In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish thinkers Miguel Giginta and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera proposed a model for welfare reform based on the design of institutions in which the organization of space made possible new ways of imposing discipline. In these institutions, known as Casas de Misericordia, the relation between the disposition of space and the possibility to control and influence the will of individuals was studied. This new consideration of space had a profound influence on areas as diverse as urban development and penitentiary systems.

The city of Ferrol was designed ‘ex-novo’ by military engineers to serve the Spanish monarchy and to house its naval base and dockyards. The principles of stratification on which society was based, and the need to defend the city from enemy attacks and to discipline workers led to a spatial plan that segregated the Navy officers and the working classes. In the nineteenth century, the naval base and the enclave economy of Ferrol became obsolete. Furthermore, the new political culture of the nation state and liberal democracy complicated further the task of controlling the working class. The Spanish Civil War allowed for the updating of Ferrol's spatial plan thanks to the identification of a single enemy both inside and outside: the political repression of the working-class became a major issue in the victory against the II República. The Franco regime meant the return of a segregated and militarized Ferrol, whereas in the 1980s, European integration and the transition to democracy made this model obsolete.

It was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor. Augustinus, De Civitate Dei

This article focuses on aspects of the economic evolution of La Coruña during the 1940s and 1950s by analysing the entrepreneurial activities in a stage characterized by an urban demographic take-off. The tertiary sector, based mainly on port traffic, fishing, commerce and other traditional urban functions, contributed significantly to the diversification of the economic structure of this town.

Through the concept of ‘character’ or ‘urban racial type’, traversing literature, science and metropolitan life, Bertellini reconsiders early American cinema's colour-based biracialism epitomized by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the New York-based film industry race also emerged from the city's dense intermingling of ‘white ethnics’ and broader shifts in epistemological emphasis – from inheritance to the environment. If Italian immigrants were racialized as innately violent in early gangster films, after 1915 heartbreaking melodramas of destitution and misfortunes adopted instead a combination of still othering and universal characterizations.

Half the people in ‘the Bend’ are christened Pasquale…When the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits.Jacob Riis, 1890

I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person.Actor and director George Beban, 1921

The Hobrecht Plan of 1862 is the framework for Berlin's urban development. The changing assessments of this plan over the past 150 years can be followed using contemporary evaluations of street and park layout and the Mietskaserne (tenement). Following early suggestions that it was authoritarian, and persistent criticism that it was responsible for bad housing, it later came to be seen more positively, as renewal and conservation took over from clearance and when reunification highlighted its significance as a common factor in the new capital city.

Modernization and westernization in the urban morphology of Istanbul during the late Ottoman period has frequently been presented by Turkish scholars in a linear process, linking urban development plans and later changes to the influence of historic figures, such as Helmuth von Moltke, a Prussian military adviser of the 1830s. A more holistic reading of this phenomenon based on primary sources, including letters in German by von Moltke, reveals a complex array of forces, responses and reactions, and simultaneously, a more modest and less seminal role for von Moltke in the development of the historic city.

As it happened in other parts of the world, the ‘Garden City’ was used more as an image than as a model in early twentieth-century Latin America. While attempting to set the regional diffusion of the model in international perspective, the review intends to explore the analogous use of the concept by Latin American historiography, following the two senses according to which it has been simplified: namely for its bucolic resonance, and to denote the suburban layouts that were different from traditional models.