Cities and peripheries.

Area of Science:

• Urban History
• Environmental Humanities
• Geospatial Analysis

Background:

• The current environmental crisis necessitates new frameworks for understanding human impact on Earth.
• Traditional urban history methods struggle to visualize human actions as geological forces.
• Reconciling experiential and visualizable aspects of urban landscapes is a key methodological challenge.

Observation:

• Mapping projects in late 18th and early 19th century Calcutta provide a case study.
• These historical maps reveal multiple, often conflicting, spatio-temporal modes of landscape formation.
• The concept of the uncanny highlights the disjunction between lived experience and historical representation.

Findings:

• The uncanny offers a valuable conceptual tool for urban history.
• It facilitates the reconciliation of what can and cannot be directly experienced or visualized in historical urban environments.
• Analyzing historical mapping through the uncanny reveals landscapes as products of diverse spatio-temporal processes.

Implications:

• This approach challenges conventional urban vocabulary and its limitations in imagining cities.
• It provides a method for urban historians to engage with geological time and human agency.
• The uncanny framework can enrich our understanding of how past environmental transformations shape present urban realities.