An explanation for the formation of the National Gallery of Scotland is proposed which affirms the priority of local conditions of cultural production. In the absence of a fecund tradition of art patronage in Scotland, the modernization of Edinburgh's art field in the early nineteenth century depended on the activities of civic elites. The Scottish model of art museum development resembled the later American model more than it did the earlier French one. What was particular to Edinburgh, though, was a strong form of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. The romantic landscape trope indexed the security of bourgeois power by the 1830s. But its own role was to act as a catalyst in the formation of collection-oriented and professional art institutions, and of a gallery going public in the capital.

Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

Historic monuments were one of the vehicles of modern nation building in the nineteenth century. Their role could turn out to be even more exposed in an ethnically mixed territory of central and central-eastern Europe. For the turn of the twentieth-century Polish inhabitants of the capital of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, urban secular historic architecture proved to be such a key tool. The Old Town of Lviv, in itself witness of a centuries-old multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tradition, became the basis for a modern nation-building project, in which local and regional Polish character administrative bodies and social institutions were involved. The project relied on the strengthening of national identity among Lviv's inhabitants by means of securing the ‘Polish character’ of the Old Town, which amounted to reinventing it anew.

On account of their dual function as princes of the church and agents for the king of France, the French cardinals in Rome constitute a well-defined and self-contained community. They were governed by complex internal dynamics as well as by the need to present a unified front to the pope, in addition to the College of Cardinals and the citizenry of Rome. French cardinals present in Rome between 1490 and 1560 were mobile, as their physical presence in the city was not continuous: a number of them were stable residents in Rome, charged with diplomatic missions, while others only attended the conclaves. A special case is that of Jean du Bellay, who became fully integrated into the life of the city, established a literary salon open to artists and poets, and was involved in the study of Antiquities and the construction of a villa-garden complex, the Horti Bellayani.

Interdisciplinarity has proved to be one of the enduring tenets of British urban history. As Fiona Kisby points out in her contribution to this special issue of Urban History, its centrality is enunciated in the agenda set by Jim Dyos in the 1960s, as the subject emerged as a self-conscious subdiscipline of British history, and in the editorials that launched this publication as a Yearbook and subsequently as a journal. The appeal of an interdisciplinary approach is that it allows those involved to transcend the straitjacket of traditional research and explore a given issue or subject from a multiplicity of angles. However, prioritizing such a methodology, though it might allow the intellectual high ground to be occupied temporarily, provides a real hostage to fortune, raising expectations that it often proves impossible to fulfil. Interdisciplinarity simply cuts against the dominant grain of academe. Where British urban historians have crossed the disciplinary barricades, they have tended to head in the direction of the social sciences (such as sociology, economics, geography and anthropology). A rapprochement with the arts (painting, film, literature, architecture, music, and the like) is less easy to discern. Yet with the growing interest in the last decade or so in cultural history the time is ripe to redress the balance. This music issue of Urban History, like that of August 1995 on ‘Art and the City’, can be seen as an attempt to do this. Its appearance coincides with the publication of a pioneering volume of essays, edited by Fiona Kisby, on Music and Musicians in Renaissance Cities and Towns, whose avowed aim is to ‘bring musicology within the sphere of urban history’. Though that collection is predominantly focused on western Europe (with six of the essays on the British Isles, six on the Continent, and one on South America) and on the years 1400 to 1650, it provides a model for how the agendas of musicologists and urban historians might be productively merged.

This study estimates the cost of living in three cities – Florence, Bologna and Milan – in eighteenth-century northern Italy. Although they do not allow an understanding of the differences between social groups or seasonal consumption patterns, the calculation of living costs and the implied modelling have a twofold aim. First, they allow the calculation of real wages, which are obtained by dividing nominal wages by the cost of a consumption basket; therefore, broadly, they allow the Italian case to be put into great debates of economic history, such as the one on the Little Divergence between northern and southern Europe at the end of the early modern period. In this regard, we will show that the existing calculations used for this purpose have many criticalities, and we will solve them. Second, determining the cost of consumption baskets allows us to observe the role played by urban public institutions in mediating between the market and consumers, with relevant effects on price trends and, therefore, on the purchasing power of the urban population.

In Germany, the Revolutions of 1848 and 1918/19 resulted in the martyrdom of opposition leaders and constituents, whose burial sites in Berlin became key sites of memory and commemoration for the working-class movement. Political turbulence and regime change throughout the twentieth century has resulted in contestation over the meaning and use of these places; a trajectory illustrating the dynamic, reciprocal relationship between popular memory and official history, and the interplay between representation, place-based associations and spatial relations in constituting social meaning in the urban landscape.

Following a spate of anarchist bombings and assassinations in Europe, the gente decente of Guatemala City began to describe local events using the language of anarchism. The 1894 anarchist furor spoke to two tendencies that had shaped Guatemala City since the 1870s. The first was the cosmopolitan desire of the gente decente. Facilitated by cosmopolitan bridge figures, trends and fashions from Europe and especially Paris shaped the cultural lexicon of Guatemala City's elite. Secondly, the anarchist furor reflected the misgivings of the gente decente toward urban disorder and malcontents as they conflated anarchism and anarchy.

This article links the nature of commercial masked balls in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s to urban development during these decades. The raucous and often destructive character of the balls, which united elites and popular classes under the mask's anonymity, coincided with a society undergoing social and political upheaval. The dress and conduct of revellers were expressions of their ambitions, fears and resentments. Changes in the urban landscape of the 1820s and 1830s – in particular, the construction of the grands boulevards and alignment of theatres sponsoring masked balls along this axis – sharpened potential conflict at such events by placing them in one of the most socially charged corridors of the city.

