From the urban focus of the Paris Summer Olympics to the implications of the COP28 Climate Agreements for city resilience and sustainability, from housing crises and increasing wealth inequality to shifting gender dynamics and pivotal democratic elections, 2024 was notable in terms of poignant, global events. These developments influenced numerous academic narratives, further enriching and diversifying the ever-changing and increasingly multifaceted landscape of urban history scholarship.
Accordingly, the 2024 collection of post-1800 era articles respond to a wide array of dynamics which impact contemporary urban life. One of the most widely discussed topics was housing inequality and discriminatory housing practices. Judith Schnelzer explores Vienna’s post-COVID-19 housing crisis in ‘Un/doing displacement in Vienna: tenants’ agency and their co-produced spatio-temporal experiences under economic pressure’, Urban Planning, 9 (2024), Article 8718. In this piece, Schnelzer investigates the alternative practices that rental tenants utilize to withstand unofficial eviction tactics. These tactics – often significant and unaffordable rent increases – are employed by landlords within a Viennese regulatory system which attempts to obstruct or delay such evictions. In response, tenants’ efforts range from cost cutting and borrowing money to stealing and foregoing heat; however, these measures are typically unsustainable in the long term, providing minimal defence against unrelenting rental increases. Other forms of housing inequality, particularly those driven by discriminatory practices, are examined in articles focused on the early twentieth century. In Washington, DC, mid-block alleys within the city’s urban grid were typically inhabited by impoverished, Black residents; elitest city dwellers aggressively pushed to eliminate these spaces altogether under the guise of sanitation and disease control. This ultimately created an example of racialized space tied to progressively racist motivations, as examined by Carolyn B. Swope in ‘The spatial configuration of segregation, elite fears of disease, and housing reform in Washington, D.C.’s inhabited alleys’, Social Science History, 48 (2024), 173–201. Set around the same time period in the American Pacific Northwest, Yiorgo Topalidis in ‘Forging an anti-racist praxis: housing discrimination against Ottoman Greek immigrants in early-twentieth-century Portland and Seattle’, Journal of Urban History, 50 (2024), 858–81, highlights racially focused restrictions utilized to subject people of colour – in this instance, Ottoman Greeks – to housing discrimination in elitest, Caucasian communities. While the discrimination faced by the Ottoman Greek population pales in comparison to restrictive covenant-based housing discrimination directed at African American, Japanese and Chinese residents in the United States, the author’s research presents one of the first studies (if not the first) that evidences potential housing discrimination against the Ottoman Greek population in these two urban regions.
Women’s spaces and movements were heavily featured across several academic journals in 2024. The fascist opposition led by British women’s organizations during the inter-war period is surveyed in Erika Huckestein’s ‘From cradle to grave: the politics of peace and reproduction in the anti-fascist campaigns of British women’s organisations’, Contemporary European History, 33 (2024), 53–69, while Eunhee Park details South Korean housewives’ strategies for earning income and gaining economic authority via sideline work within the constraints of Cold War-era domesticity in ‘South Korean housewives’ emerging economic authority and contestation of domesticity during the Cold War Era’, Gender and History, 36 (2024), 711–33. In ‘The other women’s rights movement: “streetwalkers”, habeas corpus and anticarceral activism in New York City, 1830–1860’, Gender and History, 36 (2024), 840–58, April Haynes explores sex workers’ rights in the United States. In this piece, Haynes looks at the earliest known movement for sex workers’ rights in mid-nineteenth-century New York, where mass arrests of female sex workers spawned the ‘streetwalkers’ movement; a form of activism by women who opposed then-prevalent vagrancy laws and sought independence and control over their labour choices. Crucially, this was independent and fundamentally diverged from the better-known middle-class Women’s Rights Movement, which was led by more affluent, well-educated women. The post-1918 international migration across Europe is the focus of Jasmin Nithammer and Klaus Richter’s ‘Polish conductresses and the insecurities of female labour migration to France, 1925–1929’, European History Quarterly, 54 (2024), 648–76. During this migratory period, Polish women constituted a significant portion of the labour migration into France, during which widespread mistreatment and sexual exploitation of these women ensued. In response, the Polish government introduced ‘conductresses’ in 1925, who were established as moral guardians to protect female migrants by acting as translators, mediators and advisors along both land and sea migratory corridors.
