This article explores the relationship between ‘national identity’, the urban environment and its religious practices. As a gateway city, where locals met foreigners to an unusual degree, late medieval Bruges provides a useful case-study. The focus is on the processes that shaped expressions of identity. These often involved religious rhetoric and practices. Foreign merchants, such as the Biscayans and Castilians, were grouped into ‘nations’, and identified with their homelands, especially in their chapels; but why and how they did so was not the result simply of patriotism or a sense of otherness, but of urban and strategic agendas, their own and those of native citizens.

The political ecology of historical urban water systems can yield information on the long-term, social organization of resource infrastructure and its management. In this article, the water system of Piacenza, Italy, is examined through its history and the documents of the Congregazione sopra l'ornato, the committee in charge of water management in the city, under the Farnese dukes, from 1545 to 1736. The documents include letters from residents, responses and orders from the committee, tax documents and engineering reports. These records tell a story of a water system and its relationship to the city residents.

Suburbs are significant to any understanding of Australian urbanization as they have been the dominant organizational element in the morphology of metropolitan areas. A case-study of suburban growth in Adelaide, South Australia, in the period from 1850 to 1930 suggests that dominant accounts of Australian suburbs of the era, as places of tranquillity, leisure, home and family, whose growth was driven by aspiration and social mobility, are largely illusory. Suburban growth was instead driven by speculation and economic opportunity. Accounts of commercial, recreational and industrial activity in Adelaide's suburban municipalities of the time suggests economically and socially diverse communities. Whereas the desire for the quarter or half acre block in the suburbs was most often due to its productive potential rather than bourgeois aspirations for seclusion and semi-rural tranquillity.

Following a spate of anarchist bombings and assassinations in Europe, the gente decente of Guatemala City began to describe local events using the language of anarchism. The 1894 anarchist furor spoke to two tendencies that had shaped Guatemala City since the 1870s. The first was the cosmopolitan desire of the gente decente. Facilitated by cosmopolitan bridge figures, trends and fashions from Europe and especially Paris shaped the cultural lexicon of Guatemala City's elite. Secondly, the anarchist furor reflected the misgivings of the gente decente toward urban disorder and malcontents as they conflated anarchism and anarchy.

This article examines how the management of railway traffic was problematized in urban plans for colonial Delhi after the 1890s. It reveals how Delhi was reconstituted as a space of circulation in municipal plans attempting to combat railway-induced ‘traffic congestion’. Yet, even as new gardens, localities and footpaths were envisaged as enabling smooth flows of traffic and generating a commercially healthy city, policing anxieties and concerns over political security dominated in such plans. Finally, this article shows how the process of railway-inspired ‘urban planning’ was itself driven by a contestation between different ‘scales’ of the colonial state.

Historical pageantry emerged in 1905 as the brainchild of the theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker. Large casts of volunteers re-enacted successive scenes of local history, as crowds of thousands watched on, in large outdoor arenas. As the press put it, Britain had caught ‘pageant fever’. Towards the end of the 1920s, there was another outburst of historical pageantry. Yet, in contrast to the Edwardian period, when pageants took place in small towns, this revival was particularly vibrant in large industrial towns and cities. This article traces the popularity of urban pageantry to an inter-war ‘civic publicity’ movement. In doing so, it reassesses questions of local cultural decline; the role of local government; and the relationship of civic responsibility to popular theatre.

This article examines the public culture of military associations, and their veteran membership, in inter-war Glasgow. It follows their parades and beery reunions to consider the public meanings of such acts. That these claims to civic recognition were met by a congregation of civic elements allows us to view the inter-war creation of civic identity from a new and enlightening vantage point. But this culture also allows us to encompass the vitality, and distinctly urban character, of the memory of the Great War within inter-war society. Cities provided alternative channels for the veteran associational impulse to the British Legion, which has generally been seen as synonymous with the veterans’ movement in Britain. War memory, too, had a distinct urban form and character that needs to be acknowledged within wider literature. This is the story of the ‘civic veteran’ and the social and cultural contexts that made him.