Journal of Urban History

This essay introduces the articles collected in the special issue devoted to “decentering urban history” and considers some of their implications. For the most part, urban historians have concentrated on major cities or have at least failed to distinguish between the metropolis and smaller, more peripheral cities in meaningful ways. This essay reviews the articles in the special issue, which were first presented at the 2007 Small Cities Conference sponsored by the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University. They range across the last two centuries and consider urbanization in China, Japan, South Asia, Chile, Germany, and the United States. The essay then argues that prevailing ideas about the impact of globalization, the definition of a city, and the development of urban identities require further consideration from the perspective of peripheral cities. It concludes by offering an approach to distinguishing the experiences of these communities relative to major urban centers.

The purpose of this article is to survey the field of historical studies concerned with “middle” cities (populations 100,000 to one million) in the post-Independence period of South Asia— which includes the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives—with particular focus on places with populations between 100,000 and 200,000 and places that are rapidly growing to enter this category. The discussion begins with a statistical overview of the explosive growth of urbanization in South Asia since 1947-1948. The argument then moves into the colonial past to sketch the preconditions for urban change at the beginning of the British colonial period and the British-led contributions to “secondary” urban growth through initiatives in transportation systems, the cantonment, the hill station, and the agrarian marketing-and-administrative center. The argument then shifts back to approaches that may aid in the understanding of post-colonial economic and technological processes that built on the colonial framework to propel urban growth for middle cities; case studies here include central place theory, analysis of grass-roots capitalist development and entrepreneurship, and the impact of state-designed industrial planning. The article concludes with observations on the challenges presented to the historical profession by this gigantic field of urban expansion.

During the nineteenth century, Bremen enhanced its economic viability through a series of engineering feats, but struggled with the social problems brought on by urban growth. The most notable technical challenge was maintaining access to the North Sea and Atlantic via the silt-prone Weser River. Through the purchase of land for an outport (Bremerhaven) and a series of dredging operations headed by Ludwig Franzius, Bremen was able to preserve its position as a viable northern European port. But as the city's population grew, it proved less capable in dealing with the social and political challenges associated with urban growth. Its quasi-feudal political structure, which insulated elites from democratic pressures, made it difficult for the city to address housing and other social issues. Demands from the Social Democratic Party and other reformers ultimately undermined the city's elite and contributed to the city's loss of autonomy during the twentieth century.

Valparaíso, Chile, defined itself as a relatively autonomous, cosmopolitan port city during the nineteenth century. As the leading Pacific port in South America, it played a key role in the Chilean economy. A strong foreign presence, rapid growth, and omnipresent commerce accompanied local prosperity. Local leaders sought the latest urban technologies to bring “progress”—essentially, to mitigate problems created by rapid growth. Although Valparaíso's mercantile elite favored practical solutions rather than the Haussmann-esque urban renewal seen in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile, the city tackled planning challenges aggressively and succeeded notably in some areas. It successfully negotiated tensions over its residents' dual allegiances to the Chilean state and to international trading communities until the early twentieth century. At that point, political centralization in Chile subordinated Valparaíso to Santiago's power while economic and transportation changes diminished its importance as an entrepot and the city's cosmopolitan identity receded.

The term machi, signifying both neighborhood and small town, is a key element for understanding Japanese urban form and city planning. After tracing the origins of the term, this article explores the historic and contemporary significance of the concept and its particular spatial and socioeconomic forms. The article then argues that the concept of machi influenced the ways in which Japanese planners picked up foreign concepts through the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, absorbing some ideas and rejecting others. Building on their perception of the city as composed of urban units that allowed for planning in patchwork patterns, leading Japanese planners carefully selected models—independently of international appreciation—making, for example, the book The New Town by the German planner Gottfried Feder a standard reference. The article concludes by arguing that foreign observers must understand the concept of machi to comprehend contemporary Japanese neighborhoods, city life, and urban forms.

This article recounts four decades of efforts to reenergize the economy of Corpus Christi, a regional city and ocean resort along the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Between 1920 and 1970, the advent in quick succession of a deep-water port, petrochemicals and related industries, and large military bases caused Corpus Christi to burgeon from 10,000 to 285,000 people, a pattern indicative of factors driving urbanization and economic development across Texas and the Southwest. Starting in the 1960s, planning and economic studies expressed anxiety that Corpus Christi was stagnating and that its customary economic pillars held limited future promise. Civic and commercial leaders sought new fields of activity, including, tentatively, a reorientation towards Mexico and Latin America, hitherto regarded as a source of cheap labor rather than of commercial opportunity. Through the early 2000s, such efforts yielded frustrating results. The lackluster growth that Corpus Christi did experience resulted mainly from the spillover effects of the Sunbelt-style prosperity of Texas's metropolitan cities and from the slow, but steady, expansion of customary activities, especially the port, tourism, and retail and professional services to the South Texas hinterland. The essay suggests that secondary cities such as Corpus Christi have only limited ability to free themselves from dependence on their existing urban networks and to redirect large patterns of commerce and finance to their benefit.

China's dramatic economic growth trajectory during the post-1978 reform era has been in part dependent on the important role of secondary cities as regional articulation points in the country's engagement with globalization. This article compares the urban—economic experiences of the two prefecture-level municipalities of Dongguan and Suzhou with respect to a number of overlapping vantage points, each possessing an inherent spatiality. These include a national administrative rescaling of urban places producing greater economic autonomy at local and regional scales, the differing temporal engagement of each region with the global economy, and the structure of regional production chains, particularly in relation to the global gateway cities of the larger urban regions in which each secondary city is locationally and functionally embedded.

This article examines the intersection of oil industry interests and the growth strategy of local elites in the wake of Ventura, California's oil boom of the 1920s. It amends urban growth machine and civic boosterism theory by showing why cosmopolitan capital may exert influence over parochial politics even if it does not have a direct interest in population increase. The study also finds that oil development sustained long-term quantitative growth for this coastal community, much as Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Olien found in their study of five towns in the Permian basin of west Texas. Owing to the influence of outside companies, however, boosters failed to develop Ventura qualitatively as a tourist and recreational destination. Indeed, by the 1950s, Ventura more closely resembled inland California oil towns in terms of place than nearby Santa Barbara, which boosters had hoped to emulate.

This essay looks at Google's rapidly expanding project to digitize millions of books at a number of major libraries and evaluates this research tool for urban historians.