They do not grow restricted by planning law and cadastre, but rather proliferate into a surrounding area that is difficult to delimit people change, whatever the above-mentioned statistics suggest about their stationary way of life, back and forth between city and countryside, sometimes daily, sometimes seasonally. But what does it mean to live in a city? Do seemingly unambiguous conventions calculate that every community of more than 2000 inhabitants should be called a city (as the French administration assumes) or that one should orientate oneself by historically grown city law (as in the German case)? Obviously not, because the cities of the Global South, be they of megalomaniacal proportions or just average greetings, obviously do not follow such criteria from European historical tradition. This statement was visualized with two intersecting trend lines, so that everyone can see that this tendency will linearly expand into the future – reversal is out of the question.

With an accuracy that is impressive at first glance, statisticians announced some years ago that the time had come when more people would live in cities than in the countryside. It is by no means a new insight that urbanization is not only a sign of “development” but also poses enormous challenges to exactly this development. The history of development has a long tradition, but it has often been concerned with the involvement of international organizations, national frameworks, or the imperial constellations of metropolis and (former) colony. The editors have succeeded in bringing together specialists in the history of development with the young field of global urban history and putting them into a fruitful dialogue. The present issue is a further example of this successful strategy. Link to complete issue: Editorial Global history has achieved its impressive progress not least by suggesting intellectual entanglements between previously little connected fields of research.

Cities of the global south reader