At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.

Nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization in western Europe have clearly contributed to the formation of societal knowledge and self-reflexive cultural iconographies. Especially from the 1820s onwards, one major context for discussing the social and cultural diversity of the city and concomitant socio-political tensions was the emerging market of journals and magazines. Based upon the writings of two exemplary authors, this article investigates with which techniques and metaphors nineteenth-century journalistic sketches depicted urban sociability and conditions. Furthermore, it reflects on how not only the ever more differentiating urban environments but also the proximity of different networks and institutions of knowledge encouraged the refinement of social observation and thought. Exploring a neglected genre of social knowledge production, the article proposes new perspectives for urban history and aims at stimulating a critical review of contemporary research practices in all branches of the social sciences.

The article analyses one of the most spectacular urban rebellions of the early modern Holy Roman Empire of the German nation from the perspective of local acts of communication. Led by the merchant Nikolaus Gülich, the ‘Gülich rebellion’ convulsed the free and imperial city of Cologne in the 1680s. Gülich appealed to public opinion and used media impulses within the urban community to campaign successfully against the corruption of the city council.

During the past thirty years the study of English early modern urban history has concentrated on the detailed examination of individual towns. Some very useful works have been produced, but each has treated the town in isolation, not daring to venture beyond its protective walls to speculate on the wider implications of its discoveries. Enough has now been written to encourage a recent wave of attempts at a more general view of the subject, in which,for the first time, certain generalizations are advanced which claim to summarize the characteristics of most, if not all, urban communities. Such enterprises demand much courage, for large sections of the field have still not been examined in detail, and in the reduction of the rich diversity of English urban experience to some sort of general principles lies the greatest challenge of all. It would be churlish not to pay tribute to the value of these syntheses, but equally unwise to claim that in the present state of our knowledge they can be regarded as definitive. The purpose of this essay is to examine critically three recently published studies which seek to establish general concepts of urban growth and decline in this period and to suggest alternative approaches to the problem.

The article focuses on the actions of the High Council for Immovable Historic Works and Monuments (HC), which was active from 1951 to 1983 as the sole decision-maker in issues of historic preservation for all historic structures and sites in Turkey. The HC archives reveal a historical and political framework for understanding the context within which the HC operated. Expert knowledge, especially in the conservation of historic cities, has been a powerful instrument, although the use of this instrument depended on the political context. The HC extended its authority in the 1950s, operating under a conservative autocratic government. In the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, when central power was lacking and society was dominated by political violence, chaos and economic instability, the HC could reinforce and exercise its power to raise standards in historic preservation in line with the international conservation movement.

The city of Ferrol was designed ‘ex-novo’ by military engineers to serve the Spanish monarchy and to house its naval base and dockyards. The principles of stratification on which society was based, and the need to defend the city from enemy attacks and to discipline workers led to a spatial plan that segregated the Navy officers and the working classes. In the nineteenth century, the naval base and the enclave economy of Ferrol became obsolete. Furthermore, the new political culture of the nation state and liberal democracy complicated further the task of controlling the working class. The Spanish Civil War allowed for the updating of Ferrol's spatial plan thanks to the identification of a single enemy both inside and outside: the political repression of the working-class became a major issue in the victory against the II República. The Franco regime meant the return of a segregated and militarized Ferrol, whereas in the 1980s, European integration and the transition to democracy made this model obsolete.

It was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor. Augustinus, De Civitate Dei

This article takes up recent concerns with languages of mid-Victorian reform and relates urban space to the workplace, with reference to Nottingham hosiery and lace. The article considers, first, official enquiries into lace manufacture, and second, the hosiery conciliation system. Attempts to map and to fix the boundaries of employment are characteristic of both these developments. Gender dimensions are emphasized, as is the contribution of these debates to liberal narratives of industrial progress. This is related to the formation of a wider culture of liberal reform.

Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.

Social history, and urban history in particular, has become increasingly concerned, in recent years, with studying the middle class. Historians have progressed from a concern with the ‘success’ or ‘rise’ of the middle classes, to a study them per se both in quantitative and qualitative terms: questions concerning their wealth, consumption patterns, residential preferences, representation within the political leadership as well as their beliefs, values and role in attention. Urban historians have a particular interest in the study of the local middle class, in a way that takes into account the finer detail of different kinds of urban environment and the complexities of the urban experience. Since much of urban history has been at pains to discover the variety of patterns in urban development and urban society, it is not surprising that recent specialized studies of individual towns and cities have revealed a great variety in the bases of class relations. Indeed, the traditional Marxist notion of a single national class interest is now open to qualification. The disparity between London and the provinces in respect of class interests has long been recognized. An extension of the proposition inherent in that disparity will contend here that there were different types of middle class located in different types of urban environment. Such a proposition is not in itself pathfinding or particularly new. There are problems, however, in deciding in what ways such a differentiated pattern can be drawn out, examined and presented in coherent form.

At the Leicester urban history conference in 1966 there was very little discussion of the relationship between public policy and urban history. There were some points at which linkages were implied, but these arose merely incidentally. There was no attempt to adopt public policy as a general perspective on urban development. Reciprocally, the planners paid no attention to the historians: Jim Dyos remarked that the largest part of ‘research and policy making is taking place without reference to the historians’. The picture has not greatly changed over the past 14 years. There have indeed been studies in which policy, its formation and limitations, have been implicit, but few in which they have played a central part.

