This article argues for a central role for the concept of de-industrialization in understanding the evolution of the economies of urban Britain in the years since 1945. Above all, it is suggested, this concept is crucial because it focuses attention on the consequences of the transition from an industrial to a service-dominated labour market. To make this argument requires a careful definition of the term, along with recognition of its potential weaknesses as well as strengths. Key issues are highlighted by drawing on three diverse urban areas, which help to show the ubiquity of the process, but also its diverse patterns, chronologies and impacts. These examples are a stereotypical ‘post-industrial city’ (Dundee); a major city where de-industrialization has played an under-regarded role in developments (London); and a medium-size town in the south of England (High Wycombe), where the decline of a core industry (furniture) was crucial to its recent history. The final sections analyse the relationship between de-industrialization and other key frameworks commonly deployed to shape understanding of the recent history of Britain: ‘decline’, ‘globalization’ and ‘the triumph of neo-liberalism’.

This article traces the planning history of two central marketplaces in sub-Saharan Africa, in Dakar and Kinshasa, from their French and Belgian colonial origins until the post-colonial period. In the (post-)colonial city, the marketplace has always been at the centre of contemporary debates on urban identity and spatial production. Using a rich variety of sources, this article makes a contribution to a neglected area of scholarship, as comparative studies on planning histories in sub-Saharan African cities are still rare. It also touches upon some key issues such as the multiple and often intricate processes of urban agency between local and foreign actors, sanitation and segregation, the different (post-)colonial planning cultures and their limits and the role of indigenous/intermediary groups in spatial contestation and reappropriation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the state-operated Maharashtra Housing Board and its successor organization Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) responded to Mumbai's exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure to fight the housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. In Mumbai's northern suburbs, housing compounds were built for designated income levels, such as Kannamwar Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar for the ‘low-income group’ and DN Nagar or Sahakar Nagar for the ‘middle-income group’. This article argues that Mumbai's state-sponsored tower blocks adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. The designers took up influences from both local Maharashtrian and European housing typologies of the mid-twentieth century, including upper-class art deco apartments, socialist housing compounds and serially built working-class chawls. In contrast to mass housing developments in Chicago, Moscow or Paris, Mumbai's tower blocks were built individually rather than from prefabricated parts, offered rather high standards of living compared to that of the majority and, as a result, became increasingly inhabited by comparably wealthy groups. Since the beginning of economic liberalization in the 1990s, many have been converted into private co-operatives. Once designed to house the masses, they are now visible symbols for a growing minority that constitutes Mumbai's new middle class. At the same time, they are an example for the local evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.

This article argues that cultural capital in the Victorian town contributed to spatial as well as social differentiation, helping to bolster the power of civic elites and the image and identity of the town. Evidence drawn from north Staffordshire Pottery towns demonstrates how the value of cultural capital reflected the scale, timing and geography of investment, and its ability to represent and communicate the taste and judgment of the civic elite to those of neighbouring towns. In the hothouse of local rivalry that led up to the creation of the borough of Stoke-on-Trent, investment in cultural capital took on extra significance as each town strove for political ascendancy in the nascent conurbation.

Despite the transformation of English cities by the growth of suburbs in the inter-war years, there is a dearth of reliable information about the processes, and especially the firms, that brought these suburbs into existence. Contrary to accepted wisdom – and paradoxically, in view of the scorn heaped upon suburbs by the architectural literati – architects are shown to have been heavily involved in the preparation of building applications for the construction of suburban houses. In spite of the unprecedented amount of house building in the inter-war period, the geographical spheres of influence of both builders and architects were highly localized. However, unlike in the nineteenth century, there is little evidence of speculative building having been undertaken by people whose livelihood was not primarily derived from house building or house selling.

