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.

A part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, the city of Ioannina integrated into the Greek state following the Balkan wars of 1912–13. This article provides a first in-depth historical account of the city's water supply system from the early 1910s to the eve of World War II, and traces the path leading from a traditional system relying on private wells and public fountains to a modern water network entering inhabitants’ homes. In doing so, it also offers material and insights contributing to a larger research project on the technological modernization of urban Greece in the inter-war period, during which the Greek state itself was driven by a particularly strong urge to modernize the country.

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.

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.

This year's publications address seven broad themes: urban growth and migration; the social structure of late medieval towns; women and gender; political communication and the circulation of news; the church in the city; urban decline; and writing about the city.

The first half of the 1990s was a pivotal period in the development and growth of urban history in Europe. In Britain the Urban History Group began to convene again after a decade in abeyance, work commenced on the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain, the Urban History Yearbook became Urban History whilst the European Association of Urban Historians organized their first conference. It was in this climate that Ashgate Publishing commissioned a new monograph series, Historical Urban Studies, under the editorship of Richard Rodger, editor of Urban History, and Jean-Luc Pinol, the leading French urban historian and a key figure in the European Association of Urban Historians (EAUH). The aim of the series was and is to be comparative over both time and space, drawing on multiple locations to explore what is common and what distinctive about the urban experience of diverse towns and nations. The broad agenda for the series was shaped by an overarching concern with the administration and governance of the city which underpinned attempts to manage the social, economic and political challenges wrought by 300 years of urban change. In particular, the editors stress the importance of the comparative element which should allow historians to distinguish ‘which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature’. The editors set themselves an ambitious agenda and this essay aims to explore how the series has developed over the ten or so years since it commenced publication; the degree to which it has provided a platform for advancing the sub-discipline of urban history; and to consider some future directions which urban history might take.

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.

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

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.

In the 1860s mass emigration from Merthyr Tydfil made a major impact on the town's fortunes and developing public sphere. The ‘extraordinary drain’ occasioned much concern and comment and reconfigured ongoing debates about Merthyr's contemporary condition and future survival. In turn, local power struggles, notions of the town's interests and emerging civic consciousness influenced interpretations of the nature, causes and meanings of the outflow. Emigration and the ‘urban’ thus interacted tellingly to help shape contemporary mentalities.

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.

This article presents the tale of a serial flirt, punished for making a noisy, lewd nuisance of himself outside a widows' residence in Florence in 1553. Close study of this vivid episode uncovers some of the sonic strategies of ritual insult and abuse available to early modern city-dwellers, and is also an opportunity to explore the connections between aurality and spatiality in late Renaissance Florence.