American Urban History

American urban history embraces all historiography related to towns, cities, and metropolitan regions in the United States. American urban history includes the examination of places, processes, and ways of life through a broad and diverse range of themes including immigration, migration, population distribution, economic and spatial development, politics, planning, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Urban history emerged as an identifiable subfield of United States history in the mid-20th century, admittedly well after the establishment of similar areas of inquiry in other professional fields and academic disciplines, particularly sociology. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a small number of academics, led by noted social historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., commenced the first wave of scholarly interest in American urban history with works on colonial seaports and select 19th-century cities. By the 1950s, urban history coalesced as a recognizable subfield around a reformulation of American history, emphasizing the establishment of towns, rather than the pursuit of agriculture, as the spearhead for the formation and growth of the nation. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a second round of interest in American urban history, set against the backdrop of the tremendous political and social changes that swept the nation and transformed the historical profession. Through innovative models of scholarship that broke with traditional consensus history, notably pioneering quantitative research methods, a self-identified “new urban history” emerged that emphasized spatial development as well as social, economic, and political mobility, conflict, and change. Over time, this new urban history was largely subsumed within social history, given the fields’ intersecting and overlapping interests in social and political issues viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Social history’s broad focus resulted in an explosion of scholarship that all but dominated the American historical profession by the late 20th century. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, books with urban settings and themes, most of them well within the camp of social history, won an impressive number of Bancroft prizes and other prestigious awards. Urban history itself has survived—even thrived—without a widely agreed upon canon or dominant research methodology. Scholars continue to make significant contributions to urban history, whether or not they embrace the title of urbanist. Note that attendance at the biannual meetings of the Urban History Association has grown significantly over the last two decades. The sources in this article’s twenty subject headings have been arranged to illustrate the depth and breadth of each prominent theme in the field and are by no means an exhaustive list of such scholarship, but rather a sampling of the most influential and innovative examinations of America’s urban canvas.

Moscow

According to the 2010 census, Moscow’s 11.5 million inhabitants make it the largest city in Europe. The city has the distinction of having gained capital status in the 16th century, losing it in the early 18th century, and regaining it after the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20th century. In the 10th century, Eastern Slavs colonized the area; Moscow first appeared in written chronicles in 1147, when Prince Iurii Dolgorukii established the city on a forested bluff overlooking the confluence of the Moscow and Neglinnaia rivers. Although Mongols destroyed Moscow in 1237, during the period of Mongol hegemony known as the “Tatar Yoke” (1237–1480), Moscow flourished and the city replaced Kiev as the capital of East Slavdom, the state of Muscovy born in 1547. The cluster of cupolas in the Kremlin attest to Moscow’s role as a seat of ecclesiastical power: after the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, Moscow gained new cultural significance as the self-proclaimed center of “true Christianity.” In 1712, Peter the Great transferred power to St. Petersburg and Moscow was demoted to a regional capital. During the imperial period, Moscow became an important industrial center that attracted migrants who would continually overwhelm city resources. The destruction resulting from Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 led to reconstruction. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the city emerged as the capital of the USSR and the global communist movement and, after the Second World War, as the capital of the socialist “second world.” One finds ample scholarship about Moscow during the Soviet period, as it served as an example for the rest of this “second world.” Publications have focused on attempts to alleviate housing shortages and sanitation problems; on the development of public transportation, most notably the Moscow metropolitan—the subway, which remains an architectural monument; on migration; and, considering the Soviet experience, on labor history and social movements—especially as Soviet planners aimed to create new and innovative solutions for the “new Soviet man and woman.” The scholarship reflects the fact that problems that challenged planners in the past continue into the present. One should be aware of the ideological nature of Soviet books, especially those published during the Stalin period when scholars were required to approach their work from a Marxist perspective in line with Soviet ideology. Additionally, sources about contemporary Moscow published two decades ago will be more out of date than a similarly-aged source on a city that did not experience a cataclysmic event such as the 1991 dissolution of the USSR.

