Resources

Bibliography of sources for student reports on individual cities, links to pandemic archiving projects, and useful websites in urban studies.

Bibliographies by City

Cairo, Egypt
Johannesburg, South Africa
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Kyoto, Japan
Melbourne, Australia
Nanjing, China
Osaka, Japan
Taipei, Taiwan
Tehran, Iran
Tokyo, Japan
Vienna, Austria

Web Resources in Urban Studies

Organizations and archives of interest for the study of cities.

Georgetown Global Cities Initiative
The umbrella for a wide range of ongoing projects at Georgetown University related to cities. This website is a proud part of the Georgetown Initiative.

Urban Spatial Observatory
An interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars at Georgetown, Brown University, and the Center for Policy Research. Includes Georgetown professor Rajesh Veeraraghavan’s project mapping public relief in Delhi during the pandemic.

Georgetown University Library Research Guides
Plus, an extensive research guide dedicated specifically to Urban and Regional Planning, including various lists of journals, books, newspapers, and related websites.

H-Net Discussion Log Search
H-Net is a network of academic discussion lists. There is an H-Urban, which is usually US-centric but still a potential resource. Scholars on many of these lists provide good bibliographic information.

Wikipedia List of Archives
Wikipedia’s list of public archives, by nation. Most have links. If you find a public archive of primary documents and data not on this list, add it to the list.

GWU Library’s Global Resource Center, Asia
A general source for China, Japan, Okinawa, Korea, and Taiwan. You can also visit the library in Foggy Bottom for physical books and archives.

The Hypercities Project
A digital humanities project based at UCLA, the website tries to overlay historical maps on google earth data and to include narrative reports for individual cities.

Global and World Cities Research Network
Research bulletins, publications, and data sets published by a network of geographers, mostly in Europe. The focus is on the economic relationships between cities globally.

The UN Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat)

The UN Human Settlements Programme Global Urban Observatory
Houses UN Habitat reports on cities. This site promises a lot of data, but unfortunately has a number of dead links and a database that seems difficult to use. Still, worth exploring.

Urban Waste and Pollution History: A Bibliography
This is a short bibliography on the subject of pollution and cities, collected by Dr Jan Oosthoek, an environmental historian based at the University of Newcastle in England.

City One-Minutes
A fascinating video art project with a great interface. One-minute videos from cities around the world for every hour of the day. Sadly, now defunct, although vestiges appear in YouTube. Someone should try this again.

Pecha-Kucha 20-20 and Pecha-Kucha Night
An interesting experiment in presenting stories and visual materials before an audience, with a strong urban and architectural component. The name comes from the Japanese word for “chit chat.” Now a global organization with events in thousands of cities.

Cities at Night
Space Station images of cities around the world at night introduced in a short article with a video. Night lighting is revealing of the morphology of the city. Visibility from space is also an indicator of the enormous amounts of energy spent to maintain nighttime activities in cities.

Japanese National Land Agency
Web-based GIS system (current) and aerial photograph database (1974–1990).

LSE Cities
This is a portal site for research, publications and event announcements from the London School of Economics urban studies project. Mostly on the problems of contemporary large cities. Lots of interesting material.

LSE Asia Research Centre

International County/City Management Association Newsletters
Provide daily updates on urban developments, primarily in the United States.

New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens Facebook Group
Offers a wide variety of articles and discussions on all aspects of urban planning.

The World Bank Urban Development Research
The World Bank has a compilation of research papers and briefs on urban development, including a fair amount on those who live in urban poverty in the developing world.

The World Bank DataBank
World Information on various development indicators, many of which are relevant to the urban ecosystems/planning. Data is categorized by country and many countries have databases that allow the user to generate data that is region specific. Additionally, the World Bank platform supports real-time manipulation of the data and automatically generates graphs and tables. 

UNCTAD Work Programme on FDI Statistics
The UN files on FDI worldwide, with country reports and worldwide rankings and tables.

Pandemic Documentation Projects

Archiving COVID-19
Project by Professor Ananya Chakravarti and students at Georgetown University.

Voices from the Field
Corona Chronicles: Voices from the Field, a project of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.

Teach311 + COVID-19
Another collaboration in Asia, with journals, video, and teaching resources. The site started in 2011 in response to the earthquake-tsunami disaster in Northeast Japan, but now focuses on the pandemic.

History of Science ON CALL Teaching Tools
A rich collection of class projects, teaching resources, and primary materials related to the pandemic and the history of disease, affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.