Historical Geographies Urban Geographies Urban
Provided for non-commercial research and educational use only.
Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use.
This article was originally published in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, published by Elsevier,
and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution,
for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution,
sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution’s administrator.
All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing
copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution’s website or repository, are
prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier’s permissions site at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial
Golan A. 2009. Historical Geographies, Urban. In Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human
Geography, Volume 1, pp. 146–151. Oxford: Elsevier
ISBN: 978-0-08-044911-1
© Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Author's personal copy
Historical Geographies, Urban
A. Golan, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Chicago School A group of Chicago-based
sociologists whose model of the ecological theory of the
city had initiated during the 1920s the development of
urban studies.
Cultural Turn in Geography The reemergence of
cultural geography in the 1980s that marked the
emergence of a postmodern geography.
Histoire totale Total history. Formed by the school of
the annale, a post-World-War-I group of French
historians that adhered to a research of all aspects,
activities, and strata of past human societies.
Liberal Eclecticism in Historical Geography A point
of view suggesting that no particular dogma about the
nature of historical geography was to be promoted: the
study of no problem, period, or place in the past was to
be prohibited.
Regionalism A fundamental concept in geography
regarding the core of the discipline as the study of areas
in their total composition or complexity. Regional
geography dominated among geographers in the
second half of the nineteenth and first half of the
twentieth centuries.
Synthetic Approach in Urban Historical
Geography An approach intended at the integration of
different concepts, theories, and methodologies into a
coherent method of research of urban past geographies.
Urban History A subdiscipline in history concentrating
on different social, economic, cultural, and political
aspects of urban areas in the past.
Urban Morphology A concept developed by the
British geographers, Michael Conzen and Jeremy
Whitehand, that approached urban settlements as the
outcome of an unconscious production process of builtup areas that took place over long periods.
Urban Studies An integrated discipline including
researchers from all fields of social sciences that focus
on the research of the urban phenomenon.
Introduction
‘‘Urban historical geography is no longer a fanciful label
on an empty shelf in the geographer’s library.’’ This was
Peter Goheen’s opening of a review published in 1984 on
Harold Carter’s book titled An Introduction to Urban
Historical Geography that was published about a year
before. Following more than five decades of modern
146
historical–geographical research, such an assertion implies a fault of a subdiscipline that intends to study, as
defined by Robin Butlin, ‘‘ythe geographies of past
times.’’
If that was true, it raises the question whether there
was no research previous to the 1980s taken on the past of
urban areas. Actually much has been written on different
aspects of past urban areas by scholars from different
academic disciplines. First among them were urban historians, as well as economic and social historians that
were also involved in the research of past urban areas.
While history is the default discipline for researching the
past, scholars from other disciplines were also involved in
the research of past urban areas such as sociologists,
architects, and urban planners, as well as scholars from
several subdisciplines of geography: urban geographers,
cultural geographers, social geographers, and economic
geographers.
Historical geographers avoided the research of urban
areas for a long time. This was due to the dominance of
the regionalism in geography during the time of the
formation of modern historical geography in the 1920s
and 1930s. The founding fathers of the subdiscipline
concentrated on the research of rural areas especially of
the pre-Industrial-Revolution British Isles, in which
towns were considered as part of the regional system
while their inner structure was not yet considered a
subject of research.
Urban studies were inaugurated in the United States
in the 1910s and 1920s. This was mostly the endeavor of
sociologists whose research concentrated on the evolution and development of Midwestern American cities,
especially Chicago. The growing interest in urban areas
at that time followed the large-scale nineteenth-century
Industrial Revolution that formed the modern world.
Urban centers formed the hub of modernity and the
urbanization process has fundamentally changed human
geographies of Europe, North America, and on a smaller
scale was transforming those of South America, Asia, and
Africa.
Robert Park, a Chicago-based sociologist, was the
leading figure among the founders of modern urban
studies. He and his associates endeavored to form a
model of city structure, epitomized by the well-known
zonal diagram presenting the concentric zone model of
urban development and structure presented by Ernest
Burgess in his introduction to the 1925 collection of
essays titled The City, edited by Park himself and
Roderick McKenzie. Renowned as the model of the
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Historical Geographies, Urban
ecological theory of the city, it suggested a format for
urban growth and nature based on the experience of the
American Midwest. The work of the so-called Chicago
school and followers in the 1930s and 1940s, most of
which have been trained as sociologists and economists,
developed different theoretical and methodological
frames and insights for the apprehension of the urban
phenomenon. These effected the formation of a new and
integrated scholarship of urban studies that concentrated
on different aspects of urban forms: physical, social,
economic, and others.
Their main interest was recent Western (i.e., European
and North American) cities and towns. The question of
the origins of cities seemed less significant within the
research of urbanity although not totally neglected. The
research of the urban past: the history of cities, towns, and
urban systems, emerged in Europe. European urban
tradition was much longer than that of the Americas.
Ancient and medieval towns attracted the interest of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars, mainly
historians and social scientists researching a long timespan urban evolution process. Different from the
American urban ecology theory, Europeans developed an
institutional theory of the city based on peculiar order
and historical primacy of urban institutions. Max Weber,
one of the founding fathers of sociology, took the effort in
his work titled The City, first published in 1921, to integrate theories related to different institutions into one
theory. His theory of urban community intended to form
an integrated frame for conceiving the development of
urban areas since early historical times.
