Despite widespread interest in the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban planning and architecture as of late, little is known about the city's historical development. This article suggests as a remedy more concerted efforts in comparative history. Comparison with other cities reveals three anomalies: the condition of ex-capitality; a distinctive focus on civil society as the leading dynamic in the city's evolution; and a self-image as a classic ‘second city’, that is, an economic as opposed to political centre. The essay closes with suggestions for future research, and stresses the need for a specifically cultural approach to the urban past.

This paper explores the relative balance between socio-economic grievance and confessional and political division in urban revolts during the period of the French religious wars. More particularly, it focuses on two such incidents in the town of Troyes in Champagne in the summer of 1586 and what they can tell us about the influence of popular discontent on municipal politics and town–crown relations, as well as the impact of civil war, subsistence crisis and increasing taxation on urban communities. The continuity of the traditions of popular revolt are explored alongside the implications for royal authority of the official response to such unrest. Social tensions and economic concerns dominated events in the town, whilst the crown's right and ability to enforce its will continued to be accepted and upheld. Thus, despite the disruption of civil strife, the competing interests of the municipal authorities, the urban populace and the monarchy were able to maintain a delicate equilibrium through the traditional mechanism of negotiation and compromise.

In recent years, the idea that Britain and its northern American colonies were part of a single ‘British Atlantic world’ has provided historians of both the Old World and the New with a novel perspective from which to explore their subjects during the long eighteenth century. With a case study of Charleston, South Carolina, this essay extends British categories of analysis across the Atlantic to uncover the origins of an American middle class. Emphasis is placed on the simultaneous consideration of all arenas of identity formation, with a view to demonstrating that examining either the cultural sphere or the economic one cannot bring a genuine understanding of the coherence of this eighteenth-century middling sort. Investigating the emergence of this social group in the widest possible sense, I show how the economic experience of these middling people forged common values which then found their expression in the cultural and political sphere. Since this middle sort achieved such coherence before 1776 I suggest that we must move away from accounts that depict colonial society as a place of binary opposites and occupational groupings, for such models cannot convey the complexity of the British Atlantic urban society that took shape during this era.

British slaughter-house reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughter-houses and establish public abattoirs in the nineteenth century. Abolition of London's private slaughter-houses was motivated by the congestion created by livestock in city streets, the nuisance of slaughter-house refuse in residential neighbourhoods and public health concerns about diseased meat in the food supply. The butchers successfully defended their private slaughter-houses, illustrating the persistence of the craftsman's workshop and the importance of laissez-faire sentiments in opposition to municipalization in Victorian London.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the English seaside and health resort of Torquay abandoned its old practice of municipal waste tipping and invested in a destructor, or incinerator. Technical, legal and financial considerations lay behind this decision. The ensuing protests against the operation of the destructor highlight the tensions between nascent technocrats and the affected residents. At a time when pollution was most often displaced or dispersed, topography conspired against the residents of Torquay, and challenged the accepted spatial and social relationships of waste.

This article examines how different visions of Tel Aviv as a seaside city in the 1930s were articulated in terms of urban planning and local politics. It expands on the beach as a site of leisure, pleasure, health and recuperation. It further elaborates on the demand to ‘improve the seashore’ in terms of architecture and urban development. At the centre of the discussion is the evaluation of the Grunblatt scheme and the public debate on the benefits and disadvantages of the ambitious project.

The building industry's organization has been relatively invariant down through history due to housing's unique characteristics: durability, fixity in location, complex co-ordination of various trades on site and financing its great costs. That organizational form has allowed speculative development to flourish periodically during large increases in urban population, despite considerable risk. The same building and speculative processes occurred in ancient Rome and cities in England and the US at greatly different periods of time but those histories do not acknowledge the similarities of development processes that each reports. A separate ‘housing literature’ that steps back from particulars possibly explains why these accounts are so alike.

The history of suburbs has received so much scholarly attention in recent decades that it is time to take stock of what has been established, in order to discern aspects of suburbs that are still unknown. To date, the main lines of inquiry have been dedicated to the origins, growth, diverse typologies, culture and politics of suburbs, as well as to newer topics such as the gendered nature of suburban space. The vast majority of these studies have been about particular times and places. The authors propose a new perspective on the study of suburbs, one which will begin to investigate the transformations of suburbs after they have been established. Taking the entire era from the mid-nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century as a whole, it is argued that suburbs should be subjected to a longitudinal analysis, examining their development in the context of metropolises that usually enveloped them within a generation or two of their founding. It is proposed that investigation of these ‘transitions’ should be undertaken in parallel with the changes that occur in the life-cycles of their residents. It is suggested that an exploration of the interaction of these factors will open a broad new research agenda for suburban history as a subfield of urban history.

