This article examines the relationship between public services and the urban middling sort in provincial England from 1550 to 1640 through comparative case-studies of the finance and management of waterworks, the creation of new skilled roles and the cultural import of water systems in Bristol, Chester and Ipswich. It argues that the middling sort were vital in establishing public services and that water provision centred not only on its value as a material and financial resource, but also as an expanding source of patronage and social capital that shaped and entrenched the emergence of middling groups in society.

This article explores social dancing as the setting for moral struggles related to the urban night. Based on analysis of Estonian-language newspapers, I look at the historical context and expressed viewpoints linked with nocturnal public dance events in Estonian cities from 1880 to 1940. The established moral order was endangered by those staying out dancing late into the night. In the context of the multinationalism of urban areas and the national emancipation movement of the ethnic Estonian population, I investigate the transgressions and hazards that night dancing was perceived to bring, most significantly, threat to productivity, health and virtue.

In 1964, Australian writer Donald Horne observed that ‘whatever differences there are between the Australian cities are differences within a range of similarity’. He proposed that Australia had 11 major cities and yet, in general, there existed a singular national urban culture, a one-city Australia. Unpacking the story of Australian urban history, its national trends and local nuances, has been an ongoing project ever since. What follows is an analysis of the field, which suggests how historians might begin to unpack Horne’s assertion. The final section of the article explores the contribution of Australian urban history in the national and global contexts.

In contrast to the well-studied shopkeepers, little empirical evidence exists on the locational patterns of artisans in transforming urban spaces. By GIS mapping a dataset on Brussels construction entrepreneurs (c. 1830–1930), long-term changes in their patterns of spatial clustering and dispersal become clear, showing which urban areas provided advantageous conditions for artisans to thrive, but also how and when these conditions subsided. While confirming earlier observations of a broad scattering of artisans throughout the city, the analysis also shows how remarkable clusters emerged in cheap, densely built, both central and suburban neighbourhoods. The importance of clustering decreased over time, however. Confronting locational patterns with their potential underlying causes shows that planning policies for the renewal of urban infrastructure and the resulting dynamics on the real estate market acted as the first drivers of urban de-industrialization, affecting the displacement of artisans from inner cities since at least the late nineteenth century.

This study estimates the cost of living in three cities – Florence, Bologna and Milan – in eighteenth-century northern Italy. Although they do not allow an understanding of the differences between social groups or seasonal consumption patterns, the calculation of living costs and the implied modelling have a twofold aim. First, they allow the calculation of real wages, which are obtained by dividing nominal wages by the cost of a consumption basket; therefore, broadly, they allow the Italian case to be put into great debates of economic history, such as the one on the Little Divergence between northern and southern Europe at the end of the early modern period. In this regard, we will show that the existing calculations used for this purpose have many criticalities, and we will solve them. Second, determining the cost of consumption baskets allows us to observe the role played by urban public institutions in mediating between the market and consumers, with relevant effects on price trends and, therefore, on the purchasing power of the urban population.

At the conclusion of the 1950s in Japan, plans to reclaim and develop Tokyo Bay were proposed by the Japan Housing Corporation's president and a private think tank on economic affairs. The vision was incompatible with dispersion, the basic direction of the state's policy, so it was quickly rejected, but its legacy lived on as the trans-Tokyo Bay highway in 1997. This article argues that the lack of an effective national policy led to contradictory initiatives and divisions among the stakeholders, leaving open the way for the large-scale reclamation and development of Tokyo Bay.

In early modern violence, location mattered, and where something took place communicated much to early modern urban residents about the people involved, the significance of the act and the likely judicial repercussions for their communities. This article uses GIS to trace the locations of homicides in early modern Bologna, Italy, with a ‘prepositional cartography’ that translates early modern Italian spatial mentalities into modern GIS analyses. Mapping homicides reveals much about their meaning and significance. From private buildings, streets and churches, early modern killers spoke a language of space to their audience.

This article presents a comparative study of the industrial energy consumption in Ghent and Leiden, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It asks whether or not industrial development depended on the availability of coal. Whereas the Southern Low Countries had recourse to cheap coal from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, the Northern Low Countries remained trapped in its ‘proto-fossil’ trajectory based on peat, lacking a full fossil-fuel transition. By using production data to estimate the fuel consumption by industry, it is argued that energy divergences did not matter for industrialization. Both in Ghent and in Leiden, industries such as brewing, sugar refining, glass making and textile production had already largely switched to coal by the end of the seventeenth century. Explanations for these early coal-burning trajectories should be found, not in the ‘lucky’ location of coal supplies, but in the demand and organization of coal-specific industry itself.

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.

This article explores and complicates notions of public and private urban mobility through the exploration of one site of transport, the Kowloon railway terminus in Hung Hom, Hong Kong. It considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? This article explores the Hung Hom railway terminus and its tensions and interactions with automobility and other forms of transport, most pertinently the bus network. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further throws into question seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

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.