Urban Warfare

Urban warfare refers to combat occurring in a built environment of some significant size. It is sometimes referred to as Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) or as Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA). It is widely considered to be particularly challenging. Partly this is because of the inherent complexity of the built environment, which taxes the ability of commanders to apprehend the battlespace, to lead their own forces effectively, and to judge the location and intent of enemy forces accurately. Partly it is because of the presence of civilians and sensitive civilian infrastructure (i.e., places of worship, hospitals, museums, etc.) in the battlespace, which limits the choice of tactics and weapons available to commanders for fear of violating laws of armed conflict. Partly it is because cities are nodes in global networks of trade and communications, as a result of which the consequences of tactical decisions may propagate widely and quickly to significant strategic effect. Sun Tzu advised fighting in cities only if “absolutely necessary, as a last resort,” a rule to which statesmen and commanders have tried to adhere to this day. However, on account of long-term trends in demographics, urbanization, and connectedness the major armed forces of the world have been preoccupied with a postulated unavoidability of urban warfare. Military doctrines and strategies often now start from the assumption that the future of land operations will increasingly be centered on urban terrain. The literature on urban warfare is quite segmented by discipline, normative outlook, particular areas of concern, and some fundamental points of disagreement. Researchers in urban studies detect in the growing military focus on operating in cities a “new military urbanism” that is by nature neo-colonialist, xenophobic, and “anti-urban.” The job of activist scholarship, in this view, is to expose and confront this development. In war and strategic studies, by contrast, scholars are interested in solving the challenges of urban warfare, including through the use of theories derived from disciplines like urban studies, anthropology, geography, and informatics. There is a further division between analysts who see urban warfare as an essentially modern phenomenon whose meaningful history stretches not much further back than the Second World War, and those who see war and the city as interlinked with relevant lessons going back as far as the origins of both.

Paris

Paris is the capital city of France and center of the Île-de-France region, Europe’s second-largest urban agglomeration. Paris is a globally important hub for finance, education, culture, and the arts, and by some measures it is the world’s most visited international tourist destination. The city’s importance for the field of urban studies is due primarily to (a) its present significance as a global city, and, to a greater extent, (b) its historical importance as a place where a particular version of modernity emerged that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, would heavily influence the design and cultural landscapes of cities around the world. For this reason, the urban history of Paris exerts a broad influence in the fields of planning, geography, and architectural history, as well as in public health, the history of science and technology, art history, and literature. Indeed, research on Paris stands out among other cities for the degree to which scholars in the humanities have sought to engage with urban issues. This is due to the fact that a large proportion of the artistic and cultural output associated with Paris ruminates about the nature of urban life itself. This bibliography has been written for a broad Anglophone readership; it therefore privileges scholarship in English. English translations of important French works have been supplied wherever possible. However, in an effort to balance accessibility with rigor, some French-language scholarship is included as well. In several cases, English-language publications by prominent French scholars have been supplied that may not be the best representation of these scholars’ work, but such citations will nevertheless serve to introduce these important figures to an Anglophone audience. Readers should be warned that the small number of French-language citations included here are far from comprehensive, and are primarily intended to round out the bibliography for those Anglophone scholars who read French. The bibliography is organized under the three broad headings: Historicizing Modernity, Linking Past and Present, and Contemporary Paris. The logic for this structure is based on that notion that distinguishing between urban history and contemporary urban studies will be convenient for many readers. However, some of the best work on Paris combines past and present, and a great deal of contemporary work is most engaging when placed in dialogue with the city’s history, and vice versa.

Retail Districts

Retail districts are key elements of the urban experience, reflecting and reinforcing the economic, social, political and physical attributes of their environments. Vibrant cities and neighborhoods depend on similarly vibrant retail cores and districts, and vice versa. Furthermore, retail districts strongly influence the urban experience by facilitating the exchange of goods and culture, encouraging social capital, and enabling entrepreneurship. It is therefore surprising how peripherally urban retail districts are discussed in the academic literature, as few geographers, economists, urbanists and sociologists study them as interconnected economic, social, political and physical systems. In many Western countries, urban retail districts have struggled to keep pace with trends toward efficiency, consolidation, and decentralization of retailers, and academic research has similarly moved on. While urban retail districts represent uniquely fine-grained physical settings and conditions, the majority of contemporary retail research has shifted its focus toward macro-scale or operational processes of marketing, consumer behavior, and distribution. As a result, many relevant works on urban retail are rather dated, with any recent works written in countries where retailers have remained urbanized. In this English-language bibliography, many works are therefore British, although many foreign works exist. Over recent decades, a revival of research interest in urban vitality at the scale of the retail district has prompted advances in qualitative and quantitative insights. Analytical methods to study the external and internal structure of retail districts are similarly evolving. Contemporary scholarly debates on urban retail focus on the role of retail districts as social hubs, with authors confirming their positive effect on economic vitality and cultural transfer, while acknowledging the threat of gentrification and homogenization. An increasing number of studies focus on the withdrawal of retailers from underprivileged urban districts, resulting in a dearth of affordable access to healthy food options for their residents—coined “food deserts.” As government involvement in urban retail has diminished in many countries in the late 20th century, an increasing number of retail districts have adopted the self-taxed and governed Business Improvement District model, which has prompted significant academic inquiry and debate over the past decades. The globalization of retail corporations has prompted growing academic interest in retailing in the Global South, connecting the typically local condition of retail districts to global flows of capital and culture. This bibliography presents overview works on the current condition and evolution of urban retail, common analytical models of retail distribution and consumer behavior, and current scholarly debates.

