This article brings together three aspects of early modern urban life: the later stages of the urban renaissance, the consumer revolution and horse racing. Those towns identified as having an effectively commercialized ‘race week’ between 1750 and 1805 challenge notions of any trickle-down effect from London. Successful organization and funding came largely from co-operation rather than division between the county aristocracy and gentry and the urban middling sort. Both groups attended, while race weeks were sufficiently popular for many rural and urban workers to sacrifice production time for the allure of their leisure experiences. Racecourse consumer space, with its booths, tents and stands, allowed spectators to enjoy either cross-class mixing or increased social differentiation, the latter most especially on the permanent stone grandstands, an innovation of the period.

This article analyses the role of LaClede Town, a nationally lauded housing development in St Louis (USA), in metropolitan and national contests over race, segregation and urban equity from the 1960s to 1990s. Built on the site of a massive slum-clearance project, the federally supported complex gained widespread fame for its startlingly heterogeneous racial mix and ostensibly colour-blind lifestyles. As the article argues, the quasi-utopian language applied to the neighbourhood illustrates the contours and limitations of a 1960s racial liberalism that sought to overcome structural inequalities through face-to-face neighbourly contact. Yet the project's 1990s demise signals that older ideology's supersession by a newly dominant urban neoliberalism.

Empty, abandoned or covered with vegetation – such areas were inherent to the medieval urban space, yet remain overlooked in research. Here, we describe three major types of ‘empty’ space of various origins and functions in Central European towns and suggest how these types can be investigated and interpreted through an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, written, pictorial and cartographical sources. We propose a simple interdisciplinary protocol to trace empty spaces in the urban context. This study will help to change our perception of medieval urban space into one that is more dynamic and heterogeneous than commonly believed.

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.

This article centres on a trial held in Madrid in 1614 involving a group identified as ‘vagrants’ of ‘Armenian’ and ‘Greek’ background. In order to tease out the ways in which the presence of foreigners challenged the institutions and citizens, this article approaches these defendants as relationally defined actors in the urban dynamic. It reveals the tactics marginal groups employed vis-à-vis strategic attempts by the municipal government to control foreigners by assigning them identities based on ethnicity. This case-study thus calls into question notions of vagrancy and identification based on ethnicity (‘Armenian’ and ‘Greek’, in particular) in Madrid under Phillip III and IV. In doing so, it shows marginality to be a key yet elusive site for cultural encounters and collaboration in early modern Europe, in which multilingual and culturally fluid social actors related to the Armenian diaspora played a central role.

This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data. As such, the study not only adds specificity to recent attempts to enrich the field of pre-modern public health, but also demonstrates that the Bolognese administration had a sophisticated and evolving understanding of communal health risks, and exposes several discrepancies between policy and practice.

Historic monuments were one of the vehicles of modern nation building in the nineteenth century. Their role could turn out to be even more exposed in an ethnically mixed territory of central and central-eastern Europe. For the turn of the twentieth-century Polish inhabitants of the capital of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, urban secular historic architecture proved to be such a key tool. The Old Town of Lviv, in itself witness of a centuries-old multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tradition, became the basis for a modern nation-building project, in which local and regional Polish character administrative bodies and social institutions were involved. The project relied on the strengthening of national identity among Lviv's inhabitants by means of securing the ‘Polish character’ of the Old Town, which amounted to reinventing it anew.

Nineteenth-century Glasgow was widely imagined and presented as the proud ‘Second City of the Empire’. This article investigates the implications of this identification with the empire by analysing Glasgow's great town hall, built 1883–89, as the main manifestation of the city's civic pride. It shows how the building's architectural style, sculpture and inauguration ceremonies created a specific image of ‘imperial’ Glasgow which emphasized loyalty to Union and empire. Instead of undermining each other, the layered political allegiances of civic pride, nationalism, unionism and imperialism were mutually reinforcing, shaping the town hall still in use today.

While the Victorian ideal of the public park is well understood, we know less of how local governors sought to realize this ideal in practice. This article is concerned with park-making as a process – contingent, unstable, open – rather than with parks as outcomes – determined, settled, closed. It details how local governors bounded, designed and regulated park spaces to differentiate them as ‘spaces apart’ within the city, and how this programme of spatial governance was obstructed, frustrated and diverted by political, environmental and social forces. The article also uses this historical analysis to provide a new perspective on the future prospects of urban parks today.