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 aim of this article is to offer a new conceptual framework for the study of various spaces in Istanbul during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. I contend that rather than the sharp distinction manifested with the public–private dichotomy, we need to focus on gradations of privacy. I offer qāpū and bāb as two new concepts borrowed from the period's own repertoire for representing the macro and micro ends of the spatial gradation. Theoretically, I draw on George Simmel's definition of doors as the interfaces of spatial formation.

The ability to capture, store and distribute water safely is fundamental to the health of urban and rural settlements alike. This is true for Hyderabad city, located in India's semi-arid Deccan region. I argue that an exegesis of the nineteenth-century conservation plans for Hyderabad's large, built water reservoir, Hussain Sagar, reveal multiple hydrosocial processes at work: class structures related to proximity and use of the lake's water; health concerns triggered by the water's ebb and flow; and enforcement challenges related to issues of shared governance. This article shows how conservation of a scarce resource brought together princely and colonial officials (often parsed along historiographical lines) to address a shared concern within an urban context. Such urban environmental co-operation offers a new princely urban perspective on the binaries of princely–colonial and/or ruler–ruled.

This article studies how people, especially the business community, in the southern Chinese city of Canton, responded to the government's fund-raising campaigns in the early phase of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). It challenges the conventional views that the whole city of Canton had wholeheartedly united together in the face of their encroaching enemy, and that people from all walks of life displayed a high degree of patriotism with their self-denying participation in the city's war efforts. Despite the common concern about the threat of looming attack on Canton by the Japanese, this commonality, however, did not help cement the populace into a nationalistic whole with great solidarity, as the state and its publicists hoped. This article also reveals the problem with interpreting socio-political events in this turbulent time through the narrow lens of Chinese nationalism.

This article examines the nature of sociability, communication and the ‘practical public sphere’ of Hamburg's early coffeehouses (1677–1714) and provides insight into the ‘social life’ of these coffeehouse spaces during the ‘early’ Enlightenment. Using licensing records, administrative sources and supplications, it shows how novelty, popularity, political partisanship and fashionability were characteristic of these early coffeehouses, creating a fluid and capricious dynamic of custom and communication that stressed established notions of honourable sociabilities and communication in urban public spaces. It argues that these destabilizing social and communication practices led to social stratification and a redefinition of ‘honourable’ burgherly behaviour in the normative public sphere. Strategies to govern the coffeehouses sought thus to bind these spaces and their actors to this newly articulated ‘normative’ burgherly public sphere.

This article argues that a micro-historical and comparative analysis of urban burial spaces can provide fresh insight into cities. Two late medieval cemeteries are considered here: the Qarāfa in Cairo and Saints-Innocents in Paris. Despite the former being geographically peripheral and the latter central, both these relatively large cemeteries were integral to their respective urban spheres. Beyond the role of sultans and kings, collective shaping was key to the longue durée formation of both capitals’ cemeteries. They were also shaped by multiple urban communities of the living and the dead at the closer level and offer insight into these communities.

In 2011, when Jelle Haemers looked back on a decade's worth of Ph.D. theses on urban centres in the medieval Low Countries, he identified three main trends in scholarship: the emphasis on individuals, rather than institutions; the increasing use of new methodologies, such as social network analysis (SNA) and prosopography; and the deployment of inter-disciplinary perspectives. Haemers’ intuition proved prescient; recent doctoral contributions to the historiography of medieval English towns and cities tend, generally, to fall along similar lines. In many ways, this is natural, and a testament to the enduring legacy and successes of earlier works. But, as the following discussion will elaborate, important and divergent steps have also been made, pushing our perceptions of pre-modern urban societies in new directions. Medieval urban history remains a vibrant area for study, with Ph.D. students forming an important section of its vanguard.

The aim of this article is to examine the use of suitable archive sources for the study of the economic space of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research is based on the integration and critical analysis of cartographic, descriptive and quantitative sources of an administrative and fiscal nature, developed by using Geographic Information Systems. The advantage of adopting this approach includes, in addition to the study of spatial relationships amongst economic activities and the urban space, the possibility of investigating discrepancies between the sources, thus facilitating their interpretation.

The article is a critical investigation of the role played by the Palermo left-wing newspaper L'Ora in uncovering the Sicilian Mafia's urban affairs and property speculation during the sack of Palermo in the 1960s. It pays particular attention to L'Ora's complex narrative concerning the urban Mafia and the many obstacles that the newspaper encountered in its attempt to defend the city. The article aims to explain L'Ora's account of the Mafia as an intersection of violent crime, politics and business. This study uses investigative series and archival sources to explain the emergence of ‘antimafia’ as both concept and political practice in the urban history of Palermo.