DISASTROUS PASTS AND SUSTAINABLE FUTURES
Annual Conference jointly organised by the Global History and Culture Centre and the Institute for Global Sustainable Development with the support of the Sustainability Spotlight.
29-30 June 2026, Warwick University
This conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on historical and contemporary urban disasters. It aims to outline an innovative research agenda at the crossroads of critical disaster studies, urban history, and humanitarian studies. In response to the rising frequency and severity of disasters affecting urban settlements around the world, it also aims to inform the policy-making process and relevant professional practices. It will focus on the experience of devastated communities, on the process of urban recovery, and on the manifold legacies of disaster.
Disasters are neither acts of God nor mere facts of nature. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or floods may be natural hazards, but they only have disastrous consequences if and when they affect a vulnerable community which is unable to mitigate their impacts. The study of disaster must therefore focus on the production of these vulnerabilities, a process which firmly falls within the domain of the social and historical sciences. Rejecting the misleading distinction between environmental and man-made disasters, we invite papers scrutinising particularly severe crises which threaten the capacity of cities to function and sustain themselves as urban systems. Today, as they did in the past, military conflicts, epidemics, population displacement, and environmental events critically undermine cities’ built environments, socio-economic structures, and municipal institutions. The study of urban devastation and recovery must therefore explore the complex linkages between political violence, environmental shocks, epidemics, industrial accidents, and urban resilience.
This project is predicated on the idea that neither risk nor vulnerability are primarily the result of development failures or exclusively affect the global south. It draws on the long history of urban settlements which amply demonstrates that urbanisation itself ought to be approached as a producer of risks and vulnerabilities. It also postulates that the dominant forms of industrial urbanisation that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe subsequently shaped the urban experience under the Anthropocene. Inherently comparative and interdisciplinary, this conference aims to challenge the conventional boundaries between the histories of the global north and south, or that of the west and “the rest”. It will question local and national exceptionalisms and replace specific urban crises in their global context. For disasters also upend cities’ core economic, cultural, or political functions and disrupt the wider national, regional, or global networks they are part of. We are keen to hear from colleagues who “emplace” their reflection into specific case-studies and position individual disasters in the long-term trajectory of devastated cities. We aim to demonstrate the role that history can play in the interdisciplinary field of disaster studies by illuminating the long-term – often secular – and transnational processes that brought about the contemporary disaster regime.
Finally, this conference aims to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary debates on urban resilience. Initially deployed by biologists, resilience described the capacity of an ecological system to return to equilibrium after experiencing severe stress. Since Covid-19, the omnipresence of resilience in public discourses has diminished its usefulness as a category of analysis. Resilience metaphors obscure as much as they illuminate the past and present of post-catastrophic cities. Though seemingly apolitical, discourses of resilience often confiscate the voice of disaster victims. Urban recovery is indeed highly contested and unequal, for it is about the allocation of scarce resources. It is therefore as political a process as the disaster itself. Our project is predicated on the notion that actual resilience depends on a political commitment to address the vulnerabilities of cities and to oppose their perpetuation.
This conference seeks to explore and combine normative, analytical, and operational perspectives on the experience and legacies of urban disasters and reconstruction. It will build its interdisciplinary reflection and empirical studies on four “pillars”:
1-Temporalities: critical disaster scholarship does not consider disasters to be sharp and sudden rupture in time, but the outcome of long-term processes. To historians and social scientists, the disaster category now encompasses chronic and acute crises, with slow or rapid onset. Disaster studies are now increasingly attentive to the complex temporalities of urban catastrophes that framed the interpretation and experience of severe urban crises. In the face of accelerating climate change, it should also inform wider discussions concerned with foresight and anticipation.
2-Geographies: the focus on urban disasters facilitates the combination of the different scales of analysis required to approach all relevant spaces of experiences, from the domestic to the global, through the urban and the national. Cities are indeed formed by sophisticated networks and are, at the same time, nodes within wider economic, cultural, and political networks. Particular attention could perhaps be paid to port-cities whose vulnerabilities illustrate complex types of path-dependencies. Despite their critical importance to historical and contemporary forms of globalisation, little seems to be known about the impact of their devastation and recovery on the global networks they sustain.
3-Practices: the conference will highlight the different actors and types of intervention deployed in response to urban disasters. Today, emergency responders, disaster relief experts, urban planners and architects are often highly qualified practitioners operating within complex and transnational professional communities. They work for the private or non-profit sectors, for local and national authorities, or international organisations. If the past of humanitarian organisations is now well known, few works have yet focused on the long history of disaster relief. Less attention has even been paid to the long development of the practices around which these fields now coalesce. Moreover, this conference aims to explore how a pragmatic sociology and history of post-disaster relief and reconstruction might shed light on little known vernacular practices.
4-Archives: this conference will pay particular attention to archival practices and the archive of urban disasters. Extant collections focus primarily on public authorities and humanitarian organisations, making it difficult to recover the experience of devastated communities. Further complicating matters, catastrophes destroy key urban archives (from cadastres to municipal records). In an emergency, preserving evidence of survivors’ pre-disaster lives or documenting their contributions to urban recovery rarely take priority. Resolving these archival limitations is essential to writing the longitudinal, sociohistorical studies of urban disasters we aim to promote. Our aim is to encourage an interdisciplinary reflection on the collection and dissemination of experiences and best practices of historical disaster management. We also seek to demonstrate the role that the historical discipline can play in the professional development of disaster management practitioners. History is not a repository of “lessons” to draw on uncritically. Focussing on the construction of the archive of disasters, on the complex temporalities of urban crises, and on historical methodology itself will help practitioners critically reflect on crises past and enrich their approach to future disasters.
It is hoped that this conference will help promote and deepen the interdisciplinary work on urban disasters and resilience currently ongoing across Warwick faculties, institutes, and research centres. It also aims to bring to campus a number of external colleagues who have been at the forefront of these discussions in the UK, Europe, and beyond.
