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Urban history is a field of
history History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
that examines the historical nature of
cities A city is a human settlement of a substantial size. The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no universally agree ...
and
town A town is a type of a human settlement, generally larger than a village but smaller than a city. The criteria for distinguishing a town vary globally, often depending on factors such as population size, economic character, administrative stat ...
s, and the process of
urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation in British English) is the population shift from Rural area, rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. ...
. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like
social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
,
architectural history The history of architecture traces the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions, overarching stylistic trends, and dates. The beginnings of all these traditions is thought to be humans satisfying the very basic need of shelt ...
, urban sociology,
urban geography Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have ...
,
business history Business history is a historiographical field which examines the history of firms, business methods, government regulation and the effects of business on society. It also includes biographies of individual firms, executives, and entrepreneurs ...
, and
archaeology Archaeology or archeology is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of Artifact (archaeology), artifacts, architecture, biofact (archaeology), biofacts or ecofacts, ...
.
Urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation in British English) is the population shift from Rural area, rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. ...
and
industrialization Industrialisation (British English, UK) American and British English spelling differences, or industrialization (American English, US) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an i ...
were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of
modernization Modernization theory or modernisation theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized, wealthier and more educated, their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic and rationalist. The "classical" theories ...
, or the transformation of rural traditional societies. The history of urbanization focuses on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011). The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is ''not'' urban history.


Comparative studies

Only a handful of studies attempt a global history of cities, notably
Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a ...
, '' The City in History'' (1961). Representative comparative studies include Leonardo Benevolo, ''The European City'' (1993); Christopher R. Friedrichs, ''The Early Modern City, 1450-1750'' (1995), and James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru. eds. ''Edo and Paris'' (1994) (Edo was the old name for Tokyo). Architectural history is its own field but occasionally overlaps with urban history. The political role of cities in helping state formation—and in staying independent—is the theme of
Charles Tilly Charles Tilly (May 27, 1929 – April 29, 2008) was an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian who wrote on the relationship between politics and society. He was a professor of history, sociology, and social science at the Uni ...
and W. P. Blockmans, eds., ''Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800'' (1994). Comparative elite studies—who was in power—are typified by Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti and Ioanna Laliotou, eds. ''Who Ran the Cities? City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940'' (2008) . Labor activists and socialists often had national or international networks that circulated ideas and tactics.


Great Britain

In the 1960s, the historiography of Victorian towns and cities began to flourish in Britain. Much attention focused first on the Victorian city, with topics ranging from demography, public health, the working-class, and local culture. In recent decades, topics regarding class, capitalism, and social structure gave way to studies of the cultural history of urban life, as well as the study of groups such as women, prostitutes, migrants from rural areas, and immigrants from the Continent and from the British Empire. The urban environment itself became a major topic, as studies of the material fabric of the city, and the structure of urban space, became more prominent. Historians have almost always focused on London, but they have also studied smaller towns and cities from the medieval period, as well as the urbanization that attended the industrial revolution. In the second half of the 19th century, provincial centres such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester doubled in size and became regional capitals. They were all conurbations that included smaller cities and suburbs in their
catchment area A catchment area in human geography, is the area from which a location, such as a city, service or institution, attracts a population that uses its services and economic opportunities. Catchment areas may be defined based on from where people are ...
. Available scholarly materials have become quite comprehensive today.


