The Moscow Luzhniki stadia (1954–56) were constructed at the beginning of Khrushchev's reforms as a representative object to launch a rejuvenated and modernized socialism. The article seeks to situate the stadia complex in the crucial processes of urban transformation that occurred in the post-war Soviet Union; in questioning the Stalin monumental style, the planning of Luzhniki opened a more relational understanding of public space to Soviet people.

The criticisms of the early nineteenth-century metropolitan water supply by contemporary interest groups have been largely accepted by present day historians. This article argues that these criticisms were undeserved. It is argued that the London water companies provided an adequate amount of water; charged reasonable prices, given their large capital investments; and that, although the quality of water may have been poor compared to modern standards, it was far purer than sometimes supposed.

‘Timely innovations’ uses Jim Crow segregation, and the human activity it inspired, to account for Greater Miami's emergence as a city of global importance. It shows how city dwellers in South Florida deployed race and racism as technologies of economic and demographic control. The article also explores how evolving forms of racial segregation worked in tandem with other innovations in human mobility, urban planning and US foreign policy, with each helping Miami's residents maintain a white-over-black social order. Jim Crow, the author argues, never quite disappeared. Rather, it experienced a series of modernizations, leaving even Miami, one of the most culturally diverse American cities, beholden to the mores of bi-racial governance.

The fortunes of late medieval towns seem to have become rather a contentious topic. That is probably a good thing. It is a poor historical proposition that cannot be illustrated by some evidence, but proof of an historical phenomenon like general decline or decay requires something more than illustration and something that argument may help to secure. So far, however, as S. H. Rigby points out, the debate has suffered from an uncertainty over terms that may frustrate the advance of knowledge and understanding. Two words which he did not mention but which seem to me particularly unclear are ‘decline’ and ‘decay’ themselves. Until they are examined more closely we may not be sure enough of what anyone is trying to prove to know whether he has succeeded or not.

Half a century on from Ivor Noel Hume's reference to archaeology as the ‘handmaiden to history’, historical-period archaeology has come quite a way. From disparate origins, in anthropological approaches to material and rescue archaeology in North America, and industrial and buildings archaeology in Britain and Europe, the sub-discipline has coalesced into a structured approach to the recent past. Hume's comment is often misinterpreted as a critique of archaeology's supposed inferiority to history, yet his comment actually refers to the potential for archaeological material to inform historical narratives, fill in gaps and populate the histories of non-literate peoples with a material culture. Unfortunately, overlap between the two disciplines is still in relatively short supply. In light of the recent material turn in the humanities, however, as well as an increased interest amongst historians and geographers in engaging with material culture, archaeological approaches to artifacts, sites and built heritage are in a strong position to inform methods for examining the historical material environment. Collaboration is now not only necessary, but timely, and this review of theses is an attempt to further that potential for co-operation amongst those who study the past. The doctoral theses reviewed here explore changes and developments in the modern city from a material perspective, evidencing both the breadth of approaches and the potential for research in the arts and archaeological sciences to stimulate new studies across different disciplines.

Port-cities provide excellent examples of the socio-economic transformations that occurred during the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hermoupolis on the island of Syros was a major economic centre in Greece and a hub of international trade during the nineteenth century. However, economic transformations that commenced in the 1860s affected long-established port-based activities such as wooden shipbuilding and its related industries due to the decline of sailing ships and the expansion of factories. This factor led to an increase in tension and antagonism between manufacturers and shipbuilders over the use of land and altered the physical and the socio-economic landscape of the port-city. However, new types of economic activities flourished, like the tramp steamship business and factories, which enabled Hermoupolis to maintain its economic importance until World War II.

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.

What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.

Uwe Johnson

Barcelona was the capital city of European anarchism during the inter-war years. The aim of this article is to discover the sociological and territorial features of the radicalized CNT (the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), the anarchist union, which generated the summer 1936 revolution. By looking at the role of urban space as a variable in the collective processes of the working class the article argues that the unskilled recent immigrant worker and the neighbourhoods where this working-class figure was dominant were the key protagonists of revolutionary radicalism.

The infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. This article examines the foundation stone ceremonies that marked the beginning of several large-scale building Roman Catholic church building projects between 1850 and 1900, and in particular considers the extent to which these highly visible and ceremonial events prefigured the more permanent occupation of public space by the new buildings. These foundation stone ceremonies were complex events that reflected contemporary political issues such as land rights as much as they engaged with the spiritual concerns of the Roman Catholic congregations in Ireland during this period.

This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data. As such, the study not only adds specificity to recent attempts to enrich the field of pre-modern public health, but also demonstrates that the Bolognese administration had a sophisticated and evolving understanding of communal health risks, and exposes several discrepancies between policy and practice.

