The article focuses on an historical relationship between the political institution of chieftaincy and civic pride in Ibadan, a Yoruba city in south-western Nigeria. It examines this relationship against the scholarly model of ‘Yoruba urbanism’ and argues that this model is empirically and conceptually flawed. Drawing on oral and documentary historical sources, the article explores how a ‘civic Ibadan’ was made through practices of settlement, civil disorder and external warfare during the pre-colonial period. The analysis adds to recent debates about the concept of ‘historical materialism’ in the urban past.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain's cultural life reached its most glorious stage. This ‘Golden Age’ was distinguished by a great variety of civic ceremonies and religious festivities that were performed in towns and cities. Economic and cultural factors encouraged the development of urban space as a spectacular arena for these rituals. The town became a permanent stage on which the identity of social groups and institutions was displayed. This paper examines the characteristics and development of festivals during this period and also the relative contribution of ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ culture to these celebrations.

How might one tap the idioms of vanished communities once local knowledge has faded? How might one chart the mental landscapes of locales that have been overlaid by other people's understandings and whose material forms have been erased by urban redevelopment? This paper integrates history and archaeology as it attempts an ethnographic re-reading of one such precinct in Melbourne, Australia.

Recent analysis of the public-private dichotomy in the eighteenth century has portrayed the London household as the locus of architectural innovation as elites distanced themselves from their domestic servants, so implicating it in a fundamental component of modernity, the ‘growth of privacy’. The master-servant divide allegedly widened over the course of the eighteenth century, trickling down from the nobility to the middling sorts. But the testimony of domestic servants demonstrates that much architectural innovation (like back stairs and servant bells) can be found in London houses well before the orthodox model allows, and their cultural transmission is by no means simply one of trickle-down. Continuity and complexity, rather than paradigmatic shift, are much more apparent, bringing into question the use of probate inventory or architectural evidence alone in charting cultural change.

This article analyses the urban structure of nineteenth-century Bristol through the analysis of property surveys. Examination of a machine-readable version of a property survey for 1837 demonstrates that Bristol exhibited modern patterns of urban development as the city's medieval form was supplanted by processes associated with the segregation of class and economic activity, a functional change from a mercantile centre to one broadly based on manufacturing and services. The longitudinal implications of this change are examined using subsequent surveys for 1851 and 1871.

The paper investigates the activities of the eight London Commissions of Sewers during the period 1800–47. It is argued that the criticisms of the Commissions made by Edwin Chadwick and later historians are undeserved. The Commissions were efficient, innovative and honest, and successfully kept pace with the ever-changing sanitary needs of the capital. Although they operated under severe statutory constraints, they constructed many miles of sewer and can be seen as the true instigators of the nineteenth-century sanitary revolution.

In Japan, department stores and public markets grew rapidly from the early twentieth century, and these had significant impacts on both consumers and traditional retailers. Despite pressures from the large-scale retailers, however, traditional, small-scale retailers stubbornly survived. As a result, the Japanese retail system in the pre-war period was characterized as ‘the dual structure’. In addition, the government played a critical role in Japan's retail development. These features can be accounted for as reflections of the unique modernization process of the country.

Struggles over the symbolic ownership of Bristol's open spaces were often influenced by association with conflicts between mercantile elites and ‘the people’ over the definition and nature of civic identity. Shifting political and cultural readings of Brandon Hill and Queen Square are here identified and contrasted, offering a fresh interpretation of controversies over ‘improvement’ and gentrification via the fluid appropriation of these sites for the representation of radicalism, citizenship, liberty, respectability or commercialism.

This article takes up recent concerns with languages of mid-Victorian reform and relates urban space to the workplace, with reference to Nottingham hosiery and lace. The article considers, first, official enquiries into lace manufacture, and second, the hosiery conciliation system. Attempts to map and to fix the boundaries of employment are characteristic of both these developments. Gender dimensions are emphasized, as is the contribution of these debates to liberal narratives of industrial progress. This is related to the formation of a wider culture of liberal reform.

Under what circumstances did Canadian municipalities, charged with ensuring the existence of services which encouraged the development of real property, come to be involved in the field of culture and leisure? By examining the process through which the Municipal Library and the Botanical Garden were established in Montreal, this article attempts to answer this question. Because these projects constituted precedents in relation to the usual areas of Canadian municipal intervention, they provoked vigorous debate. Each in their own way, the projects served to call into question the definition of public culture and the democratization of knowledge. They also raised the equally contentious issue of the role of municipal government in the fields of leisure and culture.

This article examines the changing images of the city of Milan over a period of two decades spanning the 1980s and 1990s. The article considers theoretical debates concerning city images. Milan is then analysed through the various spatial forms which encompass this modern city – political space, populated space, geographic space, urban space and economic space. The next section assesses the changing images of the city through shifting historical phases and crises. Finally the article draws together the fundamental economic and social changes which have marked the deindustrialization and reinvention of Milan.

The physical forms of England's inter-war suburbs are examined, concentrating on those created by private enterprise. Attention is given to the contrasts between inter-war suburbs and those created before the First World War, and the timing of the adoption of architectural styles and other aspects of built form characteristic of the inter-war period is considered. In places, houses in Edwardian styles continued to be built well into the inter-war period. The dominant characteristic of the period was the creation of garden suburbs. The Tudor Walters Report was more an endorsement of such suburbs than a stimulus to them and many of its recommendations were not adhered to.