United States


Urban biography

Urban biography is the
narrative history Narrative history is the practice of writing history in a story-based form. It tends to entail history-writing based on reconstructing series of short-term events, and ever since the influential work of Leopold von Ranke on professionalising his ...
of a city and often reaches a general audience. Urban biographies cover the interrelationships among various dimensions, such as politics, demography, business, high culture, popular culture, housing, neighbourhoods, and ethnic groups. It covers
municipal government A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...
as well as physical expansion, growth and decline. Historians often focus on the largest and most dominant city—usually the national capital—which geographers call a " primate city." Some representative urban biographies are: * Edwin G. Burrows and
Mike Wallace Myron Leon Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality. Known for his investigative journalism, he interviewed a wide range of prominent newsmakers during his seven-decade car ...
. ''Gotham: a history of New York City to 1898'' (2000) * S. G. Checkland, ''The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875-1975'' (1981) * Geoffrey Cotterell, ''Amsterdam, The Life of a City'' (1972) * Janet Abu-Lughod, ''Cairo; 1001 Years of City Victorious'' (1971) * Diane E. Davis, ''Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century'' (1994) * Constance McLaughlin Green, '' Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878'' (1962) *
Christopher Hibbert Arthur Raymond Hibbert (5 March 1924 – 21 December 2008), known as Christopher Hibbert, was an English people, English author, popular historian and biographer. He has been called "a pearl of biographers" (''New Statesman'') and "probably the ...
, ''London, the Biography of a City'' (1969) * Robert Hughes, ''Barcelona'' (1992) * Colin Jones. ''Paris: Biography of a City'' (2004) * Blake McKelvey. ''Rochester'' (4 vol, 1961),
Rochester NY Rochester is a city in and the seat of government of Monroe County, New York, United States. It is the fourth-most populous city and 10th most-populated municipality in New York, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 census. The city form ...
* Simon Sebag Montefiore, ''Jerusalem: The Biography'' (2012) * Bessie Louise Pierce, ''A History of Chicago'' (3 vol 1957), to 1893. *
Roy Porter Roy Sydney Porter (31 December 1946 – 3 March 2002) was a British historian known for his work on the history of medicine. He retired in 2001 as the director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine at University College London ...
, ''London: A Social History'' (1998) * Alexandra Ritchie, ''Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin'' (1998) * James Scobie, ''Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb'' (1974) * Ronald Taylor, ''Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait'' (1997), considers literature, music, theater, painting, and
decorative arts ] The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose aim is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. This includes most of the objects for the interiors of buildings, as well as interior design, but typically excl ...
. Historians have developed typologies of cities, emphasizing their geographic location and economic specialization. In the United States Carl Bridenbaugh was a pioneer in historiography. He emphasized the major port cities on the East Coast, the largest of which were Boston and Philadelphia, each with fewer than 40,000 people at the time of the American Revolution. Other historians have covered the port cities up and down the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast, along with the river ports along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Industrialization began in New England, and several small cities have scholarly histories. The railroad cities of the West, stretching from Chicago to Kansas City to Wichita to Denver have been well treated. Blake McKelvey provides an encyclopedic overview of the functions of major cities in ''The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915'' (1963), and ''The Emergence of Metropolitan America, 1915-1966'' (1968)


Large-scale reference books

Peter Clark of the Urban History Center of the
University of Leicester The University of Leicester ( ) is a public university, public research university based in Leicester, England. The main campus is south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park, Leicester, Victoria Park. The university's predecessor, Univ ...
was the general editor (and Cambridge University Press the publisher) of a massive history of British cities and towns, running 2800 pages in 75 chapters by 90 scholars. The chapters deal not with biographies of individual cities, but with economic, social or political themes that cities had in common. Two highly influential, authoritative and comprehensive compendia of European urban history were also compiled by Barry Haynes of the Centre for Urban History at Leicester University in 1990 and 1991, published by Leicester University. These books made a significant contribution to the bibliographic review of urban history research and literature in both Eastern and Western Europe. In the United States a very different approach was sponsored by the
National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...
has sponsored large historical encyclopedias for many states and several cities, most notably the
Encyclopedia of Chicago ''The Encyclopedia of Chicago'' is a historical reference work covering Chicago and the entire Chicago metropolitan area published by the University of Chicago Press. Released in October 2004, the work is the result of a ten-year collaboration ...
(2004; also online edition) and
The Encyclopedia of New York City ''The Encyclopedia of New York City'' is a reference book on New York City, New York. Edited by Columbia University history professor Kenneth T. Jackson, the book was first published in 1995 by the New-York Historical Society and Yale Univers ...
(1995, 2nd ed. 2010) They followed the model of an earlier encyclopedia of Cleveland and relished the details about neighbourhoods, people, organizations and events, without imposing any overall theme.


