The formation of industrial districts and the role that development played in shaping the pattern of American cities has become a standard for urban history. This has not been the case for Los Angeles. Despite its centrality for a metropolitan economy that has led California for a century and that today leads the nation in manufacturing employment, scholars and pundits have overlooked production in favour of consumption. Little is known about how firms, business associations and city officials created space for industry during the late nineteenth century when manufacturers' locational decisions contributed to spatial concentration in the city's core. A case study of the Cudahy Packing Company reveals why such sites were favoured, how a sectoral-specific district emerged and the processes through which Angelenos transformed a Yankee pueblo into an industrial city. Two factors, the local state's enablement of manufacturing via policy and regulation and the use of industrialization as an immigrant removal strategy, emerge as significant. Neither has been prominent in the literature on the growth of Los Angeles while the latter, the linking of race-ethnicity with land use, has been less prominent in prior studies of industrial districts.

This article explores the construction of publicly financed low-income housing complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s. These housing developments were possible thanks to the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance from the Alliance for Progress. Urban scholars, politicians, diplomats and urbanists of the Americas sought to promote middle-class habits, mass consumption and moderate political behaviour, especially among the poor, by expanding access to homeownership and ‘decent’ living conditions for a burgeoning urban population. As a result, the history of low-income housing should be understood within broader transnational discourses and practices about the ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ of the urban poor.

The first half of the 1990s was a pivotal period in the development and growth of urban history in Europe. In Britain the Urban History Group began to convene again after a decade in abeyance, work commenced on the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain, the Urban History Yearbook became Urban History whilst the European Association of Urban Historians organized their first conference. It was in this climate that Ashgate Publishing commissioned a new monograph series, Historical Urban Studies, under the editorship of Richard Rodger, editor of Urban History, and Jean-Luc Pinol, the leading French urban historian and a key figure in the European Association of Urban Historians (EAUH). The aim of the series was and is to be comparative over both time and space, drawing on multiple locations to explore what is common and what distinctive about the urban experience of diverse towns and nations. The broad agenda for the series was shaped by an overarching concern with the administration and governance of the city which underpinned attempts to manage the social, economic and political challenges wrought by 300 years of urban change. In particular, the editors stress the importance of the comparative element which should allow historians to distinguish ‘which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature’. The editors set themselves an ambitious agenda and this essay aims to explore how the series has developed over the ten or so years since it commenced publication; the degree to which it has provided a platform for advancing the sub-discipline of urban history; and to consider some future directions which urban history might take.

The long hold of the idea that ‘India is the land of villages’ on the imaginations of politicians, policy makers and scholars alike was a result not just of the numerical preponderance of the village, but because it represented the space of an organic, unsullied authenticity. Needless to say, in many accounts, well into the late twentieth century, the authenticity was only made possible by relinquishing a claim to the turbulence of history, and indeed on ‘modernity’ itself. The Indian city in the period of colonial rule, on the contrary, became a heaving, undisciplined monster, the site of a corrupting modernity, illegitimate and even unauthentic in its form. Apart from the monumental cities of Delhi or Lucknow, and some attention to ‘temple’ towns, most monographs on modern Indian cities written in the last 60 years remained without a legible past and were the work largely of geographers or sociologists. Those early pioneers who explored the history of the modern Indian city on its own terms, such as Narayani Gupta, Mariam Dossal or Veena Oldenburg, were lonely outcrops in a vast field of historical works that were largely rooted in the countryside. The peasant and the village, rather than the worker and the city, occupied centre-stage in the most important phases of post-independence Indian historiography. Since the history of Indian nationalism gripped the scholars of the immediate post-independence years, and economic history powered by Marxism informed the next phase of writing (both of which were enormously productive lines of enquiry), the Indian city was embedded in works that traced either the fate of anti-colonial nationalism or the broader trajectories of labour and capital. The innovative approaches of the Subaltern Studies collective from the early 1980s drew historiographic attention once more to the rebellious peasant and rural communities or mentalities.

This year has seen the introduction of the digital bibliography online. This is a searchable database of all the bibliographies contained in the Urban History Yearbook and past numbers of this journal. Containing over 33,000 citations, this is an invaluable resource for research.