The intersection of the built environment, heritage and urban influence was well represented, as evidenced by a centuries-long look at the gridded urban landscape of Myanmar’s Mandalay City. Thwe Thwe Lay Maw and Ducksu Seo in ‘Historical geographies of grid city development: Mandalay from Burma to Myanmar’, Journal of Historical Geography, 86 (2024), 133–48, focus on a non-Western exploration of urban development. The authors trace the origins of Mandalay City’s grid to Burmese astrology and Buddhism, linking its development to the reinforcement of social class divisions under Burmese kingship. Years later under British colonial rule, the city grid facilitated economic exploitation; later yet under socialist rule, it was readapted for social uses as a physical show of dominance and control, primarily benefiting the city’s elite. This long-reaching examination highlights the city’s varying eras and evolving political narrative, inextricably intertwined with the built environment. Moving to Central and Eastern Europe, communist heritage remains fused with the built environment to varying degrees. In Prague, nearly 40 per cent of residents are housed in panelaky, communist-era concrete multifamily dwelling blocks, as explained by Maja Babic in ‘The historiography and research on state-socialist housing: Prague’s Paneláky’, Architectural Histories, 12 (2024). This position paper outlines the private purchase of most of these housing blocks following the end of state socialism in the 1990s, and argues that while architecture and urban planning once served as tools of the state’s ideology, the urban realm – and the panelaky in particular – served as ‘agent[s] in ideological and urban transition’ as well as conduits for socio-cultural and economic change, rather than mere heritage remnants of a totalitarian past. In present-day Ukraine, Yegor Vlasenko and Brent D. Ryan illustrate an ongoing ideological dismantling campaign in ‘Decommunization by design: analyzing the post-independence transformation of Soviet-era architectural urbanism in Kyiv, Ukraine’, Journal of Urban History, 50 (2024), 247–88. Focusing on the capital city of Kyiv, the authors assess decommunization of the urban landscape, finding that the movement’s effect has been limited: communist symbolism in the form of extant ‘celebration heritage’ in the built environment has largely been neglected and/or tagged with Ukrainian identity symbols, though not necessarily removed. Alternatively, the legal decommunization campaign appears to have focused more specifically on removing Lenin- and USSR-specific symbology and place naming, while Soviet-constructed symbols and memorials to Ukraine’s suffering, heroism and role as a bridge between Ukraine and Russia remain relatively unscathed. The authors suggest that the Soviet legacy within Kyiv’s urban form has been found to be deeper than anticipated, resulting in an inconsistent application of spatial decommunization across the city.
The themes of colonialism, decolonization and post-colonialism were observed across multiple publications this year. During a peak era of globalized colonial violence (the twenty-year window straddling the turn of the twentieth century), Sean F. McEnroe examines the widespread native anti-colonial movements and resistance efforts in ‘Cross-cultural perceptions of technology and magic in the Ghost Dance, Boxer uprising, and Maji Maji rebellion’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 66 (2024), 81–105. McEnroe’s contribution delves into the reliance of occupied peoples on ritual magic for protection against invading European nations and their technologically advanced weaponry, exemplified by the near-concurrent emergence of several anti-colonial movements, ranging from the North American Ghost Dance and China’s Boxer Rebellion to East Africa’s Maji Maji uprising. In China, Allan T.F. Pang observes unique cultural development during Hong Kong’s late colonial period. In ‘Entertainment, Chinese culture, and late colonialism in Hong Kong’, Historical Journal, 67 (2024), 124–47, the British colonial government’s efforts to secure public support through strategic Chinese-focused cultural entertainment is examined. Festivals, carnivals and other events celebrated the cultural and societal preferences of the citizens of Hong Kong, highlighting an underexplored perspective on Hong Kong’s decolonization. This process differed from other instances of colonial transition, creating a diversified Chinese culture that was both distinct and independent from mainland China. Looking at South Sudan, Matthew Sterling Benson demonstrates that colonial-era taxation practices continue on into the present day. In ‘Of rule not revenue: South Sudan’s revenue complex from colonial, rebel, to independent rule, 1899 to 2023’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 66 (2024), 673–99, Benson concludes that these revenue-raising practices – mired in self-interest and employed to pay off the individuals enforcing collection as opposed to a public good – remains unchanged in the post-colonial era. Instead, he suggests that these practices continue the legacy established under Anglo-Egyptian occupation in 1899, whereby taxation is utilized as a predatory tactic to gain local authority support and loyalty whilst fulfilling the self-interests of the tax collectors themselves in ‘extractive patterns of rule’ within the enduring revenue complex.
