This article explores the refugee experiences of three communities in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Social and political organizations worked together in different ways to send people safely back to different parts of China. I argue that this shows how migrant identities were trans-local and that urban identity in the first half of the twentieth century in China was never wholly confined within one city. Rather, networks of individuals and institutions worked together to handle the crisis caused by one of the most devastating invasions of World War II.

The edges of Indian cities have become nebulous, their morphology uncertain. They appear to extend for miles in Mumbai and Kolkata as an ‘assorted chaos’ of middle-class residences, slums and bazaars, blurring into smaller provincial towns. The latter seem to distinguish themselves through the sameness of their ‘taste for strident politics, violent films, ostentatious architecture, lewd music, rumour-mongering newspapers and overcooked food’. The stretch between Delhi and Gurgaon is a series of real estate fictions of spurious capital and inadequate infrastructure. Spurred by the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s and supported by state policies that have lifted many of the restrictions on rent and land use, the structural transformation of Indian metropolises manifests itself on the edges of the city as a struggle between vast slums and corporate developers’ vision of up-scale real estate, between landscapes of rice and wheat fields and expanding airports and golfing greens.

The articles gathered here aim at outlining a complex view of the relationship between cities in a state of ‘crisis’ and changes to policing systems, in a period marked by rapid urbanization and industrialization. They explore the connections between the rhythms of urban change and the changes in the institutions responsible for policing the city. This introduction defines ‘urban crisis’ as a brief paroxysm and a way of describing rapid urban change that is considered problematic especially in terms of social control. It examines three sets of issues to highlight the relationships between policing powers and urban dynamics: first, how the police managed to handle unforeseen, traumatic events in emergency situations; second, how the police forces tried to legitimize their status through their understanding and control of urban dynamics; and third, how the police used the discourse of urban crisis they helped to produce, as a tool for their own ends.

What a word we live in. The existential reality of being ‘suburban’–an unpopular adjective at the best of times – has been subject to some astounding criticisms recently. People who choose to live in a suburban home are still deemed to be contemptible by a self-consciously urbane commentariat who could never live somewhere so vacuous. According to one newspaper journalist, the religious fascists who attacked Paris in November 2015 were at heart suburban, exhibiting contempt for the diversity and heterogeneity of the sophisticated metropolis because it upset their reactionary world view. The transatlantic celebrity-historian Simon Schama, appearing on BBC Television's Question Time in October 2015, denounced a critic of unfettered refugee migration to Europe for turning away his ‘suburban face’ to human tragedy. Can a suburbanite possibly find the wherewithal to bounce back from such criticism? Sadly, there is no great volume of historical literature to give them much inspiration, and more recent scholarship offers little that is truly revisionist.

Paris is renowned for artistic neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for earlier periods, the art-historical picture is much vaguer. Where did artists live and work in the eighteenth century? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the early modern art world? Drawing on data from a large-scale digital mapping project locating the addresses of hundreds of eighteenth-century artists, this article answers these crucial questions of urban art history. Following an overview of the digital project, the article explores three different mappings of the city's art worlds: a century long survey of the neighbourhoods inhabited by the Academy's artists; a comparison of where the Guild's artists were living in a single year and a wider world view of Parisian artists abroad. Through its new cartographic models of Paris's art worlds, this article brings the city to the foreground of eighteenth-century French art.

The history of crime, penal policy and policing is currently enjoying a vogue — and not least fashionable among the topics under discussion has been the question of the nineteenth-century English ‘criminal class’, the origins of the term and its social significance. Critics are divided more or less equally into quantifiers and phenomenologists, optimists and pessimists about real trends. Few are the questions about the known facts but no agreement appears in sight on the subject of their interpretation. The principal reason for disagreement, as it appears to the present writer, is the central dominance of predicative, mono-thematic perspectives and explanations — any of which will fit the facts quite well but all of which seem insusceptible to conclusive proof. First let us consider the range of dispute among the phenomenologists — each of whom may also be characterized as a univer-salist, in the sense that they seem to believe the possible range of criminal events illimitable and the figures on crime merely a reflection of external social reactions rather than evidence of any upward or downward trend in measurable events.

This article examines the decline of the craft guilds in early modern England by way of a case-study of the Tuckers’ Company in Exeter. From the 1980s, this case figured prominently in the historiographical debate concerning guild decline; however, it has not been examined recently. The current study reveals the Tuckers’ Company is not a case of decline in guild membership so much as a case of the loss of guild monopoly and a concomitant transition to charitable functions. On the basis of empirical sources, this study also reveals the mechanisms and context of this transformation in the post-Civil War politics of the city of Exeter. Specific attention is given to first, the decline of royal authority bolstering the guild against the city government and secondly, the shift of power in the guild with the ascendance of the merchant fullers. Finally, the historiographical implications of the article's findings are discussed.

