This article examines evidence for community among immigrants in ancient Transtiberim (modern Trastevere), a section of Rome that was both socially and spatially distinctive for much of the city's history. The only part of Rome located on the west bank of the Tiber River, Transtiberim was the heart of Rome's Jewish and Syrian communities. These immigrants and their descendants maintained certain traditions, languages and customs from home; participated in civic institutions that helped foster community at the local level; and laboured in institutions that were vital to the capital's urban economy. Though marginal in some ways, Transtiberim was also a neighbourhood where immigrants and their descendants found community and made vital contributions to the life of the imperial city.

‘Honesty and dissent’ explores strategies of political resistance in Tudor Norwich through an analysis of the city's prestigious Company of St George. Nearly a quarter of those nominated for membership during the second half of the sixteenth century failed to appear when summoned and declined to take up the livery; most eventually complied, but only after fines, threats of imprisonment and delays that could last a year or more. They pursued a strategy of passive resistance that allowed them to register objections while conforming to expectations of ‘honest’ behaviour. That underappreciated approach enabled citizens to push back against urban authorities without compromising their standing in the community.

Urban renewal in the British Isles in the long eighteenth century was based on new municipal powers made possible by parliament. Focusing on Jamaica between 1770 and 1805, which passed legislation for the ‘policing’ – in the broader Scottish sense – of its towns, demonstrates that it was a global phenomenon common to the whole British Atlantic. However, the solutions it produced were also specific to local circumstances. Jamaican elites feared invasion, revolt and the dissolution of the slave society. Their police acts reflected these concerns, and demonstrate the alternative pathway that urban modernity took in this part of the British Atlantic.

Through the example of Danish provincial town, Odense, the article explores the role of visual culture in the construction and transformation of nineteenth-century provincial identities and placemaking in an industrial town. It demonstrates that while representations may follow certain aesthetic conventions of urban imagery and ideas of urban prestige, they both reflect and contribute to the construction and reproduction of a specific local, imagined geography; an imagined geography where initially history and nature and as time progresses signs of industriousness and in particular an infrastructure of civic culture merges into a narrative of an ancient and industrious place.

The article analyses the characteristics of the public water service in the city of Bilbao between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. It addresses both the study of potable water and the different uses of non-potable water. In addition, the article includes the relationship between the water supply and the population that receives it. We are interested in knowing who enjoyed it at home, linking demographic sources with records of the water service of the city.

This article explores the genesis of small parks in Tokyo following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. It sheds new light on an example of innovative urban design and post-disaster reconstruction, and highlights the growing place that children occupied in the minds of bureaucrats and urban planners. The small parks were designed for children first and foremost. Originally conceived as a means to increase space for school children to play and exercise, all 52 parks were strategically located beside primary schools. As the state's goals of social management expanded, however, officials increasingly recognized the potential to use small parks as sites of rest and guided recreation, as well as emergency refuge. A history of Tokyo's small parks thus offers a window in to the growing understanding about the relationship between the built environment, health and society in inter-war Japan.

This article, based on western primary sources, seeks to investigate the relationship between western imperialism in China and the making of modern Chinese statecraft in urban form, focusing on the French perspective and on historical institutionalism. Both internal rebellions and western empires shaped modern Chinese cities. The Chinese response to western intervention is a more complicated story. Pace Paul Cohen, we do need to know about foreign activities in modern China – not as ‘impact-response’ and ‘tradition-modernity’ paradigms – but rather as part of local history, both in terms of local administration and urban landscape. Euro-American expansion and exploitation are not part of a unitary or totalizing enterprise, and warfare and Franco-British conflicts facilitated the making of modern municipal administration in the French Concession of Shanghai; on the other hand, Chinese forces indirectly shaped the structure of the institutions of imperialism, as well as pointing to divergent national approaches to imperialism.

Australian cities were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by the spread of the automobile and suburbanization. This article examines the patterns of retail diffusion that followed and the resultant adoption of the shopping centre form. Further, it considers the broader implications of retail innovation during a period of urban disruption, revealing intersections between urban geographies, business innovation and retail hierarchies. In the Australian case, dominant firms were able to leverage their market power to adapt to shifting retail geographies and new technologies, while some small entrepreneurial developers catering to the needs of these established retailers laid foundations for national and international expansion. A by-product of these processes was the creation of a unique Australian shopping centre form.