The three books under review represent the origins and promise of a relatively new field of study, urban environmental history. Joel Tarr's collection of previously published essays retraces the intellectual odyssey of its single most important pioneer. Concerned about contemporary pollution problems, he has spent a quarter of a century exploring the frontiers of scholarship on the relationship between cities and their technologies. In contrast, monographs by R. Bruce Stephenson and Andrew Hurley are typical of current trends to build on this foundation, enriching and broadening its parameters from a wide variety of perspectives. Here the insights of town planning and social history illuminate case studies of St Petersburg, Florida, and Gary, Indiana, respectively. Other recent works draw heavily upon the sciences, especially medicine and public health. Reversing decades of academic fragmentation – knowing more and more about less and less – the study of the urban environment is encouraging creative applications of cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches.

This article deals with the importance of religion as a factor influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners from – and inside – the guilds in eighteenth-century Strasbourg. We consider the different notions of the étranger as socially constructed and circumstantial. Together with factors such as social status, family ties, gender, systems of patronage, wealth, language and the citizenship rights of a town, religious and denominational boundaries constituted a major factor for influencing the inclusion and exclusion of foreigners in the early modern society. The construction and preservation of such boundaries are explored here through the examples of the carpenters' and the shipmen's guild found in the eighteenth-century multiconfessional city of Strasbourg.

Although urban historians have recently begun to study the city and the senses, relatively few have investigated the aural environment experienced by the ear. To a certain extent, towns are thus characterized as silent societies and sounds of whatever kind are not viewed as an integral part of urban life. This article, based on a small Spanish town called Jaca, aims to describe some of its most notable sounds during the ancien régime and to explore how inhabitants perceived them. Such an approach provides a deeper and more comprehensive insight into the totality of the urban experience of townspeople of the period, and also suggests some new lines of enquiry for future musicological research.

Despite a massive proliferation in the literature on ‘risk’ and ‘disaster management’ in the contemporary world, historians have been slow to clarify their thoughts on these issues. The paper seeks to remedy this state of affairs. For the purposes of exegesis, it separates disasters, mishaps and accidents into ‘natural’, ‘social’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘individual’ categories, before summarizing and interrogating the influential theoretical work of Karl Figlio in this field. In terms of conclusions, the article suggests a provisional social-historical methodology for the recovery and reconstruction of the individual ‘moment’ of the accident; proposes a breaking down of the barriers between ‘domestic’ and ‘non-domestic’ occurrences of this type; and analyses reasons for lack of scholarly interest in the area as a whole. Focused predominantly on Britain, the paper also draws selectively on European and extra-European experience; and deploys numerous examples derived from urban history in order to press home its major points.

Throughout the late Middle Ages, Castilian towns underwent a process of rapid economic and political growth which the monarchy sought to control. Accordingly, the monarchy reoriented its policies towards the towns. It attempted to impose the figure of the ‘corregidor’, the representative and defender of royal interests; it intervened wherever possible in the appointment of local government offices; it played its part in urban conflicts, alternately supporting opposing factions in an effort to take advantage of the situation and secure its own interests; and finally, the state established regulations governing economic activity. The process of royal intervention culminated under the Catholic monarchs (1474–1504) with what can be considered as a royal triumph.

This article analyses the ways the urban boundary and the landscapes beyond it were culturally conceived and physically manipulated in Munich between about 1890 and 1920. It highlights planning practice outside the ‘canon’ of planning history, showing the importance of localized decision-taking in urban design. The article explores cities as cultural constructs and material artefacts in Germany as part of a broader project linking planning history to broader historical investigation, and tries to bridge the gap between the ‘material’ city as a physical space, and the ‘cultural’ city of language and symbols.

This article examines the reports written by Gerolamo Vano, a spy working in early seventeenth-century Venice. It concentrates on their form rather than their content in a attempt to assess Vano's story-telling skills. It is also an experiment in historical story-telling, which departs from some of the conventions of academic writing and embraces the melodramatic qualities of Vano's writing. In short, the article's form is used to comment allegorically upon its content.

Directories have had a somewhat chequered history, both in terms of their original production, and also in their subsequent use as sources of information. To a large extent these two aspects are closely related, as is illustrated by the reluctance of some urban historians to use directories because of doubts over their reliability. A further factor determining the extent to which directories have been utilized, has been the availability of other information. In Britain it has been the relative abundance of small area census data that has had an important effect on directing research in urban history, by drawing much attention away from the exploration and use of other sources. This is certainly the case with directories, which for many researchers have served only as a ‘stop-gap’, being used when nothing else was available and then often with a sceptical attitude. Recently, some of these views have started to change as a growing number of urban historians make more use of directory material, particularly in the study of urban systems and changes in commercial structures.

On the definitive return of the pope to Rome in 1420, following the so-called Avignonese captivity, the city underwent major modifications. The ‘romanam curiam sequentes’, the court and administration that followed the traditionally itinerant pope, settled in the city, leading to Rome's population doubling in the space of a few years. Furthermore, with the support of the pope, the members of the curia came to take possession of spaces, offices, roles and rituals that had previously been the reserve of the local Romans. This article considers the reaction of the community of the local nobility (here described summarily as Roman families) to the encroaching presence of the curia within the specific context of the development of the built form of the via Papalis. It is argued that the via Papalis, one of the most important and prestigious streets in Rome, became the theatre within which these two communities played out their conflict through the medium of built and ephemeral architecture.

