Perspectivas Urbanas / Urban Perspectives

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News
SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON URBAN HISTORY: EUROPEAN CITY IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Athens-Piraeus (Greece), october 27th-30th, 2004


You are invited to take part in the Seventh International Conference of the European Association of Urban Historians to be held in Athens-Piraeus in 2004. This biennial conference provides a forum for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, planners and others working on all aspects of urban history. The conference will take place close to famous Athenian sites, where many of the ideas and concepts of the modern European city were born. The conference is to be held in the autumn of 2004 in order to enable participants to benefit from the extensive new amenities created in Athens for the Olympic Games of 2004.

Athens and its harbour Piraeus have a proud history going back more than 6000 years, from the time when it was the centre of commercial trade in the Mediterranean to centuries of complete abandonment after the destruction of the harbour in 80 BC. With the creation of the modern Greek state in 1834, Athens became not only the capital of Greece but also a symbol of its liberation from 400 years of occupation by the Ottoman Empire. Over a period of less than two centuries, Athens has grown in population from a few thousand inhabitants in Plaka, Acropolis Hill, to more than four million in contemporary Greater Athens. Piraeus rapidly became Greece's gateway to the world, as well as the country's largest industrial city in the nineteenth century, and today remains the most important harbour in the Eastern Mediterranean. The rapid and largely uncontrolled expansion of Greater Athens has not been easy on the natural basin, enclosed by mountains and the sea. Nevertheless, large areas have been vacated for access to and protection of archaeological monuments - a testament to the power and meaning of the past in modern Athens and Piraeus. Participants are invited from all over Europe and beyond.

Call for paper:

If you wish to present a paper at any of the sessions, please send a one page outline to the appropriate session organizers, as soon as possible and in any case before October , 2003. You will be notified of acceptance by the end of November 2003. Accepted paper givers must send their text [max. six pages -420 words per page - 20 minutes of speech]. This should be done before April 30, 2004. You must send one copy to the session organizer. You must send one copy to the conference organizer. You must also register for the conference. In order to ensure maximum effective discussion we intend to place papers on the conference web site also by April 2004.

For further information: http://www.le.ac.uk/urbanhist/urbanconf/athens.html