A Sense of Time and Place: The Historian's Approach to the Urban Past

Abstract

The purpose of this discussion is to examine the contributions that various disciplines have made and are making to the study of the urban past in terms of subject matter, conceptualization, and methodology. It is my task to outline the role of the historian (narrowly defined) in this venture. The question which immediately arises is: as the historian does not have exclusive jurisdiction over the study of the urban past, either as subject matter or as a dimension of urban studies, what does he have to contribute beyond a rather amateurish approach to the increasingly technical methodology employed today? In general, I think the contribution might be described as a special sense of time and place. In the context of other approaches, it falls somewhere between that of the social scientist interested in discovering general patterns and that of the local historian concerned only with the unique and particular. This rather nebulous middle ground perhaps is best defined by describing what historians think they are doing and by a selective look at what they have done.

The Urban Question

“…Across the Atlantic, surveying the "state of the art," Clay McShane (2006: 595) noted the paucity of theory in American urban history; and in their introduction to an American reader, Steven Corey and Lisa Boehm (2011: 15) commented that urban historians still resisted theory, flubbing Lampard's repeated challenge. The literatures on the history of Canadian, and for that matter South African, cities have attracted similar comments (Stelter 1977;Bickford-Smith 2016: 2-4). The chorus has not let up.…”

Canadian Cities as Social Technologies: An Exploratory Essay

“…(Handlin versus Lampard, 19 to use the champions of both sides.) It would appear to us that this dichotomy is an unhelpful one for even if single cities have to be X-rayed, one requires some framework to ensure that the basic variables have been touched and looked at, while the macroanalytical approach must be able to descend onto specific urban realities and to throw some light on them.…”

The State of Urban History in Canada

“…3 Gilbert Stelter, host and co-organizer (with Alan Artibise) of the Guelph conference, echoed the case for identifying that which is "generically urban." 4 In principle, the distinction is clear enough. In practice, however, it is often blurred.…”