In this article, the origins of the modern metropolis are reconsidered, using the example of Cairo within its Ottoman and global context. I argue that Cairo's Azbakiyya Garden served as a central ground for fashioning a dynastic capital throughout the nineteenth century. This argument sheds new light on the politics of Khedive Ismail, who introduced a new state representation through urban planning and music theatre. The social history of music in Azbakiyya proves that, instead of functioning as an example of colonial division, Cairo encompassed competing conceptions of class, taste and power.

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

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain's cultural life reached its most glorious stage. This ‘Golden Age’ was distinguished by a great variety of civic ceremonies and religious festivities that were performed in towns and cities. Economic and cultural factors encouraged the development of urban space as a spectacular arena for these rituals. The town became a permanent stage on which the identity of social groups and institutions was displayed. This paper examines the characteristics and development of festivals during this period and also the relative contribution of ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ culture to these celebrations.

Generalizations about ‘car culture’ in the United States, and about American's ‘love affair with the automobile’, have concealed persistent values and practices among millions of Americans that do not suit such stereotypes. Car culture and the car's attractions are not denied. American society, however, is a complex of numerous subcultures, including many that resented and resisted the automobile's growing priority during the twentieth century. Such groups’ resistance to automobile domination has been neglected. Persistent advocacy for pedestrians’ interests is illustrated through numerous examples from the 1920s to the 1960s, the decades when ‘car culture’ rose to its apogee.

During the negotiations with their Flemish subjects, the Burgundian dukes generally asked for taxes or military aid, while their subjects demanded the confirmation of privileges and the political and economic stability necessary for trade and industry to flourish. In this analysis of the institutionalized bargaining sessions between cities, rural districts and the dukes in Flanders, it will be shown that a specific political discourse developed among the Flemish delegates, that can be considered ‘corporatist’ or ‘communalist’.

Taking the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum as a case study, this article examines the historical relation between crime storytelling and the myriad local struggles for spatial control that animate urban life. Modern Europe's most staggering art heist left city officials and police wholly clueless, and inspired a two-year outpouring of explanatory narratives from Parisians of virtually all social strata. This article shows how, in ostensibly making sense of the ‘impossible’ theft, the city's inhabitants imaginatively wove it into the social fabric of everyday life, thereby bringing the event to bear on a broad range of spatial tensions and rivalries. As they re-fashioned mass press versions of the theft to fit local concerns – both public and intimate – contemporaries understood crime stories as a tool with which to shape the city as they knew it.

This article examines the neglected sensory experience of visual physical colour in the city/town centre or what is now referred to as the Central Business District. It focuses on the post-war period when reconstruction, town planning, new architecture, novel materials and technologies, and investment were all transforming British city centres. The research uses film, photographs, planning documents, oral history and social media reminiscences to research the users’ experience of colour in the city centre streets. It argues that, although new materials in construction opened up the possibilities of bright, ‘non-natural’ colours in the urban built environment, the visual experience of colour was found mainly in the ephemera of everyday life. Furthermore, it argues that colour was an important component in constructing people's sense of place and belonging in the city.

Feminist historians have expended a good deal of energy on delineating the cultural concept of the Two Spheres This curious cultural phenomenon emerged in the wake of the evangelical revival and the Industrial Revolution, and caused people to believe that the world was divided into two to match the two sexes. The male part was the world of public affairs, commerce, business and, of course, the defence of the realm. The female centred on the private domain: home, family and children. The problem that this imposed on women has never yet been successfully resolved: the sexual division of labour and the domestic location of women's work. In Britain in the nineteenth century, as the population moved into the cities and standards of living rose (if patchily), the physical form of the modern urban environment took shape in ways which perpetuated the continuance of the Two Spheres. This was particularly true for middle-class women, whose lives in suburban retreats had little physical connection with the rest of the city. Of all the pressures which dictated the form of nineteenth-century cities, there was not one related to finding new ways for women to live in modern cities outside a rigid interpretation of the Two Spheres.

Starting with Englander's denial (Urban History, 21, 2 (1994)), that ‘slums are … real only in words, … rather than being rooted in the material conditions of everyday life’, the article draws a distinction between historical analyses of slums, which entail an examination of words, signs and symbols, and analyses of inner-city neighbourhoods which have been overshadowed by slumland representations. It is claimed that this latter task entails a nuanced materialist historicism, attuned to the surviving material and oral culture of actual neighbourhoods, in place of Englander's faith in an older style of historical materialism.

The article was conceived as a guided tour through the Balkan Peninsula including descriptions of two selected towns from Hungary, Croatia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It gives a summary of Western perceptions of the Balkan towns as noted by Western Europeans who visited the area in different periods from the seventeenth century onwards. The civilization they found and described there was a part of an entity encompassing the material and spiritual culture of urban life in the Near East. During the nineteenth century the Balkans underwent major political changes and contemporary travellers' reports were rich with observations about the process of ‘Europeanization’ of the Balkan towns. During the process which meant nationalism and fragmentation in what had been a fairly uniform culture area, paradoxically, ‘Balkanization’ was the final result.