Both American and European sociologies played a
major role in the formation of a research of urban areas in
general and of urban history in particular. Nevertheless,
sociologists’ aims and methods were not historical in
essence. Research of different aspects of past urban areas
took place in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The study of different aspects of classical cities had taken
place already in the nineteenth century. Pierre Lavendan’s work on history of urban planning in the classical
world and Henri Pirenne’s on medieval cities were
published in parallel with the emergence of Park, Burgess, and McKenzie’s ecological theory of the city. Yet,
urban history did not form a subdiscipline until the early
1960s. Josef Konvitz regards the publication of four
seminal works: Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis, Lewis
Mumford’s The City in History, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and
Life of American Cities, and Daniel Burstin’s The Image, as a
landmark in the formation of urban history in America.
All four books proclaimed the relevance of urban history
for the understanding of contemporaneous trends and
planning a better future for cities. In the other side of the
Atlantic it was the British historian, James Dyos, that
initiated the formation of urban history as an academic
subdiscipline. Dyos’s approach to urban history was in
147
the tradition of the French school of histoire totale. He
regarded urban history’s totality in terms of an integrative scholarship embracing all aspects of urbanity: political, economic, cultural, social, spatial, and demographic.
The inauguration of two journals in the mid-1970s: the
Journal of Urban History in the United States and Urban
History in Great Britain mark the growing interest in
different aspects of the past of urban areas.
The research of history of urban areas was also the
interest of scholars from other fields such as urban
sociologists, economic historians and geographers, urban
geographers, historians of architecture, and historians of
town planning. The effort to form an integrated scholarship such as urban history attracted much criticism
from other scholars interested in the urban past that
ranged from defining urban historians as no more than a
clique based on Dyos and disciples to more evident
criticism such as the lack of use of theory, over fragmentation, and being no more than a form of social
history. Such intellectual debates had been persistent as
geographers turned in the 1960s and 1970s to the research of the history of urban areas.
Urban Historical Geography, the
Beginnings
In his seminal work on historical geography Robin Butlin
detects the origins of historical geographical study to the
early eighteenth century. Since then and until the 1950s,
including the time of formation of modern historical
geography, between the 1920s and the 1950s, urban
settlements did not get much attention from historical
geographers. Geography in those years adhered to the
regional imperative that formed the outline and frame of
research. Historical geographers’ main concern was regional settlement history in the regional rather than in
local or global scales. The research of urban areas was left
to social and economic geographers and to a growing
group of urban geographers. The post-World-War-II
Quantitative Revolution and rise of applied geography
during the 1950s and 1960s brought about an increasing
interest in contemporaneous geographies in which the
urban phenomenon dominated. Geographers studying
the evolution and growth of urban areas turned to the use
of theories and methods developed mainly by social
scientists.
Historical geographers could not have avoided this
turn in geography for long. Paul Wheatley, a student of
Clifford Darby – the founding father of British modern
historical geography, was among the first that turned already in the 1960s to the research of historical urban
geography. His work was based on a comparative and
meticulous research of the historical geography of urbanism in East and Southeast Asia. Wheatley considered
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Historical Geographies, Urban
all early urban traditions as sharing an astrobiological
paradigm of cosmological speculation that sought to
demonstrate the unity of existence by invoking the regularity of celestial understanding with the reality of
biological irregularity on Earth. James Vance was another
among the progenitors of urban historical geography. His
doctoral thesis submitted in 1952 was on the suburbanization of Boston, and during the 1960s and 1970s, he
turned to a broader research of the development of urbanization in Western civilization. He asserted the development of modern urbanization as based on the link
between capitalist development and formation of new
transportation systems. Another group of geographers
that researched the urban past were the scholars from the
materialist school of urban morphology led by the British
geographers, Michael Conzen and Jeremy Whitehand,
that approached urban settlements as the outcome of an
unconscious production process of built-up areas that
took place over long periods. They considered the
morphology of urban areas as the product of the work of
subsequent building activity of successive generations
that leave their traces in the urban environment. Tracing
and analyzing these layers reveals the origins and development of urban areas.
Scope and interests of historical and other geographers researching the urban past can be found in the
Journal of Historical Geography that was inaugurated in
1975. Among the first articles published in the journal
was David Ward’s discussion of modernity and urban
development in Victorian Britain. Ward had previously
edited a volume discussing different aspects of nineteenth-century American cities. Most articles published
in the first 5 years of the journal on urban subjects were
reviews of books on urban history and morphology.
American and British cities and towns have been the
main foci of interest, although other areas were considered such as in the article of Kent Mathewson’s work
on the evolution of Mayan cities of South America reflecting the Saurian tradition of cultural and historical
American geography or in that of Yehoshua Ben Arieh,
the founding father of Israeli historical geography, on the
role of Christian missions in the development of nineteenth-century Jerusalem.
Definitions, Methodology, and Theory:
Forming the Contours of Urban Historical
Geography
Growing number of publications on urban historical
geography during the 1970s and early 1980s resulted in a
debate over defining and dividing historical geographers
from other scholars specializing in the history of urban
areas such as urban historians; social, economic, and
urban geographers; and historians of architecture.
Richard Dennis’s introduction to his book on nineteenth-century English cities published in 1984 provides
an analysis of different views on the research of the past
of urban areas. At the center was the debate between
social scientists: urban sociologists, geographers, and
economists that used either quantitative or structuralist
theories and methods on the one hand, and the more
eclectic urban, social, and economic historians relying on
the research of case studies for drawing general conclusions, on the other hand. The synthesis adopted by
Dennis for his research of the urban historical geography
of English nineteenth-century towns was based on
methods used by social historians and urban geographers.
In the middle of his research stands the human agent and
different aspects of the formation of urban space by
human societies, rendering a thorough and inclusive
analysis of urban life in the Victorian period.
