How are deep relationships between city and club identification formed, and are they inevitable? The aim of this article is to provide a historical analysis of the rivalry between two football clubs, Vitesse Arnhem and NEC Nijmegen, explicating their various ‘axes of enmity’. Supporters, club officials and observers of these two clubs created and selectively maintained similarities between respective city image and club image. The process of ‘othering’ influenced both city and club images and helped create oppositional identities. Herein, football identification reflects broader societal needs for a place-based identity, and for a coherent image of both self and other.

In seeking to purge what he seems to regard as the dangerously insidious views of an academic ‘gang of four’,Dr Alan Dyer has certainly eschewed gentle persuasion as the appropriate way of re-converting erring heretics. Being apparently the worst offender - and bedaubed in penitential ashes, as I clearly ought to be - it is then hardly for me to answer for the views of my fellow conspirators: Peter Clark, Paul Slack and Penelope Corfield. They are well able to stand up for themselves. All I have space to do here is to reflect on Dr Dyer's re-assertion of the neutralist text-book orthodoxy regarding the state of England's towns in the earlier Tudor period, and so to ponder whether a recantation of my own seemingly obsessional sins might be appropriate. I certainly do not intend simply to reiterate what the disinterested follower of this discussion might wish to read for himself, the actual arguments of my 1975 paper, with its qualifying remarks and its ‘handful’ of 75 urban examples.

The developing techniques of historical nominal record linkage can make substantial contributions to the questions raised by our present understanding of the urban middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cheap printing, institutionalization, and increasing political and state action provided a growing variety of information about individuals – directories, poll books, lists of shareholders, pewholders, stallholders, members of committees and societies, signatures to petitions and requisitions, wills, insurance policies, and by the 1840s marriage and census data. By their nature most of these listings were concerned with the politically and socially active, and with those above a minimal level of social status and economic power. In practice, this meant predominantly but not exclusively members of a potential middle class. Under certain constraints the lists may be merged to provide surrogate answers to some ghostly questionnaire regarding patterns of association, behaviour and social status, major social divisions and networks, and the characteristics of those who took part in institutions and activities traditionally identified with the middle class.

With documentary sources, as with one's friends, it is never easy to recall exactly when mere acquaintance passed into familiarity. I am somewhat shaken to see from its footnotes that when I wrote my chapter for the Chapman symposium in 1969–70 that I made no use of fire insurance policies for the dating of house-building, relying mainly on conveyances, estate-plans, rate books, press advertisements and family papers; the same range of sources employed over a far wider geographical area in Christopher Chalklin's recent study. My love affair with insurance policies is therefore relatively recent, and that of an ageing researcher, not to be compared with the amatory techniques of others who were using them for industrial history well before 1971. I have been an old man in a hurry, a scanner rather than a scholar; and these practical notes from a scanner will be superseded if the S.S.R.C. project for an index to the main registers is ever realized.

Examination of writings about British cities that appeared in Germany between the mid-1830s and 1914 runs counter to emphasis either on German anti-urbanism or on growing hostility among Germans to their neighbours across the North Sea. Although it takes into account strong disparagement of flaws and failings that had, in the view of critics, resulted from the chaotic nature of urban growth in Britain, it points to increasing recognition – particularly after mid-century – of efforts to ameliorate conditions about which critics had complained. Much of what was singled out for commendation involved voluntary efforts by men and women who sought to improve working-class life via philanthropic uplift. During the 1850s and 1860s, the conservative social reformer Victor Aimé Huber sang the praises of the co-operative movement, both from an economic and from a moral standpoint. Later on, other observers, such as the liberal economist Gerhart Schulze-Gävernitz, lauded the most famous of the British settlement houses, Toynbee Hall in East London, on account of the activities it promoted in the area of adult education. Favourable commentary on municipal government rounded out a picture of the urban scene as a sphere in which local forces exemplified a spirit of civic-mindedness that ought to inspire admiration rather than enmity.

Boundaries are defined and maintained to establish and preserve cultural, societal and political integrity. Boundaries change as territorial structures and their related meanings change over time, reflecting the transformation of economic, political, administrative and cultural practices and discourses, and inherent relations of power. The Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv is no different in this context. The end of World War I and establishment of a British Mandate regime in Palestine resulted in the transformation of political, economic, social and cultural structures. The British Mandate afforded the rise of and development of Tel Aviv from Jaffa's Jewish garden suburb into a separate urban entity. Different internal and external factors affected the delineation of the urban bounds of Tel Aviv following its declaration by the British Mandate government as an autonomous township.

The article is a critical investigation of the role played by the Palermo left-wing newspaper L'Ora in uncovering the Sicilian Mafia's urban affairs and property speculation during the sack of Palermo in the 1960s. It pays particular attention to L'Ora's complex narrative concerning the urban Mafia and the many obstacles that the newspaper encountered in its attempt to defend the city. The article aims to explain L'Ora's account of the Mafia as an intersection of violent crime, politics and business. This study uses investigative series and archival sources to explain the emergence of ‘antimafia’ as both concept and political practice in the urban history of Palermo.

Anyone glancing into a bookshop window in the Federal Republic of Germany today might get the impression that urban history is currently one of the most important and widely published historical disciplines. Such an impression would mislead, however. Most of these richly illustrated and expensively produced volumes have almost no academic significance. They are the product of a wave of nostalgia which certain astute publishers have managed to catch thanks to their unerring appreciation of market demand. For instance, a whole generation over the age of fifty wants to be reminded of the undamaged towns of its pre-war childhood. Post-war redevelopment, too, has had its effect, and the insecure citizens of our often featureless towns require a means of self-representation and identification. Demand for such publications has also been generated by the growing consciousness of the environment, which has made the expression ‘Heimat’ (heritage) respectable again, and strengthened the call for the conservation of a world rooted in the past. However, modern urban history is only just beginning to function as an independent specialism in the Federal Republic (and the same applies to its eastern neighbour). It has made gradual progress in the last few years, but even so, in comparison with the sustained and varied urban history research pursued in countries such as Britain and the United States of America, Germany is an underdeveloped country. In fact, the Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik (DIFU) acknowledged as much when, as recently as April 1980, it organized a review of the field. The Federal Republic's handful of specialists were invited to Berlin for a colloquium on ‘Problems in the writing of urban history’. The aim of the conference was just as much to examine the current difficulties of urban history as to stimulate further research.

Seventeenth-century Edo was a city built by and for the shogun. The immense concentration of power in the shogun imposed stability in the city, and this made it unnecessary for the authorities to interfere directly in the city's general administration and economic affairs. Even given the overwhelming power of the shogun, however, the city did not develop a distinct culture at that stage.