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.

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 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. 552

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.

In this article, I rethink the genre of urban biographies and argue that it can be given new potency when remodelled to become a means of reinvigorating the critical public. In the first part, I reflect upon some of the recent biographies of cities in the Czech Republic. In the second part, I discuss promising strategies, drawn from a sample of innovative urban biographies. In the final part, I outline the guiding principles of an adapted model for urban biographies. I propose that the cities must be repoliticized and recentred in the biographies, which entails adopting a political concept of the city, a deconstructive approach, utilization of the urban presence and a more urban-sensitive treatment of time.

This article, based on western primary sources, seeks to investigate the relationship between western imperialism in China and the making of modern Chinese statecraft in urban form, focusing on the French perspective and on historical institutionalism. Both internal rebellions and western empires shaped modern Chinese cities. The Chinese response to western intervention is a more complicated story. Pace Paul Cohen, we do need to know about foreign activities in modern China – not as ‘impact-response’ and ‘tradition-modernity’ paradigms – but rather as part of local history, both in terms of local administration and urban landscape. Euro-American expansion and exploitation are not part of a unitary or totalizing enterprise, and warfare and Franco-British conflicts facilitated the making of modern municipal administration in the French Concession of Shanghai; on the other hand, Chinese forces indirectly shaped the structure of the institutions of imperialism, as well as pointing to divergent national approaches to imperialism.

The poll books produced before the Ballot Act of 1872 are a major source for political and social history. Those which have an occupational title for most or all entries have been increasingly used since Vincent's pioneering work. Others have been linked to other sources so that voting can be related to occupation. This is either time-consuming or expensive and often both. The alternative is a very selective sampling tactic guided by the directories. The use of occupational titles has been criticized because of the lack of social homogeneity within the groups designated by such titles. This is slightly unfair but a relevant warning against using such titles to do more analytical work than the meaning of the titles justifies. Those who want a more precise measure of status must link with the rate books and the census manuscripts.

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).

The interdisciplinary approach to the study of urban history has considerable potential for the examination of communites of manageable size. Yet, as Professor Dyos has pointed out, it is by no means clear that the proliferation of more and more case studies is a particularly useful exercise unless communities in question contain an element of typicality and are informed by the broader social and historical tendencies relating to urbanization as a major force of social change. “We know so little yet about a number of obvious things,” he once wrote. “Small towns that never grew big nor got stuck in amber as a neighbour did tend to remain unseen. There are too few studies of such towns.” (H. J. Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History [1968], 38.) Our study, of Kendal in Westmorland, seems well justified.

In spite of the campaigns for social housing conducted by its most ardent supporters, at the beginning of the century Greece completely lacked the various low-cost housing organizations that were quite common in Europe. During the inter-war period, progressive governments took various steps to rationalize the provision of housing, aiming, among others, at encouraging the formation of housing co-operatives. Under the provisions of appropriate legislation, housing cooperatives acquired land on favourable terms either in or outside the city of Athens. The proposed schemes, which were meant to be supported by state funds, were, however, inadequately administered, mainly because of the political instability and economic hardships of the inter-war period. As a result, the function of the housing co-operatives was gradually restricted to providing small investors with cheap land, on which they would build individually at a more convenient time. The happy exceptions to the rule were co-operative housing schemes which owed their implementation to the higher economic and social status of their members.

While the scholarly literature largely ignores issues of suburban population size, density and heterogeneity, during the 1920s a number of large, densely-settled, heterogeneous suburbs emerged on the fringe of the largest US cities. The article identifies forty-one of these potential ‘city suburbs’ which are defined as communities having minimum thresholds of 25,000 population and residential densities of 6,000 per square mile. City suburbs may have claimed nearly 25 per cent of the suburban populations of the nation's ten largest metropolitan districts. Drawing largely on data for midwestern cities, city suburbs are further identified through their diverse populations by class, ethnicity and race; varied housing stocks and economic activities including retailing, professional services and manufacturing; and political independence from their central city. Nearly equally divided between residential and industrial suburbs, the former, including Oak Park, Illinois, ‘fit’ traditional middle-class suburban descriptions while neighbouring Cicero represented workingclass, industrial communities.

Verdurization (lühua), a term coined in Japan and adopted into the Chinese vocabulary in the early twentieth century, was an emotive concept and relentless practice in Mao's China. The Chinese state used various verdurization campaigns as part of its project of building a socialist state and as a way of exercising ideological control, particularly in cities. At the same time, ordinary citizens had their own ideas about the role of vegetation in their daily lives – ideas that were often different from, and sometimes counter to, those of the state. The article takes Shanghai as a case-study to examine the politics of urban greening along the spectrum of state, society and everyday life in the early years of the People's Republic.