Welcome to the Global Urban History Project!
The Global Urban History Project is a meeting place for scholars interested in exploring the crossroads of urban history and global history. GUHP’s goal is to encourage the study of cities as creations and creators of large-scale or global historical phenomena. This requires minimizing the Eurocentric and U.S.-centric focus of urban history, while also connecting early-modern and pre-modern historians with those who work on more recent periods.
Founded in 2017, GUHP became a member-supported organization in January 2019. Scholars at all stages of their careers and from all parts of the world are warmly invited to join the Global Urban History Project. Those interested in cities beyond Europe and the U.S. and in periods before 1850 are especially encouraged.
Our monthly newsletter
Stay up-to-date with our monthly newsletter, “Noteworthy in Global Urban History”
Our conference
Learn about our upcoming conference, GUHP2 Berlin, and our Emerging Scholars program
Past talks and events
Explore our recorded conversations, lectures, and events on our YouTube channel, GUHP Vids
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2024 Dream Conversations: Narrating Urban Lives
In this series of public conversations, we reflect on what histories count or should count when narrating urban lives in a planetary age. In so doing, we question dominant narratives to think through the political stakes of history as a plurality of practices and projects. Which ways of knowing and being undergird historical narratives and their temporal and spatial structures? How do ecological crisis and planetary awareness inflect our understanding of urban lifeworlds and politics? How to write a history of global modernity from the urban underside? What urban worlds does anti-colonialism conjure? And how does history-writing as activism or advocacy engender new research practices beyond the archive? These questions will frame our interdisciplinary discussion, with the aim of advancing histories and theories that can do justice to the plurality of urban life.
Narrating Urban Lives 1: City and Planet
This is a recording of the first event in “Narrating Urban Lives,” a five-event series held between February and June 2024.
Narrating Urban Lives 2: Archival Futures
This second event featured Bhavani Raman, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, and Yahia Shawkat in conversation, moderated by Anwesha Ghosh, on the topic of different methodologies beyond the scope of conventional and “official” archives and how they rethink the question of the right to the city, politics over urban land (including urban commons), and water justice.
GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History
Our second in-person conference will take place at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany on July 10-11, 2025.
Since GUHP’s founding in 2017, it has supported scholarship that stretches the boundaries of the field of urban history. Programming such as the Dream Conversations have encouraged investigations of cities as creations and creators of large-scale historical phenomena while also widening the diversity of voices active in the field. Recorded online events, available on our YouTube channel (GUHPVids), have engaged interested scholars worldwide in our discussions.
Our collaborators
