-class, and local culture. In recent decades, topics regarding class, capitalism, and social structure gave way to studies of the cultural history of urban life, as well as the study of groups such as women, prostitutes, migrants from rural areas, and immigrants from the Continent and from the British Empire. The urban environment itself became a major topic, as studies of the material fabric of the city, and the structure of urban space, became more prominent.
Historians have almost always focused on London, but they have also studied small towns and cities from the medieval period, as well as the urbanization that attended the industrial revolution. In the second half of the 19th century, provincial centres such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester doubled in size and became regional capitals. They were all conurbations that included smaller cities and suburbs in their catchment area. Available scholarly materials have become quite comprehensive today.
United States
Urban biography
Urban biography is the narrative history of a city and often reaches a general audience. Urban biographies cover the interrelationships among various dimensions, such as politics, demography, business, high culture, popular culture, housing, neighbourhoods, and ethnic groups. It covers municipal government as well as physical expansion, growth and decline. Historians often focus on the largest and most dominant city—usually the national capital—which geographers call a "primate city."
Some representative urban biographies are:
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Gotham: a history of New York City to 1898 (2000)
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)
Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (1994)
Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878 (1962)
Christopher Hibbert, London, the Biography of a City (1969)
Robert Hughes, Barcelona (1992)
Colin Jones. Paris: Biography of a City (2004)
Blake McKelvey. Rochester (4 vol, 1961), Rochester NY
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (2012)
Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago (3 vol 1957), to 1893.
Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1998)
Alexandra Ritchie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (1998)
James Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb (1974)
Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (1997), considers literature, music, theater, painting, and decorative arts.
Historians have developed typologies of cities, emphasizing their geographic location and economic specialization. In the United States Carl Bridenbaugh was a pioneer in historiography. He emphasized the major port cities on the East Coast, the largest of which were Boston and Philadelphia, each with fewer than 40,000 people at the time of the American Revolution. Other historians have covered the port cities up and down the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast, along with the river ports along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Industrialization began in New England, and several small cities have scholarly histories. The railroad cities of the West, stretching from Chicago to Kansas City to Wichita to Denver have been well treated. Blake McKelvey provides an encyclopedic overview of the functions of major cities in The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 (1963), and The Emergence of Metropolitan America, 1915-1966 (1968)
Large-scale reference books
Peter Clark of the Urban History Center of the University of Leicester was the general editor (and Cambridge University Press the publisher) of a massive history of British cities and towns, running 2800 pages in 75 chapters by 90 scholars. The chapters deal not with biographies of individual cities, but with economic, social or political themes that cities had in common. Two highly influential, authoritative and comprehensive compendia of European urban history were also compiled by Barry Haynes of the Centre for Urban History at Leicester University in 1990 and 1991, published by Leicester University. These books made a significant contribution to the bibliographic review of urban history research and literature in both Eastern and Western Europe.
In the United States a very different approach was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities has sponsored large historical encyclopedias for many states and several cities, most notably the Encyclopedia of Chicago (2004; also online edition) and The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995, 2nd ed. 2010) They followed the model of an earlier encyclopedia of Cleveland and relished the details about neighbourhoods, people, organizations and events, without imposing any overall theme.
Suburbs
A new subgenre is the history of specific suburbs. Historians have concentrated on specific places, typically focusing on the origins of the suburb in relation to the central city, the pattern of growth, different functions (such as residential or industrial), local politics, as well as racial exclusion and gender roles. The main overview is Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (1987).
Many people have assumed that early-20th-century suburbs were enclaves for middle-class whites, a concept that carries tremendous cultural influence yet is actually stereotypical. Many suburbs are based on a heterogeneous society of working-class and minority residents, many of whom share the American Dream of upward social status via home ownership. Sies (2001) argues that it is necessary to examine how "suburb" is defined as well as the distinction made between cities and suburbs, geography, economic circumstances, and the interaction of numerous factors that move research beyond acceptance of stereotyping and its influence on scholarly assumptions.
