#UHG2017

[pericastalian-blog]

Urban History Group Conference, 2017, Royal Holloway

This was the first year that I made it to the Urban History Group (UHG) annual conference, despite the fact that I have long thought of it as my ‘home’ conference. Having studied at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester I know some of the leading lights of the discipline, and it was only work circumstances that had prevented me from attending in previous years. I always find it tricky to write-up conference thoughts - what to leave in? what to leave out? what do people really want to know? - but nonetheless I’m going to try to get down some of the things that most struck me about the event. As such, this is an entirely partial and subjective review, I’m not going to cover everything I saw, let alone everything that went on.

Format

UHG is a pretty close-knit community, and many of the people there attend every year and describe it as their favourite conference. The short format - 2pm Thursday to 2pm Friday - no doubt both reflects and encourages this, as many people were able to attend the whole event. Myself and other first-timers were welcomed in, and questions to speakers were thoughtful and constructive. My only personal regret is that as I was staying with my parents some distance away I was not able to stay late on Thursday evening.

Top panels

While all the papers that I saw were of exemplary quality, two of the panels really stood out for me. On Thursday evening, New Researchers and First Year PhD streams gave an opportunity to postgraduates and others with early-stage projects to share their ideas. I attended 3.3 ‘Municipal Regulation and the Creation of Boundaries’ which featured papers from Oenone Kubie (Oxford) on playground fencing in early twentieth-century America; Daniel Hood (Boston College) on the Calcutta Fire Brigade; and Alex Young Il Seo (Cambridge) on human habitation on the Korean border. The chair was Jenny Stewart (Leicester). This was among the best conference panels I have ever attended: all the speakers gave compelling accounts of their subjects, and the connections between them were at just that level of suprising yet rigorous that one would look for. Seo’s paper was supported with a stunning set of images, while Hood needed nothing more than a map to illustrate his own research. Kubie drew on a wonderful range of visual sources, including some great adverts. Discussions afterwards drew out questions of identity, place and space. The speakers are all towards the end of their PhDs, and I hope that we will be hearing much more from them in future years.

Friday morning opened with the panel I had been anticipating the most: 4.2 ‘Living on the Edge: The Precarious Nature of Urbanity on the Boundaries of Islamic Cities’, set up by the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. This topic speaks to my own research interest in North African and Middle Eastern cities, but focusing on the Ottoman dimension. Papers were by Ulrike Freitag on the wall of Jeddah; Nora Lafi on nineteenth century Tunis; and Florian Riedler on the Ottoman Balkans. Markian Prokopovych chaired.  All offered interesting readings of urban spaces, and showed some of the variety contained within the term Ottoman Empire. An interesting, to me at any rate, link between the papers was the role of water in the creation of cities, as we heard about two on coasts and one on a river. Discussion was satisfyingly rigorous and conceptual, and this set of case studies really moved us away from a UK focus, while revealing common issues in terms of power and authority.

Thoughts on Urban History

Richard Rodger (’the most relaxing voice in urban history’ James Greenhalgh*) had opened the conference with a keynote on mapping and comparing data sets as a mode of urban historical research. Searching across different sources and bringing them together for analysis has a particular importance in tracing the idea of boundaries (the conference theme) across time and space. The closing round table discussion opened with a passionate call from Markian Prokopovych for academics to show their support for the beleaguered Central European University, currently under attack from the Hungarian government. This chimed with Katy Layton-Jones’s concluding remarks on the importance of looking outside the discipline, to seek to influence the world. This prompted remarks on connections with other professions, the importance of academic citizenship, and the changing perceptions of urbanism from those outside the academy.

The other speakers on the plenary panel were Laura Vaughan and Tom Hulme. Vaughan remarked on the quality of the conference presentations and discussions, Hulme returned to the ideas of local government and identity raised in Rodger’s keynote and compared debates around expansive city councils in the early twentieth century to the relationship between cities and the EU in contemporary politics. He described this move himself as ‘somewhat spurious’, but it did raise questions about the layering and scale of identity and power.

Conclusions

As can be seen from the above, I had a thoroughly good time at the conference and am now filled with enthusiasm for the next I’m attending, a themed event on Water from the Northern Nineteenth-Century Network. Were I to offer my own critique of the conference, I would wonder if we have yet resolved the tension between the local and the global scale of cities. Whether this is, in fact, something that can be resolved or will only remain fertile ground for cultivation is another question. There were examples of both highly specific and highly networked models of city research in evidence, and finding ways to bring these differing attitudes into conversation can only be productive for the discipline. I would also ask whether we have yet fully engaged with the relationship between built and ‘natural’ environments in the city. Given the increasing public interest in this issue - both demonstrated and spurred by things like Planet Earth II - this seems like an area ripe for public comment by historians, as well as offering rich scholarly opportunities.

*corrected from the earlier misattribution to Tosh Warwick

Image by Rwendland (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Postscript

For my own records and possibly of wider interest, the full list of papers I attended:

Session 1: Plenary (introduced by Rebecca Madgin)

Richard Rodger (Edinburgh), ‘The Tyranny of the Border: Urban History at a Crossroads?’

2.3: Boundaries, Space and Traversing the City (chaired by Shane Ewen)

Hadewijch Masure (University of Antwerp), ‘The boundaries of urban solidarity communities in the Low Countries, 1300-1600′

Laura Harrison (University of the West of England), ‘The Boundaries of Social Space: youthful experience of space and place in early twentieth-century York’

Nathan Booth (University of Leeds), ‘Bounding Spaces of Improvement: the making of public parks in Victorian and Edwardian Leeds’

3.3 Municipal Regulation and the Creation of Boundaries (chaired by Jenny Stewart)

Oenone Kubie (Oxford), ‘“A Real Institution”: Playground fencing and the production of institutional space in early-twentieth century urban America’

Daniel W. T. Hood (Boston College), ‘Expanding Fire Protection: The Calcutta Fire Brigade, the Richards Report, and the Calcutta Improvement Trust, 1911-14′

Alex Young Il Seo (Cambridge), ‘Understanding the Korean border through human habitation’

4.2 Living on the Edge: The Precarious Nature of Urbanity on the Boundaries of Islamic Cities (chaired by Markian Prokopovych, all speakers from Zentrum Moderner Orient)

Ulrike Freitag, ‘Outside the Wall of Jeddah: The struggle for urbanity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’

Nora Lafi, ‘Inside/Outside the City Boundaries: Newcomers in twentieth-century Tunis and the question of urbanity’

Florian Riedler, ‘Regulating Urban Expansion in the Ottoman Balkans: Confessional and social boundaries in the nineteenth century’

5.2 Maintaining Jurisdictional Distinctions (chaired by Tosh Warwick)

Vidhya Raveendranathan (University of Gottingen), ‘Defining the Poramboke: Constituting the juridical limits of wastelands in nineteenth-century colonial Madras, India’

Anna Ross (Warwick), ‘Extension Planning in Global Perspective: The case of Tetouan, 1913-56′

David Ellis (independent scholar), ‘The Limits of Mobility: Controlling the car in urban Britain, c.1960-90′

6 Plenary session

Round table discussion: Laura Vaughan, Katy Layton-Jones, Tom Hulme and Markian Prokopovych