Urban History and Planetary Urbanization

This paper analyzes the interconnection between urban history and global history in the last two decades. Within the postnational approach to the history of the cities, two main trends have been emerging. On the one hand, especially outside Europe, some scholars have been trying to develop a kind of urban history based on the refusal of the Western narrative of modernization and focused more on the experience of city-dwellers. On the other, world historians have been pointing out the role of the cities in the development of the global networks which have been expanding over the last two centuries. Both these approaches dissolve national borders, create new spaces, and reclaim a new definition of ‘urban’. What could be the role of urban history in the ongoing construction of an interpretative model for the planetary urbanization? The ‘urban’ issue appears as a crucial challenge for experimenting a link between material reality, political space, and changing historical ideas about citizens, beyond Euro-centric perspectives.