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 Carl Nightingale, the author of Our Urban Planet in Theory and History. Carl Nightingale has taught world history and urban history for thirty years, most recently in the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His book Segregation: a Global History of Divided Cities was co-winner of the World History Association Jerry Bentley award for best book in world history in 2012. His most recent book is Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet (Cambridge, 2022). An excerpt of Our Urban Planet in Theory and History follows the interview.
Maytal Mark (MM): What does it mean to talk about “Our Urban Planet,” and how do you use this concept?
Carl Nightingale (CN): Global urban historians have been very successful in widening the scope of urban historical inquiry. Our Urban Planet stretches that impulse further. Each of its seven “Propositions” is an experiment with concepts I hope are useful for connecting urban historical research more directly with debates on the planetary predicaments of our own time. Obvious inspirations for the concept “Our Urban Planet” include the fierce recent debates about “planetary urbanization” theory and about the “Anthropocene Epoch.” Both proponents and critics of these projects give historians a lot to think about. But I also wanted to build on GUHP’s own “Dream Conversations,” one of which was devoted to expanding urban historians’ own role in the production of urban theory. Urban theorists often gesture to the importance of history to their work, and this was my chance to say, “you’re absolutely right:” here’s one way that our expertise in change over time, including the longue durée, matters to spaces designated “cities” and “the urban” – as well as to planetary transformations that some want to designate as “Epochal.”
MM: Can you explain in some of the ways you encourage expanding the scope of some terms like “cities” or “the urban” in your Element?
CN: At the very least, the phrase “Our Urban Planet” declares that cities have become crucially important to our planet, Earth. It also says that “the urban” has become far larger than cities alone. I treat these declarations as both theoretical and historical propositions. Urban historians are somewhat comfortable arguing that the production of cities in history relies on the production of far larger spaces, which we often identify explicitly as “urban hinterlands” even though most of the space that such “urban” – city-producing – spaces contain no cities at all. As such, we implicitly agree that “non-cities” that we otherwise usefully describe as rural, infrastructural, or natural spaces can be additionally identified as “urban” to some degree or another, too. We’re much more ambivalent, if not outright silent, about the converse: that cities are important to the production of spaces beyond cities that are thus urban to one degree or another too. One of my main points is that we need to get much more serious about identifying and studying these urban spaces too. I call them “urban forelands” and suggest a number of ways of measuring them using historical evidence – as spaces occupied by human action, habitat, impact, and their consequences. Add cities, urban hinterlands, and urban forelands together, and you get a space I call “the Urban Condition,” which grew and receded over time as we built or abandoned our cities, connecting and disconnecting them to larger city-producing and city-produced urban spaces along the way. My concept Our Urban Planet is meant to identify different times in the past when the outer boundaries of this Urban Condition, measured in various useful ways, reached across all of Earth.
MM: How are the two dimensions of power — human power and natural energy — central to your discussion?
CN: All seven of my propositions in this Element define Our Urban Planet along three axes: space (city, urban, planet), time (global urban history, Earth Time), and – most importantly – power, defined as geo-solar energy and human power. There are many good reasons to study cities, I imply, but today, there is one reason that is more important than all the others: cities are places where we concentrate harvests of all forms of natural energy in order to generate many forms of human power that we could not generate in other forms of human settlement alone. By defining cities as power-generating spaces – and by identifying the precise actions required to make them so, as I do in Propositions 3 and 4 – urban historians can connect with a basic fact of our own time. Whatever you think about the term “Anthropocene,” it is now true that humans deploy institutional, movement-based, and collective forms of power – in obscenely unequal ways to be sure – that rival geophysical features in determining the shape of Earth and Earth Time. Cities, as essential spatial vehicles for producing, amplifying, and deploying those forms of power, are the cockpits and the co-producers of Our Time. One symptom of this power is the fact that cities, together with larger city-producing and city-produced spaces, have also helped us produce Our Urban Planet. It follows that city-based governing institutions of all kinds – which I nicknamed “Earthopolis” in another book – hold the much of fate of many planetary systems in the balance – notably the Sun-Earth relationship itself and its implications for climate, lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. It follows that studying the power we wield in cities is also essential to changing the world for the better.
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?
CN: I wrote this element with serious students of urban history in mind, and I hope some find it useful as they enter a field that I deem among the most important fields of study to enter. As emerging scholars open their first archive boxes, I hope some of the language in this Element will make some intuitive sense as they chase down the furies from the past that fly out. I also hope other urban studies scholars, including theorists, find it useful to have a text that responds systematically to their oft-stated desire for “historical” perspectives. I hope they can assign some of it alongside texts that privilege social scientific or critical theoretical language and methods, even though some of it may seem a bit unfamiliar to them. Indeed, I hope the Element also encourages all urban studies scholars to read more urban history -global urban history and otherwise- archaeology, global history, and environmental history.
