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.

This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, non-humans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

The articles gathered in this special section explore the complex and layered relationship between meat and the nineteenth-century city. For urban historians interested in food provisioning, meat represents a critical juncture because no other food item was so deeply and, in so many ways, tied to urban modernity. This introduction outlines five central themes of the urban meat nexus: city and country relations, geography and urban space, technology and infrastructure, government and regulation, and changing nutritional standards. The four articles speak to these larger issues in specific and novel ways. They advance the existing scholarship by opening up new questions and approaches, focusing on hitherto understudied locations, while also collectively covering the entire spectrum of meat provisioning from supply hinterlands to urban consumption.

Cairo has often been seen as a ‘dual city’ divided between a ‘modern’ European city and a historic ‘traditional’ core. This article challenges this view through a historical exploration of suburban Cairo, a subject neglected by mainstream urban historians. A comparative examination of Ismailiyah, Garden City, Zamalek, Maadi, Helwan and Heliopolis illustrates that these suburbs took very different forms and reflected a wide range of historical and contemporary architectural tastes and design perspectives. Not all suburban developments were products of modern technical innovations and by 1922 no suburb had a majority of European residents. The use of the term ‘modern’ to characterize Cairo's suburbs therefore has the tendency to privilege western concepts of the modern and obscure the complexities of suburban social and economic development.

This article surveys some of the more interesting writings on Dutch urban history over the last decade against the background of the older literature of the subject. It also deals briefly with some current research projects. The choice of what to include has perforce been a subjective one since the field itself is so vast, but an effort has been made to indicate the main stream of historical research now going on. How much more widely that field might have been drawn is perhaps indicated by the subjects that have been relatively neglected: education, town planning, housing and rents, wage movements, patterns of consumption, leisure pursuits, retail distribution.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, most of the topics associated with the study of urban history have languished largely unstudied beneath a pall of ideologically based neglect. The list of understudied subjects includes urban population, physical structure, social structure, economic activity, urban politics, urban planning and the environment, and urban culture. This lack of interest in urban history directly reflects the emphasis on the role of the peasantry as a creative force in Chinese history. The history of Chinese peasant uprisings and wars became the focus of attention and left little interest for what changes might have taken place in urban settings. Today, a combination of forces has generated considerable changes in the institutional structure of historical studies in China, as well as compelling historians to reconsider established research preferences. In this atmosphere it appears that for the first time since 1949 topics that concern urban historians in the West and Japan are receiving serious attention in the People's Republic of China. While it is still too early to speak of urban history in China, continuation of current trends in historical research over the next five to ten years will almost certainly bring this specialization into existence.

Little is known of the value of eighteenth-century rates and taxes as sources for the urban historian. Corfield, in her study of eighteenth-century Norwich, stated in 1976 that ‘the stereotyped nature of eighteenth-century tax assessments precludes use of fiscal data from national sources’ and this is a fair reflection of the then and to some extent the current orthodoxy, despite Rudé's pioneering studies of the 1960s in which he used land tax and poor rate returns to estimate the wealth of the electorate of Hanoverian London and Middlesex. Schwarz, in a study of late-eighteenth-century London, could still comment in 1979 that for eighteenth-century rates and taxes ‘little is known beyond general impressions’. Recently, however, Wright has thrown interesting light on the use of the Easter books and poor rates of early-modern towns and cities, and the 1986 volume on the land tax edited by Turner and Mills, although still largely concerned with the use of rural land tax assessments, includes three chapters on the value of the assessments in urban and industrial history. The writers hope that city rate and national tax returns might play a fuller role as historical sources, but their optimism is tempered with caution because of the returns' intractability and inconsistency. It is hoped here to reinforce both their enthusiasm and their caution, to reveal additional pitfalls and suggest ways to avoid them and in particular to extend the debate to the neglected pre-1780 assessments and to the city of Bristol.

The opening lecture of the conference was on a Scottish theme to complement the Scottish venue. Professor JOHN BUTT (Strathclyde) spoke on ‘Working-class housing in the Scottish cities 1900–51’. He began with a fairly traditional picture of working-class housing, which seemed to suggest that it was almost synonymous with slum-dwelling. He also outlined the system of house-letting which operated in Glasgow at the turn of the century, and suggested the impact on the housing market. This system was based upon yearly lets expiring at one date for all but thebottom of the market, where monthly lets were the norm. The main agitation for a change in the letting system came from the mostly ‘respectable’ tenants who occupied yearly-let property, as opposed to the slum-dwellers who rented on a monthly basis. (Regular attenders at the Urban History Group conferences will remember that these themes were discussed in the paper presented by Nick Morgan and Martin Daunton to the Loughborough meeting in 1981; they will also form a major element in Dr Englander's forthcoming book on Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain 1838–1918.) Professor Butt went on to argue that during the rent strikes of the First World War, it is possible to see a clear distinction between the ‘landlord class’ and the ‘employer class’, the latter not always supporting the view of the former. The final part of the lecture considered the provision of new housing for the working classes after 1918. Detailed figures were provided to support the contention that the building industry and building supplies trade in Scotland were incapable of meeting the demand for new housing from the public sector during the 1930s. He illustrated his argument with specific examples of corporation house-building in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh.

