This article uses a quantitative and qualitative methodology to examine the role that women played as property owners in three mid-nineteenth-century English towns. Using data from the previously under-utilized rate books, we argue that women were actively engaged in urban property ownership as part of a complex financial strategy to generate income and invest speculatively. We show that female engagement in the urban land and property markets was widespread, significant and reflective of local economic structures. Crucially, it also was more complex in form than the historiography has previously acknowledged. The article delivers a final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of women's investment activity, demonstrating that women were active investors in the urban land market as well as the managers of landed estates, business owners and shareholders, thereby opening up new questions about how gender intersected with economic change and growth in the rapidly changing world of nineteenth-century England.

How are deep relationships between city and club identification formed, and are they inevitable? The aim of this article is to provide a historical analysis of the rivalry between two football clubs, Vitesse Arnhem and NEC Nijmegen, explicating their various ‘axes of enmity’. Supporters, club officials and observers of these two clubs created and selectively maintained similarities between respective city image and club image. The process of ‘othering’ influenced both city and club images and helped create oppositional identities. Herein, football identification reflects broader societal needs for a place-based identity, and for a coherent image of both self and other.

At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.

This article examines how, in the production and use of cartographic items, urban space and local knowledge were brought together to construct authoritative representations of place. Its approach is twofold. The first half of the article is an examination of the mapmakers John Bartholomew & Co.’s changing premises across Edinburgh, which shows that the firm carefully curated their business properties in order to convey credibility and gain trust. The article then introduces the London-based firm Charles E. Goad Ltd, producers of fire insurance plans, and considers their acquisition of urban information and their use of local knowledge from a distance to achieve similar aims. Both cases illustrate the importance of close attention to geography and the spatial dimensions of knowledge construction.

Taking the office of the coninc der ribauden in Ghent as a case-study, this article reconstructs the enforcement of urban sanitation and preventative health practices during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The coninc managed a wide range of issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or threatening to health. Banning waste and chasing pigs as well as prostitutes off the streets, the office implemented a governmental vision on communal well-being. Health interests, as part of a broader pursuit of the common good, therefore played an important yet hitherto largely overlooked role in medieval urban governance.

This article examines the neglected sensory experience of visual physical colour in the city/town centre or what is now referred to as the Central Business District. It focuses on the post-war period when reconstruction, town planning, new architecture, novel materials and technologies, and investment were all transforming British city centres. The research uses film, photographs, planning documents, oral history and social media reminiscences to research the users’ experience of colour in the city centre streets. It argues that, although new materials in construction opened up the possibilities of bright, ‘non-natural’ colours in the urban built environment, the visual experience of colour was found mainly in the ephemera of everyday life. Furthermore, it argues that colour was an important component in constructing people's sense of place and belonging in the city.

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.

Copenhagen is today praised as a truly bicycle-friendly city. The Danish capital earned its reputation as a ‘bicycle city’ early on. The network of bicycle infrastructure developed in the first half of the twentieth century was a result not least of a thriving cycling culture and the efforts made by cyclists’ organizations. In the following car-centric decades this network made cycling a more resilient practice than elsewhere, before cyclists and their lobby organizations managed, again, to pressure policy makers to renew supportive measures for cyclists. The article thus highlights two concepts: road users as potential co-producers of the mobility system as well as the obduracy of infrastructure and its capacity to preserve habits and cultures of the past.

Paris is renowned for artistic neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for earlier periods, the art-historical picture is much vaguer. Where did artists live and work in the eighteenth century? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the early modern art world? Drawing on data from a large-scale digital mapping project locating the addresses of hundreds of eighteenth-century artists, this article answers these crucial questions of urban art history. Following an overview of the digital project, the article explores three different mappings of the city's art worlds: a century long survey of the neighbourhoods inhabited by the Academy's artists; a comparison of where the Guild's artists were living in a single year and a wider world view of Parisian artists abroad. Through its new cartographic models of Paris's art worlds, this article brings the city to the foreground of eighteenth-century French art.

This article examines a moment of uncertainty in early 1970s Glasgow motorway history: the planning of the East Flank of the Inner Ring Road and the potential removal of the Barrows Market. As sociological influences against wholesale urban clearance came into maturity in planning and community action, Glasgow planners carried out a feasibility study into the socio-economic costs of uprooting the commercial life of the Barrows. I suggest that reading this technocratic document for its cultural assumptions, ambiguities and tensions, rather than its engineering vision, opens up a different approach to the history of motorway planning.

After Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day 1941, the ongoing war threatened life in isolated, neutral Macao. While many scholars have attributed the local people's starvation and suffering to the war, others have highlighted Macao's economic prosperity. To explain the gap between these two narratives, this article explores how the locals dealt with rice scarcity and fared relatively well during the four years of Japanese occupation of the Pearl River Delta. Instead of blaming the shortage solely on the machinations of the Japanese and the rice merchants, we uncover the local people's actions in exacerbating the problem.

This article is a historiographical analysis of the paths urban history has taken in Latin America. Its perspective is comparative, with particular attention to Mexico as well as references to several other countries. The article offers a general view of the ‘state of the art’, particularly analysing the convoluted routes urban history has navigated. At all levels, there has been uncertainty over the object of study. Latin America was affected by a plethora of development theories. In Mexico, there is an untenable but persistent view of urban historiography as absent or lacking. The following is a brief account of urban history in Latin America, with special analysis and critical examination of the routes taken to date, and a proposal for ways out of the labyrinth.

From an empirical perspective, archaeologists and historians face a somewhat peculiar challenge, that is, to understand a past that is no longer with us through the discussion of wide range of objects – buildings, texts, textiles and so on – that are mere relics of that past. This challenge is complicated by what the anthropologist Arjun Appaduraj has famously called ‘the social life of things’. The material remnants of past societies do not survive in a vacuum: instead, these objects are used and re-used in new contexts in which they acquire new meanings, be it as cherished family heirlooms, as stuffy museum objects or as irritating obstacles for project developers. Consequently, these objects are suspended between the past and the present, in the sense that – as Joseph Morsel mordantly put it – ‘a restored castle is essentially a trophy of a new social system, whose might is expressed through the ruins of another social system’. Proceeding from the insight that the original meaning of objects is often clouded by the current context in which they function, historians and archaeologists are increasingly attentive to the question why – and if so, how – some material remnants of the past are re-used whereas others are not.

The story of Hebron during the 1948 Palestine War remains largely untold, obscured by the larger historical forces of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and refugee crisis that resulted from Israel's declaration of independence. This article examines the history and historiography of Hebron from mid-May 1948 until the departure of Egyptian troops from the country on 30 April 1949, a period referred to as the ‘Dual Era’, an unusual configuration between Jordan and Egypt in which both countries temporarily ruled over the city. It analyses the Dual Era against an emerging Egyptian and Jordanian proto-pan-Arab nationalism as each country's locally based leaders vied for support for their rule from the Palestinian population in Hebron.

The European Historic Towns Atlas project, probably the largest one in European urban history, is conceptually rooted in national histories. Methodologically it is focused on the production and interpretation of large-scale maps primarily for the understanding of urban morphogenesis and the role of morphological agents but also of issues connected with the economic and cultural aspects of urban life. The atlas project now involves 19 countries and with over 520 towns produced across Europe, pioneer comparative urban studies have been published. Comparative work based on theoretical underpinning is the aim of the project and though it holds great potential, it also faces challenges: access to published towns, language barriers and consistency between national productions. It is argued that the digital production of the atlases may provide a chance for a more unified approach in the future.