This project sets out to offer a comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary perspective on the urban experience of war and catastrophes in the long nineteenth-century.
Urbanization is a defining feature of modernity and its history. Although the majority of the world population did not live in towns and cities before 2008, the experience of urban life illuminates the making of the modern world. Centres of political power, cultural influence, and economic activities, towns and cities have long played a critical role in global history. As a result, urban disasters often threatened the long-term trajectories of cities and states alike as their human and material toll reverberated for years and decades thereafter. From Lisbon in 1755 to Beirut in the late-twentieth century, the capacity of urban settlements to recover from environmental catastrophes, industrial accidents, economic decline, and from the ravages of war revealed the strengths and the weaknesses of their social fabric. In dramatic circumstances, urban reconstruction also brings to light many issues of great importance to modern historians: the link between the built environment and local identity, the nature of social cohesion, the relationship between state and civil society, the emergence of transnational solidarity, etc.
In the last two decades, events across the globe have underlined the vulnerability of the urban environment to natural and man-made catastrophes and the challenges that reconstruction and urban recovery continue to issue to victims and policymakers alike. In Japan, a country dramatically affected by the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995 and the tsunami of March 2011, urban life is regularly punctuated by natural disasters.
Likewise, more than 15 years after Hurricane Katrina, the reconstruction of New Orleans continues to exercise policymakers and activists as many residents still strive to rebuild their lives. Europe, of course, is not immune to such natural devastation as attested by the earthquakes that destroyed L’Aquila in 2009 or Amatrice in 2016. In an increasingly urbanized world, towns and cities regularly bear the brunt of ecological disasters. In Europe, however, like in Japan or the Middle East, the devastation of urban communities is also indissociable from the man-made catastrophes of the twentieth-century. To many, the names of Dresden or Coventry conjure up the memory of the Second World War, while the fate of Warsaw illustrates the conflation of modern warfare and genocide. The dissolution of Yugoslavia turned Sarajevo, Mostar, and many other cities into urban battlefields; a similar fate recently befell many Syrian cities like Palmyra or Aleppo.
Entitled as a nod to Kipling’s poem, The Cities Rise Again, this project proposes to analyse the processes of urban recovery and reconstruction from the Sheffield flood of 1864 to Chillán earthquake of 1939.
Towns and cities illustrated and encapsulated the manifold and often ambiguous effects of modernization. Essential nodes in the globalized network of trade routes, cities were critical sites of economic, political, and cultural activities. It was also within their municipal boundaries that many innovations associated with the industrial age were often first showcased, from the railway to the telegraph. Yet, cities were also prime targets for the means of modern warfare. Indeed, the devastation visiting upon towns and cities between 1864 and 1939 suggest the period was, to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm, the true age of urban catastrophes.
This wider project, intended to be carried out by an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars, largely derived from the course that I introduced a few years ago at the University of Warwick. It therefore demonstrates that my pedagogical and scholarly endeavours are intimately linked and integrated. Entitled, “Urban catastrophes. Disasters and urban reconstruction from 1906 to the present”, this 2nd-year module introduces students to urban history by focussing on the most extreme examples of urban crises in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
The research project will explore how urban communities, as well as local and national authorities, responded to devastation visited upon them by natural disasters, accidents, and military conflicts. It will consider how such catastrophes mobilized urban planners, architects, and humanitarian organizations, and transformed their expertise and practices in the process. This project will make a major contribution to urban history and to the interdisciplinary field of disaster studies. This comparative and transnational analysis of urban catastrophes in the British world, Europe, the Americas, and Japan, will shed new light on the process of social change and the nature of urban resilience.
This project will challenge the normative exceptionalism that underpins the scholarship on war and social change. Like the history of war, the scholarship on urban disasters has long remained confined within national boundaries. It also rarely considers how the urban experience of war may fit in the long history of urban catastrophes. Yet comparative and transnational approaches highlight a significant circulation of personnel and expertise across affected regions of the world, including former battlefields. Several officials of the American Red Cross operating in Europe between 1914 and 1920 had for instance been involved in the humanitarian response to the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906; and they often described the war as a disaster, in terms conventionally used in the context of urban catastrophes. Japanese commentators and policymakers often evoked the unprecedented damages caused by the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 as akin only to those visited upon the devastated regions of the Western Front. Indeed, Japanese urban planners and civil society organizations corresponded with their Belgian counterparts, in the hope they could draw lessons from the urban reconstruction of Belgium. Historians of Argentina and Chile, for instance, have recently highlighted the role of natural disasters in the process of state-building, in ways reminiscent of the history of war. Finally, anthropologists have also underlined the totalizing logic of natural disasters in terms that are now familiar to students of warfare.
Moreover, case-studies such as the Halifax explosion or the Salonica fire of 1917 would allow us to consider the specificities of urban disasters linked to the war but not directly brought about by military operations. In other words, this project would investigate the extent to which the experience of war is extraordinary but not exceptional when considered in a wider reflection on urban disasters and social change. A global history of urban catastrophes between 1864 and 1939, this project will also enable us to explore the potential specificities of the European experience of war and disasters.
This collective project will combine the history of French and Belgian towns and cities devastated as a result of the First World War, with a particular but not exclusive focus on port-cities destroyed by other types or urban catastrophes. These include San Francisco and Valparaiso in 1906, Messina in 1908, Halifax and Salonica in 1917, and Yokohama in 1923. The Chillán earthquake of 1939 will allow us to plot the impact of urban catastrophes on the political and intellectual trajectory of Chile.
The history of urban catastrophes in the long nineteenth century therefore seems a productive way to bring together the history of war and disaster studies. Marked by a number of natural and man-made urban catastrophes, this period also witnessed the emergence of the first social-scientific studies of natural disasters. To name but two celebrated examples: Samuel Prince defended a doctoral dissertation on Catastrophe and Social Change at Columbia University in 1920; L.J. Carr published his “Disaster and the sequence-pattern concept of social change” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938. The project also offers an opportunity to engage in a critical and sustained manner with the concepts elaborated by scholars and practitioners alike since the onset of the Cold War. Then, the study of disaster management undeniably benefited from the attention and financial support of civilian and military authorities anxious to mitigate the impact of a nuclear conflict. Subsequently, natural disasters become of particular interest to development scholars, in a postcolonial world increasingly defined by the social and ecological vulnerability of the global south. The recurrence of industrial accidents formed the backdrop of an interdisciplinary reflection on the technological hazards constitutive of what Ulrich Beck called the Risk Society. Today, the combination of climate change and terrorism have put the question of urban resilience at the centre of discussion about urban growth, infrastructure, planning, and politics.
