Can global urban historians engage the concept of the Anthropocene? Temporal, spatial, theoretical, disciplinary, and political challenges are at stake.

Temporally, we need to operate at once on deep geological time, on the multi-cyclical time of the Sun’s relationship to Earth, on the patient time of the biosphere's ebb and flow, on the "deep" time of humans' relationship to other lifeforms, on the contingent time of tectonic shift and volcanism, on the accelerating time of anthropogenic transformation, and on the choppier, far less predictable time of human politics. If politics dominates the urban historian’s archive, how do we re-read our sources to engage longer questions of the Anthropocene and climate change? 

Spatially, thinking about cities as creations and creators of the Anthropocene allows us to think of the built environment and its socio-cultural histories through materials like dust, sand, cement, and hydrocarbons and through connections to Earthly spaces like fields, forests, grasslands, mountains, marshes, rivers, estuaries, oceans, and the atmosphere. As Anthropocenic manifestations, cities have played a central role in terraforming our planet, just as the planet has foundationally participated in acts of human habitat design and construction. What comes of conceiving urbanization and human habitat more generally as part of the stratigraphies of the Earth’s crust, interconnected as these are with the dynamics of the Earth’s mantle, and its core? Do existing urban historical methods effectively capture these spatio-material, anthro-climactic, and even anthro-geological entanglements? 

Theoretically, cities of the Anthropocene are by definition global and planetary. What, therefore, should urban historians do with concepts like “the global city” and “planetary urbanization” that come from the social sciences and that typically do not address longer temporalities nor engage the complexities historians bring to the study of change? If cross-disciplinary questions within the social sciences and humanities are vexed enough, what of those between urban history, climate science, and geology?

Finally, we must keep our eye squarely focused on cities’ role in human and environmental justice. Can the lens of the Anthropocene help global urban historians usefully sharpen questions about inequality, rights to the city, and the right to water, food, land, labor, and wealth? As we build a global history informed by the Anthropocene and climate change, we must retain our focus on realities of resource scarcity, displacement, land submergence, migration, the transnational movement of minerals, materials, goods, ideas, people, and capital, and extensions of imperial state power.

As many critics of the term Anthropocene have made clear, all of that begs difficult questions about the "anthropos." Who is the "human" in the "human activities" - including acts of city-building - that geologists tell us, have risen to the status of "geological superpower" on our home planet?

To write urban history from the Anthropocene may involve reimagining our discipline.