New urban history
The "new urban history" emerged in the 1960s as a branch of Social history seeking to understand the "city as process" and, through quantitative methods, to learn more about the inarticulate masses in the cities, as opposed to the mayors and elites. Much of the attention is devoted to individual behaviour, and how the intermingling of classes and ethnic groups operated inside a particular city. Smaller cities are much easier to handle when it comes to tracking a sample of individuals over ten or 20 years.
Common themes include social and political changes, examinations of class formation, and racial/ethnic tensions. A major early study was Stephan Thernstrom's Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964), which used census records to study Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1850–1880. A seminal, landmark book, it sparked interest in the 1960s and 1970s in quantitative methods, census sources, "bottom-up" history, and the measurement of upward social mobility by different ethnic groups.
Other exemplars of the new urban history included
Kathleen Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860 (1976)
David F. Crew. Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860-1914 (1986)
Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (1975; 2nd ed. 2000)
Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West (1976)
Eric H. Monkkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus Ohio 1860-1865 (1975)
There were no overarching social history theories that emerged developed to explain urban development. Inspiration from urban geography and sociology, as well as a concern with workers (as opposed to labour union leaders), families, ethnic groups, racial segregation, and women's roles, have proven useful. Historians now view the contending groups within the city as "agents" who shape the direction of urbanization. The sub-field has flourished in Australia—where most people live in cities.
Demographic perspectives make use of the large volume of census data from the mid-19th century.
Rather than being strictly areas of geographical segmentation, spatial patterns and concepts of place reveal the struggles for power of various social groups, including gender, class, race, and ethnic identity. The spatial patterns of residential and business areas give individual cities their distinct identities and, considering the social aspects attendant to the patterns, create a more complete picture of how those cities evolved, shaping the lives of their citizens.
New techniques include the use of historical GIS data.
Non-Western cities
Since the 1980s extensive research has been done on the cities of the Ottoman Empire, where standardized record-keeping and centralized archives have facilitated work on Aleppo, Damascus, Byblos, Sidon, Jericho, Hama, Nablus and Jerusalem. Historians have explored the social bases of political factionalism, histories of elites and commoners, different family structures and gender roles, marginalized groups such as prostitutes and slaves, and relationships between Muslims and Christians and Jews. Increasingly work is underway on African cities,
as well as South Asia.
In China, the Maoist ideology privileged the uprising of the peasants as the central force in Chinese history, which led to a neglect of urban history until the 1980s. Academics were then allowed to assert that peasant rebellions were often reactionary rather than revolutionary and that China's modernizers of the 1870s made significant advances, even if they were capitalists.
For over a century—since Heinrich Schliemann searched for and found ancient Troy—archaeologists and ancient historians have studied the cities of the ancient world.
Images and cultural role
The study of the culture of specific cities and the role of cities in shaping national culture is a more recent development which provides nontraditional ways of "reading" cities. A representative class is Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980). The basis for some of this approach stems from a post-modern theory including 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 newspapers in Sydney, San Francisco, and Birmingham. The accounts provided dramatic life stories but failed to integrate the agendas and animosities of city officials, property owners, residents, and local businessmen. As a result, they did not reveal the true inner-city social structures. Nevertheless, the middle class accepted the image of and decided to act on the social constructions, leading to the reformers' demands for slum clearance and urban renewal.
As Rosen and Tarr point out, environmental history has made great strides since the 1970s, but its focus is primarily on rural areas, leading to a neglect of urban issues such as air pollution, sewage, clean water—and the concentration of large numbers of horses. Historians are beginning to integrate urban history and environmental history. Thus far most of the attention concerns the negative impact on the environment, rather than how the environment shaped the urbanization process.
Literature and philosophy
In literature, 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. The histories of 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.
