Urban History in Kumase, Ghana: A Note on Archives

As we begin a conference entitled “History Urbanism Resilience,” I see my role as articulating some of the ways that the concept of “resilience” contributes to the history of urbanism—and to explore how the history of urbanism helps complexify our understanding of resilience. Resilience as a term has become both increasingly ubiquitous and increasingly contested. My remarks today will both explain this and, ultimately, defend the value of the concept--as long as we approach it critically. A first observation: putting the word “Resilience” in the title of the IPHS conference seems to have worked. The word appears in the names of 12 different conference sessions, and 35 separate papers use the word in their titles. So, either “resilience” is an inspiring frame for our thinking, or many of us are just extremely dutiful--or strategically adept--at providing conference organizers with what we think they want to hear. I suspect that there is some of each at work here. More importantly, this combination of utility and malleability accounts for much of the burgeoning appeal that the term “resilience” seems to have. Are we all talking about the same thing? Probably not, though there is certainly some reasonable degree of commonality. A quick perusal of the titles in the IPHS conference program suggests that we are, collectively, applying the idea of resilience to architecture, communities, and metropolitan form, and that it is applied in many contexts of social, environmental and political change, frequently including sudden disruptions caused by disasters or warfare. In the spring of 2002, following on the 9/11 attacks in the United States, a colleague and I ran a semester-long colloquium that we called “The Resilient City: Trauma, Recovery, and Remembrance.” We wanted to look back at a variety of traumatic urban events from around the world to see how governments and their citizens had responded. How did recovery from traumatic events get conceptualized and how did these events get memorialized? Did it matter whether the cause was earthquakes or floods or wars or terrorist attacks? In other words, what could we learn from the history of post-traumatic urbanism that might help us conceptualize what might happen post- 9/11? My colleague Tom Campanella and I commissioned a series of papers exploring how cities (and their citizens) had historically recovered from sudden traumatic events—not just from terrorism, but from other abrupt events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and wars. We quickly learned that, while it was possible to chart something called “disaster recovery,” that concept was hardly straightforward. In the past 200 years, virtually every large city in the world that experienced a disaster or war seems to have been rebuilt, no matter how extreme the level of destruction or loss of life.

ABSTRACT:The aim of this article is to take stock of nineteenth-century transnational urban history. After a short introduction to transnational history, general urban histories are analysed with respect to the ways in which transnational perspectives are incorporated into the narratives. Specific contributions to urban history in a transnational perspective are analysed. Approaches to urban planning history that focus on transnational linkages and international organization are discussed. Approaches to urban history within enlarged geographical scales that go beyond the nation-state framework, with a particular focus on cities as nodes in translocal networks, are analysed. The article concludes with a critical discussion of nineteenth-century transnational urban history.

Urban history in our field has taken many different forms in the past few decades. Many such works, no doubt, have drawn great inspiration from scholars outside our area specialization. Many, however, have looked within our area specialization for inspiration, thus giving urban histories of our region several peculiar characteristics. The first part of this article discusses how urban historians have provided new perspectives on a topic long dear to Eastern Europeanist hearts—nationalism. Here the article looks at the ways in which Gary Cohen’s Politics of Ethnic Survival has influenced how historians have studied nationalism and the city. The second part will briefly survey other forms of urban history that have predominated within the field, many of which recall the questions and approaches first found in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna. The final part concludes with some thoughts about what the rise of urban history among Eastern Europeanists might mean for the future our field.

As educational history and urban history have developed in recent decades, a significant gap has opened up between them. On one side, educational historians have focused on the rise and fall of big-city school districts. On the other side, urban historians have documented how governmental housing, tax, and transportation policies fueled the postwar decline of cities and expansion of outlying suburbs. But these two fields have failed to connect with one another. In general, educational historians have not yet connected the decline of urban schools with the growth of the suburbs, and the broader political and economic shifts in the metropolitan context. Likewise, urban historians have rarely discussed what role schools played in the transformation of cities and suburbs. This chapter seeks to bridge the historiographical gap between urban, suburban, and educational history by demonstrating how these works can inform one another. It highlights major books that have served as the foundations in each field over the past few decades, as well as the rising body of new scholarship that attempts to span the distance between them.

