During the 1950s the Conservative Government initiated a policy of private housing in new towns in order to temper the financial burdens of the programme and encourage local electoral support for the party. This enquiry, by focusing on Crawley New Town, argues that the policy succeeded in exposing the contradictions of post-war new town philosophy whilst reflecting the wider economic and social changes that had begun to unfold in Britain by the late 1950s.

The reimagining of Beiping – now ‘Beijing’ – reveals the limits of community in early twentieth-century China. Despite the centrality of the crowd to the imagining, construction and management of other Chinese cities, and despite an emerging local advocacy of ‘revitalization’ for Beiping and the Beiping crowd, literary and official understandings of the city that marginalized the mass of Beiping residents remained dominant, highlighting the tension between symbol and community in the construction of place and nation.

This study addresses the interplay between the formation of civic society and urban development in the Latin East, particularly in the city of Jerusalem. It argues that while the municipal mechanisms that were formed in Jerusalem during the first half of the twelfth century drew on Western European models, they were adapted to meet the challenges of the young capital of the Latin Kingdom. The process revolves around the pivotal role of the patriarch and the clergy of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem's most important religious institution at the time, in the moulding of the urban fabric. This was realized through a close collaboration with the local burgess class, followed by the rise of new religious institutions that spurred the transition to a new urban balance. These processes demonstrate the reciprocity between spatial, social and economic factors in the shaping of the cityscape and urban dynamics in Frankish Jerusalem.

This article focuses on aspects of the economic evolution of La Coruña during the 1940s and 1950s by analysing the entrepreneurial activities in a stage characterized by an urban demographic take-off. The tertiary sector, based mainly on port traffic, fishing, commerce and other traditional urban functions, contributed significantly to the diversification of the economic structure of this town.

The early twentieth century witnessed some of the worst mining disasters the UK has ever seen. Towns and cities leapt to the aid of bereaved families, raising tens of thousands of pounds in aid. Yet, while the effects of disaster funds on the locality in which they were administered have been the focus of scholarly work, little attention has been given to how these funds were created in constituencies outside of the disaster zone. The Barry Urban District Council (UDC) responded to the call for help after the Senghenydd (1913) and Gresford (1934) disasters, opening relief funds to aid the affected. The funds blurred the line between charity and local government, with the Barry UDC reliant on functions of civic society to aid its philanthropic turn. Their reaction offers insights into the charitable role of UDCs, reflecting on how they used these opportunities to further civic activity.

A municipal boundary dispute between Dublin's nationalist city council and its independent unionist suburbs in the early twentieth century was symptomatic of a much deeper disagreement over national identity within the United Kingdom. Considering urban councils as the link between the state and local civil society (or subscriber democracy), and using theories proposed by Graeme Morton, R.J. Morris and Norton E. Long, along with illustrative contrasts from municipal behaviour in Edinburgh, this article examines these relationships in Edwardian Dublin. It argues that the modernization of Irish municipal government in 1898 empowered Dublin in unforeseen ways. By amplifying existing divergent identities, and providing a platform for the nascent Irish state, municipal government reforms contributed significantly to the break-up of the UK in 1922.

This article examines the development of Hammarby Lake City in southern Stockholm on a former industrial, waterfront site during the 1990s. The setting may resemble recent global redevelopments of urban waterfronts and docks; however, in it Stockholm needs to be viewed against longer cultural, aesthetic and historical influences. This includes early twentieth-century precedents rooted in civic and residential engagement with the modern and industrial shoreline. In addition, an informal human interaction with the abandoned southern Hammarby harbour evolved during the 1950s through reoccupation by an itinerant community of workers. Such forerunners have often been overlooked in accounts of a late twentieth-century dramatic transformation of industrial waterfronts. The article concludes that there is scope to align the theme of waterfront development more closely to the longer history of the twentieth-century city. This perspective provides a useful counterpoint to the leading view of such spaces as an expression of late capitalism.

A huge clock, made at Whitechurch by Messrs. J. B. Joyce and Co … has been sent to Shanghai, for the new Chinese Maritime Customs House. The clock, weighing nearly 30 tons, will probably be the Big Ben of the Far East.

In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt published his view, still influential today, of an artful, urban Italian Renaissance that launched Europe on its passage to modernity. A lively revisionary scholarship has challenged Burckhardt on many points, but his famous formulae still resonate: the state as work of art; the development of the individual; the discovery of the world and of man. Although we now know that Italy did not alone invent the new age, it was for many years a trendsetter, especially in the domains of cultural production at the centre of this collection of essays. Republican and princely polities alike framed these developments, but, whoever ruled, Italy's unusually intense urbanization (paired with that in another well-spring of culture in the Low Countries) fostered innovation. In Renaissance cities, people and groups invested heavily in special actions, objects and places – charismatic cultural products empowered by holiness, beauty, fame and ingenuity – that fortified solidarity and resilience in uncertain times. This essay collection addresses a conjunction of urban culture and society distinctive to Renaissance Italy: an array of encounters of artifacts with ways of living in community.

The view propounded vigorously by Mohammad Habib that workers, artisans and craftsmen were not allowed to live within the city walls prior to the establishment of Turkish rule in India is examined. On the basis of primary archaeological sources, especially excavation reports and epigraphic data, this paper argues that diverse occupational groups, whose services were essential for the growth and development of towns, lived within the city precincts. Manufacturers and merchants both worked and lived together in the same town. The segregation theory, therefore, is rejected.

Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what was later called the ‘New World’, was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. While it has been called the ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’, discussion of racial exclusion and marginalization is mostly absent in the city's architecture and urban history. This article investigates how architecture and urban design helped reinforce the colonizers’ control over enslaved peoples. Specifically, we explore the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood, its church and the slave warehouse known as La Negreta. Drawing on historical maps and archival documents, we draw attention to how the spatial and material construction of Santa Bárbara constituted and maintained social and racial structures of oppression.

Medieval Bruges was an important international economic hub in the late Middle Ages. Similar to other luxury goods, manuscripts produced in Bruges were intended for both local and international audiences. This article scrutinizes the specific urban context of Bruges as a multilingual contact zone focusing on quantitative data of extant manuscripts and case-studies of professional and non-professional book production. The dominance of francophone manuscripts in a Dutch-speaking town is noteworthy and called for an actively bilingual community of book professionals. Furthermore, the social competition of locally embedded social groups (court, merchants, craft guilds) influenced language choice as well. Both ‘official’ production of books for trade by professional writers and librarians, and the ‘private’ multilingual literary accomplishments of Bruges city-dwellers, illustrate the multilingual dynamics of urban contacts in Bruges.

The two key aspects of water infrastructure – engineered and human – in mid-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro are the foci of this article. On the one hand, gravity flow engineering brought fresh water from the Tijuca Forest to the fountains in the city, but on the other, hundreds of slaves carried heavy jugs of water from the fountains though the streets to residences. Using the account of Thomas Ewbank (1856), georeferenced historical maps and a field study, this article first reconstructs the route of the Carioca Aqueduct, then, using the accounts of Ewbank and other travellers, turns to the delivery of water in the city by enslaved water carriers.

The ordinary city of Bir al-Saba’, situated within an urban world stretched across southern Palestine, has a story to tell, of dramatic spatiotemporal transformations, presence and absence, capture and resilience. Such connected urban history is profoundly shaped through the world-making relations of those who lived and dwelt within the always-becoming material and ideational spatial geography of the Naqab. Research gathered from diverse archival sources and interview data offers insight into the voices, actions and imaginaries of the Saba'awi as they worked the shifting assemblages of this landscape between 1840 and 1936, making Bir al-Saba’ a thick multiscalar cosmopolitan place of meaning and opportunity.

Visual representations of the Lower Hill District created by Pittsburgh's redevelopment coalition and by neighbourhood insiders reveal the conflicting ways redevelopers and residents understood older neighbourhoods and their redevelopment. Redevelopers’ maps and photographs of the Lower Hill documented the neighbourhood's densely built-up blocks and intermixture of land uses as definitive examples of blight that threatened downtown's economic health. Models and architectural sketches of the Civic Arena – the jewel of the Lower Hill's redevelopment plan – promised to wipe away blight and renew the city. Redevelopers distributed their imagery through brochures and the city's daily press. Framed by captions labelling the Lower Hill a ‘blight’ and the Civic Arena a ‘wonder of the modern world’, these images helped sell the public on redevelopment. Lower Hill insiders, most notably the city's African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Courier’s lead photographer, Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, envisioned the Lower Hill and its redevelopment differently. Harris and the Courier criticized the neighbourhood's dilapidated housing but celebrated its thriving social life. They also supported redevelopment but saw it primarily as a route to new jobs and improved housing for Hill residents. After the Civic Arena opened in 1961, redevelopment failed to deliver more jobs or better housing because redevelopers’ worldview prioritized the built over the social environment. Hill District residents, led by the Courier, reacted to these shortcomings with visual protests pairing redevelopers’ favourite symbol of progress – the brand new Civic Arena – with symbols of racial injustice. By spotlighting the inequalities that undergirded redevelopers’ vision for the city, these protests stopped redevelopment from spreading further into the Hill in 1968.

This article addresses the beginnings of the twinning relationship between Coventry and Kiel to introduce and exemplify the idea of ‘urban internationalism’ as a new lens onto urban histories of town twinning initiatives and a contribution to the historiography of British town twinning. Focusing on paradiplomatic initiatives by municipal officials, religious dignitaries and other citizens in Coventry and Kiel, the article examines the role that cities played in British–German reconstruction and reconciliation in the period from the end of World War II until the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

This article examines the proposals for Stonehouse, designated as the sixth Scottish new town in 1972 but abandoned in 1976. Several themes emerge, with lessons for the wider urban and political histories of 1970s Britain. First, the evolving plans demonstrate the ‘malleability’ of the post-war ‘new town idea’, conceptually and organizationally. Second, cancellation was the consequence of short-term factors, changing strategic objectives and local government reform, rather than being the result of a sudden ideological pivot towards inner-city renewal. Third, Stonehouse counters established narratives of the practice and decline of regional planning in post-war Britain. At least in a Scottish context, regional planning took on new forms during the mid-1970s.

Dublin at the turn of the nineteenth century had limited permanent employment opportunities compared to Belfast, and for poor families financial instability manifested in limited life expectancy. This article focuses on young adult cohorts in Dublin city. By cross-referencing names and addresses from death records with census, court and prison records, it casts new light on the lives of the city's most disadvantaged people. It applies a digital humanities framework and uses historical Geographical Information Systems to explore patterns in cause of death, and to reveal more about household income, casual labour, women's work and community networks. We contend that the cautions about the occlusion of commercial sex work in historical data should be extended to the lowest strata of the working classes more generally and that it is only through granular analyses that the fine lines between poverty and destitution can emerge.