Scholarship
The Journal of Urban History has been a leading quarterly journal with articles and reviews since 1975. The Urban History Association was founded in 1988 with 284 members; it now has over 400. It sponsored the "Sixth Biennial Urban History Association Conference" in New York, October 25–28, 2012. It awards prizes for the best book prize, best article, and best PhD dissertation.
H.J. Dyos (1921-1978) at the University of Leicester was the leading promoter of urban history in Britain, leading the way, especially into the study of Victorian cities. He formed the Urban History Study Group in 1962; its newsletter became the Urban History Yearbook (1974-1991) and then the journal Urban History (1992–present). His edited volume on The Study of Urban History (1968) opened up the methodology and stimulated young scholars, as did the conferences he organized and the book series he edited. Dyos rejected the quantitative methods of the New Urban History because he was not interested in the individual people in the city, but in the larger social structure, such as the slum or the entire city.
Since 1993, the daily email discussion list H-Urban has enabled historians, graduate students and others interested in urban history and urban studies to communicate current research and research interests easily; to query and discuss new approaches, sources, methods, and tools of analysis; and to comment on contemporary historiography. The logs are open to searches, and membership is free. H-Urban seeks to inform historians on such matters as announcements, calls for papers, conferences, awards, fellowships, availability of new sources and archives, reports on new research, and teaching tools, including books, articles, works-in-progress, research reports, primary historical documents (for example, model ordinances, federal/state/local reports, addresses of city officials), syllabi, bibliographies, software, datasets, and multimedia publications or projects. It commissions its own book reviews. H-Urban has 2,856 subscribers (as of 2012) and is the oldest of the H-Net network of discussion lists.
The history of European urbanism in the 20th century is the focus of , a current Horizon 2020 European Joint Doctorate programme. It is based on the inherent multidisciplinary approach of the research field and the goal of gaining a pan-European perspective on planning history.
See also
American urban history
Center for Urban History of East Central Europe
Cities in the Great Depression, (1929-1939), worldwide
Gilded Age Plains City, online resources for American Midwest
Danish Center of Urban History
History of cities in Canada
Social history
Suburb
History of urban planning
Town and Country Planning Association
Urban planning
Urban economics
Urban studies
Index of urban studies articles
Urbanization
Cities
List of oldest continuously inhabited cities
Cities of East Asia
History of Beijing
History of Berlin
History of Chicago
History of London
History of Manila
History of Mexico City
History of Naples
History of New York City
History of Paris
History of Philadelphia
History of Rome
History of Vienna
Notes
Further reading
Abbott, Carl. "Urban History for Planners," Journal of Planning History, Nov 2006, Vol. 5 Issue 4, pp 301–313
Armus, Diego and John Lear. "The trajectory of Latin American urban history," Journal of Urban History (1998) 24#3 pp 291–301
Beachy, Robert and Ralf Roth, eds. Who Ran the Cities?: City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940 (2007)
Bennett, Larry. The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism. (U of Chicago Press, 2015), 241 pp
Borsay, Peter. The eighteenth-century town: a reader in English urban history 1688-1820 (Routledge, 2014)
Clark, Peter, and Paul Slack. English Towns in Transition 1500-1700 (1976)
Davies, Gary W. "The rise of urban history in Britain c. 1960-1978" (PhD dissertation, University of Leicester, 2014) online, With detailed bibliography pp 205-40
Denecke, Dietrich, and Gareth Shaw, eds. Urban historical geography: recent progress in Britain and Germany (Cambridge UP, 1988).
Emmen, Edith. The Medieval Town (1979)
Emerson, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War (2013) 526pp short essays on 21 major world cities in 1913, including London, Washington, Winnipeg, and Constantinople etc.
Engeli, Christian, and Horst Matzerath. Modern urban history research in Europe, USA, and Japan: a handbook (1989) in GoogleBooks
Epstein, S. E. ed. Town and Country in Europe, 1300-1800 (2001), a major anthology of scholarly articles
Frost, Lionel, and Seamus O'Hanlon. "Urban history and the future of Australian cities." Australian Economic History Review (2009) 49#1 pp: 1-18.