MM: What are your current and future research projects? What can we expect from you next?
CN: I like to try to communicate across academic silos, and I’ll keep trying to do so, with help from my lovely colleagues at the Global Urban History Project. Meanwhile, GUHP still needs to find ways to engage with global historians more, especially as they mount their own efforts to understand the connection between the “world”/ “globe” and the planet. In an essay on “Cities in the Holocene” I hope to find ways of convincing them to take cities more seriously in their own analyses than they currently do. It will expand on experimental chronologies based around ebbs and flows of geo-solar energy and human power that I propose in my sixth proposition on urban temporality. When we identify cities as the essential spatial ingredient of almost all of world history’s most powerful tools for deploying human power, we can see why “Our Urban Planet” could act as a more precise substitute for older concepts like “civilization,” “sedentary” or “agricultural empires,” “global connections,” “world systems,” “environment” and so on. Meanwhile, I remain just as interested in the minutia of cities and “the urban” as I am in their “global” and planetary manifestations. At some point soon, I hope to offer some resources for deeper exploration of these “ordinary urban spaces in ordinary moments.”
Our Urban Planet in Theory and History is available in paperback and as an e-book.
Excerpt from Our Urban Planet in Theory and History
In this Element, I sketch out seven propositions for a historical theory of Our Urban Planet. The history that supports the theory comes from my experience of writing a synthesis of historical and archeological research from across the 6,000-year lifespan of global urban history. My main goal is to offer framing insight – theory – that is useful to global urban historians as researchers, interpreters of change, teachers, and students. I also hope that a historical theory of “Our Urban Planet” is useful to professional theorists involved in debates over “planetary urbanization” and the “Anthropocene” – especially since many of these scholars have appealed to “history” as a solution to limitations of theory.
My propositions weave history with theory upon a conceptual grid with three axes, each calibrated in scope from very small to very large: space on the x-axis; time on the y-axis; and, most importantly, power on the z-axis.
Space. Cities and Our Urban Planet are spaces made up of many others that can take many nested and overlapping sizes, shapes, and scopes, all of them with blurry boundaries. I propose expanding the spatial scope of the urban, and thus of global urban history and urban theory, to include non-city spaces that made cities possible – urban hinterlands – and spaces that cities made possible – which I call “urban forelands.” Non-cities in these urban hinterlands and forelands partake of “the urban” to varying degrees and encompass spaces that we can additionally, and with equal usefulness, classify as rural, extractive, or infrastructural. Urban hinterlands and forelands can also include parts or all of Earth’s extra-human biological ecosystems and geophysical spaces ultimately created and governed by the Sun. Urban spaces that are specifically designed by humans take a variety of forms, and today’s theorists are right to notice that these forms blur into each other, as they always have, to a varied extent. Even today, though, as these urban spaces accelerate in size, the urban can still be usefully divided into relatively thick spaces (large and concentrated cities themselves, including their blurry peripheries), relatively thin spaces (even larger but dispersed rural and “natural” city-producing and city-produced spaces), and relatively threadlike spaces (typically called infrastructures, also larger in scale than cities, and distinguished, like thread, by their elongated and interconnective form).
In my propositions, I sum up these overlapping urban spaces – city + hinterland + foreland, and their thick + thin + threadlike spatial skeleton – as “the Urban Condition,” a specific spatially determined manifestation of the human condition that first arose when we began building cities. When component spaces of the Urban Condition achieve planetary dimensions, historians may enter one of many birthdays of Our Urban Planet into the registers of time. Still, note that in defining the Urban Condition and Our Urban Planet this way – again, as city-producing and city-produced space – my theory of the urban retains its foundation on the existence and historical importance of cities.
As spaces, cities, the Urban Condition, and Our Urban Planet are singularities in two senses of that word. They are unique in the universe, as far as we now know. They also share important historical attributes consistently across space and time – everywhere and always – that I will explore in depth in my propositions. However, from their varied birth in time and space, cities, the Urban Condition, and the Urban Planet have always been, for practical purposes, almost infinitely plural. In that paradox of plural singularity, urban spaces mirror the human species, even as, over time, the human condition itself became increasingly defined by the Urban Condition and the habitation of Our Urban Planet.
