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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For over thirty years demography has featured prominently on the urban history agenda. As long ago as 1963, in an article subtitled ‘On broadening the relevance and scope of urban history’, Eric Lampard emphasized that ‘An autonomous social history ought to begin with a study of population: its changing distribution in time and space’. In 1968 Leo Schnore suggested concentration upon ‘the demographic and ecological aspects of urban life’, according demography the number one priority. Leading British urban historians and historical geographers repeated such injunctions in the 1970s, emphasizing how little was known about even the most basic aspects of pre-industrial urban populations and how far British researchers lagged behind their continental colleagues in the field of urban demography. Unfortunately the response of the last generation of researchers to these precepts has been decidedly muted, and pre-industrial urban demography in England remains in its infancy.

The tension between civic virtue and self-interest has been a central theme of three generations of American urban historians. Indeed these historians have played an important role in the struggle to build America's civic culture. Critically examining their cities in light of American ideals, they have embraced the responsibilities of citizenship and kept alive the spirit of civic virtue. This essay examines democracy in Cincinnati through the work of these urban historians and argues that Americans have dispensed with civic virtue at their own peril. The democratization of the republican ideal of citizenship remains the great, unfinished task of American civilization.

This paper analyses in their political context the festival decorations created by Paolo Amato, architect to the Senate of Palermo, in 1686 for the festival of the patron saint of that city. One of these decorations, that of the main altar in the cathedral, is of particular interest in that it represents a map of the city itself. An analysis of this map in relation to other seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps of Palermo reveals its political and social aim and biases, but also shows that it was unusually up to date and accurate as a representation of the city at that date. Such a representation not only marks a striking cul-de-sac in the history of the development of cartography, but sheds light on the relationship between forging politically acceptable identities for a city and their representation in the early modern period. The map in particular, but all the decorations, or apparati, in general are interpreted in the context of the weakened Spanish empire (to which Sicily belonged) and of the internal politics of the island and of Palermo.

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.

Privately owned, for-profit, seasonal, walled-off venues that boasted a variety of flora and fauna in addition to other services like stages, buildings, thespians, musicians, exhibits and victuals, New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh commercial pleasure gardens blossomed by the mid-eighteenth century. An in-depth analysis of these pleasure gardens not only contributes to how we understand colonists’ endeavours to support a more complete leisure sector, but also reveals the nuanced nature of the ‘rural vs. urban’ or ‘wilderness vs. civilization’ dyads. Ultimately, urban colonists hoped to embrace the rural nature of their surroundings to make their ‘cities in the wilderness’ more accessible, healthy places.

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.

Empty, abandoned or covered with vegetation – such areas were inherent to the medieval urban space, yet remain overlooked in research. Here, we describe three major types of ‘empty’ space of various origins and functions in Central European towns and suggest how these types can be investigated and interpreted through an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, written, pictorial and cartographical sources. We propose a simple interdisciplinary protocol to trace empty spaces in the urban context. This study will help to change our perception of medieval urban space into one that is more dynamic and heterogeneous than commonly believed.

In the nineteenth century, meat production underwent radical changes, turning into a mass-scale and industrial process that was based on the new norms of hygiene and veterinary medicine. Anthropologists and cultural historians have pointed out that, in a western European context, this also entailed the marginalization of the slaughterhouses, which were excluded from urban life and made anonymous and invisible. This article examines the case of the Moscow public abattoir (1886–88) and argues that, instead of being marginalized, it emerged as one of the city's landmarks due to its important symbolic role in the Russian discussions on modernization and ‘Europeanness’.