Between 1411 and 1416, Gdansk was the scene for a complex conflict between town population, council and landlord, eventually resulting in violent riots. The peculiar character of these riots becomes apparent when the Gdansk chronicles are compared to the historical accounts from other, better-known conflicts, particularly sources depicting the Lübeck Knochenhauer rebellion, the Hamburg brewer's rebellion of 1481 and the 1449–53 Gentse opstand. A key difference is the extent to which chroniclers understood and portrayed the ritualized action that occurred in the urban uprisings. Comparing the contemporary chronicles of the Gdansk events with the town's urban historiography 100 years later also shows that this early conflict with the landlord later played a significant role in urban self-definition.

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.

Between 1815 and 1860, Nice became one of Europe's leading health and leisure resorts, annually hosting an international wintering population of thousands. During a period marked by the rise of the nation-state and national sentiment, Nice was celebrated as ‘une ville cosmopolite’. This article suggests that while geographic, historic and economic factors provided preconditions for cosmopolitanism, Nice's emergence as a peculiarly cosmopolitan town in the first half of the nineteenth century owes much to a combination of forward-looking urban developments and long-established traditions of face-to-face elite sociability, directed and shaped largely by women.

Accounts of nineteenth-century burial practice in England borrow heavily from French historiography, which describes the way that scientific agendas drove a shift from traditional churchyard use to secular, municipal cemetery management. A challenge to this meta-narrative uses the example of Sheffield. In this highly industrialized city, the nineteenth century did not see a dichotomized translation from churchyard to cemetery; the Church Building Act (1818) was more effective in meeting burial demand than the 1836 General Cemetery; the formal closure of churchyards did not always lead to a cessation of burial; and by the century's end, church burial provision remained substantial.

This article re-examines the 1860 census for Savannah Georgia. It melds the free and slave census to gain insights into slave ownership, owners’ occupations and makes tentative suggestions as to slave occupations. It argues that the concentration of slaveholding among a minority of locally born residents explains both the tensions evident in white society during the 1850s and actions taken to ease them. It also demonstrates that the widely used data for the number of urban slaves in Savannah overstates the actual number by c. 20 per cent. The census thus complicates our understanding of the vitality of late antebellum urban slavery.

This article argues that development and modernity have had spatial manifestations. It considers understandings of modern space in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria through the study of University College Ibadan, the country's first university institution founded in 1948. It contends that the university was shaped by existing West African conceptions of modern space and university buildings took on new meanings with the shifting politics of decolonization. The article also suggests that colonial development involved a range of groups and forms of knowledge. It seeks to recognize the strength of colonial institutions and cultures but also the limits to and contingencies in late colonial power.

Oral accounts of life over seven decades in Dashalanr, a popular neighbourhood in central Beijing, reveal a social world that despite being shaped by the state's policies of social and political classification, housing and employment, has been resistant to complete appropriation by them. Based on research in the neighbourhood since 2005, and drawing on Xuanwu District archives, this article examines local residents’ accounts of long decades of hardship and neglect. With an analytical framework that links gender with temporality, place and space, it suggests ways in which their singular experiences can be read as historical narrative.

Three new cities were created in conjunction with Her Majesty the queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012: Chelmsford, Perth and St Asaph. They were the winners of a competition which had no clear rules, no transparency and no proper feedback. The modern style is to create new cities in conjunction with a royal event, the winners to be decided by competition. How has this come to be the case? This article looks at the 2012 competition in the light of the ways in which cities have been created in the United Kingdom since the explicit link with Anglican cathedrals was dropped in 1888, and it asks whether it is worth the effort? The author concludes that what was initially conceived as a means of distinguishing between rivals for the status of city has become a competition driven by modern forms of civic boosterism, and a blatant opportunity for political patronage by governments who hide behind royal ‘privilege’. For all the effort expended, the distinction is hardly recognized outside of the town hall.