This article deals with Marseille's social and political history between the 1850s and 1910s. During this period of extensive economic and demographic growth, the municipal government and police never seemed able to handle the consequences of these rapid changes. The case of Marseille thus allows us to test the connection between a growth situation interpreted as a ‘permanent crisis’ and police reform. The persistence of the crisis discourse invites us to examine the connection between the alarmist rhetoric and reforms in law enforcement. Is the first the cause of the second and, if not, how do we interpret the continuing complaints of a crisis for more than half a century, when they must have lost their effectiveness? This article examines the weakness and discontinuity of the relationship between claims of a crisis and police reforms and situates these reforms within the political context of tensions between the national and local levels.

Music – as many of the contributors to this special issue of Urban History point out – is an important component of the urban experience and can play a significant role in the construction of a civic identity, and yet it is a topic that urban historians have tended to overlook. There are some parallels with the case of the fine arts, to which a special issue of this journal was devoted in 1995, both in the causes for this neglect – which similarly include ‘the intimidating traditions of connoisseurship associated with the field’ and the difficulty we have with analysing the ‘aesthetic experience’ – and in the developments which are helping to overcome such inhibitions. So far, the impulse seems to be coming from musicologists and music historians, who, inhabiting a fairly small corner of the academic field, are fully conscious of the need to forge connections with other disciplines and historiographical traditions. The importance of contextualizing and historicizing not only the composition but also the production, transmission and reception of music has been recognized for some time, but so far urban historians have not responded as perhaps the music historians thought they might to the insights and openings that a musical ‘new historicism’ seems to offer. But there is clearly an opportunity – indeed, a pressing need – to develop a broadly-based cultural history of towns and cities in which music will take its place. The aim of this special issue is to promote that objective by illustrating the state of the art and suggesting some of the ideas, tools and methodologies with which it might be developed in future.

This article considers how the imagination and expectation of future air raids impacted upon the perception of the built environment, and asks how the boundaries between peace and war, and thus military and civilian, began to be dissolved in this context. It examines the interactions between architects, planners and government officials about how the design of cities and buildings might change in an age of air power. By looking at changes and continuities either side of the 1938 Munich crisis, it examines how the civilian space of cities was recast in anticipation of war.

It has recently been revealed that English common law played a certain role in dealing with the pollution problems that accompanied industrialization. This article explores the role of legal actions in solving environmental problems, not within a legal theory but in a larger framework of environmental politics. By focusing on legal actions, it is shown that the Act on Smoke Abatement of 1821 triggered smoke and noise nuisance lawsuits in London, especially against printers. The introduction of the steam press not only contributed to the production of cheap prints but also transformed the printing business into a polluting industry. Legal actions could sometimes remove a polluting business from a plaintiff's neighbourhood, though it also raised the problem of environmental inequality.

For a quarter century, the term ‘class’ has been anathema for most writers of premodern urban history. The term's associations with discredited forms of analysis – forms often dubiously but persistently associated with Marxism – continue to hamper its reintroduction. In the absence of ‘class’, or a term like it, however, meaningful discussion of ‘horizontal’ divisions in urban society has dwindled. The present article suggests that ‘class’ can and should be reintroduced into our analysis, but that this should be done in an informed way, which takes into account the principal possible meanings of the term. To this end, we analyse the ways in which urban historians have employed the term ‘class’ and find four principal usages. Two of these are ‘material’ and two are ‘institutional’. It is further suggested that certain institutions, such as the nobility and town governments in Europe, can be ‘class determining’, insofar as they channel economic and productive differences into effective political, legal and ideological ‘classes’. This insight, and the typology it is based upon, open the possibility for integrating ‘class’ analysis with recent work in both European and Global contexts.

