The social relationships of housing tenure shape urban life. One of the most peculiar tenure regimes emerged in the towns of East and Central Africa during the colonial period. In accordance with the colonial policy of trusteeship, employers and municipalities were together responsible for housing all permanently employed Africans, who constituted the majority in most urban centres. Contemporaries noted that employers and municipalities commonly failed to do their job, a judgement that historians have endorsed. In fact, their contribution varied greatly from place to place and, though generally insufficient, was still substantial. This paternalistic tenure regime created dependency and open-ended commitments that could not be met.

While the Victorian ideal of the public park is well understood, we know less of how local governors sought to realize this ideal in practice. This article is concerned with park-making as a process – contingent, unstable, open – rather than with parks as outcomes – determined, settled, closed. It details how local governors bounded, designed and regulated park spaces to differentiate them as ‘spaces apart’ within the city, and how this programme of spatial governance was obstructed, frustrated and diverted by political, environmental and social forces. The article also uses this historical analysis to provide a new perspective on the future prospects of urban parks today.

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been ‘reading’ streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were ‘reflected’ in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volume The Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade after The Victorian City's first publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

This article seeks to assess the relevance of market ideas outside the European context. In pre-modern Japan, there was neither street market nor retail market but wholesale markets in cities. Feudal lords permitted wholesale dealers to operate in the market as long as the dealers paid either tribute such as fish or tax money to their lords. The Meiji Restoration in the late nineteenth century brought an end to the feudal system. In modern Japan, the problem of food supply in the city arose after the Japanese-Russo War. The Rice Riots broke out in 1918, and drove many cities to open their own municipal retail markets in order to supply urban dwellers with food and daily necessities. Fixed and marked price and cash payment were the operating principles of those municipal retail markets. These principles represented the characteristic features of the modern retail trade. Such municipal retail markets played an important role in the modernization of the retail trade in Japan.

This article uses a quantitative and qualitative methodology to examine the role that women played as property owners in three mid-nineteenth-century English towns. Using data from the previously under-utilized rate books, we argue that women were actively engaged in urban property ownership as part of a complex financial strategy to generate income and invest speculatively. We show that female engagement in the urban land and property markets was widespread, significant and reflective of local economic structures. Crucially, it also was more complex in form than the historiography has previously acknowledged. The article delivers a final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of women's investment activity, demonstrating that women were active investors in the urban land market as well as the managers of landed estates, business owners and shareholders, thereby opening up new questions about how gender intersected with economic change and growth in the rapidly changing world of nineteenth-century England.

Although plans for urban renewal after 1945 were largely based on clearance and redevelopment, the changed circumstances of post-war Britain also favoured a revival of interest in the repair and improvement of older housing. The article looks at the different approaches of Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan, and at the reasons why only limited, if useful, progress was made. It stresses the significance of a repairs backlog in conjunction with the politics of property ownership and political conceptions of the conditions under which public money could be invested in urban renewal. In such considerations repair and improvement presented far greater difficulties than clearance and redevelopment, and this was an essential element in the continuing popularity of the latter method.

The planning system which dominates most of the comtemporary world is of European and American origin. It has come out of the particular socio-historical background of these Western countries and has naturally had some implicit assumptions regarding the concepts, purposes and ideology of planning. This system has been exported to, and often imposed upon, countries with different social conditions where those assumptions are not necessarily valid. As a result, in many developing countries, planning is considered ineffective, and planners become frustrated.

During the last two decades the interests of scholars of early drama and of urban historians have found common ground in the study of urban celebration and ceremonial. For the student of early drama the beginnings of this interest coincided with a redefinition of the area and nature of the study of early drama, a shift in emphasis from the textual and literary problems of the few extant dramatic texts to the circumstances and conditions of their performance. Signalled in the mid-1950s by F.M. Salter's revealing study of the production of Chester's Whitsun plays, this movement gained impetus from Glynne Wickham's investigations of the development of English stagecraft between 1300 and 1660, the first volume of which appeared in 1959, which illustrated the interdependence of a range of ostensibly disparate activities, such as plays, royal entries and tournaments. Then, in the 1970s an iconoclastic challenge to traditional theories about the staging of mystery plays was mounted by Alan H. Nelson, drawing upon various local records, and from the resulting controversies was born a new initiative, the Records of Early English Drama, whose avowed purpose is ‘to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’. That series is still ongoing and already constitutes a major primary resource of regional documentary transcripts for all interested in early dramatic and quasidramatic activity, suggesting a hitherto unsuspected diversity and frequency of dramatic activity throughout England.

The article looks at urban stability and crime control in cities with large immigrant communities in sixteenth-century England. It outlines the strategies of shared authority between urban magistrates and leaders of refugee communities to tackle conflict and crime. It argues that the Strangers were able to present themselves as useful and welcome members of their host community, which profited from their arrival. At the same time they managed to keep their specific alien networks within their new places of residence over several generations intact.