Suburbs

A new subgenre is the history of specific suburbs. Historians have concentrated on specific places, typically focusing on the origins of the suburb in relation to the central city, the pattern of growth, different functions (such as residential or industrial), local politics, as well as racial exclusion and gender roles. The main overview is Kenneth T. Jackson's '' Crabgrass Frontier'' (1987). Many people have assumed that early-20th-century suburbs were enclaves for middle-class whites, a concept that carries tremendous cultural influence yet is actually stereotypical. Many suburbs are based on a heterogeneous society of working-class and minority residents, many of whom share the
American Dream The "American Dream" is a phrase referring to a purported national ethos of the United States: that every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. The phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams during the ...
of upward social status via home ownership. Sies (2001) argues that it is necessary to examine how "suburb" is defined as well as the distinction made between cities and suburbs, geography, economic circumstances, and the interaction of numerous factors that move research beyond acceptance of stereotyping and its influence on scholarly assumptions.


New urban history

The "new urban history" emerged in the 1960s as a branch of
Social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
seeking to understand the "city as process" and, through quantitative methods, to learn more about the inarticulate masses in the cities, as opposed to the mayors and elites. Much of the attention is devoted to individual behaviour, and how the intermingling of classes and ethnic groups operated inside a particular city. Smaller cities are much easier to handle when it comes to tracking a sample of individuals over ten or 20 years. Common themes include social and political changes, examinations of class formation, and racial/ethnic tensions. A major early study was Stephan Thernstrom's ''Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City'' (1964), which used census records to study
Newburyport, Massachusetts Newburyport is a coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, northeast of Boston. The population was 18,289 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. A historic seaport with a vibrant tourism industry, Newburyport includes p ...
, 1850–1880. A seminal, landmark book, it sparked interest in the 1960s and 1970s in quantitative methods, census sources, "bottom-up" history, and the measurement of upward social mobility by different ethnic groups. Other exemplars of the new urban history included *Kathleen Conzen, ''Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860'' (1976) * David F. Crew. '' Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860-1914'' (1986) * Alan Dawley, ''Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn'' (1975; 2nd ed. 2000) * Michael B. Katz, ''The People of Hamilton, Canada West'' (1976) * Eric H. Monkkonen, ''The Dangerous Class: Crime and Poverty in Columbus Ohio 1860-1865'' (1975) There were no overarching social history theories that emerged developed to explain urban development. Inspiration from urban geography and sociology, as well as a concern with workers (as opposed to labour union leaders), families, ethnic groups, racial segregation, and women's roles, have proven useful. Historians now view the contending groups within the city as "agents" who shape the direction of urbanization. The sub-field has flourished in Australia—where most people live in cities. Demographic perspectives make use of the large volume of census data from the mid-19th century. Rather than being strictly areas of geographical segmentation, spatial patterns and concepts of place reveal the struggles for power of various social groups, including gender, class, race, and ethnic identity. The spatial patterns of residential and business areas give individual cities their distinct identities and, considering the social aspects attendant to the patterns, create a more complete picture of how those cities evolved, shaping the lives of their citizens. New techniques include the use of historical GIS data.