In the towns of late medieval England (where perhaps 10 per cent of the population may have lived) the parish churches were being continuously expanded, adapted and decorated. Chantry and fraternity chapels were added between the nave pillars, or at the eastern ends of the aisles and here, as well as at the high altar, masses were celebrated and prayers recited with incessant devotion by the living for the repose of the souls of those who had died. These intercessory services, together with those of the usual liturgical round which took place in the choir and in the nave, were increasingly accompanied by complex polyphonic music involving several singers, both men and boys, and the playing of organs which were becoming ubiquitous in medieval parish churches. The development of this dynamic parish music has been detected, but not much studied. In part this is the result of the failure of urban historians and musicologists to talk to each other. Historians of late medieval religion have recently been exploring the diversity and sophistication of parochial devotional practices and have reaffirmed the importance of religious guilds and chantry foundations in enriching the liturgical practices of the parish, but they have paid little attention to music, and none to the impact of church music on civic ceremonial and the legitimating processes of urban rulers. Musicologists who have worked on the music of the English church have been, until very recently, comparatively uninterested in what happened beyond the interior of the church and, in any case, more interested in the great royal and collegiate foundations from which some music has survived. The surprising conclusion is that, for both urban historians and musicologists, the connected argument that links religious ritual, broadly defined, with the spatial and social dimensions of life and work in towns barely yet exists.

This article explores the social history of the political elites of Mechelen, a town that evolved from a seigneurial enclave within the duchy of Brabant to the de facto capital of the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries between the 1470s and 1530. Proceeding from a quantitative analysis of lists of aldermen, fiscal registers and epitaphs, the article argues that the short-lived functioning of Mechelen as a capital city had great impact on its ruling classes. Mechelen was traditionally ruled by a coalition of craft guilds and prominent citizens, but the latter reoriented their social networks to the court elite, as the latter's presence supercharged pre-existing trends towards ennoblement among the urban elite.

This article uses the Decrees issued by the London Fire Court to explore two aspects of property law and practice in the 1660s. The first is the use of trusts and settlements. The Decrees suggest that at least for property owners these were more widespread than previously thought. The second theme concerns women. Fathers and husbands used their property carefully to make provision for their daughters and wives. More than that, women were clearly active participants in the property ‘market’, despite the legal restrictions imposed on them. The conclusions emphasize the importance of looking beyond legal rules.

In the 1970s, a commune movement emerged in West German cities. The article explores this movement as an attempt to create spaces for feeling ‘at home’ in cities that many people perceived to be alienating. After providing a brief overview of the development of the commune movement, the article explores the new domesticity that emerged in communes. It first discusses the emotional and political ambitions that motivated mostly left-leaning students to move into communes, and then explores the practical attempts to create such spaces for feelings, how such attempts succeeded but also encountered many difficulties. The article thereby contributes to an understanding of what it takes for people to feel at home in cities.

Urban conflict in medieval England often took one of two forms: public confrontation involving ritualistic acts of transgression on the one hand and legal challenges involving litigation on the other. This article explores an urban dispute in the latter category fought at Bishop's Lynn between 1346 and 1350. The rich series of records surviving from this dispute provides a rare opportunity to reconstruct in detail the legal strategies adopted throughout the conflict. The case is significant for the innovative legal challenge adopted by the burgesses, and for the subsequent campaign of misinformation propagated in parliament by the bishop of Norwich.

It is now several years since José Luis Oyón presented an overview of recent trends in Spanish urban history, and this article seeks to communicate a sense of developments in the field since the mid-1990s, dealing with publications covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ‘contemporary’ rather than ‘modern’ history, in Spanish terminology. The question of what constitutes ‘urban history’ in Spain remains problematic, in the absence of a ‘Dyos phenomenon’, a distinctive urban history teaching enterprise and a sustained and successful dedicated journal. Four annual issues of Historia Urbana, a ‘review of the history of ideas and of urban transformations’, appeared in the mid-1990s, but the final one dates from 1997, and most of the articles presented general theoretical perspectives or articles based on research in countries other than Spain. As Beascoechea and Novo have recently remarked, it seemed in the early 1990s that urban history (or, as they put it, ‘the history of the city’) was becoming established as a recognized discipline in Spain, but subsequent developments have failed to match the expectations that were aroused. Their themed urban history issue of Historia Contemporánea, produced in 2002, is aimed at regaining the lost momentum. Meanwhile, librarians still do not respond to ‘historia urbana’ as a category, seeking to redefine it as ‘urbanismo’, a narrower concept focused on town planning and urban design.

For as historians are compelled to grind out their specified quota of specialized articles and inaccessible monographs, which are at best read only by a handful of professional colleagues, and are at worst almost completely ignored, this makes them less and less able to fulfil that essential public function which remains their real and abiding justification: satisfying the interest and furthering the comprehension of that broader, non-professional audience memorably described by Hugh Trevor-Roper as ‘the laity’ (David Cannadine, 1999).