In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant and apathetic demographic black holes.

Hanoverian London was a city full of people, a city built by people for people. These impressions dominate traditional studies of the metropolis to a remarkable extent. By contrast, historians have largely overlooked the ubiquitous presence of non-human animals in the city and underestimate their impact on urban life. This article challenges key assumptions about the Hanoverian metropolis by highlighting the role of its quadruped architects, and specifically its working horses. In doing so, it urges the recognition of animals as influential actors in social, urban and economic history. The article focuses on the role of the horse in brewing, a major metropolitan industry which relied heavily on equine power. Crucially, it shows that the brewery horse became more, rather than less, influential during the industrial revolution.

This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. It shifts historiographical interest from major urban centres in colonial India (such as Bombay or Calcutta) and instead attempts a greater understanding of smaller urban centres. In the process, it also interrogates the category of hill stations, which have been understood as exotic and scenic sites rather than as towns that were integral to the colonial economy. In arguing that hill stations, particularly Darjeeling, were not merely the scenic and healthy ‘other’ of the clamorous, dirty and diseased plains of India, it refutes suggestions that the ‘despoiling’ or overcrowding of Darjeeling was incremental to the purposes of its establishment. Instead, it suggests that Darjeeling was part of the colonial mainstream; its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy was effected from the time of its establishment. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic and its functional elements persisted throughout.

In the 1890s, the London County Council began a project to photograph old buildings in the capital. The common interpretation is that this was preservationist activity to record architectural treasures being ‘lost’. However, after 1899, many images appear not to fit neatly into a story of selective preservation. By examining metropolitan improvement schemes and the politics of housing, this article examines alternative contexts in which the images were made. It suggests the photographs acted in political dialogues about geographies of light and air, time and space, and the right place of working Londoners, as well as more mundane concerns over spending.

Histories of the ‘mass tourism’ of sunshine and beaches, and of the ‘package holiday’, in post-war Europe have tended to focus on the activities of big international companies and the role of governments. This has certainly been the case in Spain. This article recovers an earlier version of the urban history of coastal tourism in southern Europe, focusing on the resort of San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country, and thereby drawing attention to the neglected Atlantic dimension of Spanish coastal tourism. It then examines the responses of an established resort and summer capital to the new developments of the post-Civil War years, and shows how the decline of an older model of aristocratic tourism was counterbalanced by the development of new holiday markets and practices, many of which arose spontaneously beyond the regulatory and promotional gaze of the local authorities.

‘Inspiring Capital’ is the sign that confronts visitors and residents alike at the boundaries of the Edinburgh administrative area. It is a consciously ambiguous message of self-promotion: the logo proclaims the dual standing of the city of Edinburgh as a European capital city and a city of international capital. The article uses a long-run approach to explore how, by inventing and nurturing a myth about Edinburgh as a non-industrial city, councillors and planners privileged the ancient and historical character of the city and so conditioned policies associated with urban renewal and land use.

This article offers a theoretical overview of the urbanization legacy of China's great cities since 1949. It shows a persistent contradiction between ideology/planning and urban sprawl/cellular urbanism. The symbolic function of city planning reflects official ideology giving the city a unified formal structure, but the implementation of the city plan is compromised in the process of urban development. The state governance fragments Chinese urban society into emplaced groups. This social division takes effect through the spatial division of various compounds that negotiate with rather than conform to city planning. Using a case-study of Guangzhou's urban development, the article shows how the state-led spatial practices continue in the post-socialist era and how a new kind of developmental ideology informs urban developments.

This essay surveys major themes and developments in the recent study of late antique urbanism. First, re-evaluations of the late phase of classical urbanism are discussed, whereby a simple narrative of ‘decline’ has been replaced by a much more chronologically and geographically nuanced picture. The importance of regional, indeed local, specificity is stressed, with different areas of the ancient world experiencing often radically different urban trajectories. Key aspects of late antique urbanism are considered, including the relationship between town and country, economic urban life, political versus social and religious urban history, before concluding with consideration of areas where future research is particularly needed.

Doctoral theses have always had an important place in the historiography of crime, and indeed much of the discipline's most influential research has emerged from postgraduate study. For many years, the investigation of crime and justice in Britain was a staple topic of doctoral research, and theses by members of E.P. Thompson's ‘Warwick School’ had a shaping influence on the early debates of the discipline. In the British context, these early debates were concerned with questions about who could access the law and the extent to which the courts were used to enforce the values of particular social groups. More recently, scholars have given an increased amount of attention to the influence of newspaper reporting on perceptions of crime, and on the importance of printed accounts of crimes, trials and executions as texts which represented the function and effectiveness of the law in particular ways. Furthermore, over the last few decades our knowledge of policing and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe has greatly expanded, providing important insights into two very important aspects of the judicial process.