This panel brings together urban-environmental histories focused on four world regions, from Latin America and the United States to the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia. We examine how national and colonial authorities reshaped landscapes to generate capital, resolve social and engineering challenges, and foster new imaginaries and publics. We also explore the importance of local knowledge, environmental conditions, and regional or national identity in shaping the way city-building efforts evolved in each site. Several questions unite our studies. As urban historians of different world regions, what do we gain from taking a global and environmental perspective? How can cross-pollination across geographic divides enrich the study of urban environments in specific places? And how does attention to nature and the environment change how we understand the history of cities?

We address these questions through four studies of urban environments stretching from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Queenie Lin traces the interaction between Dutch colonial authorities and Chinese diasporic communities in port cities of Monsoon Asia, underscoring the necessity for local building adaptations in tropical environments. Vyta Pivo examines land reclamation projects in Florida in the nineteenth century, when settler colonial projects used European canal technologies to drain freshwater swamps and generate plantations and new settlements. Andra Chastain explores the ways local and regional identity shaped cultural understandings of urban air in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Santiago, setting the stage for conflicts over air pollution by the mid-twentieth century. Finally, Katherine Zubovich argues for the importance of seeing cities in relation to the extractive economies they relied upon as she follows building materials mined in and transported from Estonia to Soviet cities that boomed after the Second World War. Adrián Lerner will comment on these papers to highlight the stakes of studying urban environmental history in comparative and global perspective.