Urban history as urgent work, an argument for disciplinary promiscuity

Abstract 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.