This article examines the heritagization of nuclear urbanity as a distinctive form of Soviet industrial urbanism. The research focuses on the satellite settlement of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, which exemplifies the ‘presentism’ characteristic of Soviet heritage – an entanglement of multiple temporalities alongside goals of propaganda and preservation. We argue that local engagements with nuclear cultural heritage are rooted in the fact that commemorative practices were embedded from the inception of the atomic town’s development. This early transformation of nuclear urbanity into heritage ensured that the former Soviet atomic town preserved not only material traces but also a lasting infrastructure of social memory and urban imagery, mobilized by various actors for identity building and future negotiations.

This article explores nuclear cultural heritage-making as a spatial activity in the context of nuclear secrecy and restricted access. It focuses on the closed city Sarov, formerly Arzamas-16, the birthplace of Soviet nuclear weapons. Since the end of the Cold War, Sarov has cultivated its image as a heritage site, opening a Museum of Nuclear Weapons, pioneering nuclear scientists and local history, as well as reconstructing religious sites. Based on interviews and fieldwork in Russia, this article maps the hitherto unstudied development of cultural heritage infrastructure in a closed city and its diverse and conflicting political uses and assesses the ambivalence of nuclear material culture as it is selectively preserved and deployed to achieve these conflicting goals.

Baku, Azerbaijan, is one of the most significant historical sites of industrial oil production in the world. Yet, the oil industry is largely ignored in the official heritage and tourism strategies. Drawing on ethnographic research in Baku, this article examines the place of the industrial past in the top-down and bottom-up heritage practices. It identifies three different heritage discourses pursued by different actors: the government, state-linked corporate actors and city tour guides. It argues that industrial heritage has significant touristic potential which, in the context of a strongly centralized state, can only be unlocked if the official heritage actors incorporate the industrial past into its heritage discourse.

Although industrial modernization in Eurasia both preceded and outlived the Soviet project, in popular and scholarly imaginations, manufacturing cities located in the continent’s eastern regions are often understood as quintessentially ‘Soviet’. Yet, this perception tends to ignore the ways in which earlier urban developments were integrated with socialist innovations. This special issue seeks to decentre the concept of ‘Soviet urbanism’ by placing socialist forms into a longue durée perspective on industrial modernity and destabilizing popular equations of ‘post-socialism’ with ‘post-industrialism’. The collection’s contributions explore how modernist urbanism has intersected a variety of political and economic regimes over the past century and how evolving industrial processes continue to shape and reconfigure Eurasia’s urban landscapes.

This article re-examines the geography of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Havana through the gendered lens of Black freedom and enslavement. The author uses fragmentary evidence surrounding the disappearance of Margarita, a young, enslaved girl in 1820s Havana, to suggest how the city’s African and African-descended residents navigated urban space in opposition to colonial design and function. In the process, the author suggests the ways in which the interventions of Black residents, influenced by the ecologies internal to the port, were pivotal to the production of urban space and the geographies of slavery.

Focusing on the case of Mongolia during the Cold War, this article analyses how the goals of resource extraction and socialist development shaped urban and regional planning in the country. The article examines the negotiations for development assistance between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, East Germany and Czechoslovakia since 1962, with a particular focus on the foundation of the mining city of Erdenet in 1973 as a key outcome of these negotiations. It demonstrates that mineral extraction was the central aspect of socialist assistance. The requirements and scale of mining infrastructure provided a distinct logic to urban and regional planning in the country. The article argues that in the socialist development vision, extraction was integral to urban thinking. The socialist approach to resource development in Mongolia employed a heavy-handed approach of extensive urbanization, contrasting sharply with post-socialist urban patterns shaped by investments from private extractive industries.

Bishkek became the administrative centre of the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast in December 1924, meaning that Bishkek became the capital city for the Soviet Kyrgyz Republic when it was declared in 1926. This elevation in status coincided with an inauspicious economic and social situation for the city, which was still recovering from the violence of the late imperial era. Ethnic relations in Bishkek and its environs were strained, particularly over the land question. Yet, the acquisition of pastureland by the Kyrgyz population in the Bishkek region appears as a quirk of urban land management rather than a conscious policy of reparations.

