Tag Archives: Transport

Reading the City from the Streets

Kenda Mutongi. Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 350 pp., US$ 30.00 (paper). Reviewed by Norman Aselmeyer, European University Institute In Nairobi, it is a hopeless task to guard oneself against … Continue reading

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Immigration, Communities, and Neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930

By Benjamin Bryce, University of Northern British Columbia In 1869, Buenos Aires was a small city of 178,000 inhabitants. Yet by 1914, it had grown to almost 1.6 million people and become the second largest city on the Atlantic coast … Continue reading

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Cosmopolitanism on the Move: Port Said around 1900

By Valeska Huber, German Historical Institute London Research on the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean has stressed the importance of the opening of the Suez Canal as a transformative factor that had extensive reverberations throughout the region. In the decades … Continue reading

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Infrastructural Statecraft and the Rise of Just-in-Time Urbanism

By Boris Vormann, Freie Universität Berlin Containerization has led international trade to triple since the mid-1970s. This massive expansion and deepening of exchange networks would have been unthinkable without the construction of material transportation infrastructures in the world’s metropolitan agglomerations. … Continue reading

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City Life and Automobility in Twentieth-Century Ghana

By Jennifer Hart, Wayne State University On the eve of his country’s independence in the mid-1950s, Ghanaian journalist Moses Danquah claimed: “We are riding confidently on the crest of the wave to greater economic prosperity, to greater social and cultural achievements, … Continue reading

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On the Khartoum Omnibus: Stories of Sudan’s Cosmopolitanism

By Raphael Cormack, University of Edinburgh In July 2005 a helicopter carrying John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and new vice-president of Sudan, crashed in Uganda. Garang and the 13 other passengers were all killed. The most … Continue reading

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Some Reflections on Imperial Port Cities in the Age of Steam

Lasse Heerten, Freie Universität Berlin, and Daniel Tödt, Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin Let’s judge some books by their covers. In the recently flourishing literature on global and imperial history, port cities have become ubiquitous icons, visual shorthand … Continue reading

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Plural Pasts in Southeast Asian Port Cities

By Su Lin Lewis, University of Bristol Conflict and division characterize the way we often think of race relations in the colonial era, but the social history of Asia’s most multi-ethnic cities gives us a different view. The colonial scholar … 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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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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