Noteworthy perspectives on German urban history were a prevalent topic in 2024’s selection of journal articles, often focusing on the inter-war or post-war periods. Gregori Galofre Vila navigates early twentieth-century German mortality rates as tied to hyperinflation in ‘Scarring through the 1923 German hyperinflation’, European Review of Economic History, 28 (2024), 360–74, finding that hyperinflation fuelled the mortality rate across (280) German cities, with the highest death tolls attributed to deteriorating social conditions. In post-war West Germany, life was not easy for gay men, as explored by Samuel Clowes Huneke. In ‘Can democracy be queer? Male homosexuality, democratisation, and the law in postwar Germany’, Contemporary European History, 33 (2024), 398–410, Huneke details how Nazi-era laws against same sex behaviour remained in place until 1969. Urban centres have long been seen as safe havens for queer communities; however, during this era, more than 50,000 men across West Germany were arrested under these laws and regulations, which were resisted by gay men via petitions, essays, letters to government officials and gay-friendly magazine editors in a call for democracy within the new republic. In ‘Sealed off heritage: navigating Hitler’s bunker in postwar Berlin’, Journal of Contemporary History, 59 (2024), 120–39, Caroline Sharples contends that while Hitler’s bunker remains (intentionally) physically absent from Berlin’s present-day cityscape as an effort to prevent its existence from becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site, the absence itself has become a type of counter-memorial, which has fostered a public, grassroots narrative regarding dictatorial legacies and the challenges in handling notorious urban landmarks in later years.
Protesting and political resistance formed another thematic vein of the 2024 urban history narrative. Two articles – also set in Germany – that explore this are Sarah Jacobson’s ‘Redefining urban citizenship: Italian migrants and housing occupations in 1970s Frankfurt am Main’, Contemporary European History, 33 (2024), 634–50, and Maren Hartmann’s ‘“Google is not a good neighbor”: the Google campus protests in Berlin’, Space and Culture, 27 (2024), 110–26. In the former, Jacobson focuses on several housing occupations that occurred in the early 1970s in (then) West Germany’s Frankfurt. The occupiers performed what the author described as ‘acts of urban citizenship’ that disrupted the ideas of belonging and localized citizenship and effectively de-territorialized social rights by attaching them to the individual, not the state. In the latter article, Hartmann contends that Google’s 2018 renunciation of their plan to open a campus in Berlin-Kreuzberg was the triumph of local anti-gentrification protestors and activist groups, who fought the tech giant for more than two years. The success of this movement can be seen as part of Berlin’s tradition of urban resistance; a city shaped by activism that ranges from urban tenant protests in the early twentieth century to the post-war squatter movements of the 1970s–1980s. Specifically, the decentralized nature of the demonstration efforts was powerful, involving many actors and unregistered, simultaneous rallies which generated a considerable amount of noise and attention. This approach was further bolstered by a lack of solidified local government support for the Google campus, as well as widely shared Google-focused protest content. This content included critiques of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and ‘data colonialism’, which is argued to have played a substantial role in the success of the protest itself.
Though not particularly dominant themes in 2024’s urban history landscape, four additional and memorable threads were observed in this year’s article collection. A unique take on the intersection of public space, death and heritage is dissected in ‘The decay-life of things’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 66 (2024), 760–85, by Marisa Karyl Franz. Set in Brooklyn’s famed Green-Wood cemetery, this piece navigates the different realms and realities that define Green-Wood’s existence. Both a historical space and active burial ground, Green-Wood is infused with a variety of active urban uses and spaces, such as an arboretum, performance areas, joggers, picnickers and bird watchers in addition to more personal, reserved uses such as private mourning. Franz explores several concepts including ‘decay-life’, a form of afterlife which the author identifies as ‘a durational and mutable continuation that morphs the cemetery into a place of active matter’, which in turn highlights ties to the cemetery’s primary use, more active uses and an established ‘network of temporalities of decay’. A different perspective on public space and death was seen in Suharto’s Indonesia, including the utilization of ‘necropolitics’. In ‘Sacred and cursed bodies: the necropolitics in the Suharto regime’s politics of memory’, Cultural and Social History, 21 (2024), 555–71, Katarzyna Marta Głąb argues that the military regime strategically used the bodies of generals (killed during an attempted coup) as well as the bodies of other innocents (mass murdered during the regime) as a form of ‘memory politics’, becoming a tool for the Suharto dictatorship to build a new country-wide mythology. The bodies themselves became ‘sites of information and memory’; while those who namelessly perished under the authoritarian regime were depicted as cursed and were prohibited from national remembrance, the memory of the generals persists through to the present day, adorning monuments, street names and buildings, glorifying their death and heritage to legitimize Suharto’s regime.
Informal housing was another thread in 2024, exemplified by two articles from the same journal. In Chile, Valentina Abufhele Milad delves into Santiago’s ‘cyclical repopulation of informal urbanizations’ from 1990 to 2018. In ‘The reproduction of informal settlements in Santiago: housing policy, cycles of repopulation and the “politics of poverty” as a regime of government’, Urban Studies, 61 (2024), 294–312, Milad describes the reoccupation of informal housing sites by new families as prior residents are relocated into formal housing. This practice, portrayed as creating specific zones of state intervention, is further defined as a politics of poverty, underscoring the larger lack of state control with informal settlements, even with government intervention and attempts to eradicate informal settlements. In Pakistan’s capital, socio-spatial politics are explored through the case-study of an informal, walled community built within the confines of a formalized, wealthy neighbourhood. In ‘Walls and openings: the politics of containment of informal communities in Islamabad’, Urban Studies, 61 (2024), 2565–84, Faiza Moatasim shines a light on France Colony, an informal urban community which has been walled off in an attempt to obscure its presence and control the settlement’s growth. Interestingly, this strategy failed; the wall proved ineffective as a means of control. Rather than shielding the wealthier surrounds from the informalized residents, the wall ultimately prompted the affluent to retreat further into their larger homes and heighten their private boundary walls, while providing the population of France Colony with stronger opportunities to claim rights from the state. The informal residents further reclaimed the wall in their own ways, transforming it via ornamentation from a means of containment to a decorative surface within the community.
The history of urban development and planning strategies in the global South is an evolving and growing area of scholarly interest, as represented by Garth Andrew Myers’ ‘A century of urban planning for Zanzibar’s other side, 1923–2023’, Planning Perspectives, 39 (2024), 793–814. Following nearly a century of professional planning efforts in Zanzibar, the author questions if the utilization of inclusive planning has only continued the long-standing tradition of state planning failures for residents. Myers’ research finds that despite the inclusive ambitions of contemporary efforts, underlying, systematic issues with planning and development implementation ultimately result in an imperfect process whereby external powers and elitest interests continue to dominate the city building process, fail to improve the quality of life for residents and exclude the urban poor majority. Following a similar trend, Essi Lamberg’s ‘Developing global interdependencies: consulting firms and Nordic aid in postcolonial Tanzania’s rural economic development’, Architectural Histories, 12 (2024), highlights the failed implementation of Integrated Rural Development in late twentieth-century Tanzania, even though heavily supported by Finnish consulting firms that are identified as ‘global experts’ in economic development. Alternatively and across the Atlantic, the relative success of the San Borja remodelling project in Santiago was predicated on the avoidance of centralized planning and neoliberal urbanism. Instead, San Borja utilized an ad hoc design within an incrementally applied urban renewal plan to Chile’s capital city, as explained by Francisco Javier Diaz and Gonzalo Carrasco in ‘Ad hoc tools for urban renewal: the San Borja remodeling in Santiago, Chile, 1967–1976’, Architectural Histories, 12 (2024).
