Methods of Urban History

The current academic and popular interest in urban history is accompanied by methodological explorations. Paralleling the recent trends in social history, architectural historians working on urban topics have broadened the subject matter. They now investigate social, economic, political, and cultural issues to explain the built forms of cities, thereby relying on interdisciplinary research. The focus is often on urban transformations with a wide-spread concern to address the issues and problems of today and tomorrow through studying history. While the recent methodological search in urban history is rich and inspirational, it also bears shortcomings. Methodological pluralism can easily lead to a diminution of focus and a general ambiguity, obscuring evaluation standards. The approaches surveyed here display the widening perspectives, but also point to the importance of further theoretical and methodological discussion.