While town twinning has played a crucial role in reconciliation and reconstruction processes in Europe after World War II, urban historians have not yet paid sufficient attention to it. This special issue thus addresses this historiographical neglect through a set of case-studies that examine the role of twinned cities in post-war reconciliation and reconstruction between former enemy nations and across the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. The framework that underpins all contributions rests on the use of ‘twinned cities’ as an umbrella term to denote various forms of inter-municipal links and builds on similarly broad definitions of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘reconstruction’.

This article provides a fresh perspective on the history of East German town twinning in the early era of détente. While previous studies have analysed East German town twinning solely as an instrument of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) to establish paradiplomatic relations in Western Europe, I explore the dynamic inter-relation between global, national and local actors and the ambiguities of urban détente. I reveal the importance of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities (Deutsche Städte- und Gemeindetag, DStuG), the East German association of municipalities, which crucially shaped the East German concept of urban détente through practising trans-local exchange. The role played by the DStuG was backed by the United Towns Organization (UTO), a non-governmental organization founded in 1957 whose aim was to form a global network of cities beyond the East–West divide. In 1960, the DStuG joined the UTO as a member and consciously used its new position to expand its scope and improve its national status through actively working on the conceptualization of urban détente. However, the conflicts between the East German foreign ministry and the UTO grew bigger, resulting in the marginalization of the DStuG and town twinning in the SED’s concept of détente. These conflicts encouraged the UTO to redefine its global approach.

In 1959, East German Dresden and western Polish Wrocław were twinned to promote cross-border contact between political leaders, worker delegations and cultural groups. Officially formed to promote worker solidarity among friendly East Bloc regimes, in practice the inter-relationship exposed a troubling history that was just below the surface. In the recent aftermath of Nazi defeat, the German population of Breslau (over 600,000 people) had fled or been expelled from a city which had long been German. At the same time that Breslau became Polish Wrocław, a significant number of old Breslauers settled in the East German province of Saxony, especially Dresden. This article uses archival and published sources to show how, under the umbrella of worker exchanges, field trips and official amity, the sister-city programme unintentionally became a venue for German exiles from Breslau to encounter Wrocławian delegations in Dresden and to return ‘home’ to discover Wrocław’s post-war Polish reality.

Town twinning is often seen as a linear driving force of European integration. This article argues that town twinning’s historicity is more complex. The initial post-war period, according to today’s practitioners’ accounts, was characterized by a high degree of personal involvement which transformed into an exposure to relationship uncertainty. By way of contrast, twinning practices since the 1990s are reported as being driven by a more managerial logic. The shift from the imaginary of ‘reconciliation’ to that of ‘integration’ comes along with a change in twinning practices, the distribution of responsibilities and the share of personal involvement and exposure.

This article addresses the beginnings of the twinning relationship between Coventry and Kiel to introduce and exemplify the idea of ‘urban internationalism’ as a new lens onto urban histories of town twinning initiatives and a contribution to the historiography of British town twinning. Focusing on paradiplomatic initiatives by municipal officials, religious dignitaries and other citizens in Coventry and Kiel, the article examines the role that cities played in British–German reconstruction and reconciliation in the period from the end of World War II until the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

This article explores social dancing as the setting for moral struggles related to the urban night. Based on analysis of Estonian-language newspapers, I look at the historical context and expressed viewpoints linked with nocturnal public dance events in Estonian cities from 1880 to 1940. The established moral order was endangered by those staying out dancing late into the night. In the context of the multinationalism of urban areas and the national emancipation movement of the ethnic Estonian population, I investigate the transgressions and hazards that night dancing was perceived to bring, most significantly, threat to productivity, health and virtue.

This article aims to analyse housing solutions used in nineteenth-century Lisbon to deal with explosive demographic and urban development. It particularly focuses on two specific types of industrial housing ensembles created in Lisbon called pátios and vilas operárias. The goal of this article is to analyse the spatial distribution of pátios and vilas operárias in Lisbon. Through the potential of geographic information systems, we aim to understand in a spatial-quantitative way the spatial patterns of these kinds of industrial housing ensembles for the most deprived population. To do so, we used spatial modelling and spatial analysis procedures, including simple spatial distribution, mean centre, standard distance, directional distance and density estimation (hotspots). The new contribution of this article lies in the increase of scientific knowledge about these forms of working-class housing – the pátios and vilas operárias – and their spatial implementation in Lisbon in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This article explores and complicates notions of public and private urban mobility through the exploration of one site of transport, the Kowloon railway terminus in Hung Hom, Hong Kong. It considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? This article explores the Hung Hom railway terminus and its tensions and interactions with automobility and other forms of transport, most pertinently the bus network. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further throws into question seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

Using the city of Bangalore as a specific instance, this article puts together the framework of metabolic cities and techno-spheres to show how ecology and infrastructure constituted colonial cities. Divided between the colonial cantonment governed by the British and the petah or native market town/village governed by the Mysore prince, colonial medics were concerned by numerous diseases affecting the city. Attempts to control the flows of water from the cantonment to the native town proved futile. Amidst famine like conditions from the 1870s, chronic water shortages affected the city. In the 1890s, the plague struck Bangalore. The plague affected the barracks, streets, neighbourhoods and homes. Together, the diseases and water shortages led to new piped water schemes drawn from outside the city and wholesale changes in housing. The article moves beyond the framework of ‘sanitary cities’, at the confluence of colonialism, the body, fixed infrastructures and micro and macro ecological phenomena.