Non-Western cities

Since the 1980s extensive research has been done on the cities of the Ottoman Empire, where standardized record-keeping and centralized archives have facilitated work on
Aleppo Aleppo is a city in Syria, which serves as the capital of the Aleppo Governorate, the most populous Governorates of Syria, governorate of Syria. With an estimated population of 2,098,000 residents it is Syria's largest city by urban area, and ...
,
Damascus Damascus ( , ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in the Levant region by population, largest city of Syria. It is the oldest capital in the world and, according to some, the fourth Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. Kno ...
,
Byblos Byblos ( ; ), also known as Jebeil, Jbeil or Jubayl (, Lebanese Arabic, locally ), is an ancient city in the Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate of Lebanon. The area is believed to have been first settled between 8800 and 7000BC and continuously inhabited ...
,
Sidon Sidon ( ) or better known as Saida ( ; ) is the third-largest city in Lebanon. It is located on the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean coast in the South Governorate, Lebanon, South Governorate, of which it is the capital. Tyre, Lebanon, Tyre, t ...
,
Jericho Jericho ( ; , ) is a city in the West Bank, Palestine, and the capital of the Jericho Governorate. Jericho is located in the Jordan Valley, with the Jordan River to the east and Jerusalem to the west. It had a population of 20,907 in 2017. F ...
,
Hama Hama ( ', ) is a city on the banks of the Orontes River in west-central Syria. It is located north of Damascus and north of Homs. It is the provincial capital of the Hama Governorate. With a population of 996,000 (2023 census), Hama is one o ...
,
Nablus Nablus ( ; , ) is a State of Palestine, Palestinian city in the West Bank, located approximately north of Jerusalem, with a population of 156,906. Located between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, it is the capital of the Nablus Governorate and a ...
and
Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...
. Historians have explored the social bases of political factionalism, histories of elites and commoners, different family structures and gender roles, marginalized groups such as prostitutes and slaves, and relationships between Muslims and Christians and Jews. Increasingly work is underway on African cities, as well as South Asia. In China, the Maoist ideology privileged the uprising of the peasants as the central force in Chinese history, which led to a neglect of urban history until the 1980s. Academics were then allowed to assert that peasant rebellions were often reactionary rather than revolutionary and that China's modernizers of the 1870s made significant advances, even if they were capitalists. For over a century—since
Heinrich Schliemann Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann (; 6 January 1822 – 26 December 1890) was a German businessman and an influential amateur archaeologist. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeolo ...
searched for and found ancient Troy—archaeologists and ancient historians have studied the cities of the ancient world.


Images and cultural role

The study of the culture of specific cities and the role of cities in shaping national culture is a more recent development which provides nontraditional ways of "reading" cities. A representative class is Carl E. Schorske, ''Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture'' (1980). The basis for some of this approach stems from a
post-modern Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experi ...
theory including the cultural anthropology of
Clifford Geertz Clifford James Geertz (; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades&n ...
. One example is Alan Mayne's ''The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914''(1993), a study of how slums were represented in the newspapers in
Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...
,
San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
, and
Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...
. The accounts provided dramatic life stories but failed to integrate the agendas and animosities of city officials, property owners, residents, and local businessmen. As a result, they did not reveal the true inner-city social structures. Nevertheless, the middle class accepted the image of and decided to act on the
social construction Social constructionism is a term used in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory. The term can serve somewhat different functions in each field; however, the foundation of this theoretical framework suggests various facets of s ...
s, leading to the reformers' demands for
slum clearance Slum clearance, slum eviction or slum removal is an urban renewal strategy used to transform low-income settlements with poor reputation into another type of development or housing. This has long been a strategy for redeveloping urban communities; ...
and
urban renewal Urban renewal (sometimes called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address real or perceived urban decay. Urban renewal involves the clearing ...
. As Rosen and Tarr point out, environmental history has made great strides since the 1970s, but its focus is primarily on rural areas, leading to a neglect of urban issues such as air pollution, sewage, clean water—and the concentration of large numbers of horses. Historians are beginning to integrate urban history and environmental history. Thus far most of the attention concerns the negative impact on the environment, rather than how the environment shaped the urbanization process.


Literature and philosophy

In literature, the city has long stood as one of the most potent symbols of human capacities and nature. As the largest and most enduring creation of human imagination and hands, and as the largest and most sustained site of human association and interaction, the city has been seen as a marker of what humans are and of what they do. This signification has almost always been shaded with ambivalence. In old legends, epics, and utopias, cities (both actual and symbolic) appeared as places of exceptional but also contradictory meaning. The histories of Troy, Babel, Sodom, Babylon, and Rome were viewed, in Western cultures, as standing for human power, wisdom, creativity, and vision, but also for human presumption, perversion, and fated destruction. Images of the modern city restated this ambivalence with fresh intensity. Great modern cities like London, Paris, Berlin, and New York, have repeatedly been portrayed as sites of opportunity and peril, power and helplessness, vitality and decadence, creativity and perplexity. This contradictory face of the city has appeared so often in Western thought as to suggest an essential psychological and cultural anxiety about human civilization, an anxiety about humanity's relation to their created world and about "humanity" itself. This is especially true of the “modern” city, filled with human artifice and moral contradiction.


