This article presents comparative research on the role of towns and urban networks in the process of constructing space during conquest and colonization in selected ‘non-Roman’ regions of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It focuses on Kulmerland in Prussia and Meath in Ireland. In both regions, the creation of urban networks and new regional spaces entailed the use of pre-existing settlement. However, reception intensity was determined by both the state of preservation of the earlier settlement and the needs of territorial authorities. This comparison shows ways of using symbolic potential (names, central places) and former settlement points for the construction of cities. In both territories, the functions of central places were particularized due to subinfeudation.

The scholarship of high medieval warfare tends not to emphasize the contribution made by urban communities, regarding cities as the passive objects of military campaigning. This article shows that the inhabitants of medieval London, however, had emerged as an organized military community from an early date, and were regarded by contemporaries as unusually disciplined, effective, fighters.

Using several cities in the late medieval Southern Low Countries as a case-study, this article deals with the relation between urban space and different forms of political protest. Urban commoners were aware of the powerful symbolism of certain places in the late medieval city and used that to their advantage during large-scale revolts. Yet the use of space was not limited to the dramatic occupations during these revolts. This article uncovers a wide range of strategies and tactics that common people used to act within given spaces to make their resistance possible. A spatial analysis of several instances of large- and smaller-scale resistance shows that space was intrinsically connected with how and when any form of resistance developed in late medieval cities. As such, the article aims to contribute to the literature on the importance of space in late medieval urban politics, in which attention to smaller-scale practices has been very limited.

This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

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.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English-speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg's black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial considerations determined the council's provision of leisure facilities.

The years 1945–55 were a period of reconstruction for Italy; the following decade was one of economic growth. An aspect of this transition is analysed here, in relation to the forms of social integration created in working-class neighbourhoods. The case-study focuses on Milan, and the two organizations studied are the consulte popolari (the ‘people's councils’), created by the left in the immediate post-war period, and the ‘social centres’ created in the mid-1950s by the IACP (the Autonomous Institute of Public Housing). Both were attempts to involve the new, outlying suburbs in the city's political life, each of them trying to adapt to different political phases. Both, I would like to suggest, succeeded in achieving certain results.