Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T06:13:50.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
Series:   Elements in Global Urban History

Our Urban Planet in Theory and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2024

Carl Nightingale
Carl Nightingale
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo

Summary

This Element offers seven propositions toward a theory of 'Our Urban Planet' that is useful to global urban historians. I argue that historians have much to offer to theorists particularly those involved in debates over planetary urbanization theory and the Anthropocene. We must enlarge our concept of 'urban' to include spaces that make cities possible and that cities make possible and become comfortable with longer temporal frames that nest global urban history within Earth Time. Above all we need to add the crucial dimension of power, redefining cities as spaces that humans produce to amplify harvests of geo-solar energy and deploy human power within space and time. The element uses insights from 'deep history' to set the stage for a 'theory by verb' elaborating the many paradoxes of humans' 6,000-year gamble with the Urban Condition and explaining cities' own intrinsic capacity to outrun their own theorizability.
Get access

Keywords

planetary urbanizationglobal urban historyurban theoryAnthropoceneurban studies
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in Global Urban History
Online ISBN: 9781009321778
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 06 June 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Angelo, Hillary and Wachsmuth, David, 2014. “Urbanising Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39: 16–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arendt, Hannah, 1958. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah, 2018 [1960] . “Freedom and Politics: A Lecture,” in Thinking Without Bannisters: Essays in Understanding, 1954–1975 (New York: Schocken Books)Google Scholar
Algaze, Guillermo, 2005. The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization (2nd ed., Chicago: Chicago University Press).Google Scholar
Brenner, Neil, 2017. “The Problematique of Critique,” in Brenner, Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays, Brenner, Neil ed., (Gütersloh: Birkhäuser), pp. 16–24.Google Scholar
Brenner, Neil and Schmid, Christian, 2015. “Toward a New Epistemology of the Urban?” City 19: 151–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooke, John L., 2014. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childe, Gordon Vere, 1950. “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review 21: 3–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Justice Alliance, Climate, 2022. “How We Work,” https://climatejusticealliance.org/how-we-work/. Accessed April 11, 2022.Google Scholar
Derrickson, Kate, 2018. “Masters of the Universe,” Environment and Planning D Society and Space 36(3): 556–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elis, Erle C. and Ramankutty, Navin, 2008. “Putting People on the Map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 439–47.Google Scholar
Elhacham, Emily, Ben-Uri, Liad, Grozovski, Jonathan, Bar-On, Yinon M., and Milo, Ron, 2020. “Global Human Mass Exceeds All Living Biomass,” Nature 588: 442–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Favereau, Marie, 2021. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha Albertson, 2024. “Introduction: Understanding Vulnerability,” in Law, Vulnerability, and the Responsive State: Beyond Equality and Liberty, Fineman, Martha Albertson and Spitz, Laura eds. (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 1–10.Google Scholar
Future Cities Laboratory, 2023. “Extreme Territories of Urbanization,” in New Agendas Under Planetary Urbanisation [sic], https://planetaryurbanisation.ethz.ch/project/extreme-territories. Accessed November 7, 2023.Google Scholar
Glaser, Edward, 2011. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin).Google Scholar
Global Urban History Project, 2020. “Theory of, for, and by Urban Historians,” https://globalurbanhistory.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=803980&module_id=487348. Accessed August 28, 2023.Google Scholar
Graeber, David and Wengrow, David, 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux).Google Scholar
Goonewardena, Kanishka, 2018. “Planetary Urbanization and Totality” Environment and Planning D Society and Space 36(3): 456–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Avery F., 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2nd ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).Google Scholar
Haff, Peter, 2014. “Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well Being,” in A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene, Waters, C. N., Zalasiewicz, J., and Williams, Mark eds. (London: Geological Society, Special Publications, 395), pp. 301–09.Google Scholar
Harris, Richard, 2021. How Cities Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History).Google Scholar
Harvey, David, 1989. “The Urbanization of Capital,” in The Urban Experience, Harvey, David ed., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 17–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Jane, 1961. The Life and Death of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage).Google Scholar
Jacobs, Jane, 1969. The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage).Google Scholar
Kaika, Maria, Keil, Roger, Mandler, Tait and Tzaninis, Yannis eds. 2023. Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency (Manchester University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keil, Roger, 2018. “Extended Urbanization, ‘Disjunct Fragments,’ and Global Suburbanisms,” Environment and Planning D Society and Space 36(3): 494–511.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koselleck, Reinhard, 2018. Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and eds. Franzel, Sean and Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press).Google Scholar