Educational history has been regularly noticed in the Urban History Yearbook in reviews, and in the bibliography under the heading of urban culture, but it has been a minority interest among urban historians and in Britain the treatment of schools and schooling in town histories has tended until recently to be perfunctory or conventional. However, the impact of social and cultural history on both urban and educational history is resulting in more of an overlap of interests. Hence the publication later this year, in the series of themes in International Urban History, of a set of comparative essays on urban educational history: The City and Education in Four Nations. This article anticipates the historiographical reviews, case studies and theoretical discussions of that volume. It attempts to show, from a British perspective, how recent historiographical bends raise questions and issues of interest to urban historians of the modern period.

In this paper, we discuss some aspects of the relationship between computer science and historical disciplines, with reference to teaching, dissemination and research on specific topics of urban history, highlighting the support provided by computing resources to study, analysis and presentation of themes of urban landscape history. We consider two case studies: some urban changes in Bologna from 1861 to the reconstruction after World War II, and the role of the tourism in urban history of Rimini from half of 19th century to the present day. This study is part of a larger research and educational project on urban history, with various levels of thematic and technical complexity.

American urban history embraces all historiography related to towns, cities, and metropolitan regions in the United States. American urban history includes the examination of places, processes, and ways of life through a broad and diverse range of themes including immigration, migration, population distribution, economic and spatial development, politics, planning, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Urban history emerged as an identifiable subfield of United States history in the mid-20th century, admittedly well after the establishment of similar areas of inquiry in other professional fields and academic disciplines, particularly sociology. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a small number of academics, led by noted social historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., commenced the first wave of scholarly interest in American urban history with works on colonial seaports and select 19th-century cities. By the 1950s, urban history coalesced as a recognizable subfield around a reformulation of American history, emphasizing the establishment of towns, rather than the pursuit of agriculture, as the spearhead for the formation and growth of the nation. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a second round of interest in American urban history, set against the backdrop of the tremendous political and social changes that swept the nation and transformed the historical profession. Through innovative models of scholarship that broke with traditional consensus history, notably pioneering quantitative research methods, a self-identified “new urban history” emerged that emphasized spatial development as well as social, economic, and political mobility, conflict, and change. Over time, this new urban history was largely subsumed within social history, given the fields’ intersecting and overlapping interests in social and political issues viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Social history’s broad focus resulted in an explosion of scholarship that all but dominated the American historical profession by the late 20th century. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, books with urban settings and themes, most of them well within the camp of social history, won an impressive number of Bancroft prizes and other prestigious awards. Urban history itself has survived—even thrived—without a widely agreed upon canon or dominant research methodology. Scholars continue to make significant contributions to urban history, whether or not they embrace the title of urbanist. Note that attendance at the biannual meetings of the Urban History Association has grown significantly over the last two decades. The sources in this article’s twenty subject headings have been arranged to illustrate the depth and breadth of each prominent theme in the field and are by no means an exhaustive list of such scholarship, but rather a sampling of the most influential and innovative examinations of America’s urban canvas.

The article analyzes the formation and development of Urban History as a branch of historical science before and immediately after the era of the Urban Crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of the article suggests that urban history was formed in a constant dialogue with the social sciences. At the beginning, academic urban historians appeared in the 1930s as opponents of American “agrarian” and frontier histories. Drawing their ideas from the Chicago School of sociology, they reproduced the national history of civic local communities that expressed the achievements of Western civilization. However, in the context of the impending Urban Crisis, social sciences, together with urban historians, have declared the importance of generalizing social phenomena. A group of rebels soon formed among historians. They called their movement ‘New Urban History’ and advocated the return of historical context to urban studies, and were against social theory. However, in an effort to reconstruct history “from the bottom up” through a quantitative study of social mobility, new urban historians have lost the city as an important variable of their analysis. They had to abandon the popular name and recognize themselves as representatives of social history and interested in the problems of class, culture, consciousness, and conflicts. In this situation, some social scientists have tried to try on the elusive brand ‘New Urban History’, but their attempt also failed. As a result, only those who remained faithful to the national narrative or interdisciplinary approach remained urban historians, but continued to remain in the bosom of historical science, rushing around conventional urban sociology and its denial.

