This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.

Civic pride is rarely studied at the individual level. The journals of Dr John Deakin Heaton provide a unique insight into the motivations of a man linked to many institutions and civic sites of Leeds, celebrated by historians as a progenitor of its famous town hall and the city's first university. This article uses those journals to investigate the matrix of family honour, Anglicanism and professional identity, tempered by self-interest, underpinning Heaton's desire to improve his native town. Its conclusions further justify the recent historiographical emphasis on associational culture and ritual in the study of urban governance.

In the mid-1940s a conflict arose – the battle for Bankside – between two plans for a contested space on London's South Bank. The electricity industry planned to rebuild Bankside power station to alleviate a critical shortage of electricity, whereas the County of London Plan envisaged redevelopment of the area as public gardens, flats and offices. This article examines these plans and their entanglement in the planning system as then constituted; it argues that the significance of the planning principles escalated the arguments from a local issue to the highest level of government. The roles of key actors who manoeuvred to influence the decision-making process are explored. The article demonstrates that the power station approval was crisis driven and imposed ill-considered conditions with long-term implications. Elements of the County of London Plan were realized through deindustrialization and the transformation of the long-derelict power station into Tate Modern in 2000.

Post-war planning and rebuilding of Britain's towns and cities led to rapid changes in medieval building stock, topography and character, as well as below-ground archaeology. Two case-studies of large, industrial, bomb-damaged yet important former medieval towns are examined in this article: Southampton and Coventry. Together, they illustrate the range of local responses to protecting what we now term the ‘historic environment’ in the period 1945 to 1955 at a time when a limited protection mechanism was introduced through the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The responsibility for compiling lists of protected buildings and providing resources to protect them largely fell to local solutions. Using previously unpublished archive material from both national and local sources, this article offers an alternative ‘bottom-up’, local, organized grass-roots viewpoint to most official ‘top-down’ accounts.

Verdurization (lühua), a term coined in Japan and adopted into the Chinese vocabulary in the early twentieth century, was an emotive concept and relentless practice in Mao's China. The Chinese state used various verdurization campaigns as part of its project of building a socialist state and as a way of exercising ideological control, particularly in cities. At the same time, ordinary citizens had their own ideas about the role of vegetation in their daily lives – ideas that were often different from, and sometimes counter to, those of the state. The article takes Shanghai as a case-study to examine the politics of urban greening along the spectrum of state, society and everyday life in the early years of the People's Republic.

In the 2000s, Berlin saw the formation of so-called Baugruppen (construction groups) – associations of small-scale investors who pooled their modest capital to commission an architect and construct a multistorey building in which they would own and occupy a flat. They were mostly middle-class families united by a belief in community values and neighbourly contact as well as the qualities of urban living. This article will present the construction groups as an example of bottom-up architecture in an industrialized western country, in which individual initiatives and user-centred design had to be negotiated within a highly professionalized environment, as well as with contradictory political positions. It will show that construction groups brought together various threads of Berlin's recent urban history: the gradual integration of radical post-1968 lifestyles into mainstream society, the ‘return to the inner city’ connected with the increasing popularity of ‘new tenements’, and the evolution of innovative, post-functionalist architecture.

Some scholars have argued that the process of gentrification can bring about development, attract businesses and even lower the crime rate in an area. However, no scholars have considered developments in a colonial situation where government policies sometimes produced unintended results, which have subsequently become a permanent feature of those socio-political situations. The experience of colonial Lagos shows that the colonial government policies of town planning and segregation forced the working-class residents of Lagos to the suburbs. As a result, both the population and housing rent of the area were increased with implications for the demography and physical development of metropolitan Lagos.

The Dyos Prize has been awarded annually since 1992 for the best article submitted to the Urban History Journal in each calendar year. The articles are judged by the journal editors and two independent adjudicators. The prize is named after H.J. Dyos (1921–78) to commemorate his innovative contribution to the development of the field of urban history. To reflect the catholicity and interdisciplinarity which Dyos encouraged, no temporal, geographical or thematic restrictions exist, except that the paper must make a significant contribution to the study of urban history. The prize consists of a cash sum and the publication of the paper in Urban History.