Chichester challenges the orthodoxy of urban decline and a decadent church in late medieval England through the proactive role of the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral as landowner and developer; civic-ecclesiastical harmony; an economic and social environment conducive to wealth creation, entrepreneurial activity, investment and real estate management; productive artisans; and social cohesion. Comparisons with other cathedral cities furthers our embryonic understanding of the urban economy in this genre.

Divided into three separate phases, different causative factors are presented for the emergence of urban centres in India from AD 600–1200. Agrarian expansion and the growth of markets encouraged trade, both internal and external, and the foundation of towns owed much to this interplay and to the establishment of religious centres.

This article examines the reports written by Gerolamo Vano, a spy working in early seventeenth-century Venice. It concentrates on their form rather than their content in a attempt to assess Vano's story-telling skills. It is also an experiment in historical story-telling, which departs from some of the conventions of academic writing and embraces the melodramatic qualities of Vano's writing. In short, the article's form is used to comment allegorically upon its content.

By examining a major port, a capital and a planned model city, this article links the diffusion of street lighting in nineteenth-century Latin America to changing notions of the night and of technology. In these three cities, lighting emerged as an eminently flexible strategy of modernization. Street lighting attracted urban officials and elite residents, who could economically install it as an antidote to crime, a complement to night life, or an emblem of progress.

This paper investigates genteel, or middle- and upper-class boarding houses in Melbourne in the first decades of the twentieth century. It argues that urban historians have neglected boarding as a facet of Australian city life, preferring instead to use a limited range of statistical sources to focus on the importance of nuclear families, suburbia and home ownership as defining features of the Australian city. Utilizing archival, literary and oral sources, this paper re-creates daily life in a variety of these genteel boarding houses and calls for a more ethnological approach to uncovering the urban past.

These four exciting books fill in what Sir Peter Hall's monumental Cities in Civilization left undone. To be sure, they do not tell the entire story of China's five (possibly six or more according to the latest archaeological findings) thousand years of uninterrupted urban experience, but together they are a flying start, especially from the perspective of one kind of elite or another.

American fascination with the frontier and concern that economic progress might waste the beauty and vast resources of the wilderness has helped environmental history in the United States to thrive for some time. Many publications tended to be conservationist and ‘foundationalist’ in terms of the lofty place ascribed to nature. These traits were shaped by the subject's formative links with political environmentalism, as both phenomena came to life in the 1960s as self-conscious and independent activities. Even after scholars became more interested in the role played by the capitalist system in conditioning the way that cities made demands on the environment, environmental historians’ study of urban growth, including the search for water supplies, tended to focus upon the impacts on the land or its original Indian inhabitants, on how rural harmonies were disrupted by urban greed – in sum to cede to a ‘broader agroecological approach’ as the dominant orthodoxy within the discipline. American environmental historians, of course, are fixated by these issues and have engaged in subtle and profound debates about the proper purpose and methods of their calling.

Urban biographies are growing in numbers upon the shelves. A clutch of mainly English ones were reviewed recently in these pages by David Reeder with a sense of cautious enthusiasm and warnings about the dangers of fragmentation in these often topic-oriented multi-authored volumes. Recent examples include Donald Miller's 1996 study of Chicago, an example of unashamedly scholarly boosterism. The massive Burrows and Wallace study of New York followed in 1999 and presented a detailed episodic account of the city. In 1,383 pages they have still only got to 1898. This book displayed a love of city with overwhelming knowledge, but presented a very readable story for those with stamina. Scotland already has the two Glasgow volumes, also included in Reeder's review. To this have now been added multi-authored studies of Aberdeen and Dundee and two more accounts of Glasgow

This review is intended to provide a broadly based survey of doctoral theses in urban history completed at British and North American institutions. As in previous years the definition of ‘urban history’ has deliberately been given a wide interpretation that allows the inclusion both of theses that address the physical form of the city and those that address the diversity that emerges from urban life. It is the latter aspect that dominates the topics dealt with in this year's review. While this review provides a brief summary of theses, access to a comprehensive range is available electronically. The Index of Theses is located at http://www.theses.com/ and Dissertations Abstracts International at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations.