Urban history
Urban history studies how cities were formed and transformed: who decided their layout, what technique and what power made it possible, and what remained of each stage. It is the discipline that explains why the city we see has the shape it has, and why decisions from a century ago still condition today's.
Lewis Mumford traced in The City in History (1961) the path from village to megalopolis; Peter Hall, in Cities of Tomorrow (1988), the intellectual history of twentieth-century planning. Reading a city means reading layers: the wall, the extension, the estate, the motorway, the renovation.
Videos on this term (3)
- Urban history
Lewis Mumford: five thousand years of city in one book
From Mesopotamia to the industrial city, Mumford shows each era built the city it deserved, and judges the…
Lewis Mumford 2 min read - Urban history
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, the History of London
London: The Biography (2000) by Peter Ackroyd tells two thousand years of London as the life of an organism. From…
Peter Ackroyd 3 min read - Urban history
Cairo According to Nezar AlSayyad: Histories of a Superimposed City
Cairo: Histories of a City by Nezar AlSayyad explains Cairo as superimposed cities, from Fustat and the Fatimids to…
3 min read
