Call for Papers, deadline 22 October 2025
Organiser: European Association of Urban History (EAUH) (Hilde Greefs & Jasper Segerink, University of Antwerp; Rosa Salzberg, University of Trento).
Location: Barcelona
Country: Spain
Takes place: In person
Dates: 02.09-2026 - 05.09.2026
Deadline: 22.10.2025.
Website: https://www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu/sessions/#session39
We are inviting papers for our session on the historical practices of lodging at the European Association for Urban History Conference. The session explores how lodgers and their hosts have shaped their urban environments, and vice versa. We welcome papers from any geographical region, roughly from 1500 to the present.
Paper proposals are to be submitted before 22 October via the conference website, and by selecting Main Session 39.
Title: Lodging practices and networks of work, migration, and sociability. Long term perspectives across European cities and beyond (1500-present)
Keywords: lodging, migration, housing, urbanisation
Synthesis: Lodging has long shaped urban networks through mobility, labour migration, and social exchange. Yet its history remains fragmented. This session explores the long-term evolution of urban lodging, tracing its changing forms and roles in cities across Europe and beyond.
Long Abstract: Lodging has long played a crucial role in urban networks, fostering mobility, labour migration, and social exchanges. In its broadest sense, lodging includes the renting of rooms or beds for short or interim periods in the houses of hosts, either commercial or private. The practice has a long history and has taken various forms, yet crucially we lack insights into its continuities and changes across time and space. Historical research on lodging has often remained fragmented, either confined to specific regions or periods, or footnoted within broader studies of housing, migration, and urban poverty. This session aims to explore urban lodging as a historical phenomenon over the long term, examining its changing roles and functions in urban networks across Europe and beyond.
The session is guided by the leading question: How have lodgers and their hosts shaped urban environments, and how have these environments, in turn, shaped lodging practices over time? Addressing this question requires an examination of lodging not only as a form of housing but as an integral part of urban networks of work, migration, and sociability. In so doing, the session contributes to recent debates seeking to structurally incorporate transient populations and non-normative household constellations in urban histories. Given the conference’s theme, the session approaches lodgers and their hosts as crucial agents in broader urban networks, and aims to foster comparative perspectives from different regions and time periods to identify similarities and differences.
We particularly welcome papers addressing the following themes:
• Lodgers and their hosts as agents in urban labour and migration networks
• Lodging environments: their materiality and spatial organisation
• Social profiles and dynamics: gender, ethnicity, and class
• Lodging and urban crises: housing shortages, labour crises and forced migrations
• Lodging beyond Europe: case studies from colonial, industrial, and postcolonial contexts
By bringing together scholars working on different geographical and temporal contexts, this session aims to foster new comparative perspectives on the long-term history of lodging. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to broader debates on urbanisation, migration, and housing, while situating lodging at the intersection of cities’ networks and their transnational histories.