Reconsidering The City:
A Conference on Urban History
April 23-24, 2010
SUNY Fredonia
Fredonia, NY
Reconsidering the City will bring together scholars from a variety of institutions to discuss new directions in urban history. Urban history has grown steadily as a sub-field of U.S. history for more than fifty years; however, in the past twenty years an explosion of scholarly interest in urban history in the non-western world has revitalized and refocused the field. Recent large-scale urbanization in the developing world, along with the decline of many industrial centers in such regions as the northeastern United States, have focused scholarly attention on the processes underlying the emergence, evolution, and decline of cities. Issues relating to state building; trade and the establishment of commercial networks; the competition for political, economic, and cultural resources; the creation and spread of new identities, cultural forms and technologies; as well as issues relating to humans’ impact on the environment, are all embedded within the processes which create and change cities, making urban history an especially rich field to explore. The panels at this conference will explore a broad range of places, times, and topics: crime in twentieth-century Beijing, the development of transportation networks in nineteenth-century Baltimore and Chicago; the construction of identities in urban Africa; the restoration of brownfields in Worcester, Massachusetts; urban planning in Berlin. In spite of their disparate topics, all of the conference papers hold in common a view of the city as contested terrain, a place where different groups struggle to shape the city in ways that meet their distinct political, economic, cultural, and environmental goals. Please join us as we reconsider the city as a site for people to create, negotiate, and live out their varied visions of the “good life,” social justice, environmental well-being, political participation, and cultural access.
-Thanks to the SUNY Fredonia Vice President for Academic Affairs, Associate Vice President for Graduate Studies and Research, and Dean of the College of Education for providing funding to make Reconsidering the City possible.