The blog is run by a group of historians in the Berlin area who share an interest in both global and urban history. Taking into consideration recent charges that global history is in danger of an imperial overstretch, we aim at grounding our interest in historical connectedness in analyses of concrete local processes. This combination, we hope, illuminates the inherently uneven outgrowths of urbanized globalization. While treating cities as nerve centers of long-distance connections and engines of momentous historical developments, we therefore also explore how they produced segmented, unequal, and unmixed cityscapes.

The website originally grew out of a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, but its aim now is to pool the research of a group of young scholars in the Berlin area with an interest in the global history of cities. With the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität and the Global History Research Area at the Freie Universität, Berlin is an auspicious place for this undertaking. By inviting guest submissions for our blog and by disseminating information on upcoming events and book reviews on our website and on Twitter and Facebook, we also hope to become a wider forum of exchange for those invested in global and urban history.