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Urban Resilience is seen by many as a tool to mitigate harm in times of extreme social, political, financial, and environmental stress. Despite its widespread usage, however, resilience is used in different ways by policy makers, activists, academics, and practitioners. Some see it as a key to unlocking a more stable and secure urban future in times of extreme global insecurity; for others, it is a neoliberal technology that marginalizes the voices of already marginal peoples. This volume moves beyond praise and critique by focusing on the actors, narratives and temporalities that define urban resilience in a global context. By exploring the past, present, and future of urban resilience, this volume unlocks the potential of this concept to build more sustainable, inclusive, and secure cities in the 21st century.

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively. In recent years, urban history has witnessed an expansion of actors. Historians have substantially and continuously extended their perspectives when it comes to examining the forces that drive urban developments. This expansion to an ever-broader range of human and increasingly also non-human actors (e.g. animals, technological systems and resources such as water) has opened up many new venues for investigations. It has also raised new questions about the role of cities in the history of social change. One of the most provocative ideas involves the claim that cities themselves should be considered agents and proprietors of change. Such notions of urban agency are premised on the assumption that, on the whole, cities are more than the sum of their parts. In this context, urbanization is not just viewed as the outcome of other determining societal forces, most notably capitalism. Instead, cities themselves are understood as determining entities and powerful enablers or preventers of material transformations. The investigative potential of such a perspective is tremendous, but the possible pitfalls should also not be underestimated. Exploring the explanatory prospects of urban agency requires, first of all, a critical engagement with both of the terms ‘agency’ and ‘the urban’. In my brief contribution to this roundtable, I would like to offer two points to the discussion: the first centres on the relationship between agency and intentionality/responsibilities, which is ultimately a political concern; the second aims to differentiate between the city as an entity and the urban as a process. Such a distinction, in turn, poses conceptual as well as methodological questions regarding the efficacy of agency as an urban concept.

Livestock diseases have a long history. Epizootics like cattle plague and foot and mouth disease have always been a great threat to the well being of animals, human health, and agricultural production. However, thus far they have received little attention in the historical scholarship on risk management. The following essay seeks to contribute to this scholarship by looking at the history of Rinderpest in eighteenth and nineteenth century France and Germany. In comparing these two examples, the essay examines how epizootics have affected the development of European meat production. I maintain that they fostered the creation of expert knowledge, which in turn directly affected the reform of meat production. Yet it also increased the realization that meat production always remained a risky business prone to such 'natural' disasters.

The human toll of the Second World War dwarfed the combined efforts of states and civil society entities to ameliorate that suffering. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the massive humanitarian operations directed by Herbert Hoover during the First World War and its aftermath had become mythologized in large reservoirs of popular memory. The transition of international refugee management responsibilities to the International Refugee Organization opens a window onto some wider geopolitical and institutional legacies that United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) bequeathed to the post-war international order. The massive state-directed aid programmes of the Second World War created unprecedentedly vast opportunities for civil society organizations to engage in international humanitarian endeavours, even as the nature of those opportunities were regulated by governments. The issue of human rights and its ideological cousin, humanitarianism, invites a concluding reflection on that blend of compassion and cold calculation that produced the moral economy of the Second World War.

Could the concepts of "metropolitanism" and "thick space" aid our understanding of historical and contemporary urban change? Essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic provide interdisciplinary approaches to the complex dynamics of large-scale urbanisation. The book opens with conceptual questions regarding the development of metropoles and metropolitan studies. The following sections provide analyses of the social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of metropolitan spaces from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, such as the role of planning and urban parks, the impact of ethnic diversity and segregation, the place of cinematic visions or the centrality of infrastructures and architecture.