Urban history scholarship saw a noteworthy subset of articles focused on waste management in 2024, illuminated in detail by Galia Limor-Sagiv, Nurit Lissovsky and Naomi Angel in ‘Israel’s largest landfill rehabilitation: creative landscape design as a catalyst for a functioning metropolis’, Planning Perspectives, 39 (2024), 259–83, and covered within ‘Waste management during the twentieth century’, a special section of the Journal of Contemporary History, 59 (2024), guest edited by Iris Borowy, Viktor Pál and Carl Zimring. Limor-Sagiv, Lissovsky and Angel chronicle the transformation of Tel Aviv’s Hiriya from the one-time largest landfill in Israel into a metropolitan park that spurred the urban rebirth of the surrounding area. Beyond focusing on the revitalization of a brownfield site, the Hiriya redevelopment brought a level of social resurgence to neglected neighbourhoods in southern Tel Aviv, including novel approaches to water management and waste treatment. The authors argue that this urban landfill regeneration project serves as a global model for urban sustainability and brownfield site reutilization. Borowy, Pál and Zimring’s special section further focuses on twentieth-century waste management, explaining the subject matter as the (literal) byproduct of explosive population growth, city expansion, urbanization and ever-changing lifestyles. The five articles that comprise the ‘Waste management during the twentieth century’ section explore how waste management illustrates imbalances in power, conflict and wealth. Ranging from food waste and survival during the Ukrainian Soviet famines to military waste and NATO-influenced hazardous waste governance, the never-ending challenges of collection and disposition have become more complex and multidimensional in light of ever-changing social, environmental and health considerations that impact cities around the globe.
Finally, several other special issues provide fresh and nuanced contributions to the canon of urban history. These publications touch on a variety of themes and potentially serve as harbingers of future research and narrative to come. Guest editors Gregory Clancey, Jiat-Hwee Chang and Liz P.Y. Chee dive into the arena of climate change and energy usage in ‘Heat and the city: thermal control, governance and health in urban Asia’, Urban Studies, 61 (2024). While sustained interest in urban climate impacts has emerged more recently, many Asian cities have grappled with elevated temperatures for centuries. In this volume, articles explore the urban energy landscape across Asia, examining the evolving relationship between heating, cooling, technology, governance and health, while considering the political and socio-economic impacts of air-conditioning dependency, heat islands and associated environmental impacts across Asian urban centres. Switching focus, guest editor Andrew Smith encapsulates the intersection of urban change, city planning and the Olympic Games in ‘Olympic urbanism: past, present and future’, Planning Perspectives, 39 (2024). This article collection studies the impact that the games have had on past host cities and further argues that as the games have become urbanized, the urban environment is now centre stage to the games themselves – no longer simply a host environment. The editor and contributing authors ponder, amongst other foci, how this special brand of Olympic urbanism is shaping numerous cities across the globe, be it through a ‘grand vision’ or the notion of ‘spectacle’ as promoted via political influence, from urban infill projects to post-game reutilization strategies; all of which ultimately reshape the built environment. In ‘Citizen science. Akademische und bürgerschaftliche Stadtgeschichtsforschung’, Moderne Stadtgeschichte, 55 (2024), editors Sebastian Haumann and Christoph Lorke internally flip the research lens and focus on the science of urban history itself, scrutinizing the inclusion of ‘citizen science’ as a new means of urban history research. The authors detail citizen science’s relationship to participatory urban historiography, public engagement, archival work and oral history, exploring the role that interested citizens (or ‘laypeople’) may be able to play within the historical research arena, or in collaboration with established historians. Lastly, the concept of the ‘geomedia city’, or a city where life and production modes are dependent on geomedia, is illustrated by guest editors Maren Hartmann and André Jansson in ‘Gentrification and the right to the geomedia city’, Space and Culture, 27 (2024). This can also be understood as the influence of geographically responsive media technology on urban spaces and experiences, such as the role of ‘viral’ Instagram posts in expediting neighbourhood transformation and the aestheticization of urban space, reflecting a temporal desirability for an area which inevitably changes over time. Set within the framework of urban gentrification across Europe, the United States and Australia, the seven submissions within this assemblage examine how urban displacement is promoted through a plethora of media platforms that foster a ‘discriminatory regime of dwelling’, including the socio-cultural implications of geomedia, ‘platformed modes of urban aestheticization and the emergence of socially exclusive medial-reliant places’, as well as various forms of resistance to the resultant marriage of gentrification and geomedia.
As evidenced by the articles of 2024, urban history scholarship continues to evolve, shaped by the challenges and complexities of global urban environments. This year’s contributions converge at the intersection of environmental, social, cultural, historical and technological dynamics, addressing a range of multifaceted and interconnected issues that promise to inspire a new wave of urban scholarship in 2025.
