To mark the publication of new contributions to our Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series, we will feature interviews with authors and share short excerpts from their work. Here, GUHP Blog associate editor Maytal Mark interviews Matthew Vitz, the author of Globalizing Urban Environmental History. Matthew Vitz is Associate Professor of History at The University of California, San Diego. He is the author of A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City.
An excerpt of Globalizing Urban Environmental History follows the interview.
Maytal Mark (MM): Your Element brings together methodologies from global urban history, environmental history, and urban political ecology. Can you talk about why that fusion is critical and how it helped you highlight certain flows of material, energy, and people?
Matthew Vitz (MV): There’s been so much excellent work lately in urban environmental history, a growing subfield within the larger field of environmental history. Yet much of that work, including my own, has been circumscribed by a particular city’s limits, or regional hinterlands. Integrating global history and urban political ecology, in particular, allows me to identify global patterns and trace connections while staying attuned to local variations and contexts. Concepts such as “urban metabolism” from urban political ecology, and global “structural integration” and “connectivity” from global history prove fruitful for understanding the historical changes that urban environments have undergone and the contested relations of power from which those environments are created. I hope I’ve made a convincing case that by fusing these different methodologies we gain a better understanding of the making of specific urban ecologies, on the one hand, and the development of global urban patterns and connections, on the other.
MM: Can you explain the global dimension of the relationship that you identify between urban environments and technical experts?
MV: The technical experts I refer to in the Element include hydraulic engineers, physicians, urban planners, architects, and others responsible for governing urban environments and fostering and regulating the material flows in and out of cities. The global dimensions of the history of this kind of expertise stem from the intersecting and globalizing forces of capitalism, colonialism, and liberal nation building. Growing commerce across metropoles and colonies facilitated the spread of diseases that ravaged urban populations, particularly those around ports. Later, industrial capitalism required ever-greater quantities of energy that was fulfilled by harnessing and moving fossil energy—coal and petroleum— through and between cities. Modern governance, in both its colonial and metropolitan forms, meanwhile, hinged on the quest to sanitize cities and facilitate the flow of material energies in and out of them, both of which empowered a new and professionalized cadre of urban experts. And, by virtue of this global structural integration, ideas about how to achieve these purposes circulated across urban spaces. The global history of urban-environmental expertise, therefore, lies in these connections and the shared patterns that the integrating forces of colonialism and capitalism brought about.
MM: What made you interested in writing an Element, with its novel format, and who do you hope will read it?
MV: There were several reasons why I decided to take on the task of writing this Element. First, I was thirsty to deepen my knowledge of the environmental history of urbanization at a global scale and learn more about the history of cities beyond my comfort zone in Mexico and Latin America. Second, after completing my first book on the environmental history of Mexico City, I was interested in exploring better the global dimensions of the environmental interventions that planners and public officials had made there. Third, I sensed that the conceptual and theoretical work of historians and non-historians alike in global history and urban political ecology had much to offer students of urban environmental history, and I wanted to provide a kind of template, or first stab, at what doing urban environmental history within a global frame might look like. With these motives in mind, it’s my hope that the Element can serve undergraduate students in their critical thinking about power relations within contested urban spaces as well as the material flows of energy and water between and through cities. I also believe the Element will be useful for graduate students and scholars who are searching for new questions and research methods for their urban-environmental topics.
MM: Elements are intended to be accessible to lay readers and their length makes them easy to assign in classes. How do you imagine your Element might fit into a university curriculum? Which classes might you assign it for? With what other readings would you pair it?
MV: I think the Element will be suitable for global history surveys as well as courses in urban and environmental history. I also think it would fit nicely into graduate-level research seminars and historiography seminars. I could also imagine assigning the individual sections in a course on energy history or one on the history of urban disease and health, respectively. What I would pair the Element with would depend greatly on the specific course. To give an idea: in a global environmental history course, I might supplement it with Chris Otter on the technosphere, sections of Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism, Christopher Jones’ Routes of Power, McNeill’s Mosquito Empires, or work by Myrna Santiago on oil labor ecologies in Mexico. For an urban history course, I might supplement it with Cecilia Chu’s work on colonial Hong Kong or a couple of chapters of Maria Kaka’s City of Flows. For an energy history course, work by Timothy Mitchell, Carola Hein, Germán Vergara, or Andrew Nikiforuk would be excellent companion pieces.
MM: What are you working on next?
MV: These days I’ve turned my attention to the history of environmentalisms in late twentieth-century Mexico. My idea is to write an intellectual-political history anchored in land disputes and forms of land governance pursued by the developmentalist state. Case studies include the settlement and attempted conservation efforts of rain forests in southeastern Mexico, dam construction and tropical agricultural development, and urban peripheral spaces where state regulations forbade settlement in ecologically precarious areas. Research for this Element has helped me place Mexican biologists’, anthropologists, and environmental activists’ ideas about ecology, nature, and development into a wider global conversation involving research institutes, the United Nations, NGO networks, and development agencies.
Globalizing Urban Environmental History is available in paperback and as an e-book. It is free to read online until December 20, 2024.
Excerpt from Globalizing Urban Environmental History
Earthquakes are inherently local events. Rock masses shift in a specific location along a geological fault, sending seismic waves that can damage the built environment. And, when they occur near a major city, mass casualties sometimes result. Many of the most devastating earthquakes in world history, although not necessarily the most fatal, were those that have wrecked large metropolitan areas: San Francisco in 1906; Tokyo-Yokohama in 1923; Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in 1948; Managua, Nicaragua, in 1972; Tangshan, China, in 1976; Mexico City in 1985; Kobe, Japan, in 1995; Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2010. Scholars of urban earthquakes tend to employ local and national registers to trace their destruction and impacts, as well as the process of rebuilding. They follow building codes and local planning, the class and racial disparities of earthquake damage, and grass-roots mobilization. Sometimes, major earthquakes are interpreted as watershed moments in national politics: for example, earthquakes in San Juan, Argentina, in 1944, Managua in 1972, and Mexico City in 1985 empowered popular movements and civil societies vis-à-vis authoritarian states (Buchenau and Johnson 2009; Healey 2011; Rodgers 2013).
Rarely are earthquakes, given their place-specific dynamics, understood in global-historical frameworks of connectivity and convergence. What would a global history of an urban earthquake look like? We might consider the global formation of earthquake science and earthquake-ready building codes or the global expertise driving rebuilding efforts, especially in cities throughout the Global South in the twentieth century (Coen 2013). We might explore the global dimensions of race- and class-based tensions – for example, the movement of people, animals, and diseases that stigmatized some peoples and neighborhoods as less worthy of reconstruction, or worse, as fit for removal. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, as historian Joanna Dyl (2017) has asserted cannot be understood outside urban Chinese migrant subsistence practices and the racialized stigmas of Chinatown that the bubonic plague outbreak had reinforced among the urban elite several years before the quake. Certainly not all earthquakes have equally global dimensions; historical epoch matters. The first “global quake” may have been the Lisbon earthquake-tsunami-fire of 1755.
It sparked perhaps the first internationally coordinated relief effort, and according to one historian, changed the course of the European Enlightenment (Molesky 2015). However, one might say that the nineteenth century inaugurated the era of the globalized quake when urban planning and development practice spread widely, the movement of people and the companion species (including diseases) they brought with them accelerated, global markets formed, and racist colonial ideologies circulated across diverse urban centers.
The way historians tend to study urban earthquakes mirrors the way urban
environmental history writ large has taken shape over the past several decades…