This article explores urban memory politics in Komsomolsk-na-Amure – a military-industrial stronghold erected in Russia’s Far East in the 1930s with the participation of Komsomol volunteers from across the USSR. Known as pervostroiteli or ‘first-builders’, Komsomolsk’s founders became the city’s first chroniclers, who played an enduring role in shaping the city’s heroic popular image. I argue that the Soviet government’s active efforts to glorify Komsomol builders endowed the figures of pervostroiteli with unparalleled moral authority, which participants in the city’s early development used to curate their own memorialization and local historical politics.

This article analyses the naming of streets in late nineteenth-century Kyiv. Building on scholarship on critical toponymy and using unpublished archival sources, it presents street naming as more multifunctional than usually recognized. Besides orientation and ideology, toponyms were believed to be able to raise property value and attract tourists. By highlighting the debates among landlords, municipal authorities and imperial officials around commercialization and temporalization of the streetscape of late imperial Kyiv, the article demonstrates how economic priorities accompanied and even sometimes outweighed political considerations in determining toponymical choices.

The steam-driven transport revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dramatically altered the geography of globalization, fuelling rapid urbanization at an unprecedented scale in port cities across the globe. Whereas global historians have primarily studied port cities because of their function in globe-spanning networks, this special issue explores the intersection of global and urban history from a socio-environmental perspective. Crucially, the contributions to this issue underline that the creation of port cities, and their social histories, must be understood in relation to local landscapes, both built and natural, and their transformations over time.

Excrements are slippery objects of historical inquiry. They are seldom nominated, often tiptoed around. Excreta are only apparently trifling matters, yet they bear the traces of events that could not be otherwise observed. They demand consideration of the mundane and seemingly apolitical dimension of everyday life. They show up in archival trickles that, if followed up seriously, point to what political and economic histories may have swiped out of plain view. Excrements in 1859–69 Port Said convey that the Suez Canal Company may not have been at all that concerned or effective in its management of public hygiene in the encampments and towns sprouting along the canal. The Egyptian government was similarly unimpactful, but tried to tackle some of the issues confronting booming towns in Egypt and elsewhere: planning flaws, ‘miasmatic effluvia’, desertic and acquatic dumpsters and a seemingly ever-growing volume of and proximity to trash.

This survey argues that urban historians should be engaging with the climate crisis as a driver of urgent research and the environmental humanities as a vibrant and growing gathering of different disciplines and approaches. This will enable urban historians to help address the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. The survey identifies three areas in which urban-environmental historians might go further than existing work in the field: ambitious thinking; radical critique; and engagement with play or experimentation. Each of these is explored through existing scholarship, with reflections on the implications for the practice of urban history.

Between the 1770s and the 1870s, there were no fewer than eight attempts to establish colonial footholds along the coasts of Sabah, the northern quarter of Borneo. This article charts the history of these abortive settlements and, in doing so, subverts established narratives of colonialism and urbanization that usually centre on the British North Borneo Company from the 1880s. It argues that these settlements should be regarded as part of a persistent but sporadic struggle to colonize and control the shores of Sabah. Their repeated frustrations and failures reveal the ways in which coastlines imposed constraints on thalassocracies.

Examining the early post-colonial Beirut International Airport (BEY), we make two arguments. First, BEY had the potential to become the Middle East’s largest airport only because from the mid-1800s Beirut, which had a large maritime port, had been the Arab East’s global cultural, commercial, communications and transport hub, which created a path dependency. Second, BEY deepened Beirut’s regional-global role throughout the 1960s, making it an aero-city piggybacking on a port-city. We explore four dimensions. First, in urban planning, the government was exceptionally interventionist where BEY was concerned; second, BEY’s construction triggered sociopolitical conflicts; third, BEY intersected with Palestinian and Lebanese unskilled labour flows; and, finally, air-travel, including tourism, affected Beirut’s cityscape deeply yet unevenly.

