Under what circumstances did Canadian municipalities, charged with ensuring the existence of services which encouraged the development of real property, come to be involved in the field of culture and leisure? By examining the process through which the Municipal Library and the Botanical Garden were established in Montreal, this article attempts to answer this question. Because these projects constituted precedents in relation to the usual areas of Canadian municipal intervention, they provoked vigorous debate. Each in their own way, the projects served to call into question the definition of public culture and the democratization of knowledge. They also raised the equally contentious issue of the role of municipal government in the fields of leisure and culture.

This review begins with a subject that is familiar to all urban historians of the Middle Ages. Citizenship was one of the most ubiquitous forms of social and political organization in medieval towns. Yet, as Pierre Racine points out, in ‘La citoyenneté en Italie au Moyen Âge’, Le Moyen Âge, 115 (2009), 87–108, it is perhaps surprising that there have been so few studies devoted specifically to the right of citizenship in the Italian cities of the communal period. Racine's discussion is focused upon the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, that is, from the formation of the communes to the emergence of princely states in northern and central Italy, when many of the city-states disappeared. If citizenship was in some ways a burden which entailed liability to taxation and the fulfilment of military service, it was fundamentally a privilege. Thus, the thirteenth-century communal governments of cities such as Piacenza appointed officials charged with investigating cases of ‘false citizens’. Citizenship was acquired largely on the basis of more or less permanent residence and the ownership of a house in the city and it allowed the citizen to participate in the popular assembly, where the important questions concerning the election of officials and the problems of daily life were debated and decided. In emphasizing the emotional attachment which citizens felt towards their urban patria, Racine addresses the cultural as well as juridical meaning of citizenship.

How can a modern concept like Amartya Sen's capability approach be introduced in historical studies? One possibility is to ask how public services were implemented in municipal policy and how these services open up capabilities for the individuals of a city. This article uses Sen's theoretical framework as an analytical tool to explore two Prussian towns, Erfurt and Frankfurt am Main, and their public services (job centres and tramway systems) as examples of social policy at the local level.

This article examines the social topography and the housing patterns of Moscow workers in the context of their social status and experience of immigration. It argues that in the early twentieth century Moscow was characterized by extremely poor housing conditions and the absence of clear residential segregation of social classes due to the lack of profound planning policy and urban reforms.

This article examines how the management of railway traffic was problematized in urban plans for colonial Delhi after the 1890s. It reveals how Delhi was reconstituted as a space of circulation in municipal plans attempting to combat railway-induced ‘traffic congestion’. Yet, even as new gardens, localities and footpaths were envisaged as enabling smooth flows of traffic and generating a commercially healthy city, policing anxieties and concerns over political security dominated in such plans. Finally, this article shows how the process of railway-inspired ‘urban planning’ was itself driven by a contestation between different ‘scales’ of the colonial state.

A content analysis of the Leiden Sketchbook (1577–85) addresses two major issues. First, how a stereotype of an Ottoman town was created by sixteenth-century travellers and second, how the social organization of space and integration of formerly Christian towns into the Ottoman system during the period of its greatest expansion was perceived. The comparison of visual sources with travelogues and historiography confirms the historicity and trustworthiness of the drawings. The drawings are revealing when interpreted in the context of the approach of historical anthropology: they illustrate the travelogues and testify to the sensual experience of their author.

Studies of office-holding in Renaissance Italy have largely ignored magistrates of communal origin. The focus has been on offices and officials in the developing regional states, with an emphasis on princely regimes and on Lombardy. The present article examines the citizen magistrates despatched by the city of Lucca to govern its significant but depleted and fragmented territories. It addresses the question of the professionality (or lack of professionality) of the short-term office-holders of urban-centred republican regimes, and briefly explores what a study of office-holding can reveal about relations between a city and its dependent countryside. Though fifteenth-century Lucca was atypical in its historical setting, comparisons have been drawn throughout between Lucca and neighbouring (albeit very different) political formations.

For some years, the historiography on Francoist violence has engaged with debates developed by European scholars on the importance of citizen collaboration in authoritarian regimes. In some cases, denunciations made by ‘ordinary men’ have been quantified to establish the extent of violence in everyday life, without taking other qualitative criteria into account. This article explores the importance of urban criteria such as neighbourhood, sociability and mobility in the scope of Francoist violence, taking the military occupation of Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War as a case-study.

As the population of Khartoum increased during the 1940s, the Sudan government sought to demolish the Deims that surrounded the southern edge of the city and relocate the residents to a new planned site. Here, it was envisaged that improved housing would help to create ‘modern’, model families. However, like many of the post-war housing projects in British Africa, the resettlement of the Deims was undermined by poor planning, inadequate financial support and resistance from residents, who rejected the colonial planners’ vision of how domestic life should be organized.

