Tag Archives: Spatial History

The City as a Palimpsest and Crucible of National Identity

By Alexander C. Diener, University of Kansas, and Joshua Hagen, Northern State University The tendency of successive regimes to rework commemorative landscapes speaks to the intrinsic and intricate linkages between place, memory, and identity. We affix memories and identities to urban space … Continue reading

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Building Social Space in Marseille

By Minayo Nasiali, University of California, Los Angeles During the spring and summer of 2017, the Marseille city council approved a series of measures aimed at limiting the number of kebab shops in downtown neighborhoods. The city will draw from … Continue reading

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Imagine Lagos: Mapping a Pre-Colonial West African City

By Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, University of California, Riverside Africa’s cities are now among the fastest growing in the world. But how well are their pre-colonial origins understood? Recent research on Lagos’s past reveals a thriving, indigenous yet cosmopolitan urban community, one … Continue reading

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Analyzing the Palimpsestic Petroleumscape of Rotterdam

By Carola Hein, Delft University of Technology Petroleum – its extraction, refining, transformation, and consumption – has shaped our built environment in visible and invisible interconnected ways around the world over the last 150 years. Industrial structures, buildings, monuments, urban … Continue reading

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Sex Work Regulation and the Colonial Order in Late Nineteenth-Century Cairo

By Francesca Biancani, University of Bologna In modern cities, flows of people, capital, and desires intermingled and structured a new spatial order. Straight streets, airy boulevards, agreeable parks, coffee houses, and taverns constituted the backdrop of a new type of … Continue reading

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Between a Wall and the Sea: A New Book on Colonial Havana

Guadalupe García, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana, Oakland: University of California Press, 2016,  296 pp., $34.95, £24.95 ISBN: 9780520286047 Reviewed by Cecilia T. Fernández, Freie Universität Berlin Strolling through Havana’s so-called “casco histórico,” its colonial center, can … Continue reading

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Black London: Two New Books on the Postcolonial British Capital

Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, 414 pp., $29.95 / £22.95, ISBN: 9780520284302 Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the … Continue reading

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Mapping as Process: Food Access in Nineteenth-Century New York

Gergely Baics, Barnard College, Columbia University Geographic information system (GIS) has changed social science and humanities research through spatial analysis. It has reinvigorated the spatial turn, which has swept many fields in the past decades, improving their empirical foundations, methodological … Continue reading

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Rangoon and Singapore: Connections, Comparisons, and the Construction of Southeast Asian Cities

Michael Sugarman, University of Cambridge November’s parliamentary elections in Myanmar have contributed to a sense of cautious optimism not only on the ground, but also amongst academics studying the Southeast Asian nation’s rich and complex history and society. While academic … Continue reading

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What’s in a Grid? Finding the Form of Settler Colonialism in Melbourne

Nadia Rhook, La Trobe University In recent years Melburnians have been educated about an episode of Australian history previously little known in non-Indigenous circles. A play, Coranderrk: we will show the country, has been performed in theatres around Melbourne, and this … Continue reading

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