Urban history is a rapidly expanding, flourishing field in Europe. Nevertheless, urban scholars would do well to re-examine the paradigms within which they have been working as the field today lacks central questions and general interpretive models. Moreover, the common focus on urban biography or upon one region within a single nation-state has become increasingly outmoded, given the international scale of economic processes and migration flows. More attention to topics treated within a European-wide or even international context is needed. In addition, urban history as currently defined is tilted towards social and economic concerns to the neglect of the political arena.

This article analyses the relationship between the port-city of Bremen and its different hinterlands. It examines four determinants of port–hinterland linkages: the political framework; the volume and pattern of trade; the extent and significance of population transfers; and Bremen's contribution to the transmission of cultural innovation. It focuses, in turn, on trade, migration and cultural exchange as distinct, but interrelated, fields of interaction and discusses new theoretical approaches for understanding the historical complexity of port–hinterland relations and the extent to which trading, migration and cultural hinterlands were part of an interactive system.

Republican Shanghai was a renowned art capital. This article is based on a large-scale digital mapping project of the residential locations of 1,349 Shanghai artists. We analysed the transformative spatial distribution patterns of artists in relation to the city's social and urban conditions, and developed an artists’ habitation approach to elucidating the issues of Republican-period Shanghai urban and art history from the perspective of Chinese cosmopolitanism. We mapped areas of high artist concentration and identified a higher percentage of artists residing in the concessions (compared with the Shanghai general population) and the incremental convergence of art clusters in the concessions. We argue that the concessions provided a favourable environment for cultural diversity and the ungovernable, elite spirit of the literati tradition. The mainstream Shanghai art practices, known as haipai, were modern, as they were rooted in the urban modernity of the concessions and embodied Chinese cosmopolitanism.

This article examines carnivals held in Greater London during the Boer War, as a prism through which to analyse the contemporary construction and enactment of locality in the metropolis. It argues that ideas of locality, class and citizenship were reshaped through advances in transport and communication, more active government and urban and then suburban growth. This was manifest in the carnivals, whereby a national and imperial cause stimulated local initiative and citywide replication, encouraged expressions of local identity but also instigated and exacerbated local rivalries, and illustrated the extent to which class identities were nested in local ones.

This article argues that historians have largely neglected the dimension of Chinese–Russian interaction, which was central to the development of Harbin from the emergence of this city in 1898 as an outpost of imperial Russia in Manchuria (north-east China). It goes on to propose a new approach to Harbin history, which, integrating its ‘Russian’ and ‘Chinese’ histories during the period prior to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1932, would also place it in a wider comparative context. This comparative approach is illustrated in the article by a consideration of the issue of ethnically segregated living quarters.

The aim of this survey is to present the Greek social housing model as a part of the southern European model through an Athenian case-study. Several characteristics of the Greek housing model are unique, and the analysis of the Athenian case provides an example that emphasizes those characteristics. Moreover, this survey intends to contribute to filling the gap in the relevant urban history and geography bibliography and, more specifically, to describe the Greek social housing model and the role of the city of Athens in the planning and distribution of social housing. This survey is based mainly on secondary data (literature review) but also on primary sources.

The importance of legal institutions as mediators of social relations in early modern towns has long been recognized. However, opinion differs over the extent to which early modern courts generated social conflict or resolved it through promoting consensus. This article brings to light a neglected jurisdiction and argues that while the university courts inevitably generated conflict when pursuing their regulative agenda, they nonetheless offered Cambridge inhabitants a considerable resource which was used extensively in both the speedy resolution and the vexatious prolongation of a wide range of disputes which tended to cut across rather than deepen town–gown hostilities.

This article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

For a long time historians saw the increased wealth, numbers and power of British manufacturers, merchants and professionals as simply an inevitable part of the process of industrialization. As a result the formation of the class seemed to require no further exploration. More recently interest in the middle class has increased and much closer attention has been given to specific dimensions. It seems evident from this work that any analysis of the middle class faces a number of problems. Firstly, that of definition. There was a wide range of status and income groups within the middle class. What criteria of wealth and occupation should be used, how important is it to fix upper and lower boundaries for the class, how are questions of lifestyle and attitudes to be gauged? Secondly, there were certain divisions within groups who can reasonably be considered middle class by any criteria. Above all, we must note that there was no distinctive middle-class political party and differences were as deeply felt in politics as were antagonisms between Anglicans and Nonconformists in religion. In view of such diversities is it possible to speak of the middle class and, if so, what does class formation and unity consist of? What levels of unity allow or inhibit class power? This is the subject of my overall research, of which only a glimpse can be given here.

From the early 1900s to 1914, an informal, but dedicated, group of English-Canadian actors took up the cause of urban planning, forming connections with the international planning cohort, and circulating foreign innovations and expertise across the country. This article considers such urban planning networking, first exploring the local urban context from which interest in planning emerged, then, through the use of case-studies, studying the four key channels through which English-Canadian actors acquired and disseminated foreign planning information. Through this analysis, the conscious and critical nature of local interactions with the wider urban planning cohort is emphasized.