The idea for this special issue, exploring the history of cities and urbanism within the emerging transnational paradigm, originated in a discussion among the members of the North American Editorial Board of Urban History about what it means for cities to be global. Veering in many directions, spanning multiple centuries and stretching into much of the world, the conversation touched on the movement of people and ideas, the relationship of urban areas with their hinterlands and with each other, the importance of given technologies and industries for particular forms of urban development, the critical role of politics – at all levels – in that development and the ongoing and evolving role of global capital on those cities. Using the global Internet, members of the North American Editorial Board located in Montreal (Michèle Dagenais), Rochester (Victoria Wolcott), Irvine (Jeffrey Wasserstrom), Philadelphia (Lynn Hollen Lees), Miami (Robin Bachin), Mexico City (Hira de Gortari Rabiela), Hamilton (Richard Harris), Los Angeles (Philip Ethington and Janice Reiff), Amherst (Max Page) and Ann Arbor (Matthew Lassiter) generated a plan to issue a global call for papers for the IXth International Conference of the European Association for Urban History in Lyon, France in August of 2008. Nine scholars from Canada, the United States, France and Mexico pre-circulated their papers for a special bilingual double-long session, co-chaired by Michèle Dagenais and Phil Ethington.

At the turn of the 1910s, a productive tension opposed two competing kinds of North American city planning actors: urban reformers (such as Benjamin Marsh, founder of the National Conference on City Planning (NCCP) in 1909) and professional city planners (such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, new director of the NCCP in 1911). Analysing the many unsuccessful attempts, between 1911 and 1913, to send the ‘Cities and Town Planning Exhibition’ – a British itinerant exhibition directed by the Scottish thinker and reformer Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) – to tour America, this article examines the transnational similarities and interactions between American and European urbanist milieux; the competing scales (municipal, national, international) in this dialogue; and the strategies of the professionalization of planning.

The vast transformations that shaped western cities at the turn of the twentieth century were the product of global processes and interactions. Drawing on the cases of Montreal and Brussels, this article argues that underlying these broad dynamics were questions and preoccupations pertaining to more localized and personal scales of the body and the home. Concentrating on the discourses that circulated in these distinct, yet analogous cities, the article shifts the focus of the transnational approach from specific contacts between individuals and places, to the wider web on which circulated the ideas and initiatives that reshaped people's living environment.

‘Timely innovations’ uses Jim Crow segregation, and the human activity it inspired, to account for Greater Miami's emergence as a city of global importance. It shows how city dwellers in South Florida deployed race and racism as technologies of economic and demographic control. The article also explores how evolving forms of racial segregation worked in tandem with other innovations in human mobility, urban planning and US foreign policy, with each helping Miami's residents maintain a white-over-black social order. Jim Crow, the author argues, never quite disappeared. Rather, it experienced a series of modernizations, leaving even Miami, one of the most culturally diverse American cities, beholden to the mores of bi-racial governance.

This paper illuminates the significant contributions that Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, a British town planner, editor and educator, made to transnational discourse on modern urban planning and design from 1941 to 1951. This is when she formulated her synthesis of utopian planning ideals, grounded in the bio-regionalism of the Scottish visionary Patrick Geddes and informed by European modernism. Her hybrid grew into the Geddessian branch of the planning arm of the post-war modern movement. In addition to uncovering Tyrwhitt's hidden voice, the article also uses the biography of a transnational actor as a vehicle to analyse the emergence of the concept that urbanism encompasses both the global and the local.

In the 1950s, ‘urban design’ was born in American debate thanks partly to the import of foreign discourses in a new context. Among others, was the fragmented and erratic translation of the British Architectural Review's ‘Townscape’ discourse. This article traces carefully this translation not only to describe another key moment in the Anglo-American dialogue on planning but also to give a more complex portrait of the foundation and early development of the field of urban design. Involving some American universities, Fortune magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation, these lines of exchange also exemplify variations on the translation of a militant discourse into an academic one.

This article explores the construction of publicly financed low-income housing complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s. These housing developments were possible thanks to the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance from the Alliance for Progress. Urban scholars, politicians, diplomats and urbanists of the Americas sought to promote middle-class habits, mass consumption and moderate political behaviour, especially among the poor, by expanding access to homeownership and ‘decent’ living conditions for a burgeoning urban population. As a result, the history of low-income housing should be understood within broader transnational discourses and practices about the ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ of the urban poor.

The long hold of the idea that ‘India is the land of villages’ on the imaginations of politicians, policy makers and scholars alike was a result not just of the numerical preponderance of the village, but because it represented the space of an organic, unsullied authenticity. Needless to say, in many accounts, well into the late twentieth century, the authenticity was only made possible by relinquishing a claim to the turbulence of history, and indeed on ‘modernity’ itself. The Indian city in the period of colonial rule, on the contrary, became a heaving, undisciplined monster, the site of a corrupting modernity, illegitimate and even unauthentic in its form. Apart from the monumental cities of Delhi or Lucknow, and some attention to ‘temple’ towns, most monographs on modern Indian cities written in the last 60 years remained without a legible past and were the work largely of geographers or sociologists. Those early pioneers who explored the history of the modern Indian city on its own terms, such as Narayani Gupta, Mariam Dossal or Veena Oldenburg, were lonely outcrops in a vast field of historical works that were largely rooted in the countryside. The peasant and the village, rather than the worker and the city, occupied centre-stage in the most important phases of post-independence Indian historiography. Since the history of Indian nationalism gripped the scholars of the immediate post-independence years, and economic history powered by Marxism informed the next phase of writing (both of which were enormously productive lines of enquiry), the Indian city was embedded in works that traced either the fate of anti-colonial nationalism or the broader trajectories of labour and capital. The innovative approaches of the Subaltern Studies collective from the early 1980s drew historiographic attention once more to the rebellious peasant and rural communities or mentalities.