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.
