Urban historians are importers of theory, rarely producers or exporters. While we engage deeply in basic research, we contribute less to the big concepts we use – including “city,” “urban,” and “urbanization.” Global urban historians rely even more on imported theory for notions of the “global,” “globalization,” global city, and “global” or “planetary urbanization.” Most of our interpretive vocabulary – urban and global - originates elsewhere: in the work of sociologists, geographers, and economists, and in the work of literary and cultural studies, political science, and scholars of design, architecture, and planning. While urban historians have produced an enormous secondary literature, we have taken much of this imported theoretical vocabulary for granted: it even feels like our own.
What would happen if urban historians took an inventory of our theoretical vocabulary, checked its archaeology, reassessed its usefulness, exposed its blind spots, rediscovered alternatives we overlooked- especially from scholarship in the global south? Should we recalibrate the proportion of concepts from different sources, search elsewhere for useful theory, ask what we might do without theory, or even generate concepts of our own more useful to us as primary researchers?
In this multi-year series of events, we hope to find answers to those questions. The moment is propitious. The conversation has already begun as panels on the “urban question” at our conferences. Two inaugural publications in the Cambridge “Elements in Global Urban History” series- “How Cities Matter” by Richard Harris and “Real Estate in Global Urban History” by Alexia Yates- contain substantial explorations of the theory vocabularies urban historians use, even suggestions for paths we could take from here.
We invite scholars from across urban history and beyond to join us in a systematic theoretical discussion of our own: for, of, and even by urban historians. Each event will involve an hour and half discussion followed by a business discussion of up to a half hour to plan follow-up events and other actions depending on how the conversation goes. The series is projected for all of 2021-22, with the goal of sustaining it as long as it remains productive.
Participants in the GUHP Mentorship program will join us along with their mentors and present their work at the second GUHP Emerging workshops in Spring, 2022. Some events will be jointly organized with GUHP’s parallel Dream Conversations on the Anthropocene, Inequality, and Empire / Decolonization. We welcome the idea of joint events with other urban history associations.