This article reviews research on autobiographical texts written by artisans and other members of the urban popular classes during the early modern era. After reviewing some of the ways in which urban history has incorporated personal literature by authors from diverse social backgrounds, it explores the meaning of the term ‘popular autobiography’. After examining the contribution of this unique historical source to the study of urban politics, society and culture, the essay then focuses on the specific question of what autobiography can reveal about the study of popular sociability. A preliminary list of popular autobiographers figures in the appendix.

This paper looks at Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham and claims that George Dawson's famous ‘civic gospel’ which laid the ground for the municipal reforms was permeated by a consensus view of the moral and civic role of art. It suggests that it was this combination of philosophy in action through art which created the special Birmingham context for a vibrant civic culture which led to the political and artistic achievements of the 1870s and 1880s. For a few brief years, this combination enabled Birmingham to stand above other British cities and lay claim to the titles of ‘the best-governed city in the world’ and ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’.

Set in the context of the nineteenth-century expansion of Madrid, the Parque del Oeste not only reflected the plans for urban expansion of the city, but it also encapsulated the core values and ideals of the conservative reformist agenda of Spain's Restoration government. The relationships between park and city are explored in the context of the late nineteenth-century expansion of Madrid.

Drawing on contemporary musings and references from a variety of civic records, this article will consider music heard in the public spaces of urban England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Negative reactions to performers such as common fiddlers and street traders became increasingly common as the period progressed and were intimately connected both with fears concerning the crowd-gathering potential of such people and with a desire to control the sound environment to enable effective sleep, worship and concentration.

This article examines public health spending, health outcomes and political complexion in London's 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils (MBCs) in the inter-war period. It describes the place of the MBCs in the governance of the capital and demonstrates the variety of experience across the different boroughs in terms of wealth, politics and mortality. Searching for potential causes of differences in outcomes, it discovers some positive statistical relationships between the extent of Labour party presence on the councils, local spending and health outcomes. Our tentative conclusion is that local democratic processes could lead to distinctive and beneficial public health policies, albeit within the context of other local and structural determining factors.

In our introduction to this Special Issue on early modern cities and globalization, we explore the current place of cities before 1850 in global urban history and address the promise of a greater focus on their role. We argue that the interplay between the large scale and the small scale in the imperial global city is an essential dialogical force in the formation of each city's relationship to the wider early modern world. Furthermore, early modern global urban history can help explain the creation of spaces that facilitated connections between distant, global locations, as well as illuminate the emergence of networks of exchange between city communities around the globe. Yet, it also reveals the tense, messy negotiation of the meaning of these urban spaces, as well as the incredibly diverse communities they harboured.

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.

Although little explored, regulations – in the form of laws and byelaws – formed an important technique of nineteenth-century government. This article explores the implementation and enforcement of two sets of regulations regarding the keeping and disposal of dirt imposed by Scottish local authorities: one on behaviours around the disposal of domestic refuse, the other on the keeping of dung – a form of property. While behaviours around refuse were more stringently policed than those affecting property, in both cases regulations were not the basis of a strict disciplinary regime, but a means of informing, educating and persuading residents into cleanly habits.

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.

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.

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.

The implementation of Modern Movement town planning is still regarded as both rapid and relatively unproblematic in the aftermath of World War II. A more complex narrative emerges from an examination of the urban redevelopment policy and practice at Vancouver, British Columbia, during the immediate World War II decades. The analysis focuses on the civic and professional discourse of redevelopment. It illuminates the diverse interests and processes by which Modernist planning theory and practice were introduced, modified and resisted. New concepts and values are shown to have been subject to internal no less than external forces of revision.

Urban development corresponds with economic shifts. In the second half of the twentieth century, when traditional forms of industrial production declined in many western cities, this posed new kinds of challenges. Cities were in need of a new economic base and at the same time had to cope with the abandonment of industrial sites. This article highlights the agency of local societies in shaping this process of deindustrialization and redevelopment. It interprets deindustrialization and redevelopment as a process of transformation which was open-ended and a matter of intense negotiation between diverging interests at the local level. In analysing the highly contentious case of the disused Stollwerck chocolate factory in Cologne, the article traces a complex set of site-specific factors of deindustrialization and redevelopment.

Portraiture has accurately been identified as one of the many harmony-inducing, commemorative devices employed in the celebratory culture of the London liveries in the century after the Reformation. But a closer examination of the developing tradition of livery company portraiture shows its use to be considerably more complex, and sometimes more divisive, than previously recognized.

These four exciting books fill in what Sir Peter Hall's monumental Cities in Civilization left undone. To be sure, they do not tell the entire story of China's five (possibly six or more according to the latest archaeological findings) thousand years of uninterrupted urban experience, but together they are a flying start, especially from the perspective of one kind of elite or another.

This article makes use of memoirs, autobiographies and oral interviews in order to consider the relations between the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant communities in the Gorbals. While there was considerable variation in individual experience, there were also particular occasions where inter-ethnic relations were all too predictable, almost following a ‘calendar of conflict’. The article shows that, while there was a degree of anti-Semitism in the area, integration between the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the district was facilitated by a number of factors. Ultimately, anti-Semitism was mediated through the sectarian rivalry, which was the dominant religious conflict in the city.