Books in the Elements in Global Urban History series

Epidemic Cities provides an overview of the history of epidemics through a particular focus on a range of cities in different regions of the world. The dual focus on both epidemics and specific cities provides an unusual perspective on global history: the analysis of globally circulating epidemics enables reconstructing a variety of wide-reaching entanglements, on the one hand. On the other hand, the concentration with specific urban settings highlights differences and the unevenness engendered by global entanglements. After an introduction concerning the history of the relationship between medicine, epidemics, and cities, the book focuses on the history of three epidemic diseases and how they affected Paris, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Bombay, and Baltimore. The timings of major pandemics punctuate the structure of the book: cholera pandemics from the 1830s to the late nineteenth century, bubonic plague at the turn of the twentieth century, and finally tuberculosis until the mid-twentieth century.

Why should we care how cities matter? What difference does it make to how we understand our daily lives or, for those of us who are academics, to what we research and how we teach? This Element examines these questions.

This Element examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon that was at once wider and eminently urban.

This Element examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology of possession and using it to move across scales of analysis, from the local spatiality of particular built spaces to the networks of legal, political, and economic imperatives that constitute property and operate at national and international levels.