Business Improvement Districts

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are a form of special purpose government that utilize special assessments on real property to deliver services to a spatially defined commercial area. The first BIDs emerged in North America in the early to mid-1970s. They grew tremendously in the early 1990s, with some current estimates exceeding 1,500 BIDs globally as of 2018. While the legal and administrative process to create and govern BIDs varies in the United States based on state laws and local ordinances, they are typically created through a vote of affected property owners after some period of public disclosure and hearings. BIDs vary widely in their geographic size and capacity for assessment collection, ranging from $20 million-plus annual budgets and covering entire central business districts, to sub-$100,000 budgets with service areas that cover a few blocks of a neighborhood commercial strip. Assessments are typically collected by local governments and then passed on to BID operating organizations, which are usually governed by nonprofit organizations. Many BIDs also augment their assessment budgets through gifts, grants, contracts, and fees for services. These funds are used to support services that often include some mix of common area sanitation, security, marketing, and landscaping. Many large US cities have extensively used BIDs as an economic development tool, with cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles each having over forty BIDs. The growth of BIDs has been linked to set of larger of fiscal, social, and economic problems that cities faced during the era of economic restructuring and deindustrialization. BIDs filled a void left by many city governments’ inability to organize, fund, and manage services directed toward the problems facing many commercial areas, which often included crime, homelessness, and disorderly public environments. As BIDs have matured and are now a common feature of the urban landscape, they have grown in their capacities as organizations, with some comprehensive organizations fulfilling more ambitious functions related to infrastructure provision, social service coordination, urban planning, and public space management. Academic work around BIDs has been pursued by researchers and theorists across law, social science, and public affairs literatures. The dominant themes in academic work on BIDs has been organized around their various forms and functions; their accountability to the public; their effectiveness, especially in the areas of crime prevention and economic development; and social equity issues, with special attention often given to their interaction with homeless populations.

Asian and Asian American Suburbs in the United States

Asians and Asian Americans are the most suburbanized people of color in the United States. While Asians and Asian Americans have been moving to the metropolitan fringe since the 1940s, their settlement accelerated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This was partly the result of relaxed US immigration policies following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Globalization and burgeoning transnational economies across the so-called Pacific Rim also encouraged outmigration. Whether it is Korean or Indian immigrants in northern New Jersey or Vietnamese refugees in suburban Houston, Asians and Asian Americans have shifted Americans’ understandings of “typical” suburbia. In the late 1980s, academic researchers and policymakers started paying closer attention to this phenomenon, especially in Southern California, where Asians and Asian Americans often clustered together in select suburbs. Sociologists, in particular, observed how greater Los Angeles’s economic, political, and built landscapes changed as immigrants and refugees—predominantly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Vietnam—established roots throughout the region, including Orange County. Since then, other studies of heavily populated Asian and Asian American ethnic suburbs—or “ethnoburbs”—have emerged, including research on New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Nonetheless, scholarship remains focused on Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other hubs of the metropolitan West Coast. Research and scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans living in the suburbs has grown over the last decade. This is partly a response to demographic shifts occurring beyond the coasts. Moreover, geographers, historians, and urban planners have joined the discussion, producing critical studies on race, class, architecture, and political economy. Despite the breadth and depth of recent research, literature on Asian and Asian American suburbanization remains limited. There is thus much room for additional research on this subject, given a majority of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States live outside city limits.

Urban Soundscapes

The word “soundscape” is associated with composer and music scholar R. Murray Schafer and his World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Schafer describes the soundscape as “any acoustic field of study.” He argues that, “We may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape.” Despite this wide potential, the term has come to be used mostly in relation to the last of these categories, prompted by Schafer’s own explanation of the soundscape as the auditory equivalent of landscape. Schafer argued that modern industrial environments were increasingly polluted by noise, causing harm to human health, culture, and communication. He wanted more thoughtful planning of sound environments as well as the preservation of traditional and natural soundscapes, aims which crystallized in the “acoustic ecology” movement. Schafer provided categories for analyzing and planning soundscapes: “keynote” sounds, “the anchor or fundamental tone” in the background of a soundscape which we may not always notice; foreground “signals” which we listen to consciously; and “soundmarks” which, like landmarks, lend uniqueness to a soundscape. In an urban context, motor traffic might form the keynote (though according to Schafer, an unhealthy one), with sirens, alarms, and religious sounds functioning as signals. What counts as a soundmark is more varied, depending on the cultural listening practices of a community. A church or town hall bell might be a signal, but if it comes to take on special meaning to a community, as in the case of London’s Big Ben clock chimes, it becomes a soundmark and “deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.” Schafer’s way of thinking about sound as both a physical environment and a culture of listening has been influential, inspiring sound recordists, composers, and artists as much as acousticians, architects, and urban planners. It has also underpinned strands of thinking in the interdisciplinary field of sound studies as it has grown since 2000. Contributions to the study of urban soundscapes come from all these directions and more, making it a highly diverse area in disciplinary and methodological terms. Publications on urban sound inspired by these developments may make little reference to Schafer or even to the term soundscape, but are included here because they nevertheless contribute to what may be understood as the field of urban soundscape studies in its broadest sense.