Shortly into his path-breaking study of The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London, Peter Guillery remarks that ‘houses are principally interesting because people live in them’ (p. 10). To urban historians the observation might seem unexceptional, even banal. To many architectural historians his comment would be incomprehensible. Therein lies the difficulty for the urban historian with a concern for housing, public buildings and planning. There is a wealth of serious academic studies of architecture, but the majority are written in a language which can seem arcane to the uninitiated and address an agenda which appears little interested in those who inhabited the buildings. At the heart of the problem lies the requirement to treat the built form primarily as a work of art, so that what is studied has to justify itself as an object worthy of aesthetic consideration, and has to relate to an established stylistic canon and chronology. Judged in this light, considerations of user and usage are largely irrelevant, and can appear an invitation to slip into the sort of popular architectural discourse, common in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, in which dwellings are valued primarily for the celebrities and anecdotes associated with them. People are germane only to the extent that they designed buildings, as architects, or commissioned them, as patrons of the arts. Among the two most influential figures in developing and in particular disseminating the art-history perspective on architecture in twentieth-century Britain were Nikolaus Pevsner and John Summerson. Today their presence is felt not only in the world of scholarship, where it has not gone unchallenged, but also and more importantly in popular perceptions of architecture, as mediated through guide literature, the amenity societies (like the National Trust, the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society) and the conservation movement. It is an influence which has been ambivalent. On the one hand, it has led to a far deeper popular understanding and appreciation of architectural form and its history, and has saved many fine buildings. On the other hand, it is has led to a dissociation of form and human usage, a devaluation of structures and traditions not defined as canonic and a blindness to the subjective and ideological nature of architectural history itself.

Readers of English can currently refer to only two works that offer synthetic overviews of the history of European cities from the period of classical antiquity into the twentieth century. We have long had the powerfully argued and highly readable book by the architectural critic, Louis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (1961). Beginning with the earliest settlements in the Near East and continuing through the rise of the suburbs in the United States, Mumford's volume tells a dramatic story in which urbanity at its best (as exemplified by such communities as Athens and Amsterdam) gave way to a succession of assaults, whether in the form of Baroque planning, rampant industrialization, oversized ‘megalopolises’ or automobiles. Continuing in the vein of many earlier critics, Mumford saw the modern big city as a depressing departure from earlier norms of urban beauty and human solidarity, and his view of the future was bleak indeed. Nearly four decades later, Sir Peter Hall offered a similarly large-scale but otherwise very different view of the broad sweep of the urban past, in his Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (1998). He constructed his book not as a narrative but instead as clusters of case studies, in which sixteen cities appear as scenes and agents of various types of exemplary achievement. Focusing on Europe, but not restricting himself to it, Hall presented not only Athens, Florence, Paris, Vienna, London, Manchester and Berlin but also New York, San Francisco and Tokyo as ‘places that [have] ignited the sacred flame of intelligence and human imagination’ (p. 7). It is primarily for this reason that, in Hall's view, the history of great metropolises is inseparable from the history of civilization itself.

The writing of this review has been complicated this year due to the fact that it has had to be prepared rather earlier than in the past, which has somewhat skewed the careful construction of statistical comparisons that have been developed over previous years. The problem is compounded by the fact that last year's review was, in turn, also prepared earlier than in previous years, leading to a backlog on 2005 theses to be reported. The change of schedule also means that the British and Irish thesis list, the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, has not yet reported on the 2006 theses, while the American Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/ dissertations has reported many of the 2006 theses. Thus this review is a slightly mixed offering in that it features theses from both 2005 and 2006, but it is hoped that this problem will have been overcome by 2008. It was, however, not difficult to find theses which fit the liberal definition of urban history that has always underpinned this review. For the first time it was necessary to cull severely the identified theses to produce a reasonable coverage of topics and a manageable number of theses to review. This suggests that urban history continues to be a vibrant and productive discipline.