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.

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’.

This year has seen the introduction of the digital bibliography online. This is a searchable database of all the bibliographies contained in the Urban History Yearbook and past numbers of this journal. Containing over 33,000 citations, this is an invaluable resource for research.

This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

Federally funded ‘urban rehabilitation’ began with the Housing Act of 1954 in the United States. Baltimore's Harlem Park was selected to pilot this experimental programme; a logical choice seeing how the pilot largely built on a programme dating from the prehistory of legislated urban rehabilitation that originated in Baltimore. This article lays bare the history of this programme, known as the ‘Baltimore Plan’, which offered empirical evidence that substantiated the potential of participatory urban planning. Beyond transferring upon minority communities a level of control over housing that black communities had seldom possessed before, the Baltimore Plan also constituted in an alternative to public housing.

Researching the history of daily greetings is challenging, because references are casual and scattered through many sources. Nonetheless, some broad trends are apparent. In eighteenth-century Britain, the old tradition of deep bowing and curtseying was slowly attenuating into a brisker touching of the cap or head (for men) and a quick bob (for women). Yet that transition was not the whole story. Simultaneously, a new form of urban greeting, in the form of the handshake, was emerging. The strengths and weaknesses of many different sources are here assessed, including novels, plays, letters, diaries, etiquette books, travelogues and legal depositions, as well as artwork. Strategies for analysis are identified, with a warning against generalizing from single references in single sources. Finally, the emergence of the handshake among the middle class in Britain's eighteenth-century towns gives a clear signal that socio-cultural change does not invariably start at the ‘top’ and ‘trickle down’.

In the history of crime and criminal justice, the city of Goerlitz represents a rather special case. The city magistracy did not feel politically responsible towards the burghers and therefore did not strive to legitimize its rule by administering efficient social control. As a consequence, the formal and inefficient procedures of archaic Saxon law were largely kept intact. Due to this, the level of violence seems to have been higher than in other cities.

This article explores the tendency of citizens to liken their city to other cities in an effort to promote particular visions of their hometown. It examines three mythic visions of fin-de-siècle Cracow – the Polish Mecca, the Little Vienna on the Vistula and modern Big-City Cracow – as reflected in contemporary accounts and historical scholarship, demonstrating how they functioned to promote national, imperial and interurban identification. Most critical of the national vision, the article advocates a broader perspective.

This article explores the relationship between dwelling space and the lifestyles and social identities of the Roman bourgeoisie during a period of great social and cultural change. Concentrating on a few exemplary situations, the neighbourhoods and homes of the bourgeoisie are examined through the analysis of elements such as forms of behaviour, social relations, dress codes, building typologies and domestic interior furnishings. What emerges is the importance of dwelling space to the development and expression of bourgeois social identities, as well as the plurality of the latter and their evolution over the period examined.

The appearance of the Urban History Yearbook marks an important and exciting stage in the development of its subject, not only in this country but wherever it is studied. The study of the urban past is no new thing but what has been so striking about it in the course of the last decade or so has been the almost overwhelming growth in the numbers of scholars taking part in it and the immensely wider range of topics and techniques they have been pursuing.

Since the path-breaking work of prominent North American historians such as Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, as well as more recent roundtables in Europe, urban environmental history is now a mature research field, at the intersection of various related approaches. Time has passed since a leader of environmental history, William Cronon, could write that ‘cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received’. In this field, urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science and engineering. Urban environmental historians, as they are referred to here, have duly established the importance of studying the relationships between ‘nature’ (including non-humans) and humans in and around cities. This ‘nature’ is a complex and shifting entity: recent doctoral studies have, for instance, documented rivers transformed by human action, weeds growing in the spatial and social margins of cities and tidal wetlands progressively filled in and built upon. The recently completed Ph.D.s reviewed in this essay see the built environment more as a hybrid of natural elements, like water, plants, animals and human action. Aided by the environmental lens, the scope of the urban historian has also been broadened by studying the ways in which residents’ lives were transformed by the invention, spread and environmental impact of new technologies, as well as the political responses to environmental crises.

The Portuguese discovered the uninhabited Azores archipelago in 1427 and started to settle it during the fifteenth century. Angra, located on Terceira Island, soon became the most important Azorean city, leading to rapid urban development. This article investigates the overlooked role of streams in the rise of Angra as a pivotal Atlantic urban centre. Through the intersection of historical and flood modelling methods, it makes a unique contribution to our understanding of Angra's urban morphologic development, highlighting the potential of applying urban flood modelling to analysis of the rise of coastal urban settlement.

The city of Laon was a significant commercial and administrative centre in late medieval northern France. Laon's rich and powerful cathedral attracted many to its chapter, which was the largest in the country. In the years circa 1400 its ranks included a number of leading musicians. An investigation into their musical and non-musical duties sheds fascinating light on to the daily life of the cathedral musician and his position in the local urban and rural context.

Historians came late to the study of the American city. They lagged far behind scholars in other disciplines who, by the turn of the twentieth century, had begun to apply the tools of the social sciences to the examination of urban America and its problems. American urban history as a distinctive field of scholarly inquiry does not date much earlier than 1940, when Arthur M. Schlesinger, sr, published his landmark article on ‘The City in American History.’ Interest in the field grew rather slowly, however, and by the mid-1950s only a half-dozen or so universities offered courses in the subject. Progress in urban history research was also somewhat less than dynamic, the chief accomplishments being several fine urban biographies and a handful of monographs, notably the works of Carl Bridenbaugh on the colonial seaport towns, Oscar Handlin's study of Boston's immigrants, and Richard C. Wade's book, The Urban Frontier (1959).