In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant and apathetic demographic black holes.

This article brings together two Geographical Information Systems (GIS) datasets – building-level land-use data from the 1852–54 Perris Fire Insurance Atlas, and geocoded home addresses from the 1854 city directory – to explore how desirable and undesirable conditions of the built environment accounted for new dynamics of residential separation in mid-nineteenth-century New York. Using spatial analysis, it shows how early forms of residential separation were driven by the desire of elites to create secluded residential neighbourhoods. Further, although stark contrasts delineated the extremes of wealth and poverty, the city's dominant landscape was defined by in-between conditions and subtle variations in built environment and residential distance.

For a quarter century, the term ‘class’ has been anathema for most writers of premodern urban history. The term's associations with discredited forms of analysis – forms often dubiously but persistently associated with Marxism – continue to hamper its reintroduction. In the absence of ‘class’, or a term like it, however, meaningful discussion of ‘horizontal’ divisions in urban society has dwindled. The present article suggests that ‘class’ can and should be reintroduced into our analysis, but that this should be done in an informed way, which takes into account the principal possible meanings of the term. To this end, we analyse the ways in which urban historians have employed the term ‘class’ and find four principal usages. Two of these are ‘material’ and two are ‘institutional’. It is further suggested that certain institutions, such as the nobility and town governments in Europe, can be ‘class determining’, insofar as they channel economic and productive differences into effective political, legal and ideological ‘classes’. This insight, and the typology it is based upon, open the possibility for integrating ‘class’ analysis with recent work in both European and Global contexts.

Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what was later called the ‘New World’, was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. While it has been called the ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’, discussion of racial exclusion and marginalization is mostly absent in the city's architecture and urban history. This article investigates how architecture and urban design helped reinforce the colonizers’ control over enslaved peoples. Specifically, we explore the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood, its church and the slave warehouse known as La Negreta. Drawing on historical maps and archival documents, we draw attention to how the spatial and material construction of Santa Bárbara constituted and maintained social and racial structures of oppression.

This article is a historiographical analysis of the paths urban history has taken in Latin America. Its perspective is comparative, with particular attention to Mexico as well as references to several other countries. The article offers a general view of the ‘state of the art’, particularly analysing the convoluted routes urban history has navigated. At all levels, there has been uncertainty over the object of study. Latin America was affected by a plethora of development theories. In Mexico, there is an untenable but persistent view of urban historiography as absent or lacking. The following is a brief account of urban history in Latin America, with special analysis and critical examination of the routes taken to date, and a proposal for ways out of the labyrinth.