This article examines the delicate relationship between the civic privilege of wine retailing and the constitutional emphasis on order in a city republic. Burghers appreciated the revenues from beverage sales, while urban authorities worried about destabilizing effects. In the context of state formation, Bern claimed control over public houses throughout its territory, but closer analysis suggests that socio-economic and political interests were constantly renegotiated, not only within the capital but also between centre and periphery.

In the Wilhelmine era (1871–1918) the Krupp steel company developed into Germany's largest industrial establishment and most famous armaments manufacturer. While the firm further cultivated its reputation as ‘Cannon Kings’, it claimed to be a leader in an entirely different area: the provision of housing. Extensively marketed through company publications, displays at international exhibitions and its Besucherpolitik (visitor policy), Krupp's housing developments in Essen generated considerable domestic and international interest. During a period when the housing question increasingly entered the political realm, high-profile individuals such as Kurt Eisner, Hannes Meyer and Alfred von Tirpitz all passionately expressed their views on Krupp's housing developments. This article assesses their historically neglected first-hand observations against the quantitative and qualitative housing achievements of the steel giant.

Recent historical studies of social groups have stressed the need to know, in detail at a household and personal level, the precise objective character of individuals and their circumstances – the physical profile – to the extent that these can be defined, quantified and measured. One of the areas of success in the analysis of social change has come in studies that emphasize local situations. The local area – city, town, or district – was the context in which, for all but the small element who formed the upper class, life was conducted, social contacts circumscribed and power struggles and conflicts articulated. Local case-studies, particularly of urban and therefore geographically compact populations, have emerged as a major mechanism through which the details of dynamic social relationships can be identified and juxtaposed.

The place of Charles Booth's London poverty survey within an empirical tradition of sociology has been much discussed in recent years. The pivotal position which Booth had in this tradition was highlighted by Philip Abrams especially. Booth's achievement, it has been claimed, was to illuminate the structural underpinnings of poverty rather than just its extent. In doing so he not only challenged the assumptions of political economy but brought new life to the tradition of house-to-house surveys and case-studies as practised by those involved in the statistical movement of the nineteenth century in Britain. Booth sought answers to narrowly denned social problems, seeking to generate new and superior data capable of bearing the questions. His was the habit of ‘ad hoc compartmentalised research’, from which one main line of development was the government enquiries of the Webb era and beyond. Another line of descent can be traced in the social survey movement centred in the United States, and through this Booth's influence spread to the Chicago school of urban sociologists. Despite this wideranging influence those who followed Booth's lead studied his own descriptions of his findings and methods, and rarely, if ever, looked behind the published volumes to the varied materials generated by the large-scale research project he masterminded. These materials represent a rich and varied source of data which have so far been relatively little used by historians, and then mainly in a minor illustrative way.

This paper explores the relative balance between socio-economic grievance and confessional and political division in urban revolts during the period of the French religious wars. More particularly, it focuses on two such incidents in the town of Troyes in Champagne in the summer of 1586 and what they can tell us about the influence of popular discontent on municipal politics and town–crown relations, as well as the impact of civil war, subsistence crisis and increasing taxation on urban communities. The continuity of the traditions of popular revolt are explored alongside the implications for royal authority of the official response to such unrest. Social tensions and economic concerns dominated events in the town, whilst the crown's right and ability to enforce its will continued to be accepted and upheld. Thus, despite the disruption of civil strife, the competing interests of the municipal authorities, the urban populace and the monarchy were able to maintain a delicate equilibrium through the traditional mechanism of negotiation and compromise.

Between 1815 and 1860, Nice became one of Europe's leading health and leisure resorts, annually hosting an international wintering population of thousands. During a period marked by the rise of the nation-state and national sentiment, Nice was celebrated as ‘une ville cosmopolite’. This article suggests that while geographic, historic and economic factors provided preconditions for cosmopolitanism, Nice's emergence as a peculiarly cosmopolitan town in the first half of the nineteenth century owes much to a combination of forward-looking urban developments and long-established traditions of face-to-face elite sociability, directed and shaped largely by women.

Based on so-called Excise court records, this article argues that in eighteenth-century urban Sweden much of middling women's work took place in the interstices between households, as ‘help’ given to other women, often across social divides. These forms of work are often difficult to track in the historical records and, consequently, they have remained unnoticed, creating the erroneous picture that women did not contribute to their households through paid work. The lack of attention to these kinds of work has also overemphasized the closed character of early modern households which were, in fact, both flexible and permeable units.

Walter Scott's assertion in Rob Roy that ‘In those days possession was considerably more than eleven points of the law’ overlooked a pivotal point of Scots Law, the distinction between ownership and possession. Possession or occupancy was not ‘as good as title’ as the sixteenth-century Scottish proverb or old French saying ‘possession vaut titre’ claimed. Though the distinction between ownership and possession might have seemed a nicety to Rob Roy in the sixteenth century, by 1617 a general register of titles to land, the Register of Sasines, was established in Scotland, and has continued virtually uninterrupted until the present day. It is consequently a record of immense importance to urban historians.