Urban Sexualities

Sex and related questions of sexual reproduction and coupling have been an important focus for the social sciences since the 1960s and 1970s when sociologists, gay activists, and feminists first began to argue that sexuality is socially constructed, and not innate. The discipline of urban studies adds to such accounts by demonstrating that sexuality is also spatially constructed, with peoples’ sexual identities and desires influenced in various ways their upbringing, surroundings, and neighbourhood of residence in the city. Additionally, it brings to the fore the idea that cities offer more freedom than traditional rural communities in terms of possible sexual lifestyles, with larger cities exhibiting a diverse range of sexualized spaces (e.g., adult entertainment centers, sex clubs, gay bars, brothels) which act as the focus for sometimes niche sexual practices and identities. The way these different sexualities are made visible (or not) in the cityscape is revealing of the way these sexualities are regarded as either ‘normal’ or in some way ‘deviant.’ This noted, the study of sexuality in urban studies has generally been eclipsed by more traditional preoccupations with class and race. However, there has been gradual—if sometimes grudging—acknowledgment that questions of sex and sexuality matter when addressing the complexity of urban processes. This is most obvious in those studies of lesbian, gay, and bisexual life which have honed in on the importance of specific neighborhoods in LGBTQ life. Here studies of LGBTQ residence in a range of Western cities (notably San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Sydney, and Amsterdam, but also some smaller cities and towns including Provincetown, US and Hebden Bridgem UK) highlighted the importance of neighborhood spaces in the social, economic, and political life of those whose lives fall outside the heterosexual ‘norm.’ In time, the realization that many of these spaces of residence were also key sites of gentrification helped to bring the investigation of sexuality into dialogue with unfolding debates in urban and regional studies about the role of culture and lifestyle in driving processes of capital accumulation. Beyond the explication of changing LGBTQ residential geographies, ‘queer theory’ has also contributed to urban studies by foregrounding the importance of LGBTQ sexual identities and practices in processes such as global city migration, city branding, and urban tourism, engaging with debates on urban encounter, race, and gender in the process. Although still small in number, studies have also begun to explore the way that different heterosexualities are distributed across the public and private city, from the quiet spaces of suburbia to the ‘hot’ adult entertainment districts where varied—and sometimes criminalized—sexual pleasures can be bought and sold. In all of this there is an increasing focus on the mediated nature of sexuality, based on the understanding that urban sexual encounters and relationships are often arranged or conducted in the online realm via dating apps and platform technologies.

Cities in the Early American Republic

Cities in America’s early republic developed on the edge of two worlds. The majority of these urban areas had been born in colonies that belonged to European powers, including England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. In this colonial world, cities hugged the Atlantic coast and served the interests of Europe’s mercantile empires. After the American Revolution, however, urban areas developed in line with the interests of the United States, expanding geographically, economically, politically, socially, and culturally. The cities of the early republic were central to the first debates about the fate of the fast-changing republic. On 23 September 1800, on the verge of wresting power from the first generation of Federalist politicians, the Republican Thomas Jefferson wrote to his old friend Dr. Benjamin Rush that he viewed “great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” Jefferson, ever the champion of the independent farmer, argued that cities “nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others with more health virtue & freedom would be my choice.” As president, Jefferson tried to expand his agrarian empire of liberty by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, but he could not stay the growth of cities. After the War of 1812, Americans moved westward in unprecedented numbers and used trading hubs and cities to center and connect their own economic growth. The story of cities in America’s early republic thus unfolds in two parts: the first follows the American Revolution and is anchored by its participants’ belief that republican theories and individual virtue would tie the populace together; the second part is paced by the energy unleashed in the 19th century as liberalism and the boundless possibilities of market capitalism sent Americans across a continent, building, dispossessing, and re-envisioning what it meant to be American. This population remained predominantly rural over the course of the early republic, but the nation’s urban centers often anchored and drove change. While early histories focused more intently on urban development and city planning, recent studies have expanded into an eclectic mix of social history topics, including class development, political culture, immigration, religious development, urban slavery, gender relations, and sexuality. In the end, however, studies dedicated to specific cities have remained at the center of historical inquiry about urban development and life in America’s early republic. One yet unexplored avenue for study that might shift conceptualizations of urban spaces would be to examine dense indigenous population centers in the early republic. Looking at Tippecanoe or the southwestern pueblos, for instance, might alter the heavy association of the word urban with European cultures alone and open new conceptualizations of indigenous America and Euro-America.