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

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.

In the 2000s, Berlin saw the formation of so-called Baugruppen (construction groups) – associations of small-scale investors who pooled their modest capital to commission an architect and construct a multistorey building in which they would own and occupy a flat. They were mostly middle-class families united by a belief in community values and neighbourly contact as well as the qualities of urban living. This article will present the construction groups as an example of bottom-up architecture in an industrialized western country, in which individual initiatives and user-centred design had to be negotiated within a highly professionalized environment, as well as with contradictory political positions. It will show that construction groups brought together various threads of Berlin's recent urban history: the gradual integration of radical post-1968 lifestyles into mainstream society, the ‘return to the inner city’ connected with the increasing popularity of ‘new tenements’, and the evolution of innovative, post-functionalist architecture.

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.

Zooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking.

The article discusses the dramatic history of the Tsaritsyno Park and museum-reserve. By the mid-2000s, it had become one of Moscow's iconic places and a zone where urban public culture was shaped. The authors trace the history of this architectural ensemble and park in terms of their role in сity culture and analyse changes in the historical culture of contemporary post-Soviet Moscow. The Tsaritsyno Park and museum exemplify these changes. An unfinished country residence of Catherine II, with a Grand Palace that had stood as a ruin for over 200 years, it has been radically renewed by the Moscow city authorities in what came to be labelled ‘fantasy restoration’. The palace was finished and now serves as the core of the museum, organized according to a controversial historical policy. Tsaritsyno as a whole became a cultural oddity featuring historical attractions for the public, effectively an ‘eighteenth-century theme park’.

Financial and economic crises are recurrent in history. A special issue of Histoire Urbaine (33, 1 (2012)), entitled ‘Villes européennes et crises financières (XIVe-XVIe siècles)’, shows that in the medieval and early modern period cities played a crucial role in the development of such crises, just as they do today. Several case-studies on France, Spain and the Low Countries demonstrate that cities are and were financial and commercial centres which were governed by a small group of merchants, bankers and powerful families. And, as David Sassu-Normand notes in his introduction, medieval and early modern municipal authorities were even more adept than their twenty-first century counterparts in disposing of political power in order to tackle economic and financial difficulties. The close relationship between money and power in those cities made it easier for elite factions to abuse public revenues, because they could autonomously decide about urban spending and its fiscal consequences. Yet, he argues, the tied relationship between urban governors and the city's economy and finances could also have positive effects. Markets and budgets were not autonomous entities, because they were embedded in urban societies and manipulated by those who govern them. As a result, urban governors disposed of the political means to deal with financial crises, or at least to remedy some of their consequences. The case of late medieval Brabant, studied by Claire Billen and David Kusman in the same issue, shows that not only urban oligarchs but also less powerful citizens could intervene in the financial politics of a town (‘Les villes du Brabant face à la crise des finances du duché de Jean II. La crise d'une société entière?’, 63–80). In the duchy of Brabant, in around 1300, the ducal and urban finances were under considerable pressure due to warfare, manipulation of the mint and an economic downturn. In the principal cities of the duchy (Brussels, Antwerp and Louvain), discrete groups of citizens, such as craftsmen and self-made merchants, forcefully protested against the monetary and fiscal measures taken by the urban authorities. Their protests were not initially successful. By the 1360s, however, urban society had changed in Brabant. Both Billen and Kusman argue that the ideas that inspired the urban protests of the 1300s led to new, more successful revolts in the 1360s and afterwards. As a result, craftsmen gained rights of political participation in the cities mentioned. Using their newly gained political power, the rebels proposed constructive solutions to resolve the ongoing financial crisis in the cities of the duchy. The measures taken reflected the existence of a belief that the urban government should be fiscally sound and stable, and that it should not live beyond its means. Fiscal reforms led to more stable urban finances, though new challenges in the fifteenth century would upset the balance again. In short, the Brabantine case shows, once again, that politics and finance are closely knit together in the medieval city, but also, and more surprisingly, that social protest against headstrong governors ultimately led to far-reaching political and fiscal reforms. Therefore, this stimulating issue of Histoire Urbaine demonstrates that financial crises can have an unpredictable outcome.

This case-study of Jewish activism in Strasbourg and Nice, interwar urban locales situated along the frontiers with National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy, respectively, examines critical facets of Jewish advocacy during the refugee crisis of the 1930s. It focuses on how urban spaces engendered dense thickets of community activism unlike that which took place in Paris. Whereas friction and ineffectiveness characterized aid efforts in Paris, these cities offer alternative views on the nature of the refugee crisis in France and the ways that Jews overcame obstacles to help asylum-seekers. It advances much-needed discourse on the complexity of French Jewish experiences during the interwar years and highlights the city as both location and a conduit for diverse activist strategies. Although circumstances varied in Strasbourg and Nice, Jews in these two borderland cities followed similar patterns of engaging urban civil society to build flexible networks that addressed the plight of refugees from multiple angles.

Urban historians are much concerned with the need to study their towns from the perspective of social class and socio-spatial segregation, especially in periods of rapid industrialization. The models of such scholars as Engels, Sjöberg, Burgess, Hoyt and others are predicated on the possibility of identifying clearly the members of defined social classes. The manuscript census enumerators' books (CEBs) are one of the basic sources used for Victorian Britain (1841–81), but it is no simple matter to attribute the occupational descriptions found in them to a range of social classes. Problems occur at two levels: those associated with the conceptual validity of systems of class distinction, and those encountered in attributing occupations within such systems. As this article shows, there is also a degree of interaction between the two levels since it is useless to pursue concepts that cannot be systematically and straightforwardly related to the information available.

From the early 1960s until his sudden and unexpected death in August 1978, Jim Dyos was the chief inspiration, proselytizer and ambassador of urban history in Britain. Through many personal contacts and friendships in various parts of the world, he gave to all those connected with his chosen pursuit the sense of belonging to a great international family. It was entirely in keeping with his ambitions that he had been planning a major international conference to chart the progress made since the earlier agenda for urban history was set out at Leicester in 1966, and to highlight those methodological issues which should be confronted if urban historians are to sustain an innovative role into the 1980s. This conference will still take place with the help of a committee which had been working with him, the intention being to publish a volume based on the proceedings as the most fitting tribute to his memory. Nevertheless, it seemed right to begin this issue of the Yearbook with a short appreciation of the way Jim Dyos contributed to the study and enjoyment of urban history through his own teaching, research and writings.

The importance of landowners' influence on the timing, scale and type of development in many large nineteenth-century towns is a platitude of urban history. But the power which it gave a large, aristocratic, urban landowner to influence local affairs – political, cultural, religious and philanthropic – has received much less attention. Most historians would agree with Ralph Nevill that during the nineteenth century ‘the political influence of the English land-owning class must in any case have disappeared with the development of the great towns and the increase in population’. But while that change has been described and investigated as it occurred at Westminster and in the country-side, the actual shift in the balance of power in the towns – from those who owned and managed urban estates to those who lived on them as leasehold tenants – has received much less attention. The purpose of this article is to review the literature at present available on the subject, and to offer some suggestions as to the directions in which future research might proceed.