This book offers a unique contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese historical geography. Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event. Through the exploration of nine urban sites of momentous change, over an extended period of time, this book connects the past with the present, and provides much-needed literature on city growth and how they became complex laboratories of prosperity. The first part of this book puts Chinese urban changes into historical perspective, and probes the relationship between nation and city, focusing on Shanghai, Beijing and Changchun. Part two deals with the relationship between history and modernity, concentrating on Tunxi, a traditional trade center of tea, New Villages in Shanghai and street names in Taipei and Shanghai. Part three showcases the complexities of urban regeneration vis-à-vis heritage preservation in cities such as Datong, Tianjin and Qingdao. This book offers an innovative interdisciplinary and international perspective, which will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese urban studies, as well Chinese politics and society.

Originally published in 1988, this book provides a fascinating comparative review of research in urban historical geography in Britain and West Germany. It draws together a wide range of material on the history of urban development to explore the theoretical and methodological possibilities offered by comparative surveys of contrasting national and regional urban expenses. The chronological focus of the essays ranges in time from the medieval period onwards, and the contributors explore not only the specifically intellectual consequences of their empirical research, but also its policy implications for urban planners and conservationists. Serious extended comparative debate has hitherto been absent from the field of urban historical geography as a whole: this volume sought to reverse that trend, and in so doing to establish a fresh research agenda for an important and expanding discipline.

Historical geography is an active, theoretically-informed and vibrant field of scholarly work within modern geography, with strong and constantly evolving connections with disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Across two volumes, The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides you with an an international and cross-disciplinary overview of the field, presenting chapters that examine the history, present condition and future potential of the discipline in relation to recent developments and research.

"This ambitious volume reviews the best recent work in historical geography... It demonstrates how a dual sense of history and geography is necessary to understand such key areas of contemporary debate as the inter-relationship between class, race and gender; the character of nations and nationalism; the nature and challenges of urban life; the legacies of colonialism; and the meaning and values attributed to places, landscapes and environments." - Mike Heffernan, University of Nottingham Key Concepts in Historical Geography forms part of an innovative set of companion texts for the Human Geography sub-disciplines. Organized around 24 short essays, it provides a cutting edge introduction to the central concepts that define contemporary research in Historical Geography. Involving detailed and expansive discussions, the book includes: An introductory chapter providing a succinct overview of the recent developments in the field 24 key concepts entries with comprehensive explanations, definitions and evolutions of the subject Pedagogic features that enhance understanding including a glossary, figures, diagrams and further reading Key Concepts in Historical Geography is an ideal companion text for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students and covers the expected staples from the discipline - from people, space and place to colonialism and geopolitics - in an accessible style. Written by an internationally recognized set of authors, it is is an essential addition to any human geography student′s library.

This book illustrates how literature, history and geographical analysis complement and enrich each other’s disciplinary endeavors. The Hun-Lenox Globe, constructed in 1510, contains the Latin phrase 'Hic sunt dracones' ('Here be dragons'), warning sailors of the dangers of drifting into uncharted waters. Nearly half a millennium earlier, the practice of ‘earth-writing’ (geographia) emerged from the cloisters of the great library of Alexandria, as a discipline blending the twin pursuits of Strabo’s poetic impression of places, and Herodotus’ chronicles of events and cultures. Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria, and the mathematician Ptolemy employed geometry as another language with which to pursue ‘earth-writing’. From this ancient, East Mediterranean fount, the streams of literary perception, historical record and geographical analysis (phenomenological and Euclidean) found confluence. The aim of this collection is to recover such means and seek the fount of such rich waters, by exploring relations between historical geography, geographic information science (GIS) / geoscience, and textual analysis. The book discusses and illustrates current case studies, trends and discourses in European, American and Asian spheres, where historical geography is practiced in concert with human and physical applications of GIS (and the broader geosciences) and the analysis of text - broadly conceived as archival, literary, historical, cultural, climatic, scientific, digital, cinematic and media. Time as a multi-scaled concept (again, broadly conceived) is the pivot around which the interdisciplinary contributions to this volume revolve. In The Landscape of Time (2002) the historian John Lewis Gaddis posits: “What if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping?” He links the ancient practice of mapmaking with the three-part conception of time (past, present, and future). Gaddis presents the practices of cartography and historical narrative as attempts to manage infinitely complex subjects by imposing abstract grids to frame the phenomena being examined— longitude and latitude to frame landscapes and, occidental and oriental temporal scales to frame timescapes. Gaddis contends that if the past is a landscape and history is the way we represent it, then it follows that pattern recognition constitutes a primary form of human perception, one that can be parsed empirically, statistically and phenomenologically. In turn, this volume reasons that literary, historical, cartographical, scientific, mathematical, and counterfactual narratives create their own spatio-temporal frames of reference. Confluences between the poetic and the positivistic; the empirical and the impressionistic; the epic and the episodic; and the chronologic and the chorologic, can be identified and studied by integrating practices in historical geography, GIScience / geoscience and textual analysis. As a result, new perceptions and insights, facilitating further avenues of scholarship into uncharted waters emerge. The various ways in which geographical, historical and textual perspectives are hermeneutically woven together in this volume illuminates the different methods with which to explore terrae incognitaes of knowledge beyond the shores of their own separate disciplinary islands.

For those who have ever wondered why we have trees in cities or what makes the layout of cities like Paris and Amsterdam seem so memorable, City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century by Henry W. Lawrence provides a comprehensive and handsome guide to the history of trees in urban landscapes. Covering four centuries of development in the cities of Europe and America, this book shows how trees became integral to urban landscapes by looking at the historical evolution of the spaces in which they were planted and how these spaces were used. Reflecting on the impact trees have had on what many consider to be the fundamental aspects of city life--people, buildings, social and economic activity--Lawrence draws on graphic materials, written descriptions, local histories, and archival research to provide a unique look at the tree's role in urban landscape history. Primarily concerned with aesthetics, power, and national traditions, Lawrence reflects on the differing impacts city trees have had on multiple aspects of culture, from their roles as symbols and their representation of economic prosperity to the differing ways nations planted their trees, which gradually blended into an international style of urban planting. Complete with fascinating illustrations, City Trees will appeal to those interested in urban history and geography as well as the general public interested in cities, cultural history, and landscape design.

Over recent decades, the historico-geographical approach to urban morphology has been prominent in the debate on the physical form of our cities and on the agents and processes shaping that form over time. With origins in the work of the geographer M.R.G. Conzen, this approach has been systematically developed by researchers in different parts of the world since the 1960s. This book argues that J.W.R. Whitehand structured an innovative and comprehensive school of urban morphological thought grounded in the invaluable basis provided by Conzen. It identifies the development of several dimensions of the concepts of “fringe belt” and “morphological region” and the systematic exploration of the themes of “agents of change,” “comparative studies” and “research and practice” as key contributions by Whitehand to this school of thought. The book presents contributions from leading international experts in the field addressing these major issues.

As the growing world population increasingly comes to live in cities, the field of urban geography will continue to expand in numbers and significance. This book encompasses both systems of cities and the internal geography of metro areas. It is a contemporary introduction to urban geography by a renowned scholar in the field.