Between the Glorious Revolution and the mid-eighteenth century the governance of the Corporation of London was transformed from an oligarchy of aldermen to a ‘rate payer's democracy’. Previous analyses of this transformation have produced a contradictory picture of how and why this shift in governance occurred. By analysing the Corporation's progress to democracy from an administrative perspective, this article argues that this process was more evolutionary in nature than has previously been suggested.

Urban studies and urban history have, in recent decades, become a booming field in Russia. The most likely explanation for this is the post-Soviet development and transformation of Russian cities. It is not only the demographic growth – although for some cities it has been quite substantial in the last 25 years – but rather the striking changes made to urban space, economy, governance, social organization and residential patterns that have provoked interest in urban research among scholars and the general public. Reflecting this wave of interest, several new centres of urban studies emerged in Russia during the 2000s (for example, the Strelka Institute, the Graduate School of Urban Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the programme in urban studies at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences).

Despite the fact that sporting spaces reflect key shifts in thinking about town planning, sports architecture is still an underexplored area in the historiography of urban design. The architects, engineers and designers attempting to regenerate and rejuvenate cities after World War II were aware of the popular interest in competitive sports. Stadia and landscape design were intended to help erase the negative urban images of nationalism and totalitarianism. By starting a dialogue with the past, town planners questioned the grandeur and monumentalism prevalent in architecture since the late nineteenth century. They sought to rediscover and redefine the modern.

Current historiography endorses a narrative that the political elite of pre-industrial gateway cities became more ‘open’ in the wake of efflorescence and that their city councils became populated with merchants. Yet, according to the existing literature, Antwerp challenges this narrative, as the influx of merchants was very limited during late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when Antwerp transformed from a medium-sized Brabantine city into the leading economic centre in western Europe. Moreover, scholars disagree on whether the economic expansion had any impact at all on the composition and profile of Antwerp's political elite. By analysing the social composition of the city council and how this evolved from the beginning of Antwerp's commercial expansion around 1400 until its apogee around 1550, I revisit the question whether Antwerp constitutes an exception to the established pattern of elite formation in gateway cities and, if so, why.

This article re-examines the 1860 census for Savannah Georgia. It melds the free and slave census to gain insights into slave ownership, owners’ occupations and makes tentative suggestions as to slave occupations. It argues that the concentration of slaveholding among a minority of locally born residents explains both the tensions evident in white society during the 1850s and actions taken to ease them. It also demonstrates that the widely used data for the number of urban slaves in Savannah overstates the actual number by c. 20 per cent. The census thus complicates our understanding of the vitality of late antebellum urban slavery.

Histories of the ‘mass tourism’ of sunshine and beaches, and of the ‘package holiday’, in post-war Europe have tended to focus on the activities of big international companies and the role of governments. This has certainly been the case in Spain. This article recovers an earlier version of the urban history of coastal tourism in southern Europe, focusing on the resort of San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country, and thereby drawing attention to the neglected Atlantic dimension of Spanish coastal tourism. It then examines the responses of an established resort and summer capital to the new developments of the post-Civil War years, and shows how the decline of an older model of aristocratic tourism was counterbalanced by the development of new holiday markets and practices, many of which arose spontaneously beyond the regulatory and promotional gaze of the local authorities.

During the 1880s, a massive speculative boom occurred in the Roman real estate market. Its subsequent crash left a lasting mark on the structure of the city and triggered a nationwide banking crisis. This article analyses the causes of this boom and bust by showing how a small but cohesive lobby managed to bypass and bend to its own advantage formal regulation by exploiting institutional conflicts and political divisions at both national and local level.

This article explores the significance of mobility in the everyday structures of political life through a case study of political space in mid-eighteenth-century Stockholm. Analytical in approach, the study focuses on political action in public space, in its spatial negotiations of inclusion and exclusion, and investigates three particular places: the city itself, the central square Riddarhustorget and the city's wine shops. It shows that temporary political density and geographical proximity during meetings of the Estates of the Realm, when a large influx of people upset the corporate social division of the city, gave the lower orders the opportunity to cross thresholds into elite places. In addition, mobility between sites and the use of many places, rather than the mastering of one particular site, was a means for these orders to take part in political life. Results show that a unified ‘public sphere’ was not a prerequisite for extra-parliamentary politics. Instead, participation was made possible by moving between places, and learning how to navigate many different social and political boundaries.

This article examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman's writings on Paris – its history and specific places within the city – we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it meant to be ‘French’.

In 1613 the learned divine Dr Andrew Willet remarked on the number of London churches that had recently been rebuilt, commenting that ‘generally all of them have beene more Beautified and adorned in the space of twenty or thirty yeeres than in an hundred yeeres before’. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the subject of church building in Jacobean London has attracted little attention. Yet the detailed examination of such building provides special insight into the way parishioners viewed themselves and their community.