Cities Beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History

Drawing on a body of research covering primarily Europe and the Americas, but stretching also to Asia and Africa, from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this book explores the methodological and heuristic implications of studying cities in relation to one another. Moving fluidly between comparative and transnational methods, as well as across regional and national lines, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the necessity of this broader view in assessing not just the fundamentals of urban life, the way cities are occupied and organised on a daily basis, but also the urban mindscape, the way cities are imagined and represented. In doing so the volume provides valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of using multiple cities to form historical inquiries.

Table of Contents:
Preface; Introduction: ‘Every time I describe a city’: urban history as comparative and transnational practice, Nicolas Kenny and Rebecca Madgin. Part I: The seven Cs: reflections on writing a global history of urban segregation, Carl H. Nightingale; Port cities in crisis: considering urban governance, modernity and migration in mid-19th-century Montreal and Liverpool in a transnational context, Dan Horner; Choreographies of urban life: mapping the social history of cities, Jordan Stanger-Ross; Rebuilding the cities destroyed in the Second World War: growing possibilities for comparative analysis, Jeffry Diefendorf. Part II: Urban governance and prostitution in 18th-century port cities in France and England, Marion Pluskota; Comparing urban reform in London and Brussels, Janet Polasky; Town planning and municipal growth in late colonial Bombay: towards a transnational perspective, Nikhil Rao; Whose ‘urban internationale’? Intermunicipalism in Europe, c.1924-36: the value of a decentred, interpretive approach to transnational urban history, Stefan Couperus and Shane Ewen; The (trans)national question: Nazi spatial and urban planning, Janet Ward. Reflections: Cities of fear: the globalization of insecurity in the age of the gated community, Harold L. Platt; Reflections: putting the ‘trans’ into transnational urban history, Richard Rodger. Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Nicolas Kenny is a member of the History Department at Simon Fraser University. His research examines the bodily and emotional relationship to the urban environment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focussing especially on Montreal and Brussels in a comparative and transnational context. He is the author of The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (2014). Rebecca Madgin is Senior Lecturer in Urban Development and Management in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. She currently researches the economic and emotional values of heritage in relation to urban development. Her work is located in an international context spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and she is the author of Heritage, Culture and Conservation: Managing the Urban Renaissance (2009).