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Layered Cities: Scale and Time in Global Urban History
Layered Cities: Scale and Time in Global Urban History
SG
17. Juni 2026
Mexico City, June 21 – 22, 2027
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
– Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas
The Global Urban History Project (GUHP) was founded in 2017 with the goal of supporting research at the intersection of global and urban history, where cities are both the products of and producers of larger-scale historical phenomena.
For our third in-person conference, we invite scholars within and beyond the GUHP community to propose presentations – preferably in the form of full panels or roundtables, but also as individual papers, to be delivered in English or Spanish – that explore how urban spaces are produced across intersecting scales and temporalities, generating both continuity and rupture.
We welcome studies that examine cities as palimpsests, as sites where social relations, political power, infrastructures, and urban environments are continually constructed, obscured, and reactivated over time. By bringing together perspectives from different regions and periods, the conference aims to link the intimate and the global, the material and the imagined. We welcome contributions that engage with questions of layers, multiple spatial and temporal scales, the built and natural environments, mobility, and infrastructures. We encourage experimentation with new narrative forms and methods that emphasize historical contingency, conceiving cities as accretive sites where environment, geography, and the elements of urbanity are continually reconfigured.
Guiding Themes
Layers: Layering offers a metaphor for examining how cities are continually made and remade. As exemplified dramatically by our host city, cities carry residues of what has been built, demolished, re-signified, displaced, remembered, and forgotten – allowing multiple pasts to remain active in the present. These sedimented formations encompass infrastructures and institutions, natural and built environments, legal codes and bureaucracies, social hierarchies, economies, patterns of movement, and regimes of memory.
Time: Urban time is rarely singular or linear. Cities bring together everyday rhythms, established patterns, moments of spontaneity and rupture, projected futures, and slower transformations in infrastructure and environment. How might global urban histories conceptualize continuity, contingency, recurrence, and disruption without reducing urban change to a single chronological logic?
Scale: Urban space is produced through relations that extend well beyond the visible boundaries of the city. From the intimate scales of the body or the home to the wide-ranging scales of hinterlands and planetary urbanization, multiple scales interact in the creation of urban life. How might global urban histories refine, historicize, or unsettle categories such as city, region, hinterland, world, and planet?
Mobility: Urban life is shaped by movement and as well as the uneven conditions that channel, delay, or obstruct it. The mobility of humans and animals, ideas and infrastructures, technologies and commodities, has been central to shaping urban spaces. How can global urban histories offer new insights into flows as well as friction, exclusion, and the infrastructures that both connect and divide?
Power: Urban space is never neutral. It is produced through unequal relations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, property, labor, and access to resources. Housing systems, land markets, real estate development, infrastructure, policing, and law reveal how power becomes embedded in the material and social organization of the city. How can global urban histories illuminate struggles over belonging, displacement, access, and justice in the city?
Methods and Approaches: We invite interdisciplinary approaches and experimentation in methods, archives, and narratives. In particular, we welcome approaches that incorporate visual sources, maps, oral histories, environmental data, digital tools, and public engagement. How can global urban histories tell stories that move between the intimate and the planetary, the episodic and the longue durée, the visible and the obscured? How can we move across fragments, scales, and temporalities without flattening their complexity?
THE APPLICATION PERIOD for GUHP3 MEXICO will run from August 17, 2026 through October 16, 2026.
Candidates for the 2026-27 cohort of GUHP EMERGING scholars should apply as part of their application to the conference.
Application instructions will be available from August 17th on our website and through our newsletter Noteworthy in Global Urban History.
For now: Save the date! Start thinking about panels and presentations!
NOTE: All applicants and presenters must become members of GUHP to apply. This is a good time to become a member or renew your membership. This act will also guarantee that you receive ongoing communications regarding the conference and GUHP Emerging 2026-27.
We look forward to seeing you in Mexico City in June 2027!
Organisiert von
Global Urban History Project (GUHP)
Sprachen der Veranstaltung
Englisch
Website der Veranstaltung
https://globalurbanhistory.org/
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas
Anmeldeschluss
16.10.2026 - 12:00
Ciudad de México
Outside of Switzerland
![Detail from the painting “Abend über Potsdam” [“Evening over Potsdam”] by Lotte Laserstein, 1930](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vny6rfv7ic24qx3depkrx2dy/bafkreic5xryrm6h2bwvosripbsslahywe5j5ef5jx5xcl6b3tj3uimhjji)
