Agenda
Prof. Em. Carl Nightingale delivers lecture 2025 Raymond van Uytven Chair 2025 – register by 30 June 2025
The Centre for Urban History and the Urban Studies Institute of the University of Antwerp invite you to the public lecture of the 2025 Raymond van Uytven Chair for Urban History by Emeritus Professor Carl Nightingale, on Wednesday 2 July 2025.
Carl Nightingale is Professor Emeritus of Urban History and World History at the University at Buffalo and Co-Coordinator of the Global Urban History Project (GUHP). Most recently he is the author of synthetic work on cities and the planet, including Earthopolis; A Biography of Our Urban Planet(Cambridge, 2022) and Our Urban Planet in Theory and History (Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History 2024). He is working on an online lecture series entitled “Urban History in Earth Time” that draws on work in numerous fields to contextualize the story of cities within the recent story of our home planet.
Professor Nightingales lecture is titled ‘Urban History and Earth Time: Five Big Stories About Cities and Their Planet’ and offers five large stories about global urban history in Earth Time and aims to explore what urban historians can offer to Our Time. The first is ‘Earth Time’ itself, the story of the polyrhythmic ebb and flow of life-giving solar energy on our home planet. The second, ‘Energy In’, traces how we gathered that energy for the purpose of building cities, creating urban hinterlands, or ‘power grids’ on Earth’s surface. The third, ‘Cities and Power’, shows how building cities augmented human power by harnessing spatial design to political complexity. The fourth, ‘Power Out’, explores the spaces that cities thus made possible, measuring the growth and retreat of our built habitat, action, and planetary impact against the polyrhythms of Earth Time. The last story is a mediation on ‘Rising and Falling under our Urban Condition’ – what global urban history tells us about cities and Earth Time to come.
Those wanting to attend this lecture, should register ultimately by 30 June 2025.