Different from Denis’s interpretative approach, Harold Carter presented in 1983 a positivist deductive
method for forming a synthetic approach to urban historical geography. The first part of his research is dedicated to the definition of cities, review of theories of
urbanization, and to the history of the urban phenomenon since the beginning of history and its diffusion in
ancient and medieval times. The second concentrates on
urban population on functions of cities and on the evolution of urban systems. The third deals with the evolution of town planning and the last, with the internal
functional and social structures of the city. Different from
Dennis, who wished to form a method for urban historical–geographical research depicted in nineteenth-century British cities, Carter presented a historical overview
of urbanism from which he aspired to draw a methodological inclusive framework. Nevertheless, the scope of
his work, spare the first part, is also limited to the
European and North American cities.
The rise of critical Marxist theory among geographers
in the 1970s, whose main protagonist, David Harvey,
concentrated on the urbanization process of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presented a major challenge to urban historical–geographical research. The
ambitious attempt to use Marxist theory to form a holistic view of the city and rapid transformation of modern
urban areas seems to be a major challenge for both
Dennis and Carter in forming an alternative view and
method for the research of urban historical geography.
The interpretative approach such as that of Richard
Dennis attempted at a study of contemporaneous concepts of cities on the one hand, and modern researchers’
concepts on these cities, on the other hand. In this
sense the interpretative approach was a predecessor of
the postmodern turn to social and cultural–historical
geographies. Harold Carter seems to preserve a more
positivist–conservative tradition of urban historical–
geographical research that follows the school of
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Historical Geographies, Urban
materialist urban morphology, concentrating on the
evolution of the morphology and functions of cities and
towns from antiquity to the nineteenth century.
The widening interest in urban historical geography
in 1980s resulted in the evolution of an Anglo-German
group of urban historical geographers, following two
seminars held in (West) Germany and Britain successively in 1982 and 1983. The publication in 1988 of a
volume edited by Dietrich Denecke and Gareth Shaw
titled Urban Historical Geography: Recent Progress in Britain
and Germany was the outcome of both seminars. According to the editors’ introduction, the main aim of the
seminars was to initiate the formation of international
cooperation in urban geographical–historical research
and an international terminology of urban history and
urban historical geography. Despite this, it seems as the
forming of this venture was not intended to form a
subdiscipline within historical geography but to form an
interdiscipline group of urban historical geographers and
urban historians.
It seems rather obvious that the initiators of both
seminars did not wish to form a methodological framework for a school of historical geography. The volume
edited by Denecke and Shaw provided a cross section of
the work of contemporaneous urban historical geographers, at least those located in Britain and Germany. It
ranged from more traditional research of urban morphology, structure, and functions to social–historical geography of cities and towns, from evolution of European
towns in the Middle Ages to the formation of modern
cities in the nineteenth century. Preservation of historical
cites was also in the scope of this volume. The multifaceted quality of urban historical geography was also
evident in the chapter titled ‘Historical geographies of
urbanization’ included in Butlin’s work on historical
geography that was published in 1993.
The aim to form a supranational discussion group of
urban historical geographers seemed to correspond to the
views presented in 1992 by Richard Rodger, a British
economic and urban historian and the editor of Urban
History. Rodger considered the aim of the journal as
embracing methodological, historiographical, and analytical contributions that would enable intertemporal
and interdisciplinary interests to coalesce, united by a
common interest in the town or city. Accordingly, urban
history was the subdiscipline in which urban historical
geographers should be operating among sociologists;
political scientists; art, cultural, economic, and social
historians; and architectural and planning historians
interested in the study of urban history. Submerging
into urban history and becoming partners in a wide
interdisciplinary group may have been luring, but it
also meant relinquishing the identity of geographers,
which was not in the interest of urban historical
geographers.
149
Urban Historical Geography and the
Cultural Turn in Geography
The rise of a new cultural geography afforded historical
geographers as a whole the opportunity to redesign their
place within the discipline of geography.
The cultural turn in geography was simultaneous to
the endeavor to formulate a thematic group of urban
historical geographers that took place in the 1980s.
Similar to historical geography, cultural geography
seemed also to be marginalized following the rise of
quantitative methods followed by that of Marxist theories
that placed economic and social geographies at the center
of the discipline.
Through the 1970s and 1980s historical geographers
including those interested in urban areas strove to locate
themselves, in the theoretical and methodological realms,
among historical research, on the one hand, and theories
and methods employed by main currents of geography,
on the other hand. The subdiscipline was situated as
regarded by Carville Earle ‘‘yin midstride, between
empirical tradition and epistemological innovation, between the rock-ribbed world of materiality and the elusive worlds of representations’’ (Earle, 1995: 455–459).
No wonder he considered ‘‘yhistorical geography is
anything but unifiedy’’ and historical geographers as
those whose research interests ‘‘yspan the spectrum of
geographical researchy’’ (Earle, 1995: 455–459).
These efforts hampered the attempt to form a welldistinct group of urban historical geographers, forming a
multifaced group among which some inclined to
follow conservative methodologies while others tended
to adopt theories and methods of social and economic
geographies.
Different from the invigoration of historical geography, the Sauerian tradition that dominated cultural
geography for decades seemed to be losing its appeal in
the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the humanistic school in
geography and domination of Marxist theories, both as
responses to dominant quantitative and systematic approaches, gave birth in the 1980s to a new cultural
geography. By the late 1980s geography underwent a
cultural turn that reformulated not only cultural geography but other subdisciplines as well, including historical geography. Moreover, it was not geography alone that
was affected by the cultural turn. All human sciences had
to consider postcolonial critique that questioned the
dominance of Western political and cultural concepts, as
well as post-structural critique raised by Continental
philosophy on the relevance of Western models of society. In short, the turn from modernism to a postmodernism formed the fundamentals of the cultural turn
in geography. Postmodernism has contested intellectual
hierarchies and afforded the legitimization of plural
views of the world. Many geographers adopted the use of
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Historical Geographies, Urban
the plural form ‘geographies’, rather than singular
‘geography’, to present a world of multiple identities and
views that form different concepts of space and especially
of places.