This article provides a detailed study of the Liber Albus, a London custumal compiled in 1419 by John Carpenter, Common Clerk of the City, under the direction of the mayor, Richard Whittington. It explores how the manuscript demonstrated a growing conservatism in early fifteenth-century London government, especially in relation to the regulation of the food trade and matters of public order, linking this to memories of late fourteenth-century turbulence in the City and poor relations with the Crown.

In common with many British cities, but unlike the rest of Ireland, late nineteenth-century Belfast experienced rapid industrialization and physical expansion. Women formed a significant proportion of the city's workforce, attracted by the employment opportunities represented in the burgeoning textile industry. Many of them were economically vulnerable, however, and could find themselves destitute for a number of reasons. This article sets Belfast's Poor Law workhouse in the landscape of welfare in the city, exploring how its use reflected the development of the city and the ways in which the female poor engaged with it in order to survive.

This article contributes to discussions about the spatial organization of urban food retail on empirical and theoretical grounds. As a case-study, it presents new analysis of New York City's public market system between 1790 and 1860, documenting its expansion and geography relative to urban growth, and how the deregulation of the meat trade by the 1840s reshaped this vital infrastructure. More broadly, it theorizes the municipal market system's geographic principles, emphasizing its countervailing dynamics of agglomeration and dispersal. Exploiting the city's transition from a public to a free market model, it further demonstrates how distinct political economies produced profoundly different geographies of retail food distribution.

The importance of energy, in particular coal, is the subject of ongoing debate amongst economic historians who examine its relationship to the timing and nature of British industrialization. Yet attention to the case of London during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that heavy coal consumption did not require industrial production, nor was heavy industrial coal demand dependent on steam engines. Rather, through the first sustained attempt to quantify industry's proportion of London's demand for mined coal, this article argues that the early modern world's leading coal market was driven primarily by domestic rather than industrial consumption, but that many industrial facilities nevertheless consumed fuel on scales often associated with later industrialization.

This article explores the importance that accessing urban life assumed for British soldiers stationed in France during World War I. Many who fought on the Western Front had never visited a foreign country before sailing to France. Drawing on contemporary letters and diaries and later memoirs, it considers how men responded to the new experiences they found in French towns and cities behind the lines. Through exploring activities from shopping and dining to cinema and prostitution, it argues that urban outings became critical to sustaining morale by offering opportunities to engage with civilian life on a reasonably regular basis.

This article explores the ways in which a young woman who migrated from Londonderry to London in the 1930s acquired and used spatial knowledge of the city. Using detailed diary evidence the article maps everyday action spaces, and examines themes such as the use of visual cues in the accumulation of spatial knowledge, the use of maps and signs, the influence of previous travel experiences and the organization of search and exploration strategies in the city.

This article reports on the contribution made by almost twenty years of archaeological excavations to the historical outline of the City of London from earliest times to c. 1800. It seeks to familiarize historians with programmes of excavation and publication, and argues that the regional implications extend well beyond the confines of the metropolis.

Using case studies of English county towns, this article contributes towards the creation of a geography of scientific culture in England, 1750–1850. It argues that although emulation of the metropolis was important, provincial scientific culture had its own distinctive identity often concentrated through the lens of county town sociability and associations. The second part analyses data on literary and scientific institutions from the 1851 census in order to determine whether county towns continued to retain their importance in scientific culture by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Accounts of nineteenth-century burial practice in England borrow heavily from French historiography, which describes the way that scientific agendas drove a shift from traditional churchyard use to secular, municipal cemetery management. A challenge to this meta-narrative uses the example of Sheffield. In this highly industrialized city, the nineteenth century did not see a dichotomized translation from churchyard to cemetery; the Church Building Act (1818) was more effective in meeting burial demand than the 1836 General Cemetery; the formal closure of churchyards did not always lead to a cessation of burial; and by the century's end, church burial provision remained substantial.

Professor Marion Bowley, writing of the housing boom of the 1930s which was uniquely based upon sales to owner-occupiers, remarked that ‘we have no means of knowing statistically the extent of owner-occupation before the Great War…Actually, it is more important to know why the change occurred [in the inter-war period] than to know its actual size, and there is no need to be led astray in a futile search for non-existent statistics’. The same ban would seem to extend to analysis of investment ownership of housing before 1914. What I want to suggest is that it is indeed possible to obtain statistics relating not only to owner occupation but also to the overall structure of the urban housing market; and that far from leading us astray, it is in fact important to acquire precise figures in order to understand with more certainty the structure of the nineteenth-century housing market – something of which we have remarkably little knowledge.