Dutch urban history has finally accorded the eighteenth century the attention it deserves in a number of recent publications. That century was characterized by the economic and political decline of the Dutch Republic generally, and certain towns in particular. The ‘Zuiderzee’ towns witnessed a dramatic fall in population, reflecting their economic decline, and in the southern part of the province of Holland urban life also stagnated. In contrast to the ports, inland towns derived status in the urban hierarchy from their industrial interests, but due to foreign competition in the eighteenth century, they too declined; most notably, the cloth industry of Leiden, the clay pipe industry of Gouda, and the breweries and potteries of Delft each lost the leading position established in the seventeenth century. Leiden was the largest of the towns with more than 70,000 inhabitants in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and after Amsterdam, was the most populous town of the Republic. Leiden however could not maintain that position, and lost almost 50 per cent of its inhabitants during the first half of the eighteenth century, declining further to under 30,000 residents by 1800. Gouda numbered about 20,000 in 1732, but declined to 12,000 in 1795; Hoorn with 12,000 inhabitants diminished to only 9,500 in 1795 and the population of Delft, too, fell from around 24,000 in 1680 to 14,000 in 1795.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the process of urban economic development and the role of housing markets in this process is as essential as it is obvious. In order to make progress towards providing answers to some of the important questions relating to the development of towns, it is necessary to try to obtain more precise information on trends in house prices, the level and structure of housing demand and the character of the supply side of the markets. Studies of local housing markets, however, have been constrained by the lack of reliable data on the most important variables and are, therefore, characteristically qualitative and descriptive. Our main objective, therefore, when embarking on the study described below, was to obtain reliable data on which to base analyses of local housing markets.

History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.

Urban history in Scandinavian countries has long been practised mainly in the form of individual town histories, a large number of which have been written by local amateurs. Among professional historians, however, local history (including the history of towns, parishes and regions) has been of interest since the late-nineteenth century, and has been especially popular in Norway and Finland. This may have to do with the fact that these two countries did not become independent until 1905 and 1917 respectively. The Swedish-Norwegian union of 1814–1905 had been preceded by Norway's incorporation into the Danish kingdom from 1536 on, and Finland's inclusion in the Russian empire as a semi-autonomous grand duchy between 1809 and 1917 had been preceded by her incorporation into the Swedish kingdom since the Middle Ages. These facts must be kept in mind in order to realize why historical research in Scandinavia has so many topics and features in common. They also explain some of the differences, such as why historians in Norway and Finland to a greater extent than in Sweden and Denmark should have turned to local history both before and after having achieved independence, in order to strengthen the conciousness of national identity in the two countries. Although there was much interest in rural local history, town history also got its share. There are very few towns – if any – in Norway and Finland that have not had their histories written; in Denmark and Sweden urban and local history also became increasingly popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

The present bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History from 1992. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken, though many other journals are also checked. There is an index of towns on p. 775.

Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, this article exposes the wreckage of urban renewal on LeBreton Flats – a mixed industrial and working-class neighbourhood in Ottawa, Canada. Photographic and textual fragments of urban life retrieved from government expropriation files are used to expose the spell of progress embodied in the urban renewal plan for the neighbourhood. This article shows how urban historians can deploy Benjamin's methodological approach to reclaim the memory of everyday life on LeBreton Flats from the realm of official planning documents. This article shows how despite an official narrative of decline scrap-dealers, craft-workers and residents continued to value the Flats and participate in an imaginative urban life.

A remarkable cluster of Irish town histories appeared in the early nineteenth century, coming after several generations of unprecedented urban growth. But that growth stalled and most Irish towns entered a long period of stagnation. Meanwhile, academic interest in the urban past became dormant. Urbanization in Ireland resumed in the twentieth century, but the study of urban history was late to develop and slow to move beyond the documentation of built heritage. However, public interest in medieval origins, official interest in urban heritage and the vision of a handful of medieval historians and historical geographers have helped transform the prospects for Irish urban history.