Scholarship

The Journal of Urban History has been a leading quarterly journal with articles and reviews since 1975. The Urban History Association was founded in 1988 with 284 members; it now has over 400. It sponsored the "Sixth Biennial Urban History Association Conference" in New York, October 25–28, 2012. It awards prizes for the best book prize, best article, and best PhD dissertation. H.J. Dyos (1921-1978) at the University of Leicester was the leading promoter of urban history in Britain, leading the way, especially into the study of Victorian cities. He formed the Urban History Study Group in 1962; its newsletter became the ''Urban History Yearbook'' (1974-1991) and then the journal ''Urban History'' (1992–present). His edited volume on ''The Study of Urban History'' (1968) opened up the methodology and stimulated young scholars, as did the conferences he organized and the book series he edited. Dyos rejected the quantitative methods of the New Urban History because he was not interested in the individual people in the city, but in the larger social structure, such as the slum or the entire city. Since 1993, the daily email discussion list H-Urban has enabled historians, graduate students and others interested in urban history and urban studies to communicate current research and research interests easily; to query and discuss new approaches, sources, methods, and tools of analysis; and to comment on contemporary historiography. The logs are open to searches, and membership is free. H-Urban seeks to inform historians on such matters as announcements, calls for papers, conferences, awards, fellowships, availability of new sources and archives, reports on new research, and teaching tools, including books, articles, works-in-progress, research reports, primary historical documents (for example, model ordinances, federal/state/local reports, addresses of city officials), syllabi, bibliographies, software, datasets, and multimedia publications or projects. It commissions its own book reviews. H-Urban has 2,856 subscribers (as of 2012) and is the oldest of the H-Net network of discussion lists. The history of European urbanism in the 20th century is the focus of , a current Horizon 2020 European Joint Doctorate programme. It is based on the inherent multidisciplinary approach of the research field and the goal of gaining a pan-European perspective on planning history.Helene Bihlmaier, "urbanHIST: a multidisciplinary research and training programme on the history of European urbanism in the twentieth century." ''Planning Perspectives'' (2020): 1-9
online
/ref>


See also

* American urban history * Center for Urban History of East Central Europe *
Cities in the Great Depression Throughout the industrial world, cities were devastated during the Great Depression, beginning in 1929 and lasting through most of the 1930s. Worst hit were port cities (as world trade fell) and cities that depended on heavy industry, such as ...
, (1929-1939), worldwide * Gilded Age Plains City, online resources for American Midwest * Danish Center of Urban History * History of cities in Canada *
Social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
*
Suburb A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan areas jobs are located with some being predominantly residential. They can either be denser or less densely populated ...
* History of urban planning ** Town and Country Planning Association **
Urban planning Urban planning (also called city planning in some contexts) is the process of developing and designing land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportatio ...
*
Urban economics Urban economics is broadly the economic study of urban areas; as such, it involves using the tools of economics to analyze urban issues such as crime, education, public transit, housing, and local government finance. More specifically, it is a bra ...
*
Urban studies Urban studies is based on the study of the urban development of cities and regions—it makes up the theory portion of the field of urban planning. This includes studying the history of city development from an architectural point of view, to th ...
** Index of urban studies articles *
Urbanization Urbanization (or urbanisation in British English) is the population shift from Rural area, rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. ...


Cities

*
List of oldest continuously inhabited cities This is a list of present-day cities by the time period over which they have been continuously inhabited as a city. The age claims listed are generally disputed. Differences in opinion can result from different definitions of "city" as well as "c ...
* Cities of East Asia *
History of Beijing The city of Beijing has a long and rich history that dates back over 3,000 years. Prior to the unification of China by the First Emperor in 221 BC, Beijing had been for centuries the capital of the ancient states of Ji and Yan. It was a prov ...
* History of Berlin *
History of Chicago Chicago has played a central role in American Economy of the United States, economic, Culture of the United States, cultural and Politics of the United States, political history. Since the 1850s Chicago has been one of the dominant metropoli ...
*
History of London The history of London, the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, extends over 2000 years. In that time, it has become one of the world's most significant Economy of London, financial and Culture of London, cultural centres. It has with ...
* History of Manila *
History of Mexico City The history of Mexico City stretches back to its founding ca. 1325 C.E as the Mexica city-state of Tenochtitlan, which evolved into the senior partner of the Aztec Empire, Aztec Triple Alliance that dominated central Mexico immediately prior to ...
* History of Naples *
History of New York City The written history of New York City began with the first European explorer, the Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1528. European settlement began with the Dutch in 1608 and New Amsterdam was founded in 1624. The " Sons of Liberty" campaigned ...
*
History of Paris The oldest traces of human occupation in Paris date from about 8000 BC, during the Mesolithic period. Between 250 and 225 BC, the Parisii (Gaul), Parisii settled on the banks of the Seine, built bridges and a fort, minted coins, ...
*
History of Philadelphia The city of Philadelphia was founded and incorporated in 1682 by William Penn in the Kingdom of England, English Crown Province of Pennsylvania between the Delaware River, Delaware and Schuylkill River, Schuylkill rivers. Before then, the area wa ...
* History of Rome * History of Vienna


