The aim of this article is to take stock of nineteenth-century transnational urban history. After a short introduction to transnational history, general urban histories are analysed with respect to the ways in which transnational perspectives are incorporated into the narratives. Specific contributions to urban history in a transnational perspective are analysed. Approaches to urban planning history that focus on transnational linkages and international organization are discussed. Approaches to urban history within enlarged geographical scales that go beyond the nation-state framework, with a particular focus on cities as nodes in translocal networks, are analysed. The article concludes with a critical discussion of nineteenth-century transnational urban history.

This article examines how the civic authorities of six English towns responded to competition from new markets, regional fairs, informal trade and each other during the period 1250–1400. It argues that the civic authorities adopted an aggressive strategy based on developing a good reputation for their town, in order to show that the town was well governed and that its merchants and artisans maintained high standards of quality. This article focuses upon how a credible reputation was developed through the creation and enforcement of market regulation, and examines its appeal to citizens, foreign merchants and the crown and nobility.

Over the past thirty years, one of the fastest growing fields of urban history has been the history of planning. In some respects, this is surprising, as urban planning had existed on an institutional basis only since the early twentieth century. In other ways, though, it was a very logical development. Planning reached its high point during the 1960s, and by the 1970s was being condemned in many quarters, being blamed, for example, for disasters like high-rise tower blocks and sacrificing old cities to crude commercial and transport developments. Historical research was necessary to understand how a movement which promised so much at the start of the century had degenerated so badly in sixty years. Criticism became so severe that, in the words of one historian, ‘many planners have certainly thought in more pessimistic moments . . . that the past may be the only thing they have to look forward to’. For whatever reason, the Planning History Group was set up in 1974 and a massive body of historical research on planning has been produced. This paper reviews four recent books on planning, two from North America and two European. They represent different aspects of planning and different time periods and will be treated in chronological order.

This article argues that a one-sided focus on official sources has dominated historical research on urban green space. The absence of the users’ perspective obscures a substantial part of its significance. This article, which aims at complementing rather than contradicting existing research, will show that the different perspectives and practices of city dwellers widen our understanding of the history of urban green spaces. The article will also consider the value of often marginalized, unofficial green spaces like ramparts and wastelands at the urban fringe.

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.

We describe and analyse how Newcastle was transformed from a relatively stagnant British city at the dawn of the nineteenth century to one of the most vibrant cities in the world by the early twentieth century. We use two frameworks to chart and explain this momentous change: Wallerstein's model of hegemonic cycles to locate Newcastle's late development in a world-historical context, and Jacobs’ theory of city economic growth to understand the processes of change within the city and its region. These lead to an empirical focus on three investigations: first, how Newcastle grew geographically to become a multi-nodal city region (Tyneside plus Wearside); second, how the Newcastle city economy grew and developed into a very complex division of labour; and third, how this generated a new modern metropolitan cultural world.

The Hand-list compiled by the late Professor Herbert Finberg and myself was completed in September 1971, revised during 1972, and published in August 1973. Its aim was defined in the Introduction as ‘providing, for the first time, a gazetteer of places which in their day were reckoned to be boroughs’.

The peasant continues to be the favourite subject for research in India, but urban history has made considerable progress in the last few years. In 1969, when the Yearbook was a slim Newsletter, I had contributed a bibliographical essay on ‘Urban History in India’ which also indicated the abundant raw material available and suggested possible lines of enquiry. The present report will cover briefly issues raised in writings and at seminars in the last few years.

Australia was possibly ‘the first suburban nation’. Already at the end of the nineteenth century the American statistician Adna Weber noticed the peculiar demography of this ‘newest product of civilization’ whose population, he calculated, was more urbanized than any other country's. Yet the large coastal cities in which most town—dwellers lived were less densely occupied—more suburbanized—than the cities of Europe or North America. Here, Weber suggested, was ‘the representative of the new order of things towards which the modern world is advancing’. Later research on urban development has largely confirmed Weber's opinion. Australian city-dwellers enjoyed among the highest per capita incomes and levels of individual home-ownership in the nineteenth-century world and were among the first to display the low birth and death rates characteristic of ‘modern’ societies. They were early and enthusiastic users of railways, tramways and other forms of public transport. In 1900 about one in five Austalians lived in detached houses in the suburbs of the capital cities but by the early 1970s the proportion had risen to about three in five. A traveller flying in over Sydney or Melbourne now sees ‘the newest product of civilization’ spread out in a monotonous mosaic of green lawns, terra cotta roofs and sparkling backyard swimming pools.

