News

In September 2025, the special issue “Bridgeheads and Breakwaters: The Socio-Environmental History of Port Cities after the Global Turn” was published in Urban History. This special issue is the product of several years of conversations and two workshops organized by the Patchwork Cities team and was edited by Michael Goebel, Christian Jones, Yorim Spoelder and Xinge Zhai.

The special issue features 11 articles including an introduction and concluding essay in which the broader themes and objectives of the special issue are discussed. The articles cover a wide range of cities across the world from Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon to Sandakan on the coast of North Borneo as well as better known port cities like Calcutta and Colombo and move from the 18th to the 20th century.

Together, these articles adopt a “socio-environmental” approach to writing global urban history in which the social and environmental landscape of the city is central in shaping the cities interaction with global processes of growth and exchange. The full issue can be found here and individual are linked articles below.

A blog post about the special issue can be found on the Global Urban History blog.

Table of Contents

In January 2023, Freie Universität Berlin hosted the second international workshop as part of the Patchwork Cities project entitled “Bridgeheads and Breakwaters: the Socio-Environmental History of Port Cities After the Global Turn.” The aim of this workshop was to share and critique papers for a special issue on this topic.

On Thursday, July 7th at 18:15, Prof Carl H. Nightingale from the State University of New York at Buffalo will be delivering a keynote lecture on behalf of the workshop “Writing the Social History of Port Cities” hosted by the Patchwork Cities team. This lecture is open to interested students and staff in Berlin and is titled “Is There an Urban Planet in the Urban Patchwork? Accelerations of Energy and Power in Steam-Era Port Cities.” No registration is required but we will be asking all attendees to wear a mask. More information is available in the poster below. We look forward to seeing you there!

As our first workshop approaches we are happy to share the poster and programme and look forward to seeing everyone in July.

The Patchwork Cities team is delighted to announce that it will be hosting a workshop in Berlin, July 7 and 8, entitled: “Writing the Social History of Port Cities: Comparative Approaches to Urban History in the Global South.” We see this workshop as an opportunity for scholars working on port cities in different regions of the world to come together and discuss the methodological and historiographical implications of doing comparative urban social history. In particular, we hope to look beyond the still dominant North Atlantic cases and highlight cities in other parts of the world.

At the moment the following participants are confirmed to be in attendance in addition to the Patchwork Cities team:

Vivian Bickford-Smith (University of Cape Town)
Mark Ravinder Frost (University College London)
Malte Fuhrmann (Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)
Guadalupe García (Tulane University)
Anindita Ghosh (University of Manchester)
Prashant Kidambi (University of Leicester)
Adrián Lerner Patrón (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lorraine Leu (University of Texas at Austin)
Carl H. Nightingale (University at Buffalo)
Cyrus Schayegh (Graduate Institute, Geneva)
Sujit Sivasundaram (University of Cambridge)
Olivia Durand (Freie Universität Berlin)
Mikko Toivanen (University of Warsaw)

A further description of the workshop is as follows:

Port cities in the Global South witnessed rapid growth and became bridgeheads of uneven globalization during the era of steam. The advent of industrial capitalism and intensifying cross-continental trade and migration flows left their mark on cityscapes and dramatically altered the socio-urban fabric in places as far apart as Durban, Singapore, and Buenos Aires. This workshop aims to bring together scholars with an interest in the social history of port cities in different parts of the world that are rarely studied together. Whereas much of the conceptual vocabulary, as well as theoretical reflection, in the field of urban history continues to be primarily informed by scholarship on the North Atlantic, this workshop redirects the geographical focus to the Global South. What can a more comparative and global perspective teach urban historians, and what are the pitfalls and limits of such an approach? How can we write histories that strike a balance between the peculiarities and rootedness of place on the one hand, and the fluid realities of flows and mobility on the other? And what can a focus on port cities, and the oceanic-urban frontier implied in this typology, teach us about a specific form of globality mediated by urban space? Can we enrich our conceptual vocabulary with more precise mid-range concepts that speak to different case-studies yet retain their explanatory power in specific contexts? How useful is, for example, the ubiquitous term “segregation” in making sense of residential and occupational clustering in such diverse contexts as Cape Town, Havana and Batavia? By fostering a dialogue between urban historians specialized in different regions of the world, this workshop probes the potential for a truly global urban history. 

What does the metaphorical title really mean? Patchwork Cities: Urban Ethnic Clusters in the Global South During the Age of Steam, conjures more questions of migration, cities and the history of segregation than a passion for steam engines. It leads to a fundamental alchemy of the habitat of cities and urban spaces and delves into the historical reasons for, and the meaning of, ethnic residence patterns in port cities of the Global South, 1850–1930.

In this podcast, part of the Fields podcast series of the Graduate Institute’s research office, Prof. Michael Goebel, historian, invites us to better understand the construction of segregation in Port cities around the world at the end of the 19th century. A steamboat trip that takes us to the beginning of economic globalization.