The cultural turn among historical geographers in
general and urban historical geographers in particular is
evident through scrutinizing reports of historical geography sessions that took place in different conferences
since the early 1990s. Representations, identities, iconographies, and discourses were frequently present in
titles of presentations, side by side with older historical
geographical traditions that concentrated on assimilation
and settlement of immigrants in North America and
development of industries and rural areas.
In such an intellectual climate of epistemological,
theoretical, and methodological transformations that
blurred interdiscipline and subdiscipline lines of demarcation, the effort to define and articulate a group of
urban historical geographers seemed irrelevant. This is
reflected by Miles Ogborn’s discussion in Progress in
Human Geography on the work of historical geographers in
1997. Relating to different categories of research he regards the debate on relations between history and
geography, in themes such as geography and empire,
environmental history, memory, and heritage, and social
and cultural histories. Works on cities and towns are
mentioned in both latter categories, but not as a separate
theme of research.
Michael Heffernan, the former editor of the Journal of
Historical Geography defined the journal in his 1997 editorial note as ‘‘ya haven of intelligent eclecticismy.’’
He followed the spirit of his predecessor, Alan Baker’s
expansive vision of historical geography as ‘‘eclectic and
liberal: no particular dogma about the nature of historical
geography was to be promoted: the study of no problem,
period or place in the past was to be prohibitedythe
concern of the journal ought not to be the precise definition and rigorous policing of historical geography’s
borders.’’ The liberal and eclectic spirit of the journal
reflected and inspired an intellectual climate that did not
encourage the formation of subgroups concerned on one
facet of historical–geographical research such as urban
historical geography.
The liberal and eclectic nature of historical geography
is evident, sustained in the variety of publications on the
subdiscipline and those published in both its stages:
Journal of Historical Geography and Historical Geography. This
is also true concerning edited volumes on historical
geography such as that edited by Brian Graham and
Catherine Nash titled Modern Historical Geographies
published in 2000. Their use of the plural form ‘geographies’ presents the multifaced character of historical–
geographical research and its liberal and eclectic nature.
This is well articulated by Deryck Holdsworth in a paper
titled ‘Historical geography: the ancients and the
moderns – generational vitality’ published in 2002 in
Progress in Human Geography. He quotes Graham and
Nash’s introduction regarding modern historical geographies ‘‘that signal new directions informed by feminism, post-structuralism, anti-racism and post-colonial
perspectives sharing concerns about questions of power
and meaning with other researchers more readily located
within the traditional subdisciplines of economic, cultural, political and social geography’’ (Holdsworth, 2002:
671–678). And notice the use of singular while referring
to other subdisciplines of geography. The celebration of a
modern historical geography does not imply the formation of a ‘new’ historical geography but rather maintenance of the tradition of liberal eclecticism.
This is also true regarding geographical–historical
research of urban areas. A scrutiny of papers published
on the urban phenomenon in The Journal of Historical
Geography since the mid-1990s reveals a diversity of research methods and subjects. Some trends of research
could be, of course noted, as the almost total avoidance of
ancient, medieval, and early modern cities and towns in
favor of the research of modern urbanization that is of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, the
effort to define borders and limits of urban historical
geography seems to be neglected. Liberal eclecticism
affords the recent urban historical geographer to easily
mingle, in the academic sense, with urban historians and
other practitioners of the urban past, becoming a part of a
postmodern interdisciplinary scholarship whose interests
are the search of the history of urbanism.
See also: Industry, Historical Geographies of; Street
Names and Iconography; Urban Morphologies, Historical.
Further Reading
Basset, K. (2005). Marxian theory and the writing of urban history: On
David Harvey’s Paris, capital of modernity. Journal of Historical
Geography 31, 568--582.
Butlin, R. A. (1993). Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Time
and Space. London: Edward Arnold.
Carter, H. (1983). An Introduction to Urban Historical Geography.
London: Edward Arnold.
Denecke, D. and Shaw, G. (eds.) (1988). Urban Historical Geography.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dennis, R. (1984). English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Earle, C. (1995). Historical geography in extremis? Splitting
personalities on the postmodern turn. Journal of Historical
Geography 21, 455--459.
Goheen, P. G. (1984). Book review on an introduction to urban
historical geography by Harold Carter. The Geographical Review 74,
376--377.
Graham, B. and Nash, C. (eds.) (2000). Modern Historical Geographies.
London: Longman.
Heffernan, M. (1997). Editorial: The future of historical geography.
Journal of Historical Geography 23, 1--2.
Holdsworth, D. W. (2002). Historical geography: The ancients and the
moderns – generational vitality. Progress in Human Geography 26,
671--678.
Author's personal copy
Historical Geographies, Urban
Konvitz, J. W. (1993). Introduction. Journal of Urban History 19,
3--10.
Ogborn, M. (1999). The realities between geography and history: Work
in historical geography in 1997. Progress in Human Geography 23,
97--108.
Rodger, R. (1992). Urban history: Prospect and retrospect. Urban
History 19, 1--22.
151
Vance, J. (1990). The Continuing City. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Wheatley, P. (1977). The suspended pelt. Reflections on a discarded
model of spatial structure. In Deskins, D. R., Kish, G., Nyusten, J. D.
