This Element provides the history of the formation of urban environments via the adoption of fossil fuels and environmental governance.

'Globalizing Urban Environmental History' melds the methodological prescriptions of global urban history, the innovative methods of environmental history, and the interdisciplinary field of urban political ecology to trace the contours of a global urban environmental history. I argue that a global lens fixed on material, political, and cultural flows, movements, and connections-all of which were founded upon the structural integration of urban spaces through capitalist expansion and empire-sheds new light on the histories of specific urban political ecologies, on the one hand, and large-scale urban patterns on the other. These patterns comprise shared urban environmental imaginaries, strategies of environmental governance, and a global urban physical and cultural landscape stitched together by the adoption of fossil-fuel energies.