The city of Sapporo, founded in 1869 by the Japanese government as a colonial headquarters in Hokkaido, developed as part of a global wave of settler-colonial urbanism. Like counterparts in North America and Australia, Sapporo facilitated economic, environmental and political transformations across Hokkaido that led to the displacement of Indigenous Ainu society by a soon overwhelming number of ethnically Japanese settlers. However, several historical factors distinguish Sapporo’s settler-colonial urbanism from its peers, including the long history of relations between the Ainu and Japanese; the heavy role of the Japanese state in Sapporo; and the lack of mass relocations of the Ainu to reservations far from their traditional homes.

This survey reflects on the intersections of global and urban history through brief reflections on the Round Table Conference which took place over three sessions in London between 1930 and 1932. Uniting Indian representatives and the British government in London to solve political stalemate in South Asia, the conference provides a dramatic event through which to explore the enfolding of the British empire into the imperial capital. But the conference was also indebted to international and global connections and comparisons which intersected in the intimate spaces of diplomatic networking in the capital.

This survey introduces the reader to the history of international zones. It argues that they offer striking insights into peacekeeping during the transition from a world of formal empires to one dominated by sovereign states. While the study of international zones is not new, there has been little examination of internationalization in practice. The survey suggests some of the benefits of adopting this approach and findings it might unearth.

This exploratory text proposes a US imperial ‘research perspective’ on post-war post-colonial cities – cities that the United States did not colonially occupy, i.e. not cities like Manila, 1898–1946. US imperial actors and interests helped shape such cities, and in turn were shaped by their people and structures. Importantly, the US case seems to strengthen the general recent view, also regarding formal empires, that it makes little sense to posit the existence of an imperial city type, and more sense to use ‘the imperial urban’ as a research perspective.

The survey examines the past, present and future of the urban history field in Britain, mixing memories and reflections. I trace the global turn of that field and the challenges it brings. One argument concerns the impact of a global scale on the methods and the explanatory frameworks used. A second concern is the role of economic history and economic frameworks of analysis in the writing of urban history, and I advocate their continued relevance.

This survey challenges conventional perceptions of colonial suburbs in the early modern Indian Ocean world in general, and those under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in particular. Recent urban research advocates re-evaluating suburbs as intricate and diverse spaces, yet this shift has had limited impact on historical studies of early modern colonialism. The survey highlights the importance of recognizing suburban regions in eighteenth-century settlements such as Cape Town, Cochin, Colombo or Batavia, where significant population growth resulted from inter-Asian and internal migration. These areas fostered ethnic and cultural diversity, disrupting normative ideas of segregation. By shifting the analytical focus from the core to the periphery and exploring colonial histories from an outside-in perspective, the contribution emphasizes the potential of a more horizontal approach to sub/urbanity for understanding early modern colonial societies, encouraging scholars to delve into the intersection of ‘the imperial’ and ‘the urban’.

This survey reflects on a creative workshop which the authors ran for the ‘The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future’ conference (July 2023). ‘Making manifestos for urban history’ was an experiment to encourage small group work and co-operative outputs in a conference setting, allowing for an atypical ‘many-to-many’ model of participation. During the session, five groups each produced a manifesto poster addressing issues that they thought were important for the future of urban history. The survey sets out the form the workshop followed, considers those who were involved and comments on how successful the workshop was in fostering conference community and active learning. Feedback recorded at the end of the session indicated that it was indeed successful in both these areas. Overall, the workshop demonstrated that when urban historians work together across generations and continents, they produce work of real value, which is resilient and sustainable.

In this article, I rethink the genre of urban biographies and argue that it can be given new potency when remodelled to become a means of reinvigorating the critical public. In the first part, I reflect upon some of the recent biographies of cities in the Czech Republic. In the second part, I discuss promising strategies, drawn from a sample of innovative urban biographies. In the final part, I outline the guiding principles of an adapted model for urban biographies. I propose that the cities must be repoliticized and recentred in the biographies, which entails adopting a political concept of the city, a deconstructive approach, utilization of the urban presence and a more urban-sensitive treatment of time.

Empty, abandoned or covered with vegetation – such areas were inherent to the medieval urban space, yet remain overlooked in research. Here, we describe three major types of ‘empty’ space of various origins and functions in Central European towns and suggest how these types can be investigated and interpreted through an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, written, pictorial and cartographical sources. We propose a simple interdisciplinary protocol to trace empty spaces in the urban context. This study will help to change our perception of medieval urban space into one that is more dynamic and heterogeneous than commonly believed.

Few biographical databases exist giving any information about the lives of ‘ordinary’ local leaders. Who Led Leeds? was a public engagement project that aimed to create a biographical collection at the Leeds Central Library, detailing the lives of Leeds city councillors who served between 1918 and 1939. This article describes the project and considers the extent to which the project was successful. It also reflects on how the creation of such archives using existing resources in local studies and family history libraries has the potential to expand and enrich the field of urban history.

This article reflects on the role that urban history can play in contemporary efforts to reduce waste. It is focused on a public history project that uses the history of waste management in World War II as a critical vantage point from which to consider current debates over reduction, reuse and recycling. Placing this project within a broader discussion of public history in the United Kingdom, the article argues that urban history is well placed to encourage a critical understanding of the present.

