Lecture | Global Questions Seminar
From Hygienic Cities to Fossil Urbanism: Global Forces, Local Contexts, and Urban Environmental History
- Date
- Tuesday 20 May 2025
- Time
- Series
- Global Questions Seminar 2024-2025
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.80
Abstract
In 1968, renowned biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which in describing the “overpopulated” streets of Delhi contributed to fears among Western environmentalists that urban growth, especially in the so-called third world, was akin to a cancer. Big cities and nature, in this view, were irreconcilable. Four years later, the famous “blue marble” photo showing a fragile earth from space tapped into a growing conviction that the environmental crisis was planetary in nature, even as cities were excluded from most ecological concerns. While urban environmental history, which emerged in the 1980s and 90s, has helped explode long-standing binaries of city/nature, the field has largely neglected the global forces and patterns, and material and biological connections, that have shaped specific urban ecologies since at least 1800. Drawing on histories of hydraulic engineering, sanitation, and the creation of hydrocarbon-based cities, this presentation will offer a conceptual and analytical roadmap for a global urban environmental history. I will argue that to fully grasp urban-environmental change, as well as the possibilities for a more environmentally just future, we must simultaneously zoom in on the idiosyncrasies of the urban form and zoom out to trace global patterns and connections forged by capitalism and colonialism.
About the speaker
Matthew Vitz is associate professor of Latin American History at UC-San Diego where he also directs the Global South Studies Program. His areas of expertise include urban and environmental history and modern Mexico. His first book A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City was published by Duke University Press in 2018. He has also published articles in Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, and Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña, among others. Most recently he completed a Cambridge Element for the Global Urban History series titled Globalizing Urban Environmental History. His current research seeks to explain the historical formation of a variety of environmentalisms in Mexico across a range of rural and urban spaces where big development schemes seeking to exploit natural resources became focal points of both a new politicized ecology and popular land claims during the 1970s and 80s. These histories reveal the limits and possibilities of popular environmentalism in Mexico and elsewhere. Vitz has also contributed to several blogs and podcasts in urban, environmental, and Mexican history, and has written on the environmental history of Mexico City in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.
Global Questions Seminar
The motto of the Institute for History’s research programme is ‘Global Questions, Local Sources’. Across all areas and time periods, researchers of the Institute focus on important processes such as migration, colonialism, urbanization, and identity formation.
The ‘Global Questions Seminar’, for which we invite distinguished international colleagues to discuss the interplay between global and local issues from the past, brings all staff members of the Institute for History together.