This study highlights the simultaneous existence of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ forces in an incorporated borough and their relevance to civic society and governance in a spatial context. Loosely organized networks of men and women of different ages and status were evidenced in credit arrangements, small-scale dealings and sociability in markets, streets and residential houses. These public and private spaces were also subjected to a civic government which attempted to integrate uncontrolled activities into the society of freemen. It is argued that the actions and decisions taken by informal groups and associations were constitutive of the progress of civic society in early modern England.

Using case studies of city halls in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, this article contributes towards the creation of an iconographic reading of this building type. This article argues that the symbolic aim of the city hall was to express the burgher's pride and values, and to symbolize the local and national history. To understand the multifaceted architecture of a city hall in a capital city, one must also understand the ideas behind nation-building in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The second part of the article analyses how European, national and local narratives were used in the city halls.

Which social groups were moving into owner occupation in Britain before the Second World War is a matter of controversy, with opposing claims that this involved mainly white-collar or skilled manual workers. Although reliable figures showing the growth of home ownership in this period are rare, data are available for Edinburgh which indicate that tenure development in the city probably resembled that of England and Wales rather than the rest of Scotland. The relationship between income and the cost of home ownership is examined and this suggests that the main social group to move into owner occupation were probably white-collar workers. However, an analysis of occupational information from housing across a range of values in the city shows that this movement also affected manual workers and that there was a strong association between the proportions in each social class and the average rateable value of areas of housing.

The debate about the ability of Third World cities today and in the future to cope with rapid population growth has taken place with virtually no reference to urban history. This article seeks to remedy that, examining how three of Asia's largest cities during the pre-modern period coped with the problem of major fires. It examines the nature of the problem, its causes and its economic significance. The article concludes by considering the implications of this history for the current debate.

Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.

The article focuses on an historical relationship between the political institution of chieftaincy and civic pride in Ibadan, a Yoruba city in south-western Nigeria. It examines this relationship against the scholarly model of ‘Yoruba urbanism’ and argues that this model is empirically and conceptually flawed. Drawing on oral and documentary historical sources, the article explores how a ‘civic Ibadan’ was made through practices of settlement, civil disorder and external warfare during the pre-colonial period. The analysis adds to recent debates about the concept of ‘historical materialism’ in the urban past.

In the free towns of Germany we can observe a fundamental shift in the maintenance of urban stability. Whereas in late medieval towns the burghers themselves were responsible for the settlement of conflicts, the town council took over control in a long-ranging process. Burghers lost their traditional right to bear arms in public. Burghers and other town dwellers could henceforth call upon the guards of the council or take a case to law in order to settle a dispute. As a consequence petty conflicts in the public sphere became less ritualized.

Urban biographies are growing in numbers upon the shelves. A clutch of mainly English ones were reviewed recently in these pages by David Reeder with a sense of cautious enthusiasm and warnings about the dangers of fragmentation in these often topic-oriented multi-authored volumes. Recent examples include Donald Miller's 1996 study of Chicago, an example of unashamedly scholarly boosterism. The massive Burrows and Wallace study of New York followed in 1999 and presented a detailed episodic account of the city. In 1,383 pages they have still only got to 1898. This book displayed a love of city with overwhelming knowledge, but presented a very readable story for those with stamina. Scotland already has the two Glasgow volumes, also included in Reeder's review. To this have now been added multi-authored studies of Aberdeen and Dundee and two more accounts of Glasgow

The political culture of Scotland's late medieval towns has been neglected in recent scholarship. This article seeks to provoke discussion through an analysis of communitarian language and its use by urban elites in the fifteenth century. The Scottish urban community, as elsewhere, could be positioned as a location, a legal construct and a group of people. This provided the burgh council with a variety of political tools which could be employed – consciously or otherwise – in order to legitimize its authority.

I am what Chinese would call a waihang (outsider to the guild) in this discussion, neither a specialist in European urban history nor up-to-date on the body of critical social theory that informs much of the discussion in the roundtable. Therefore, I see my role here as primarily presenting a comparative case – China – and only incidentally engaging with the theoretical aspects of the discussion.