During the nineteenth century, police, magistrates, reformers and the press noticed a rising tide of juvenile crime. Child-stripping, the crime of stealing young children's clothes by force or deception, was an activity of this type which caused alarm among contemporaries. As the century progressed, improved policing, urbanization and Irish migration, allied to growing social concern, caused more cases of child-stripping to be noticed. Accounts by Dickens, Mayhew and others characterized child-stripping as an activity indulged in by old women who were able to make money by victimizing the weakest strata of society. However, research in the British Library's digitized newspaper collections as well as in parliamentary papers conclusively demonstrates that child-stripping, far from being the domain of Dickensian crones, was actually perpetrated by older children, notably girls, against children even younger than themselves. Despite widespread revulsion, which at times approached a ‘moral panic’ prompted by the nature of the crime, progressive attitudes largely prevailed with most child-stripping children being sent to reformatories or industrial schools in the hope of reforming their behaviour. This article thus conforms with Foucauldian notions of the switch from physical to mental punishments and aligns with the Victorians’ invention of children as a category of humanity that could be saved.

This paper analyses the notion of neighbourhood in Haarlem, a Dutch town in the province of Holland, in the seventeenth century. During the first decades of the century the city magistrates were challenged by huge immigration, religious and cultural pluralism, and, due to the Dutch Revolt, a lack of a strong central power. In spite of these ingredients for social unrest, peace was preserved without too many difficulties. One of the mechanisms that kept society from falling apart was neighbourhood. Several levels of neighbourhood will be studied here and an answer is given for the growing interference of city magistrates with neighbourhood life.

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.

The multifarious ‘objective’ indicators used to place individuals by class (for example, occupation, wealth, income), or proxies thereof, capture only a part of who we are. More important is our ‘style of life’: our tastes, how we spend what we earn and how this interplays socially to include or exclude us from ‘society’. Of these the most significant cultural site was an individual's house and home, against which, using local property tax records, we can place a defined numeric value. This article analyses class in relation to housing and property values in Nottingham in the first half of the twentieth century.

Fires are often seen as a constant in early modern European towns, changing only in the modern era when inflammable building materials replaced wood. This article argues that the incidence, nature and risk of fire shifted repeatedly over time. Fire danger was determined not only by building materials but also by forms of construction, by the everyday uses people made of flame and by wider factors such as climatic variation and shifts in world trade and consumer demand. It was influenced by urban social and political change, including the way governments and populations responded to the risk. Responses to new fire dangers in turn helped change the way urban government functioned.

Historians have suggested that medieval urban guilds played a role in political and commercial networking. Guilds’ commercial protectionism was designed to benefit their membership and close ties have been discovered between merchant guilds and urban oligarchies. This article asks if all guilds should be viewed as commercial networking hubs. It uses evidence from a later fourteenth-century membership roll of St Mary's guild in Nottingham in conjunction with Nottingham's borough court rolls to analyse the commercial connections between members and non-members in that period. It concludes that the guild did not function as a networking hub.

Even without the urban riots of 1980–1, there would be little disagreement that one, if not the major change in British cities since the war has been in the ethnic composition of their populations. The Black and Asian population of Britain, estimated at some 2.1 million in mid 1980 by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, and forming 3.9 per cent of the total population, compared with under 1.4 million (2.5 per cent) in 1971 and some 200,000 in 1951. The concentration of this population into four or five major conurbations where, until economic crisis brought unemployment, there was a high demand for labour, means that anywhere between 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 inhabitants of many towns is of so-called ‘New Commonwealth’ and Pakistan origin; in certain London boroughs, depending on definition, the figure might be 30 per cent.

Scholarship on provincial towns and cities has thus far overlooked their role as centres of painting in the early modern era, leaving the false impression that painting, and art itself, remained the preserve of London. Chester proves a vibrant centre for such activities in the era 1590–1640. This article shows how and why the distinctive characteristics of Chester and its wider hinterland encouraged and shaped its production of portraiture. It also places Chester in the wider context of painting activity in other such provincial centres.

The seventeenth-century Worcestershire antiquarian Thomas Habington knew of great agitations around 1400 at Shipston-on-Stour, a manor of Worcester Cathedral Priory. He reported that after an arbitration of 1405–6 ‘the discontented tenants not satisfied broke out against their lord again, but all these being long since buried, shall not be revived by my pen, which shall never prejudice or blot any with infamy’. This article will rescue the rebels from the oblivion to which Habington sought to condemn them. This is not just to correct his bias (as a recusant he sympathized with Benedictine monks; as a member of the gentry he disliked disturbance of the social order), but more to use the Shipston story to investigate general problems of urban conflict in the Middle Ages.

This article explores the relationship between colonial ideologies and urban planning in the context of the pre-war Japanese empire. It does so by examining the second largest city in what was Japan's first formal overseas colony of Taiwan. By exploring some of the key texts through which the city of Takao (Kaohsiung) was depicted and its future debated in the colonial era, the ways in which imperial ideologies, such as the ‘southern advance’ of the Japanese empire, influenced and were reflected in urban space will be considered.

Through the concept of ‘character’ or ‘urban racial type’, traversing literature, science and metropolitan life, Bertellini reconsiders early American cinema's colour-based biracialism epitomized by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the New York-based film industry race also emerged from the city's dense intermingling of ‘white ethnics’ and broader shifts in epistemological emphasis – from inheritance to the environment. If Italian immigrants were racialized as innately violent in early gangster films, after 1915 heartbreaking melodramas of destitution and misfortunes adopted instead a combination of still othering and universal characterizations.

Half the people in ‘the Bend’ are christened Pasquale…When the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits.Jacob Riis, 1890

I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person.Actor and director George Beban, 1921