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The challenge of political change: urban history in the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Lynn Hollen Lees
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Abstract

Urban history is a rapidly expanding, flourishing field in Europe. Nevertheless, urban scholars would do well to re-examine the paradigms within which they have been working as the field today lacks central questions and general interpretive models. Moreover, the common focus on urban biography or upon one region within a single nation-state has become increasingly outmoded, given the international scale of economic processes and migration flows. More attention to topics treated within a European-wide or even international context is needed. In addition, urban history as currently defined is tilted towards social and economic concerns to the neglect of the political arena.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , April 1994 , pp. 7 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the conference of the European Association of Urban Historians in Amsterdam in September 1992. I would like to thank Peter Clark, Herman Diederiks and Bernard Lepetit for asking me to speak at the conference. I am grateful to Paul Hohenberg and Andrew Lees for their helpful comments on the text.

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