Kostof, Spiro, 1991. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (New York: Little Brown).Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri, 1968 [1971]. La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Allen Lane: The Penguin Press).Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri, 1974 [1991]. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden: Blackwell).Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri, 1970 [2003]. The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bonnono. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Lewis, Simon L. and Maslin, Mark, 2018. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (New Haven: Yale University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liverani, Mario, 1998. Uruk: The First City (Sheffield: Equinox).Google Scholar
McIntosh, Roderick J., 2006. Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W., 2017. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44: 594–630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Jerry D., 2012. The Prehistory of Home (Berkeley: University of California Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nightingale, Carl, 2012. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nightingale, Carl, 2015. “The Seven C’s: Reflections on Writing a Global History of Urban Segregation,” in Cities beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History, Kenney, Nicholas and Madgin, Rebecca eds. (Farnham: Ashgate), pp. 27–42.Google Scholar
Nightingale, Carl, 2022. Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Aihwa, 2012. “Worlding Cities or the Art of Being Global,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Roy, Ananya and Ong, Aihwa eds. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell),Google Scholar
Buffalo, PUSH, 2023. PUSH Buffalo website at PUSHBuffalo.org. Accessed November 1, 2023.Google Scholar
Roy, Ananya, 2015. “What is Critical about Critical Urban Theory,” Urban Geography 37(6): 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruddiman, William F., 2014. Earth Transformed (New York: Freeman).Google Scholar
Schayegh, Cyrus, 2017. “Transpatialization: A New Heuristic Model to Think about Modern Cities,” Global Urban History blog, December 14, at globalurbanhistory.com. Accessed August 29, 2023.Google Scholar
Schmid, Christian, 2018. “Journeys in Planetary Urbanization: Decentering Perspectives on the Urban,” Environment and Planning D Society and Space 36(3): 591–610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sennett, Richard, 1977. Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf).Google Scholar
Shryock, Andrew and Lord Smail, Daniel, 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soja, Edward, 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell).Google Scholar
Simone, AbdouMaliq, 2022. “Conclusion: Turbulent Urbanities,” Antipode, https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/AbdouMaliq-Simone_conclusion.pdf. Accessed August 28, 2023.Google Scholar
Smith, Michael E., 2019. “Energized Crowding and the Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Scaling,” in Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization, Gyucha, Attila ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press), pp. 37–58.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura, 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, ).Google Scholar
Tzaninis, Yannis, Mandler, Tait, Keil, Roger and Kaika, Marria, 2023. “Introduction: Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency,” in Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency, Maria Kaika, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler, and Yannis Tzaninis. eds. (Manchester University Press), pp. 1–34.Google Scholar
Thomas, Julia Adeney, Williams, Mark, and Zalasiewicz, Jan, 2020. The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press).Google Scholar
Thomas, Julia Adeney, 2022. Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, Charles, 1996. “What Good Is Urban History?” Journal of Urban History 22: 702–719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vergès, Françoise, 2017. “Racial Capitalocene,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, Johnson, Gaye Theresa and Lubin, Alex eds. (New York: Verso), pp. 72–82.Google Scholar
Wallerstein, Emanuel, 1974. The Modern World-System, Vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press).Google Scholar
Weaver, Warren, 1947. “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36: 536–44.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Colson, 2021. Harlem Shuffle (New York: Doubleday).Google Scholar
Wirth, Louis, 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Sociological Review 44: 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolkenstein, Diane and Kramer, Samuel Noah, 1983. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (New York: Harper and Row).Google Scholar
Yusoff, Katheryn, 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).Google Scholar
Jan, Zalasiewicz and Williams, Mark, 2012. The Goldilocks Planet: The Four-Billion-Year Story of Earth’s Climate (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar

Save element to Kindle

To save this element to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Our Urban Planet in Theory and History
Available formats
×

Save element to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Our Urban Planet in Theory and History
Available formats
×

Save element to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Our Urban Planet in Theory and History
Available formats
×