Steam navigation in the 1850s and the Rubber Boom beginning in the 1890s connected the Amazonia to the world. This article studies Iquitos, a major riverine port city in Peru, to interrogate the kind of urban environmental regime produced by the contrast between the modernizing impulse of the rubber era and the conditions of the rainforest and the customs of its peoples. Studying urbanization as an eco-technical process that involves both the longue durée and contingent critical junctures reveals pervasive connections between social inequalities and environmental conditions. The long-term trajectory of Iquitos reveals a vicious cycle of urban inequalities and precarious urbanization.

Summarizing the key findings of this special issue, our conclusion embeds them into the long-term history of cities extending to our present age. Some of the cities treated in our special issue have since turned into megacities marked by environmental hazards and extreme socio-economic inequalities. Their combination invites rethinking the interdependence of natural, built and social environments in urban contexts in the longue durée. Interweaving nine case-studies of cities in different world regions, our special issue demonstrates that a sustained environmental focus and the longue durée approach enriches current scholarship on port cities, and also nurtures discussion on the long-term consequences of the coastalization of the world population, thereby contributing to the fields of global and imperial history as a whole.

The filling of the lagoons and creeks that framed the city and island of Lagos changed the relationship between people, power, land and the water at the turn of the nineteenth century. As elites in the city negotiated power with British colonial administrators, ordinary Lagosians pushed back against the measures that threatened to displace them and rewrite cultural space through the demands and logics of ‘slum clearance’ and anti-malarial campaigns. This article examines how these struggles over water, land and urban space were the catalysts for cultural change.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta was a premium port city and the nerve-centre of the British Empire’s commercial activities in South Asia. In many ways it was presented as a promising mercantile global metropolis – a symbol of efficiency, infrastructure and urban modernization – celebrated in contemporary colonial accounts and literature.1 However, looking beyond, it is possible to locate other perspectives that challenge the colonial narrative. Reading both against the grain of colonial archives and closely examining Indian accounts, this article highlights the gaps in its smooth functioning, and uncovers local practices that challenged metropolitan blueprints. As seen here, it was possible for the everyday city to pose a serious challenge to European – purportedly universal, and therefore global – models of urbanization implemented by the colonial government. Calcutta here emerges as much a product of its own social, cultural and natural environment, as that of global modernization regimes unleashed by colonialism, the legacy of which can be seen even today.

A city must stand on stable ground for it to be a place of residence, sociability and peace. If so, the following is an exploration of how a city came to be in a wetland, with marshy ground, with an overflowing river, with stormy seas and with lowland liable to flooding. A wetland, the key ecology in what follows, was not easily urbanized. Indeed, in the late modern moment, taken in what follows simply as a shorthand to refer to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earth was dug, water was channelled, a river estuary was changed, reefs were affected, harbours were built and sea flow appeared to change. Yet, the manipulation of terrain of various kinds did not create a space which was a smooth site of connection and meeting for colonists and colonized. Rather, nature obstructed these fluid experiments of engineering in various ways. Simultaneously, the people who congregated at these sites forged new ways of considering their status in the ‘new imperial’ colony. The colonial reorganization of nature ran parallel with colonial attempts at arranging people; yet, both nature and people did not yield automatically to the hand of this new regime of modelling and segmenting environments in and around the sea and land.

From the shores of the Black Sea to the banks of the Mississippi River, more than mere distance separated the nineteenth-century port cities of Odessa and New Orleans. Although these ports emerged in distinct political and geographical settings, a comparative analysis reveals striking parallels between these two southern metropolises, each positioned at the territorial edge of continental empires. This article aims to examine the common challenges these cities encountered in their development, the factors that divided their cosmopolitan populations and how socio-environmental vulnerabilities contributed to their urban fragmentation.