This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, non-humans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

The aim of this survey is to present the Greek social housing model as a part of the southern European model through an Athenian case-study. Several characteristics of the Greek housing model are unique, and the analysis of the Athenian case provides an example that emphasizes those characteristics. Moreover, this survey intends to contribute to filling the gap in the relevant urban history and geography bibliography and, more specifically, to describe the Greek social housing model and the role of the city of Athens in the planning and distribution of social housing. This survey is based mainly on secondary data (literature review) but also on primary sources.

Using Leicester's de-industrialized St George's area as a case-study, this article discusses three projects, all of which involved an academic team, including urban historians, working with a range of non-academic partners, in order to uncover the history and heritage of this part of the city in order to support the regeneration of the area. The first two of these projects leveraged digital media to engage public audiences, while the third used a more ‘traditional’ set of interpretation panels, removing the requirement for specific technology in order to access information as they passed along the street.

The recreation of urban historical space in museums is inevitably a complex, large-scale endeavour bridging the worlds of academic and public history. BCLM: Forging Ahead at the Black Country Living Museum is a £23m project recreating a typical Black Country town post-World War II. This article uses case-studies of three buildings – a Civic Restaurant, a record shop and a pub – to argue that urban-historical research methodology and community engagement can both create a vivid sense of the past, and challenge pervasive prejudices. It also argues that such a collaborative and public project reveals much about the urban and regional nature of industrial areas like the Black Country in this pivotal historical moment.

During World War II, Hull suffered from an intensity of bombing which made it one of the most heavily blitzed cities in Britain. Air raids fundamentally reshaped the history of the Yorkshire port city. In 2017, 75 years later, Hull's year as UK City of Culture marked another period of change and development. This article explores how one public history project, The Hull Blitz Trail, brought these two moments of urban transformation together, and reflects on some of the benefits and challenges of taking urban history beyond the academy. It outlines how public engagement projects can become more meaningful, more engaging and more ‘impactful’ if we carefully consider the physical and cultural landscape of the city today, as much as the histories themselves. However, combining the urban past and present influences our work in powerful ways, shaping the histories we are able to share, and how we share them.

This account of Vera Bacskai's contribution to European urban history after 1990 is a personal narrative, written by a friend and collaborator. It argues that her role was multi-dimensional. It was founded on her major publications on Budapest and small towns, shedding a crucial East Central European light on European urbanization. It was underpinned by her participation in various international projects like the EU TEMPUS programme which created strong institutional bonds with Western universities as well as opportunities for Hungarian students through exchange programmes, international workshops and the like. Not least, she was a strong pillar in the construction of the European Association for Urban History. When she joined the committee in 1991, it was still an embryonic body. In 1996, she organized the successful and important Budapest conference. When she retired from EAUH in 2004, its conferences were attracting many hundreds of researchers, from across Europe and beyond.

Researching the history of daily greetings is challenging, because references are casual and scattered through many sources. Nonetheless, some broad trends are apparent. In eighteenth-century Britain, the old tradition of deep bowing and curtseying was slowly attenuating into a brisker touching of the cap or head (for men) and a quick bob (for women). Yet that transition was not the whole story. Simultaneously, a new form of urban greeting, in the form of the handshake, was emerging. The strengths and weaknesses of many different sources are here assessed, including novels, plays, letters, diaries, etiquette books, travelogues and legal depositions, as well as artwork. Strategies for analysis are identified, with a warning against generalizing from single references in single sources. Finally, the emergence of the handshake among the middle class in Britain's eighteenth-century towns gives a clear signal that socio-cultural change does not invariably start at the ‘top’ and ‘trickle down’.

Taking its cue from the ‘material turn’ of recent years, this survey examines the connections between infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in north European cities in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that connections between these different constructs were fundamental not only to how cities functioned but how citizens themselves were imagined. As such, the survey critiques histories of welfare and citizenship that foreground the national and neglect the urban origins of the modern state. It does so by examining infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in smaller European nation-states such as Belgium, Denmark and Ireland rather than in the more familiar cases of Germany, France and Britain. Asking questions about the inter-relationship of infrastructure, welfare and citizenship, the survey suggests, offers an important way to reinterpret what the ‘modern city’ meant in twentieth-century northern Europe.

Ever since the publication in 1948 of Sylvia Thrupp's seminal book, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, successive generations of historians of English cities have advanced two central claims about the distinctiveness of the English urban landscape. First, ‘urban dynasties’ in late medieval England very rarely survived beyond two or three generations. Secondly, their weakness was a ‘peculiarly English’ phenomenon and a fundamental difference between English and continental towns. The article explores the historiographical significance of this thesis, the strength of which rests upon its explanatory role within a much wider narrative of English exceptionalism. It argues that the thesis has implications for the study of cities in continental Europe and, finally, it suggests that the English evidence might reveal a much more interesting picture of elite reproduction, when we think more critically and comparatively about how urban elites conceptualized ‘lineage’.