‘Inspiring Capital’ is the sign that confronts visitors and residents alike at the boundaries of the Edinburgh administrative area. It is a consciously ambiguous message of self-promotion: the logo proclaims the dual standing of the city of Edinburgh as a European capital city and a city of international capital. The article uses a long-run approach to explore how, by inventing and nurturing a myth about Edinburgh as a non-industrial city, councillors and planners privileged the ancient and historical character of the city and so conditioned policies associated with urban renewal and land use.

Now that the debate about the standard of living during the first half of the nineteenth century appears to have entered a relatively quiescent phase, historians have begun to turn their attention towards the more elusive concept of the quality of life. The incidence of fatal and non-fatal disease is clearly central to research of this type and so, too, is a delineation of the physical context in which infections have flourished and in which those who have been afflicted by them have lived. Although there has been a tendency to underestimate the ferocity of epidemics in rural areas in the period after about 1750, historians working on disease in the modern period are inevitably most usually concerned with processes which are specifically urban in character. And urban historians, especially those interested in such topics as the development of utilities, the growth of administrative bureau-cracies or the spatial segregation and different life experiences of the classes, can undoubtedly benefit from a knowledge of patterns of infection in the past.

In the 1950s, ‘urban design’ was born in American debate thanks partly to the import of foreign discourses in a new context. Among others, was the fragmented and erratic translation of the British Architectural Review's ‘Townscape’ discourse. This article traces carefully this translation not only to describe another key moment in the Anglo-American dialogue on planning but also to give a more complex portrait of the foundation and early development of the field of urban design. Involving some American universities, Fortune magazine and the Rockefeller Foundation, these lines of exchange also exemplify variations on the translation of a militant discourse into an academic one.

There are well-known reconstruction plans for various UK cities produced during and after the Second World War, but little attention has been paid to those towns suffering little damage, or whose plans were not drawn up by the usual eminent consultants. This paper explores the process of preparing such a plan for Wolverhampton, in the English West Midlands. Here, a ‘technocentric’ plan is evident, typical of the 1940s reconstruction plans, but one with roots stretching back a decade into the middle 1930s; one whose key impetus was the Borough Surveyor, but which was prepared for a major programme of public involvement and consultation. Although this plan was not carried out in this form, it set the agenda for the next forty years of development in planning thought and in changing urban form. It was pivotal in the history of the town and its restructuring from the middle of the twentieth century.

One of the problems of urban history is the fearsome range of expertise that the urban historian is supposed to appreciate, if not master. Belaboured, rightly, by archaeologists, geographers, and architectural historians, we have begun to open our eyes to the evidence of the physical environment of medieval towns, but that is not the half of it. In order to understand urban institutions one needs to be a religious historian, an economic historian, a legal historian; and if one were ever to make sense of everything that is included in the ‘social history’ of towns, then social anthropology, historical demography, and sociology are only three of the battery of foglamps that would be needed to penetrate our cloud of unknowing. The subject which I now wish to add to the list of those we are supposed to cover does not even have the attraction of sounding new and modish and exciting. The history of political thought has, after all, formed a part of undergraduate history courses in this country ever since they began, and it is traditionally one of the least popular and least satisfactory parts of them, especially for the sort of students who may go on to be interested in urban history: those who relish the exact, the local detail, the reality of topography, the ability to connect the documents of the past with visible phenomena in the present.

This article examines the role played by workmen's trains in allowing working-class families to move out into London's suburbs between 1860 and 1914. While previous scholarship has argued that these trains effectively only benefited skilled artisans or a working-class elite, it is argued here that from the 1880s onwards they were increasingly used by unskilled workers in irregular employment. Furthermore, they were also used by women and children earning low wages in subsidiary employment. Ultimately, it is demonstrated that a much broader spectrum of the working class were living in the suburbs and commuting than has been previously supposed.