Taking its cue from the ‘material turn’ of recent years, this survey examines the connections between infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in north European cities in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that connections between these different constructs were fundamental not only to how cities functioned but how citizens themselves were imagined. As such, the survey critiques histories of welfare and citizenship that foreground the national and neglect the urban origins of the modern state. It does so by examining infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in smaller European nation-states such as Belgium, Denmark and Ireland rather than in the more familiar cases of Germany, France and Britain. Asking questions about the inter-relationship of infrastructure, welfare and citizenship, the survey suggests, offers an important way to reinterpret what the ‘modern city’ meant in twentieth-century northern Europe.

The regulation of public space was fundamental to the achievement of ‘urban stability’ in the early modern period. As such, this article analyses the resolution of two tavern conflicts in eighteenth-century Lyon. Although the city council as well as royal representatives had an interest in administering peace within the city walls, the case studies demonstrate that public order depended upon a complex process of negotiation between different institutions and that townspeople themselves played prominent roles in the regulation of public affairs.

Pressures for cleanliness in inter-war Tel-Aviv stemmed from the British government, the autonomous Jewish Municipality, local residents and visiting Zionists. This article reconstructs Tel-Aviv's sanitation during the 1920s and 1930s, describes and analyses attempts to clean the urban public space and their limited success. It is argued that the sanitary reality and the issue of cleanliness and squalor in Tel-Aviv, ‘The First Hebrew City’, reflected British colonial policies, Zionist national ideologies, ethnic and social stereotypes.

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 examines the image of the city and notions of urban management in the discourse of elite groups in Belgrade between 1830 and the late 1860s. It focuses on the negotiation of modernity in heterogeneous cultural spaces, particularly looking at the textual interplay of power, orientalized exoticism and notions of backwardness. These discourses were integral to the processes of managing urban populations and homogenizing the cityscape. The city's specific political situation as a site of dual authority, however, left room for minor acts of contestation which questioned the primacy of exclusion and dispossession as bases for modern urban transformation. This dynamic interplay framed the city as a site of conflict between mutually defining forces of ‘Europeanization’ and ‘backwardness’.

This article uses the evidence of the internal decoration and spatial hierarchy of an English town hall to explore the construction of urban oligarchy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Urban historians have regarded this period as one of fundamental importance in the political history of pre-modern English towns. It is associated with the emergence of the ‘close corporation’, an oligarchic form of government which remained largely in place until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. The article examines the iconography and historical context of a tapestry, custom-made for the town hall of Coventry around 1500, to present a different view of the character of urban political culture at the end of the Middle Ages.

Urban growth revealed problems associated with the administration of mid-sixteenth-century cities. In the Mediterranean area, and especially in Spain and France, a discrete discourse emerged in the late seventeenth century as to how towns and cities should be organized and administered. Contained in numerous tracts and manuals were ‘policy science’ recommendations to deal with environmental health and related matters. This article examines the evolution of ‘policy science’ in Spain which achieved its greatest prominence during Carlos III's reign (1759–88). It is a field of study which offers insights into urban customs, behaviour and beliefs, and had important implications for the subsequent morphology of the Spanish city.

This essay looks at London in the second half of the nineteenth century, when features of musical life associated with a capitalist economy and the consolidation of power of a wealthy industrial bourgeoisie became firmly established. Prominent among such features, which are all closely related to the rapid increase in urban populations, were the commercialization and professionalization of music, new markets for cultural goods, a growing rift between art and entertainment, and the bourgeoisie's struggle for cultural domination.

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.

In recent years, urban history has witnessed an expansion of actors. Historians have substantially and continuously extended their perspectives when it comes to examining the forces that drive urban developments. This expansion to an ever-broader range of human and increasingly also non-human actors (e.g. animals, technological systems and resources such as water) has opened up many new venues for investigations. It has also raised new questions about the role of cities in the history of social change. One of the most provocative ideas involves the claim that cities themselves should be considered agents and proprietors of change. Such notions of urban agency are premised on the assumption that, on the whole, cities are more than the sum of their parts. In this context, urbanization is not just viewed as the outcome of other determining societal forces, most notably capitalism. Instead, cities themselves are understood as determining entities and powerful enablers or preventers of material transformations. The investigative potential of such a perspective is tremendous, but the possible pitfalls should also not be underestimated. Exploring the explanatory prospects of urban agency requires, first of all, a critical engagement with both of the terms ‘agency’ and ‘the urban’. In my brief contribution to this roundtable, I would like to offer two points to the discussion: the first centres on the relationship between agency and intentionality/responsibilities, which is ultimately a political concern; the second aims to differentiate between the city as an entity and the urban as a process. Such a distinction, in turn, poses conceptual as well as methodological questions regarding the efficacy of agency as an urban concept.