& Olsson, G. (eds.) Geographic Humanism, Analysis and Social
Action: A Half Century of Geography at Michigan, pp 47--108. Ann
Arbor MI: Department of Geography, University of Michigan.
Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use.
This article was originally published in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, published by Elsevier,
and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution,
for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution,
sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution’s administrator.
All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing
copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution’s website or repository, are
prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier’s permissions site at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial
Golan A. 2009. Historical Geographies, Urban. In Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human
Geography, Volume 1, pp. 146–151. Oxford: Elsevier
ISBN: 978-0-08-044911-1
© Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Author's personal copy
Historical Geographies, Urban
A. Golan, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Chicago School A group of Chicago-based
sociologists whose model of the ecological theory of the
city had initiated during the 1920s the development of
urban studies.
Cultural Turn in Geography The reemergence of
cultural geography in the 1980s that marked the
emergence of a postmodern geography.
Histoire totale Total history. Formed by the school of
the annale, a post-World-War-I group of French
historians that adhered to a research of all aspects,
activities, and strata of past human societies.
Liberal Eclecticism in Historical Geography A point
of view suggesting that no particular dogma about the
nature of historical geography was to be promoted: the
study of no problem, period, or place in the past was to
be prohibited.
Regionalism A fundamental concept in geography
regarding the core of the discipline as the study of areas
in their total composition or complexity. Regional
geography dominated among geographers in the
second half of the nineteenth and first half of the
twentieth centuries.
Synthetic Approach in Urban Historical
Geography An approach intended at the integration of
different concepts, theories, and methodologies into a
coherent method of research of urban past geographies.
Urban History A subdiscipline in history concentrating
on different social, economic, cultural, and political
aspects of urban areas in the past.
Urban Morphology A concept developed by the
British geographers, Michael Conzen and Jeremy
Whitehand, that approached urban settlements as the
outcome of an unconscious production process of builtup areas that took place over long periods.
Urban Studies An integrated discipline including
researchers from all fields of social sciences that focus
on the research of the urban phenomenon.
Introduction
‘‘Urban historical geography is no longer a fanciful label
on an empty shelf in the geographer’s library.’’ This was
Peter Goheen’s opening of a review published in 1984 on
Harold Carter’s book titled An Introduction to Urban
Historical Geography that was published about a year
before. Following more than five decades of modern
146
historical–geographical research, such an assertion implies a fault of a subdiscipline that intends to study, as
defined by Robin Butlin, ‘‘ythe geographies of past
times.’’
If that was true, it raises the question whether there
was no research previous to the 1980s taken on the past of
urban areas. Actually much has been written on different
aspects of past urban areas by scholars from different
academic disciplines. First among them were urban historians, as well as economic and social historians that
were also involved in the research of past urban areas.
While history is the default discipline for researching the
past, scholars from other disciplines were also involved in
the research of past urban areas such as sociologists,
architects, and urban planners, as well as scholars from
several subdisciplines of geography: urban geographers,
cultural geographers, social geographers, and economic
geographers.
Historical geographers avoided the research of urban
areas for a long time. This was due to the dominance of
the regionalism in geography during the time of the
formation of modern historical geography in the 1920s
and 1930s. The founding fathers of the subdiscipline
concentrated on the research of rural areas especially of
the pre-Industrial-Revolution British Isles, in which
towns were considered as part of the regional system
while their inner structure was not yet considered a
subject of research.
Urban studies were inaugurated in the United States
in the 1910s and 1920s. This was mostly the endeavor of
sociologists whose research concentrated on the evolution and development of Midwestern American cities,
especially Chicago. The growing interest in urban areas
at that time followed the large-scale nineteenth-century
Industrial Revolution that formed the modern world.
Urban centers formed the hub of modernity and the
urbanization process has fundamentally changed human
geographies of Europe, North America, and on a smaller
scale was transforming those of South America, Asia, and
Africa.
Robert Park, a Chicago-based sociologist, was the
leading figure among the founders of modern urban
studies. He and his associates endeavored to form a
model of city structure, epitomized by the well-known
zonal diagram presenting the concentric zone model of
urban development and structure presented by Ernest
Burgess in his introduction to the 1925 collection of
essays titled The City, edited by Park himself and
Roderick McKenzie. Renowned as the model of the
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ecological theory of the city, it suggested a format for
urban growth and nature based on the experience of the
American Midwest. The work of the so-called Chicago
school and followers in the 1930s and 1940s, most of
which have been trained as sociologists and economists,
developed different theoretical and methodological
frames and insights for the apprehension of the urban
phenomenon. These effected the formation of a new and
integrated scholarship of urban studies that concentrated
on different aspects of urban forms: physical, social,
economic, and others.
Their main interest was recent Western (i.e., European
and North American) cities and towns. The question of
the origins of cities seemed less significant within the
research of urbanity although not totally neglected. The
research of the urban past: the history of cities, towns, and
urban systems, emerged in Europe. European urban
tradition was much longer than that of the Americas.
Ancient and medieval towns attracted the interest of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars, mainly
historians and social scientists researching a long timespan urban evolution process. Different from the
American urban ecology theory, Europeans developed an
institutional theory of the city based on peculiar order
and historical primacy of urban institutions. Max Weber,
one of the founding fathers of sociology, took the effort in
his work titled The City, first published in 1921, to integrate theories related to different institutions into one
theory. His theory of urban community intended to form
an integrated frame for conceiving the development of
urban areas since early historical times.