Summoning the popularity and prestige of cinema, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) invented the image of Baghdad for Iraqi audiences as the sight/site of oil modernity in the 1950s. In other words, oil urbanization, or the modernization of the city as shaped by the petroleum industry and its revenues, in Iraq cannot be understood apart from the representation of Baghdad as visible evidence of petroleum's promise to benefit the national population. The British-controlled oil company in Iraq produced a programme of at least two-dozen sponsored films and cine-magazine episodes between 1951 and 1958, which this essay examines as an emblematic case of neo-colonial film, constituting an archive of media practices that bridge the categories of colonial film on one hand, and industrial film on the other. After World War II, the Atlantic Charter reinforced the right to democratic self-rule as a global norm and the British state developed creative tactics to abet its continued control over strategic resources in its colonized territories. Oil above all became central to this story and, as this essay will show, British oil companies played a fundamental role towards reinventing the imperial project in the post-colonial context of Iraq. Through a contextualized analysis of the IPC films, I argue that the company public relations office utilized the conventional approaches and standard formats of colonial and industrial film – including montage, scripted voiceover and staged b-roll – to narrativize the association between neo-colonialist practices of oil extraction and national development as causal, inherent and positive.

This paper juxtaposes two key themes: the concept of citizenship and ideas on urban renewal over the past century. The aim is to explore the interaction of cultural changes and the physical environment of cities. The concept of citizenship represents a cultural response to social change which itself has changed dramatically over the past century. Urban renewal has taken many forms. Yet behind all the growing technical expertise in dealing with the physical environment, there are specific social responses to the city which legitimize action. By looking at citizenship and urban renewal together, it is possible to establish a perspective on how the urban environment has been manipulated over the past century, often in ways which have barely interfaced with the social demands of many sections of the community.

This article is concerned with the Cotton Famine affecting the towns of north-west England between 1861–64. It examines charitable responses to the Famine and especially the impact of the charity relationship between recipient and donor. Understanding the complexities of this relationship, based on a reciprocal arrangement and establishing behavoural norms, leads to a wider appreciation of the role of charity in determining class cohesion and in managing the urban environment.

This essay surveys major themes and developments in the recent study of late antique urbanism. First, re-evaluations of the late phase of classical urbanism are discussed, whereby a simple narrative of ‘decline’ has been replaced by a much more chronologically and geographically nuanced picture. The importance of regional, indeed local, specificity is stressed, with different areas of the ancient world experiencing often radically different urban trajectories. Key aspects of late antique urbanism are considered, including the relationship between town and country, economic urban life, political versus social and religious urban history, before concluding with consideration of areas where future research is particularly needed.

This article surveys the Thatcher administration's approach to inner-city policy. It uses recently opened archives to reignite the debate over how far these years marked a radical break with past practices towards market-oriented approaches. The first part explains why inner cities became such a central issue for the Conservative party, running through all areas of domestic policy and taking up a vast amount of legislative time. The second part details some of the transatlantic neo-liberal ideas that blamed inner-city ills on government intervention, which were increasingly influential amongst senior Conservatives. The third section shows how little free market ideology actually succeeded in directing government policy, which more often than not saw an expansion of the role of the state. Antagonism with local authorities is revealed to have been a much more important and influential factor. These themes are expanded in the fourth section, which charts the Action for Cities policy drive of Thatcher's final term.

This article explores the visibility of the cyclist in Dublin from the 1930s to the 1980s. This visibility is explored in three ways: how the historian can and has apprehended the figure of the cyclist within the city, how the cyclist made him or herself visible within the urban environment and how cyclists were seen within techniques and conventions of urban planning. I suggest that a close examination of the place of the cyclist within the city provides a suggestive tool for understanding the implicit assumptions of urban change at mid-century.

In investigating urban culture, historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made and the modern, and have paid less attention to the role of nature and the past, which seem the opposite of what the town stands for. This survey, which takes as its case-study England, argues that nature and the past have always been part of urban life, but as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, they became if anything an even more important element in city and town culture.

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

The article considers the impact of new arterial roads on the mobilities of the wealthier inter-war Londoner, and argues that they occasioned an emergent form of automobility that was modern, sensational and exciting for the metropolitan driver, but was also highly dangerous, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists living in suburban homes near these roads.