CFP for a Session at the 14th EAUH International Conference on Urban History on “Urban Renewal and Resilience. Cities in Comparative Perspective”, Rome

In the 20th century, debates on urban life abounded with emotions. Historical actors associated particular urban spaces, situations, and architectural styles with specific feelings like fear, loneliness, or trust. The urban built environment was said to require certain emotional practices: While urban experts stressed the effects of modern cities on the psyche and the individuals’ sense of belonging, they also recommended various practices of how to deal with the rapid transformations that characterised urban life in the 20th century. Nevertheless, urban scholars have only begun to integrate the relevance of emotional phenomena into their analyses of urban subjectivities and forms of communal living.
As part of the EAUH international conference on urban history, this session’s aim is to examine the transformation of urban lifestyles and milieus in the 20th century from a history of emotions perspective. In order to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which historical actors experienced and dealt with the fundamental changes in their urban environment over the course of the 20th century, it seeks to explore how particular urban spaces and lifestyles came to be associated with particular emotions and how a variety of actors tried to shape the urban environment in order to produce emotions. In 1960s Western Europe, for example, both leftwing and conservative writers blamed modernist high-rise estates for causing loneliness or fear, while old neighbourhoods became increasingly associated with trust and a sense of belonging. Which actors, practices and forms of knowledge shaped this emotional topography? And how did one city’s sentimental landscape relate to that of another?
Referring to recent academic debates on emotional geographies, affective spaces, emotional styles and practices, we invite papers that investigate the emotions attached to particular spaces and situations in both European and non-European cities. We also propose to explore how historical actors attempted to transform their urban environment and forge urban communities with the help of emotional practices. Possible questions include:
(1) How did specific urban spaces come to be represented or mediatised as arousing certain emotions or requiring specific emotional practices? What role did different urban actors (experts, architects, activists, local residents) play in this process?
(2) How was a city’s emotional topography interconnected with its social topography and the boundaries drawn by race, class, gender, sex, or age?
(3) What did urban actors do to create or avoid a specific emotional geography? Papers might explore, for example, what local residents, authorities, or urban experts did to dispel a sense of fear in certain neighbourhoods, or how social movements campaigned for different urban atmospheres, emotional styles, and forms of living together.

Taking place biennially, the International Conference on Urban History is an international conference that aims at bringing together scholars interested in the history of cities and urban phenomena. It is organized by the European Association for Urban History (EAUH). The EAUH’s fourteenth International Conference on Urban History takes place in Rome, under the title “Urban Renewal and Resilience. Cities in Comparative Perspective”. For details, see: https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/.

To submit a paper proposal, please create a user account using the conference management system (https://eauh2018.ccmgs.it/users/?pagename=initregistration) and upload your abstract (max. 300 words) to Session M. 27: Longing & Belonging: Historicising the Emotional Topographies of Urban Life in the 20th Century. The EAUH has just extended the deadline for paper proposals; it is now the 31st of October 2017.