Urban history and urban cartography are closely linked. The analysis of spatial relationships through cartography enables a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of studied phenomena, and thus can be a valuable support to urban historians. In this context, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cadastres represent a fertile ground for experimentation in the quantitative analysis of urban space. The explicit relationships between the descriptive data of the cadastral registers and cadastral maps facilitate the computerization of this historical source and the construction of the spatial database. This article illustrates the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geostatistical methods applied to urban historical studies, focusing on the analysis of socio-economic information retrieved from the Pio-Gregorian cadastre of Rome, from 1818 to 1824.

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.

This article offers an analysis of different approaches to control walking in Stockholm in the inter-war period. Various social actors engaged in controlling pedestrians through legislation, police monitoring, educational campaigns and traffic control technologies. But the police, municipal engineers, local politicians and road user organizations differed in their aspirations to privilege motorists over pedestrians. While the inter-war period saw a shifting balance between pedestrians and motorists in Stockholm, the transition in terms of legitimate use of city streets was incomplete. Moreover, taking pedestrians’ viewpoints into consideration, what many observers and motorists understood as rebellion against traffic rules or simply bad manners, many pedestrians found to be the safest way to cross the street.

This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.

Scholars from various disciplines argue that the 1970s formed a historical watershed. Several arguments rely on the notion of a significant change in the modes of production, labour and consumption – a change usually coined as de-industrialization, which had severe economic, social and cultural repercussions on numerous cities. These repercussions are frequently phrased in semantics of crisis. The article will present an exemplary case that sits uneasily with this master narrative. Wilhelmshaven, a medium-sized city in north-west Germany, witnessed significant changes in the 1970s, too – but not away from, but towards industrialization, and throughout the industrializing phase, diagnoses of crisis played a major role in stabilizing the process. Analysing Wilhelmshaven's industrialization, which took place between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, will shed light on two aspects: first, the effects industrialization had on the city's socio-economic structure; secondly, the effects different crises and their diagnosis had on the process. In doing so, the article will link perspectives from urban history with theoretical concepts of crisis and, thus, attempt to provoke a closer look at cities of the 1970s.

Finnish children today enjoy a relatively high level of independent mobility. This article discusses how different urban planning professionals defined children's needs in a post-World War II Helsinki that was undergoing rapid urbanization, and how these discourses relate to childhood memories of the time. The emphasis on family by the planning professionals led to major changes in the city structure, including developed play areas, safer streets and shorter distances to schools. This study suggests that a dominant understanding of the importance of outdoor activities has contributed to the relatively stable level of independent mobility of the children in Helsinki.

This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, non-humans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

How did the complex relationship between working worlds and urban spaces change in Hamburg in times of de-industrialization? To answer this question, I focus on Hamburg's history from 1960 to 2008. Starting from the idea of a cumulative structural break, I develop a typology of Fordist and neo-liberal urban spaces and distinguish seven dimensions of change: from international division of labour to globalization, from industrial production to creativity, from rationalization to digitalization, from centralization to networks, from functional zoning to blurred boundaries, from social security to precarity and from suburbanization to the renaissance of the inner city. Finally, I consider whether this typology is valid for other European cities.

Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

This article analyses the changing options for the provision of burial places between the Reformation and the mid-nineteenth century in two major provincial cities, Bristol and Exeter. The two cities experienced very different patterns of change, especially in their Anglican provision, reflecting medieval differences of organization as well as the differential impact of dissent. Common factors include the effect of epidemics (plague, cholera) and population pressure, but also great conservatism regarding use of inner-city burial places. The major changes are associated with the three great shocks to church–state relations: the Reformation, the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the reform period of the 1830s and 1840s.

This article examines the decline of the craft guilds in early modern England by way of a case-study of the Tuckers’ Company in Exeter. From the 1980s, this case figured prominently in the historiographical debate concerning guild decline; however, it has not been examined recently. The current study reveals the Tuckers’ Company is not a case of decline in guild membership so much as a case of the loss of guild monopoly and a concomitant transition to charitable functions. On the basis of empirical sources, this study also reveals the mechanisms and context of this transformation in the post-Civil War politics of the city of Exeter. Specific attention is given to first, the decline of royal authority bolstering the guild against the city government and secondly, the shift of power in the guild with the ascendance of the merchant fullers. Finally, the historiographical implications of the article's findings are discussed.