This article focuses on the disparity between two urban reports of the Gómez regime (1908–35). Relying on the theoretical platform provided by European positivism, there is, on the one hand, the erudite ideologists' justification of the material achievements of the dictatorship. On the other hand, there is the critique present in the literary characters of the works written by the young political class, where the parochialism of Caracas served as an excuse to attack the social abuses and cultural obscurity of one of Latin America's longest dictatorships.

During the inter-war period, the formation of amenity groups marked a new phase in the way place was conceived and shaped and their establishment and relationship with newly empowered local authorities remains an under-examined aspect of the management of towns and cities at the time. Focusing on the motivations for group formation in Birmingham and Norwich, we explore how complex relationships of attachment to place, or topophilia, entered into dialogue with professionalizing approaches to urban development and shed new light on attitudes to urban conservation and planning in the inter-war period. The article also adds a historical perspective to work on affective relationships with place.

Although early modern Welsh towns were small by European standards, appearing to follow Clark's model for Europe's northern periphery of localized settlements not closely integrated within a wider urban hierarchy, Welsh towns showing greatest expansion were commercial outlets for specialist produce within the wider commercial matrix of southern Britain. Their smallness indicates a role within this wider, integrated network rather than constriction born of isolation.

This article attempts a detailed social portrait of Cape Town on the eve of apartheid. In the process it provides a rare cross-racial study of a twentieth-century South African city. The first section reveals a complex place already distinguished by considerable segregation and predictable social inequalities, both between and within racial and ethnic categories. Yet such findings are at odds with popular memories of a golden age – marked by tolerance, greater cohesion and security. So the second section explores and explains the differences. It finds that memories cannot simply be dismissed as myths.

This article examines the public culture of military associations, and their veteran membership, in inter-war Glasgow. It follows their parades and beery reunions to consider the public meanings of such acts. That these claims to civic recognition were met by a congregation of civic elements allows us to view the inter-war creation of civic identity from a new and enlightening vantage point. But this culture also allows us to encompass the vitality, and distinctly urban character, of the memory of the Great War within inter-war society. Cities provided alternative channels for the veteran associational impulse to the British Legion, which has generally been seen as synonymous with the veterans’ movement in Britain. War memory, too, had a distinct urban form and character that needs to be acknowledged within wider literature. This is the story of the ‘civic veteran’ and the social and cultural contexts that made him.

This article examines the rise of co-operative life insurance societies and the market for life insurance in the early eighteenth century. Life insurance offered the middling sort in particular an opportunity to associate together for mutual economic protection and also provided them with a means to advance a set of reforming ideals. Until 1774, however, the lack of any legal restrictions on who might insure whom meant that prudential insuring existed alongside gambling on other people's lives, leading to a clash of property interests among the societies' members. Ultimately, a new moral technology was developed that segregated licit from illicit motives for insuring and also curtailed the proprietary rights insurance society members had previously exercised over their own policies, subjecting them instead to an impersonal financial bureaucracy.

The tenement is the traditional form of urban housing in Scotland and most tenements were built for rent. From the early nineteenth century onwards, private landlords in Scotland employed ‘factors’ to manage the houses on their behalf, responsible for houseletting, rent collection and the organization of repairs and maintenance. This paper examines the nature of the house factoring profession in terms of its organization and uses case studies to illustrate the way individual firms operated. The representation of the profession through factors’ associations is also examined and there is a consideration of the negative image which factors have acquired. The paper explores the changing nature of factoring as tenement flats have been sold off and factors have become agents not for individual landlords but for a multiplicity of owner-occupiers.

The article considers where and how the silk industry was located in the urban space of Lyons. It also explores how the changing nature of silk production and manufacture influenced the institutional arrangements and physical character of the city. Several sub-periods are considered between the early seventeenth to the early twentieth century, each with different spatial logics largely defined by changes in the governance of the trade. This study offers new insights into how a dominant industrial activity reorganized the spaces of a major city and how the resulting social structure affected its spatial pattern. In so doing, space is accorded a more central role in understanding urban development, while recognizing that social, economic and political forces also modify this materiality. Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) facilitate greater precision in terms of urban locations and thereby utilize written qualitative and quantitative sources more effectively.

This article examines the origins and evolution of Hong Kong triads since 1842 through official archival documents, media analysis, interviews with triad members and an analytical framework of criminal politics (organized crime–state relations). We propose ‘the urban criminal polity’ as a novel concept to explicate urban criminal organizations as a non-state power in the city. We argue that interactions between triad societies and the British colonial government were primarily characterized by enforcement–evasion rather than confrontation. Since the 1990s, alliances have grown between patriotic triads and the Chinese central government, which enhances the Chinese government's control over the city.

During the sixteenth century, antiquarians increasingly developed a self-conscious identity as a professional group with specific social, intellectual and artisan skills. Their activity was not linked to a particular place though: antiquities surfaced from the earth both inside and outside the city walls and were traded in streets, squares, private houses and gardens. Using the Stampa brothers as a case-study, this article investigates the role and commercial strategies of antiquarians and their ability to cross the boundaries of social groups, since they had to deal with artisans, peasants and artists on one side, and cardinals and gentlemen on the other.

What difference do cities make? How the urban – and place more generally – have contributed to historical processes is one of the questions that continually confront urban historians. Should towns and cities be regarded as no more than the backdrop against which events and developments – industrialization, social conflict, war – are played out? Or do cities and urbanism more widely possess agency? Do they (as many urbanists claim) have an active part to play in shaping how historical processes eventuate, why things happened in this way here and that way there? If so, what precisely is the urban variable; how can we define and estimate it?