The ways in which the organization of local government and the practice of political power locally have changed over time has attracted heightened interest from urban and administrative historians over recent decades. Much of this burgeoning interest has paralleled the concurrent decline in the status and powers of local government since the 1980s. In recent years, a shifting focus from government to governance has allowed the historian to re-conceptualize approaches to urban political power. Urban governance denotes a wider system of government by encapsulating the complex range of actors, interests and resources, which straddle the public, private and voluntary sectors, each with a vested interest in the way that political power is organized and practised locally. By broadening their approach to urban political power, urban historians have, since the late 1980s, elicited new perspectives on municipal administration, reattaching it with the national and juridical frameworks of analysis from which it had been fractured. In general, this growing number of local, regional and cross-national historical studies hints at a more complex and interesting municipal dimension which transcends previously impermeable divisions between the private and the public spheres, between political democracy and administrative bureaucracy, between the central state and municipal administration, and between national and transnational contexts of administrative thought and practice.

Urbanization and urban history in West Africa

In this article I describe and discuss my attempt to design an entire course around a shared class project of conducting applied local environmental history research leading to an online book. Although I am an environmental historian, this course draws heavily on urban history as well. I start with the concrete details of my current course design, followed by some reflections on my previous attempts at teaching this course. Ultimately, I believe that both urban and environmental history courses would benefit from attempting to get our students into the field and conducting local research that links physical places to written documents and narratives. This provides the students the opportunity to connect history with physical places that they can visit and experience. We would be remiss if we did not use this inherent advantage that we have as urban and/or environmental historians. Through this “field history,” we can reach students and teach them how to truly engage in the practice and art of history.

It is now several years since José Luis Oyón presented an overview of recent trends in Spanish urban history, and this article seeks to communicate a sense of developments in the field since the mid-1990s, dealing with publications covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ‘contemporary’ rather than ‘modern’ history, in Spanish terminology. The question of what constitutes ‘urban history’ in Spain remains problematic, in the absence of a ‘Dyos phenomenon’, a distinctive urban history teaching enterprise and a sustained and successful dedicated journal. Four annual issues of Historia Urbana, a ‘review of the history of ideas and of urban transformations’, appeared in the mid-1990s, but the final one dates from 1997, and most of the articles presented general theoretical perspectives or articles based on research in countries other than Spain. As Beascoechea and Novo have recently remarked, it seemed in the early 1990s that urban history (or, as they put it, ‘the history of the city’) was becoming established as a recognized discipline in Spain, but subsequent developments have failed to match the expectations that were aroused. Their themed urban history issue of Historia Contemporánea, produced in 2002, is aimed at regaining the lost momentum. Meanwhile, librarians still do not respond to ‘historia urbana’ as a category, seeking to redefine it as ‘urbanismo’, a narrower concept focused on town planning and urban design.

Of special interest to readers of the review is the announcement of publication of the first extensive bibliography on urban history in Canada. It is Canadian Urban History: A Selected Bibliography (Sudbury: Laurentian University Press, 1972). 65 pp. Compiled by Gilbert A. Stelter. Copies are available for $2 from Laurentian University Bookstore, Sudbury, Ontario. The bibliography is divided in three, Part I being "The Study of Urban History", Part II being "Selected Topics in Urban History" and Part III being "The Rise of Urban Canada: Regional" Non-Canadian sources of general application are included in the publication, particularly in Parts I and II, but the bulk of the references are by Canadian authors or institutions and on Canadian subjects. Included in Part II, Topics in Urban History, are listings on planning, architecture, government and politics, economic growth, population, class, ethnicity, social problems, the urban church and the single-enterprise community. Material in Part III includes direct references for most of the major cities in Canada.

TEACHERS who use field studies to enhance urban or community history courses face an important decision. Should fieldwork concentrate on local issues alone? Or can field sessions be designed to transcend locality, to provide insights into the external forces that influence the community as well as teach methods of analysis that apply to all cities? For instructors who prefer the more general approach, the strategy for planning field instruction is by no means obvious, especially since the most accessible parts of a city-the tourist attractions, architectural landmarks, and tours through leading local institutions-are all too readily subject to localistic interpretation. Yet the major themes of urban history can be an important guide for conducting field activities of a general nature. This article will first briefly outline several major themes of American urban history that pertain to the study of all communities; it will then describe how a program using extensive comparative community field studies reinforces these general themes, noting the application of this model to community field studies on any scale.

When I prepared an article on "Urban history in Canada" for the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee's Urban History Group Newsletter in December, 1969, I felt that it was best to include a note that "so many developments are taking place, these comments will probably have to be amplified and modified before long". If anything this was an underestimate: new urban history courses continue to appear, the rapid flow of books continues to build up, more source materials are available, the first urban history session of the Canadian Historical Association was held at St. John's and now we have a Canadian urban history newsletter.