Both American and European sociologies played a
major role in the formation of a research of urban areas in
general and of urban history in particular. Nevertheless,
sociologists’ aims and methods were not historical in
essence. Research of different aspects of past urban areas
took place in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The study of different aspects of classical cities had taken
place already in the nineteenth century. Pierre Lavendan’s work on history of urban planning in the classical
world and Henri Pirenne’s on medieval cities were
published in parallel with the emergence of Park, Burgess, and McKenzie’s ecological theory of the city. Yet,
urban history did not form a subdiscipline until the early
1960s. Josef Konvitz regards the publication of four
seminal works: Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis, Lewis
Mumford’s The City in History, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and
Life of American Cities, and Daniel Burstin’s The Image, as a
landmark in the formation of urban history in America.
All four books proclaimed the relevance of urban history
for the understanding of contemporaneous trends and
planning a better future for cities. In the other side of the
Atlantic it was the British historian, James Dyos, that
initiated the formation of urban history as an academic
subdiscipline. Dyos’s approach to urban history was in
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the tradition of the French school of histoire totale. He
regarded urban history’s totality in terms of an integrative scholarship embracing all aspects of urbanity: political, economic, cultural, social, spatial, and demographic.
The inauguration of two journals in the mid-1970s: the
Journal of Urban History in the United States and Urban
History in Great Britain mark the growing interest in
different aspects of the past of urban areas.
The research of history of urban areas was also the
interest of scholars from other fields such as urban
sociologists, economic historians and geographers, urban
geographers, historians of architecture, and historians of
town planning. The effort to form an integrated scholarship such as urban history attracted much criticism
from other scholars interested in the urban past that
ranged from defining urban historians as no more than a
clique based on Dyos and disciples to more evident
criticism such as the lack of use of theory, over fragmentation, and being no more than a form of social
history. Such intellectual debates had been persistent as
geographers turned in the 1960s and 1970s to the research of the history of urban areas.
Urban Historical Geography, the
Beginnings
In his seminal work on historical geography Robin Butlin
detects the origins of historical geographical study to the
early eighteenth century. Since then and until the 1950s,
including the time of formation of modern historical
geography, between the 1920s and the 1950s, urban
settlements did not get much attention from historical
geographers. Geography in those years adhered to the
regional imperative that formed the outline and frame of
research. Historical geographers’ main concern was regional settlement history in the regional rather than in
local or global scales. The research of urban areas was left
to social and economic geographers and to a growing
group of urban geographers. The post-World-War-II
Quantitative Revolution and rise of applied geography
during the 1950s and 1960s brought about an increasing
interest in contemporaneous geographies in which the
urban phenomenon dominated. Geographers studying
the evolution and growth of urban areas turned to the use
of theories and methods developed mainly by social
scientists.
Historical geographers could not have avoided this
turn in geography for long. Paul Wheatley, a student of
Clifford Darby – the founding father of British modern
historical geography, was among the first that turned already in the 1960s to the research of historical urban
geography. His work was based on a comparative and
meticulous research of the historical geography of urbanism in East and Southeast Asia. Wheatley considered
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all early urban traditions as sharing an astrobiological
paradigm of cosmological speculation that sought to
demonstrate the unity of existence by invoking the regularity of celestial understanding with the reality of
biological irregularity on Earth. James Vance was another
among the progenitors of urban historical geography. His
doctoral thesis submitted in 1952 was on the suburbanization of Boston, and during the 1960s and 1970s, he
turned to a broader research of the development of urbanization in Western civilization. He asserted the development of modern urbanization as based on the link
between capitalist development and formation of new
transportation systems. Another group of geographers
that researched the urban past were the scholars from the
materialist school of urban morphology led by the British
geographers, Michael Conzen and Jeremy Whitehand,
that approached urban settlements as the outcome of an
unconscious production process of built-up areas that
took place over long periods. They considered the
morphology of urban areas as the product of the work of
subsequent building activity of successive generations
that leave their traces in the urban environment. Tracing
and analyzing these layers reveals the origins and development of urban areas.
Scope and interests of historical and other geographers researching the urban past can be found in the
Journal of Historical Geography that was inaugurated in
1975. Among the first articles published in the journal
was David Ward’s discussion of modernity and urban
development in Victorian Britain. Ward had previously
edited a volume discussing different aspects of nineteenth-century American cities. Most articles published
in the first 5 years of the journal on urban subjects were
reviews of books on urban history and morphology.
American and British cities and towns have been the
main foci of interest, although other areas were considered such as in the article of Kent Mathewson’s work
on the evolution of Mayan cities of South America reflecting the Saurian tradition of cultural and historical
American geography or in that of Yehoshua Ben Arieh,
the founding father of Israeli historical geography, on the
role of Christian missions in the development of nineteenth-century Jerusalem.
Definitions, Methodology, and Theory:
Forming the Contours of Urban Historical
Geography
Growing number of publications on urban historical
geography during the 1970s and early 1980s resulted in a
debate over defining and dividing historical geographers
from other scholars specializing in the history of urban
areas such as urban historians; social, economic, and
urban geographers; and historians of architecture.
Richard Dennis’s introduction to his book on nineteenth-century English cities published in 1984 provides
an analysis of different views on the research of the past
of urban areas. At the center was the debate between
social scientists: urban sociologists, geographers, and
economists that used either quantitative or structuralist
theories and methods on the one hand, and the more
eclectic urban, social, and economic historians relying on
the research of case studies for drawing general conclusions, on the other hand. The synthesis adopted by
Dennis for his research of the urban historical geography
of English nineteenth-century towns was based on
methods used by social historians and urban geographers.
In the middle of his research stands the human agent and
different aspects of the formation of urban space by
human societies, rendering a thorough and inclusive
analysis of urban life in the Victorian period.
