The eighteenth century saw a series of reforms in judicial structures and practices, including the creation of the Acordada and the division of the capital city into cuarteles. These reforms may have contributed to more draconian approaches to justice in New Spain, as evidenced by an increasing number of corporal punishment sentences in the late 1780s and a peak in executions in 1790. This year also represents a watershed in the history of the Novohispanic judiciary due to the creation of Mexico’s first salaried corps of nightwatchmen. Arguably, the shock of the Dongo massacre motivated Revillagigedo to create this new institution.

Control over the management of urban land use is one the local government powers with the greatest influence on the lives of residents (the other being the budget). Yet in Iran, despite political decentralization, the responsibility for land use rests with the central government and the relevant local branches of the relevant ministries. Chapter 7 reviews the history and legal framework of master planning as well as the economic pressures that led governments to ignore their municipalities’ master plans during the 1990s. The chapter describes how a controversial urban renewal project in the early 1990s led to calls for greater local participation in the development and design of plans by the new elected council. It then examines the effort to give the municipality a greater and indeed determinative role in city planning and land use management during the preparation of the third Tehran Master Plan 2003–2007. A success in the capital city would have created a precedent and model for many other cities. While national media brought the issue to public attention and local representatives had unprecedented involvement in city planning, ultimately the city council failed to achieved more than an informal role with formal responsibility remaining with the central government. The chapter concludes by highlighting the great difficulties and challenges of achieving greater local participation in complex and technical areas of local governance such as land use planning.

This chapter examines the unprecedented era of urban rebuilding which took off in the late 1950s and lasted into the 1970s, in which enthusiasm for ‘comprehensive’ town centre redevelopment and modernist urban renewal was at its peak. This was the era when shopping malls were imported from the United States and planted at the centre of British towns and cities, and these developments rested upon an unusual alignment between the modernist planning ideals of urban professionals, the developmental agendas of local authorities and the commercial strategies of a handful of development companies. I stress how important the rhetoric of modernisation was in uniting these different interests, but also how loosely and variably notions of ‘the modern’ were defined and applied. I also highlight the importance of the technocratic enthusiasms of the age, particularly in the early 1960s, when the idea of engineering efficient urban environments came to the fore. Planners, policymakers and property developers adopted a deeply Taylorist, mechanistic idea of urban renewal, in which prosperity, efficiency and growth would be precisely engineered while ‘obsolescence’ would be excised from the modern city with surgical precision. For urban authorities facing darkening economic prospects, these were seductive ideas, and viewed as a means to combat the onset of deindustrialisation.

This chapter examines the politics and the practice of partnership in the urban renewal era. This public-private dynamic was the central political relationship which drove urban transformation; it was codified and mandated explicitly within planning legislation and central policy diktats and pursued energetically by many individual local authorities eager to remake the image and economy of their towns. I show how this hybrid, mixed economy of planning was situated within the wider political economy of post-war Britain, tracking the political influence and connections of the property and construction sectors as well as the attitudes and policy positions of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. I also trace the operation and impact of partnership-based urban renewal on the ground in various cities, focusing in particular on Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham. Local authorities had a range of motivations for working with the commercial development sector and their experiences were not uniform. The chapter shows that some cities managed to navigate the new terrain of public-private developmentalism more successfully than others, but I also stress the basic asymmetries involved in these relationships, particularly for those places that were struggling most economically.

This chapter explores the trajectory of American urban ethnic literature, focusing on Italian American fiction –– after brief consideration of Jewish American fiction –– as selected writers make their journey from immigrants to ethnics. Unlike the few Italian immigrant writers who preceded them, whose work argued for acceptance as human beings and recognition as Americans, the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants documented and explored the conditions under which they were born and raised. We see over the years in the shift from earlier Italian-American writers’ origin narratives featuring struggles with the host culture, alienation from the ancestral culture, and the price of integration, to the inward turn of later writers whose work mark the passage of the literary city from realist to modernist narrative. That inward turn toward loss in later generationsis not merely formal; it measures the distance between a vibrant ethnic urban world commonly founded on regional identities (often called campanilismo) to the shards of memory, the ancestral ghosts that survive in recreatedidentities, and poses the aesthetic and existential question of what to make of it.

This chapter puts Marxist geography in dialogue with scholarship in critical ethnic studies in order to provide a critical basis for studying the urban geographies of racial capitalism. It focuses on work in black, Chicanx, and indigenous studies that has nuanced and extended the “spatial turn” introduced by scholars such as David Harvey, Neil Smith, Doreen Massey, and Cindi Katz. Discussions of gendered black geographies (Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, and Rashad Shabazz), indigenous geographies (Laura Furlan), and Latinx geographies (Mary Pat Brady, Raúl Homero Villa) contextualize the stakes of urban literature by black, Chicanx, and indigenous authors such as Marita Bonner, Danez Smith, Helena María Viramontes, and Tommy Orange.

Changes in Great Power politics, technical developments, and flows of trade all together transformed Eastern Mediterranean perceptions and usages of space. From their image of Europe and the opportunities it offered to modes of travel, to visions of and policies of urban renewal and its acceptance, many aspects of life in Levantine cities were transformed by the heightened interaction with Europe. Nonetheless, the new Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica were not carbon copies of the towns on the far side of the sea, but very much also the product of local desires and attitudes.