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Global Urban History Project

Welcome to the Global Urban History Project!


The Global Urban History Project is a meeting place for scholars interested in exploring the crossroads of urban history and global history. 

GUHP's goal is to encourage the study of cities as creations and creators of large-scale or global historical phenomena. This requires minimizing the Eurocentric and U.S.-centric focus of urban history, while also connecting early-modern and pre-modern historians with those who work on more recent periods.

Founded in 2017, GUHP became a member-supported organization in January 2019.
Scholars at all stages of their careers and from all parts of the world are warmly invited to join the Global Urban History Project. Those interested in cities beyond Europe and the U.S. and in periods before 1850 are especially encouraged.

2024 Dream Conversations—Watch Now on GUHP VIDS!


In this series of public conversations, we reflect on what histories count or should count when narrating urban lives in a planetary age. In so doing, we question dominant narratives to think through the political stakes of history as a plurality of practices and projects. Which ways of knowing and being undergird historical narratives and their temporal and spatial structures? How do ecological crisis and planetary awareness inflect our understanding of urban lifeworlds and politics? How to write a history of global modernity from the urban underside? What urban worlds does anti-colonialism conjure? And how does history-writing as activism or advocacy engender new research practices beyond the archive? These questions will frame our interdisciplinary discussion, with the aim of advancing histories and theories that can do justice to the plurality of urban life.

Our Collaborators

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