Urban nature holds great potential to address the web of challenges that cities are facing and support transitions to a more sustainable future. Cities are working with nature in a diversity of ways, such as by using blue and green infrastructure. Blue infrastructure includes, for example, lakes, ponds, drains, and wetlands. These features can regulate storm-water flows, reduce pressure on the urban drainage system, and create sponge cities that lower flooding risks while reducing heat island effects, enhancing biodiversity, and providing recreational opportunities. Green infrastructure can include, for example, urban forests, green roofs and walls, multi-functional parks, and river embankments. These areas can improve air quality and energy efficiency, reduce heat island effects, and contribute to human health and well-being, amongst other benefits. Furthermore, urban gardens can increase access to food and employment while enhancing physical and mental health and social integration.

Chapter 2 provides an overview and critique of discourses about deterritorialisation in international law. The first sections sketch out three main strands to these discourses. The first strand contains accounts of a fundamental transition in the organising logic of international law; a shift from ordering competences on the basis of territory to functions. The second strand groups together accounts addressing the relocation of power but containing imprecise and undertheorised understandings of these spaces. The third strand includes accounts concerning the porosity of states. The chapter then problematises these discourses. Each strand applies a similar legal-spatial imaginary, and in so doing omits the resulting spaces produced by deterritorialisation. Common to all is a tendency to continue to applying a particular and unproblematised concept of territory, limiting theoretical insight, consistently producing deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, and often conflating at an analytical level actors, spaces, and functions. The reason for this again lies in the continuing prioritisation of the stato-centric approach to territory in international law’s implicit geography.

The chapter seeks to understand how the 2030 Agenda expressed through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate urbanism reconfigure urban planning and related processes in Zimbabwe. As discourses of climate change and sustainability have gained traction, urban planning plays a critical role in achieving carbon-free societies. Through the case study of three Zimbabwean cities (Harare, Bulawayo and Gweru), the chapter aims to highlight opportunities and challenges presented to urban planning by Agenda 2030. The chapter employs primary and secondary data sources to understand how urban planning in Africa, and particularly in Zimbabwe, is being shaped by the climate discourse. As such, the chapter contends that there is a seemingly discernible paradigm shift in terms of urban planning processes in Zimbabwe, which seems to be drifting towards a multilateral planning vision dominated by climate-centred urban planning policies. It must be noted that climate-centred urbanisation will be useful in future in curbing and dealing with pandemics like COVID-19. However, it should be noted that climate-centred urban planning processes seem to be more abstract thinking than operationalisation. Finally, the chapter suggests ways to promote a pragmatic shift from abstract thinking to operationalisation of climate-friendly urban planning.

The early modern Japanese city, in the paradigmatic form of the castle town (jōkamachi), gave spatial form to the social distinctions of status group (mibun), and it evolved through complex negotiations between multiple status communities, each with its own social logics and visions of urban life. This chapter sketches these spatial structures and social processes through a study of the shogunal capital of Edo, focusing on the triangular negotiation between three sets of agents: the shogunal administration, the propertied townspeople, and the diffuse occupational collectives of the unpropertied urban margins. This triangular negotiation is illuminated through a historical survey of the Edo firefighting system, revealing the ways in which the early modern city was shaped by competing interests and claims over space. Particular attention is given to the diverse forms of social agency that interacted in the urban process, complicating a binary model of governmental authority and popular subversion.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

A positive shock to a society’s supply of human capital can come from exogenous and unanticipated immigration. One such case arose from Louis XIV’s precipitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced French Calvinists – Huguenots – to convert or to flee. Many fled to the Protestant regions of Germany, where – owing to the Huguenots’ renowned expertise and entrepreneurship – they contributed greatly to subsequent economic development. Only some of Germany’s many Protestant cities, however, welcomed the refugees. Analysis of sixty cities’ attitudes contradicts the idea that powerful guilds opposed, or that pre-existing human capital favored, the admission of the Huguenots. Rather, a city was likelier to welcome them the closer it lay to a major trade route, or the more of its population it had lost in the Thirty Years’ War. Territorial rulers almost unanimously welcomed the Huguenots and often compelled reluctant cities to admit them. Animated by the ideas of Seckendorff, rulers saw in the Huguenots both a welcome influx of human capital and a way to undermine the craft guilds, which Seckendorff regarded as a major impediment to economic growth.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

Early modern Europe was a mobile society, but migration has primarily been described in terms of men seeking work, as labourers, apprentices, journeymen, soldiers or sailors. Long-distance migration was primarily male, but the much more common shorter-distance migration from countryside to town or from town to town was predominantly female. Men came to cities and often left again; women moved to cities and stayed. In most cities in Western Europe by 1700 women outnumbered men. This imbalance most likely resulted from women immigrating or men emigrating. Women, like men, moved primarily at younger ages and overwhelmingly in search of work. Women moving to towns are commonly associated with domestic service, but we show that only around half of all female immigrants worked as servants, and even these worked mostly for artisanal and trading households, assisting in the household business. The other half worked in institutions such as hospitals, as labourers in transport and as apprentices and journeywomen in manufacturing and the rapidly growing retail opportunities. We survey existing findings on female migration and the economic significance of marriage and lay out the territory for future research, challenging current theories on migration and showing the impact of gender.