Notes


Further reading

* Abbott, Carl. "Urban History for Planners," ''Journal of Planning History,'' Nov 2006, Vol. 5 Issue 4, pp 301–313 * Armus, Diego and John Lear. "The trajectory of Latin American urban history," ''Journal of Urban History'' (1998) 24#3 pp 291–301 * Beachy, Robert and Ralf Roth, eds. ''Who Ran the Cities?: City Elites and Urban Power Structures in Europe and North America, 1750-1940'' (2007) * Bennett, Larry. ''The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism''. (U of Chicago Press, 2015), 241 pp * Borsay, Peter. ''The eighteenth-century town: a reader in English urban history 1688-1820'' (Routledge, 2014) * Bukowczyk, John J. "Identities, Assimilation, and Race" ''Journal of Urban History'' (May 2022) 48#3 pp. 690-696. * Clark, Peter, and Paul Slack. ''English Towns in Transition 1500-1700'' (1976) * Davies, Gary W. "The rise of urban history in Britain c. 1960-1978" (PhD dissertation, University of Leicester, 2014
online, With detailed bibliography pp 205-40
* Denecke, Dietrich, and Gareth Shaw, eds. ''Urban historical geography: recent progress in Britain and Germany'' (Cambridge UP, 1988). * Emmen, Edith. ''The Medieval Town'' (1979) * Emerson, Charles. ''1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War'' (2013) 526pp short essays on 21 major world cities in 1913, including London, Washington, Winnipeg, and Constantinople etc. * Engeli, Christian, and Horst Matzerath. ''Modern urban history research in Europe, USA, and Japan: a handbook'' (1989
in GoogleBooks
* Epstein, S. E. ed. ''Town and Country in Europe, 1300-1800'' (2001), a major anthology of scholarly articles * Frost, Lionel, and Seamus O'Hanlon. "Urban history and the future of Australian cities." ''Australian Economic History Review'' (2009) 49#1 pp: 1-18. * Gillette Jr., Howard, and Zane L. Miller, eds. '' American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review'' (1987) * Goldfield, David. ed. ''Encyclopedia of American Urban History'' (2 vol 2006); 1056pp * Harvey, David, ''Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization'' (1985), a Marxist approach * Handlin, Oscar, and John Burchard, eds. ''The Historian and the City'' (Harvard U.P., 1963) * Haynes, Barry. ''Register of European Urban History'' (Leicester University, 1991) * Haynes, Douglas E., and Nikhil Rao. "Beyond the Colonial City: Re-Evaluating the Urban History of India, ca. 1920–1970." ''South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies'' (2013) 36#3 pp: 317–335
Online
* Hays, Samuel P. "From the History of the City to the History of the Urbanized Society," ''Journal of Urban History,'' (1993) 19#1 pp 3–25. * Isin, Engin F. "Historical sociology of the city' in Gerard Delanty & Engin F. Isin, eds. ''Handbook of historical sociology'' (2003). pp. 312–325
online
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Online


External links




The International Planning History Society International Conference - 2012 website

The International Planning History Society International Conference - 2014 website

H-URBAN, daily email discussion group on urban history


* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20150312054102/http://uha.udayton.edu/ The Urban History Association
Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, U.K.

Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, Belgium

Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv, Ukraine

Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium)
Fields of history Urban planning Local history *