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Research in urban history: recent theses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century municipal administration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

STEFAN COUPERUS
STEFAN COUPERUS*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University, Drift 10, NL – 3512 BS Utrecht, The Netherlands
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Extract

The ways in which the organization of local government and the practice of political power locally have changed over time has attracted heightened interest from urban and administrative historians over recent decades. Much of this burgeoning interest has paralleled the concurrent decline in the status and powers of local government since the 1980s. In recent years, a shifting focus from government to governance has allowed the historian to re-conceptualize approaches to urban political power. Urban governance denotes a wider system of government by encapsulating the complex range of actors, interests and resources, which straddle the public, private and voluntary sectors, each with a vested interest in the way that political power is organized and practised locally. By broadening their approach to urban political power, urban historians have, since the late 1980s, elicited new perspectives on municipal administration, reattaching it with the national and juridical frameworks of analysis from which it had been fractured. In general, this growing number of local, regional and cross-national historical studies hints at a more complex and interesting municipal dimension which transcends previously impermeable divisions between the private and the public spheres, between political democracy and administrative bureaucracy, between the central state and municipal administration, and between national and transnational contexts of administrative thought and practice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 322 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 On this, see Couperus, Stefan, Smit, Christianne and Wolffram, Dirk Jan (eds.), In Control of the City: Local Elites and the Dynamics of Urban Politics, 1800–1960 (Leuven, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Exemplary studies include Hietala, Marjatta, Services and Urbanization at the Turn of the Century. The Diffusion of Innovations (Helsinki, 1987)Google Scholar; Cohen, William B., Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: Five Municipalities in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1998)Google Scholar; Gaspari, Oscar, L'Italia dei municipi. Il movimento comunale in età liberale (1879–1906) (Rome, 1998)Google Scholar; Rugge, Fabio, Il governo della città prussiane tra ‘800 e ‘900 (Milan, 1989)Google Scholar; Saunier, Pierre-Yves, ‘Sketches from the urban internationale, 1910–50: voluntary associations, international institutions and US philanthropic foundations’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25 (2001), 380–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Since published as Hunt, Cathy, A Woman of the People: Alice Arnold of Coventry (Coventry, 2008)Google Scholar.

4 A commercial edition of Kaal's thesis is available in Dutch. Kaal, Harm, Het hoofd van de stad. Amsterdam en zijn burgemeester tijdens het interbellum (Amsterdam, 2008)Google Scholar.

5 This is also available in print: Couperus, Stefan, De machinerie van de stad. Stadsbestuur als idee en praktijk in Nederland en Amsterdam, 1900–1940 (Amsterdam, 2009)Google Scholar.

6 Stoker, Gerry, ‘Regime theory and urban politics’, in Judge, David, Stoker, Gerry and Wolman, Harold, Theories of Urban Politics (London, 1995) 54–71Google Scholar, at 54.

7 Two seminal works in this respect are Cohen, Urban Government and the Rise of the French City, and Topalov, Christian (ed.), Laboratoires du nouveau siècle: la nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914 (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar. A shortened version of Payre's dissertation is available in print: Payre, Renaud, Une science communale? Réseaux réformateurs et municipalité providence (Paris, 2007)Google Scholar.