Different from Denis’s interpretative approach, Harold Carter presented in 1983 a positivist deductive
method for forming a synthetic approach to urban historical geography. The first part of his research is dedicated to the definition of cities, review of theories of
urbanization, and to the history of the urban phenomenon since the beginning of history and its diffusion in
ancient and medieval times. The second concentrates on
urban population on functions of cities and on the evolution of urban systems. The third deals with the evolution of town planning and the last, with the internal
functional and social structures of the city. Different from
Dennis, who wished to form a method for urban historical–geographical research depicted in nineteenth-century British cities, Carter presented a historical overview
of urbanism from which he aspired to draw a methodological inclusive framework. Nevertheless, the scope of
his work, spare the first part, is also limited to the
European and North American cities.
The rise of critical Marxist theory among geographers
in the 1970s, whose main protagonist, David Harvey,
concentrated on the urbanization process of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presented a major challenge to urban historical–geographical research. The
ambitious attempt to use Marxist theory to form a holistic view of the city and rapid transformation of modern
urban areas seems to be a major challenge for both
Dennis and Carter in forming an alternative view and
method for the research of urban historical geography.
The interpretative approach such as that of Richard
Dennis attempted at a study of contemporaneous concepts of cities on the one hand, and modern researchers’
concepts on these cities, on the other hand. In this
sense the interpretative approach was a predecessor of
the postmodern turn to social and cultural–historical
geographies. Harold Carter seems to preserve a more
positivist–conservative tradition of urban historical–
geographical research that follows the school of
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materialist urban morphology, concentrating on the
evolution of the morphology and functions of cities and
towns from antiquity to the nineteenth century.
The widening interest in urban historical geography
in 1980s resulted in the evolution of an Anglo-German
group of urban historical geographers, following two
seminars held in (West) Germany and Britain successively in 1982 and 1983. The publication in 1988 of a
volume edited by Dietrich Denecke and Gareth Shaw
titled Urban Historical Geography: Recent Progress in Britain
and Germany was the outcome of both seminars. According to the editors’ introduction, the main aim of the
seminars was to initiate the formation of international
cooperation in urban geographical–historical research
and an international terminology of urban history and
urban historical geography. Despite this, it seems as the
forming of this venture was not intended to form a
subdiscipline within historical geography but to form an
interdiscipline group of urban historical geographers and
urban historians.
It seems rather obvious that the initiators of both
seminars did not wish to form a methodological framework for a school of historical geography. The volume
edited by Denecke and Shaw provided a cross section of
the work of contemporaneous urban historical geographers, at least those located in Britain and Germany. It
ranged from more traditional research of urban morphology, structure, and functions to social–historical geography of cities and towns, from evolution of European
towns in the Middle Ages to the formation of modern
cities in the nineteenth century. Preservation of historical
cites was also in the scope of this volume. The multifaceted quality of urban historical geography was also
evident in the chapter titled ‘Historical geographies of
urbanization’ included in Butlin’s work on historical
geography that was published in 1993.
The aim to form a supranational discussion group of
urban historical geographers seemed to correspond to the
views presented in 1992 by Richard Rodger, a British
economic and urban historian and the editor of Urban
History. Rodger considered the aim of the journal as
embracing methodological, historiographical, and analytical contributions that would enable intertemporal
and interdisciplinary interests to coalesce, united by a
common interest in the town or city. Accordingly, urban
history was the subdiscipline in which urban historical
geographers should be operating among sociologists;
political scientists; art, cultural, economic, and social
historians; and architectural and planning historians
interested in the study of urban history. Submerging
into urban history and becoming partners in a wide
interdisciplinary group may have been luring, but it
also meant relinquishing the identity of geographers,
which was not in the interest of urban historical
geographers.
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Urban Historical Geography and the
Cultural Turn in Geography
The rise of a new cultural geography afforded historical
geographers as a whole the opportunity to redesign their
place within the discipline of geography.
The cultural turn in geography was simultaneous to
the endeavor to formulate a thematic group of urban
historical geographers that took place in the 1980s.
Similar to historical geography, cultural geography
seemed also to be marginalized following the rise of
quantitative methods followed by that of Marxist theories
that placed economic and social geographies at the center
of the discipline.
Through the 1970s and 1980s historical geographers
including those interested in urban areas strove to locate
themselves, in the theoretical and methodological realms,
among historical research, on the one hand, and theories
and methods employed by main currents of geography,
on the other hand. The subdiscipline was situated as
regarded by Carville Earle ‘‘yin midstride, between
empirical tradition and epistemological innovation, between the rock-ribbed world of materiality and the elusive worlds of representations’’ (Earle, 1995: 455–459).
No wonder he considered ‘‘yhistorical geography is
anything but unifiedy’’ and historical geographers as
those whose research interests ‘‘yspan the spectrum of
geographical researchy’’ (Earle, 1995: 455–459).
These efforts hampered the attempt to form a welldistinct group of urban historical geographers, forming a
multifaced group among which some inclined to
follow conservative methodologies while others tended
to adopt theories and methods of social and economic
geographies.
Different from the invigoration of historical geography, the Sauerian tradition that dominated cultural
geography for decades seemed to be losing its appeal in
the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of the humanistic school in
geography and domination of Marxist theories, both as
responses to dominant quantitative and systematic approaches, gave birth in the 1980s to a new cultural
geography. By the late 1980s geography underwent a
cultural turn that reformulated not only cultural geography but other subdisciplines as well, including historical geography. Moreover, it was not geography alone that
was affected by the cultural turn. All human sciences had
to consider postcolonial critique that questioned the
dominance of Western political and cultural concepts, as
well as post-structural critique raised by Continental
philosophy on the relevance of Western models of society. In short, the turn from modernism to a postmodernism formed the fundamentals of the cultural turn
in geography. Postmodernism has contested intellectual
hierarchies and afforded the legitimization of plural
views of the world. Many geographers adopted the use of
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the plural form ‘geographies’, rather than singular
‘geography’, to present a world of multiple identities and
views that form different concepts of space and especially
of places.
