Urban Seasonality: New Paths in Urban Environmental History

Abstract

Seasons shape infrastructures, temporalities, and life worlds in fundamental ways. Urbanites have long recognized the seasonality of their environments, but seasons have been little studied by historians. This special section explores the diverse ways that urban seasonality affects urban life, focusing on cities in temperate zones across the globe, from North America to Europe to Japan. This collection of essays shows how seasonal rhythms, differentiated from weather (with its transient nature) and climate (with its vast scales) can reveal new areas of inquiry for historians concerned with how urban environments are located in time and space. Taken together, these collected essays move beyond seasonal descriptions to frame seasonality as an analytical and methodological tool, suggesting new ways of thinking about everything from childhood to potholes, social solidarity, style, sewage and human-animal relations. This introduction is an effort to focus our attention on urban seasonality as generative of often surprising ways of approaching familiar topics in urban history.