Urban History Group Conference 2025.
The Urban Commons: Rights and Citizenship in the City from the Medieval to the Modern.
4th & 5th September, 2025.
All Day.
University of Leicester.
Ideas of the urban commons have been important in cities throughout history. Examining their importance questions the extent to which the city is a site of freedom and free expression, yet also reveals the ways that places, behaviours, and protest are policed. Furthermore, how have attitudes towards urban commons changed over time and in different places? Medieval and early modern townspeople, for example, habitually contested the regulation of common spaces such as marketplaces, while also invoking the idea of the ‘commons’, and the ‘commonweal’ in all kinds of debates around power and control. The Chartists famously exerted their right to collect and protest on sites such as Kennington Common and St Peter’s Field. Since the 1950s, the development of shopping precincts has created new types of private space, and increasingly policed appropriate behaviours in the city. What these examples reveal is that ideas of who has a right to the city, what can be done, and who can do it, constantly shift in different periods and in differing geographic locations.In exploring the idea of the urban commons, the conference also asks participants to consider issues of ownership of, and participation in the urban past. In so doing, it takes inspiration from the vitality of the impact agenda which has led to much new co-produced urban research and local history projects. We would therefore welcome researchers who wish to reflect on how impact projects and community partnerships shaped their research, asking how these projects have shaped the questions they have asked about cities and the things they have learned?
The Urban History Group invite responses of individual papers or conference panels in response to the conference theme. Potential topics might include (but are not limited to):
- Urban protest
- Gender and urban citizenship
- Governance and control of urban spaces
- Ideas of public and private in the city
- Belonging and exclusion in the city
Papers should be a maximum of twenty minutes in length and panel proposals can be for either two or three papers. Papers and panel proposals might present individual case studies or they might cut, thematically, across time and space to draw out the larger-scale historical processes at work in urban history and urban studies. Contributions may cover any period and can be drawn from any geographical area.
For further details please contact
Dr. James Greenhalgh
University of Lincoln
Tel: 01522 83 7729
Email: jgreenhalgh@lincoln.ac.uk
More information about the conference here