It is a daunting task to recover a usable Mumford from his vast body of writing, myriad ideas and public career over a span of seventy years. These four books make a substantial contribution to that end. Their shared virtues are clarity and thoughtfulness supported by firm scholarship. Useful perspectives are provided on modernization, social ecology, community planning and the human condition. Novak assembles and illuminates a historically important body of letters. Spann narrates an interplay of strong intellects with politics of social change in the 1920s and 1930s. Luccarelli and Wojtowicz cut an impressive swath through the entire scope of Mumford's thought and experience in the contexts of regionalism and architectural criticism. While all the books draw attention to men and women often forgotten but worth knowing about, Mumford is conspicuous for brilliance and charisma in the battle to reconcile urban growth with healthy environments and communities. His arsenal of values, shared by many supporters past and present, supplied articulate standards for change.

One of the most difficult concepts in both contemporary and academic accounts of the Second World War is that of civilian morale. This paper uses evidence from the Mass-Observation Archive to argue that understanding fluctuations in morale can only be understood through an exploration of working-class culture during the 1930s and 1940s. The paper examines difficulties of defining ‘morale’ and goes on to argue that the pattern of bombing in urban centres and the continuity of working-class institutions helped shape and maintain morale during the critical period of 1940–41

Historically speaking, women's purposeful activities have contributed significantly to the uses and meanings of urban spaces and have been a key part of the texture of social and economic relationships in town and city as well as the countryside. A good deal of the scholarship which underpins this conclusion has called for the detailed study of particular historical situations: the domestic economy in industrializing Montreal, dairying in mid-twentieth-century Denmark, gossip in the back yards and closes of inter-war Manchester. Methods of inquiry such as oral history or the close examination of census data necessarily lend themselves to the case study approach. This kind of detailed investigation has encouraged re-examination of some of the overarching meta-narratives of historical change more characteristic of earlier historical studies of women and work, notably that of Tilly and Scott.

The three books under review represent the origins and promise of a relatively new field of study, urban environmental history. Joel Tarr's collection of previously published essays retraces the intellectual odyssey of its single most important pioneer. Concerned about contemporary pollution problems, he has spent a quarter of a century exploring the frontiers of scholarship on the relationship between cities and their technologies. In contrast, monographs by R. Bruce Stephenson and Andrew Hurley are typical of current trends to build on this foundation, enriching and broadening its parameters from a wide variety of perspectives. Here the insights of town planning and social history illuminate case studies of St Petersburg, Florida, and Gary, Indiana, respectively. Other recent works draw heavily upon the sciences, especially medicine and public health. Reversing decades of academic fragmentation – knowing more and more about less and less – the study of the urban environment is encouraging creative applications of cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches.

In ‘Shanghailanders: the formation and identity of the British settler community in Shanghai 1843–1937’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), 161–211, Robert Bickers portrays the collective experiences and self-images of an idiosyncratic enclave of ex-patriates who preferred to be known as permanent residents rather than ‘temporary sojourners in a foreign land’. Tracing longue durée relationships between the International Settlement and Shanghai Municipal Council, Bickers has unearthed highly pertinent demographic data. By 1935 the British community numbered approximately 10,000. Between approximately 1850 and 1900 half of the total comprised unmarried males, a figure that fell to 17 per cent by the mid-1930s. Drawing on Saidian conceptualizations of otherness, Bickers probes ethnic and sexual as well as political and cultural boundaries and stereotypes. He suggests that ‘in lieu of the city-state denied them by the diplomats [Shanghailanders] . . . declaimed about their “republic”, which they “imagined” – in Benedict Anderson's term – as meritocratic, egalitarian and democratic’. As communists and nationalists confronted one another in the final battle for the heart and soul of a deeply divided land, the ex-patriate community clung desperately to a collective cultural ethos. But, within three years of Mao Zedong's triumph in 1949, the British Chamber of Commerce had been forced to dissolve itself. By 1953 a number of Shanghailanders had been denied exit visas for more than three years and in 1957 the last British firm was forced to close its doors. A few isolated individuals – quasi-prisoners or converts to the Maoist cause – lived out a shadowy existence in China's greatest industrial and maritime city. Now the settler mentalité ‘survived [only] . . . in the imagination’.

Returning to the pattern of previous years, this review provides a broad overview of recent unpublished doctoral theses from both Britain and the United States – mostly completed in 1997. Employing a broad interpretation of ‘urban history’ which includes both the history of, and history in, urban areas, it consists of brief summaries based on abstracts published in the Aslib Index to Theses [ASLIB] and Dissertations Abstracts International[DAI]. The thirty-nine dissertations explore subjects ranging chronologically from the third millennium BC to the 1990s, with the majority covering the late nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries, with another smaller concentration focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spatially most cover British (15) and North American (10) subjects, though there are studies of elements of urban history in France, Germany, China, Venezuela and Cape Colony, as well as studies comparing British cities with similar places in France and Holland, Ireland and the United States. Though many different types of urban settlement are represented in the theses under review – including some of the earliest in Syro-Palestine – the British selection is dominated by work on London (7) along with a smaller number covering Belfast and Liverpool, whilst American studies include four exploring aspects of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Chicago and two on Caracas, Venezuela, in the same period. In terms of subject, ‘space’ – the theme of the recent Urban History Group conference in Oxford – features prominently, as does cultural politics ranging from a redefinition of the meaning of ‘misrule’ in the medieval period to two studies of the importance of culture in the American Civil Rights Movement and the eighteenth-century British and Irish port town. These newer organizing concepts and locations feature alongside the more usual subjects such as the law, policing, leisure, gender and ethnicity and a revival of interest in London, especially in the early modern period.