Gillette Jr., Howard, and Zane L. Miller, eds. American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review (1987) online
Goldfield, David. ed. Encyclopedia of American Urban History (2 vol 2006); 1056pp; excerpt and text search
Harvey, David, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (1985), a Marxist approach
Handlin, Oscar, and John Burchard, eds. The Historian and the City (Harvard U.P., 1963)
Haynes, Barry. Register of European Urban History (Leicester University, 1991)
Haynes, Douglas E., and Nikhil Rao. "Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating the Urban History of India, ca. 1920–1970." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2013) 36#3 pp: 317–335. Online
Hays, Samuel P. "From the History of the City to the History of the Urbanized Society," Journal of Urban History, (1993) 19#1 pp 3–25.
Isin, Engin F. "Historical sociology of the city' in Gerard Delanty & Engin F. Isin, eds. Handbook of historical sociology (2003). pp. 312–325. online
Lees, Andrew. "Historical perspectives on cities in modern Germany: recent literature." Journal of Urban History 5.4 (1979): 411–446.
Lees, Andrew. "Cities, Society, and Culture in Modern Germany: Recent Writings by Americans on the Großstadt." Journal of Urban History 25.5 (1999): 734–744.
Lees, Lynn Hollen. "The Challenge of Political Change: Urban History in the 1990s," Urban History, (1994), 21#1 pp. 7–19.
McKay, John P. Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (1976)
McManus, Ruth, and Philip J. Ethington, "Suburbs in transition: new approaches to suburban history," Urban History, Aug 2007, Vol. 34 Issue 2, pp 317–337
McShane, Clay. "The State of the Art in North American Urban History," Journal of Urban History (2006) 32#4 pp 582–597, identifies a loss of influence by such writers as Lewis Mumford, Robert Caro, and Sam Warner, a continuation of the emphasis on narrow, modern time periods, and a general decline in the importance of the field. Comments by Timothy Gilfoyle and Carl Abbott contest the latter conclusion.
Miller, Jaroslav. "‘In each town I find a triple harmony’: idealizing the city and the language of community in early modern (East) Central European urban historiography." Urban History (2012) 39#1 pp: 3-19.
Piker, Burton, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (1981)
Mohl, Raymond. "Urban History," in D. R. Woolf, ed. A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (1988) pp 907–14
Nicholas, David M. The growth of the medieval city: from late antiquity to the early fourteenth century (Routledge, 2014); The later medieval city: 1300-1500 (Routledge, 2014)
Platt, Harold L. Building the Urban Environment: Visions of the Organic City in the United States, Europe, and Latin America (Temple University Press, 2015). 301 pp.
Reulecke, Jürgen; Huck, Gerhard; Sutcliffe, Anthony. "Urban History Research in Germany: Its Development and Present Condition," Urban History Yearbook (1981) pp 39–54
Rodger, Richard. "Taking Stock: Perspectives on British Urban History," Urban History Review (2003) 32#1 online
Roth, Ralf, and Marie-Noëlle Polino, eds. The City and the Railway in Europe (Ashgate, 2003), 287 pages
Ruiz, Teofilo. "Urban Historical Geography and the Writing of Late Medieval Urban History," in Carol Lansing and Edward D. English, eds., A Companion to the Medieval World (2010) pp 397–412
Wang, Q. Edward. "Urban History in China: Editor's Introduction." Chinese Studies in History (2014) 47#3 pp: 3–6. Special issue on Chinese cities Online
External links
International Planning History Society
The International Planning History Society International Conference - 2012 website
The International Planning History Society International Conference - 2014 website
H-URBAN, daily email discussion group on urban history
Gilbert A. Stelter, "Introduction to the Study of Urban History" (1996)
The Urban History Association
Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, U.K.
Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv, Ukraine
Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium)
Fields of history
Urban planning
Local history