The cultural turn among historical geographers in
general and urban historical geographers in particular is
evident through scrutinizing reports of historical geography sessions that took place in different conferences
since the early 1990s. Representations, identities, iconographies, and discourses were frequently present in
titles of presentations, side by side with older historical
geographical traditions that concentrated on assimilation
and settlement of immigrants in North America and
development of industries and rural areas.
In such an intellectual climate of epistemological,
theoretical, and methodological transformations that
blurred interdiscipline and subdiscipline lines of demarcation, the effort to define and articulate a group of
urban historical geographers seemed irrelevant. This is
reflected by Miles Ogborn’s discussion in Progress in
Human Geography on the work of historical geographers in
1997. Relating to different categories of research he regards the debate on relations between history and
geography, in themes such as geography and empire,
environmental history, memory, and heritage, and social
and cultural histories. Works on cities and towns are
mentioned in both latter categories, but not as a separate
theme of research.
Michael Heffernan, the former editor of the Journal of
Historical Geography defined the journal in his 1997 editorial note as ‘‘ya haven of intelligent eclecticismy.’’
He followed the spirit of his predecessor, Alan Baker’s
expansive vision of historical geography as ‘‘eclectic and
liberal: no particular dogma about the nature of historical
geography was to be promoted: the study of no problem,
period or place in the past was to be prohibitedythe
concern of the journal ought not to be the precise definition and rigorous policing of historical geography’s
borders.’’ The liberal and eclectic spirit of the journal
reflected and inspired an intellectual climate that did not
encourage the formation of subgroups concerned on one
facet of historical–geographical research such as urban
historical geography.
The liberal and eclectic nature of historical geography
is evident, sustained in the variety of publications on the
subdiscipline and those published in both its stages:
Journal of Historical Geography and Historical Geography. This
is also true concerning edited volumes on historical
geography such as that edited by Brian Graham and
Catherine Nash titled Modern Historical Geographies
published in 2000. Their use of the plural form ‘geographies’ presents the multifaced character of historical–
geographical research and its liberal and eclectic nature.
This is well articulated by Deryck Holdsworth in a paper
titled ‘Historical geography: the ancients and the
moderns – generational vitality’ published in 2002 in
Progress in Human Geography. He quotes Graham and
Nash’s introduction regarding modern historical geographies ‘‘that signal new directions informed by feminism, post-structuralism, anti-racism and post-colonial
perspectives sharing concerns about questions of power
and meaning with other researchers more readily located
within the traditional subdisciplines of economic, cultural, political and social geography’’ (Holdsworth, 2002:
671–678). And notice the use of singular while referring
to other subdisciplines of geography. The celebration of a
modern historical geography does not imply the formation of a ‘new’ historical geography but rather maintenance of the tradition of liberal eclecticism.
This is also true regarding geographical–historical
research of urban areas. A scrutiny of papers published
on the urban phenomenon in The Journal of Historical
Geography since the mid-1990s reveals a diversity of research methods and subjects. Some trends of research
could be, of course noted, as the almost total avoidance of
ancient, medieval, and early modern cities and towns in
favor of the research of modern urbanization that is of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, the
effort to define borders and limits of urban historical
geography seems to be neglected. Liberal eclecticism
affords the recent urban historical geographer to easily
mingle, in the academic sense, with urban historians and
other practitioners of the urban past, becoming a part of a
postmodern interdisciplinary scholarship whose interests
are the search of the history of urbanism.
See also: Industry, Historical Geographies of; Street
Names and Iconography; Urban Morphologies, Historical.
Further Reading
Basset, K. (2005). Marxian theory and the writing of urban history: On
David Harvey’s Paris, capital of modernity. Journal of Historical
Geography 31, 568--582.
Butlin, R. A. (1993). Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Time
and Space. London: Edward Arnold.
Carter, H. (1983). An Introduction to Urban Historical Geography.
London: Edward Arnold.
Denecke, D. and Shaw, G. (eds.) (1988). Urban Historical Geography.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dennis, R. (1984). English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Earle, C. (1995). Historical geography in extremis? Splitting
personalities on the postmodern turn. Journal of Historical
Geography 21, 455--459.
Goheen, P. G. (1984). Book review on an introduction to urban
historical geography by Harold Carter. The Geographical Review 74,
376--377.
Graham, B. and Nash, C. (eds.) (2000). Modern Historical Geographies.
London: Longman.
Heffernan, M. (1997). Editorial: The future of historical geography.
Journal of Historical Geography 23, 1--2.
Holdsworth, D. W. (2002). Historical geography: The ancients and the
moderns – generational vitality. Progress in Human Geography 26,
671--678.
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Historical Geographies, Urban
Konvitz, J. W. (1993). Introduction. Journal of Urban History 19,
3--10.
Ogborn, M. (1999). The realities between geography and history: Work
in historical geography in 1997. Progress in Human Geography 23,
97--108.
Rodger, R. (1992). Urban history: Prospect and retrospect. Urban
History 19, 1--22.
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Vance, J. (1990). The Continuing City. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Wheatley, P. (1977). The suspended pelt. Reflections on a discarded
model of spatial structure. In Deskins, D. R., Kish, G., Nyusten, J. D.
& Olsson, G. (eds.) Geographic Humanism, Analysis and Social
Action: A Half Century of Geography at Michigan, pp 47--108. Ann
Arbor MI: Department of Geography, University of Michigan.