It is somewhat surprising that music has only recently become a serious subject for urban historians. Musicologists and music historians, urban geographers, planners and all others who deal with diverse aspects of local development, cultural industry and the built environment have fared much better in tackling the fundamental social implications of music in a particular locality. It is not an accident that, for example, the recent volume of Built Environment, ‘Music and the city’, edited by an economic geographer, Robert C. Kloosterman, deals with urban spaces of creativity and the role of black music today, some of which have by now an ascribed ‘urban’ adjective in North America.1 It is also only natural, however, that Kloosterman's enquiry should concentrate on music in the city of the present and rarely venture into the time periods before World War II.

This article seeks to understand how the emergence of public dance hall culture affected the consumption of dance music among different social classes in Vienna between the years 1780 and 1814, when the number of dance halls more than tripled. Using mainly contemporary eyewitness accounts as sources, this article argues that social distinctions, rather than disappearing, were reinforced after the commercialization of the Viennese dance halls. As turn-of-the-century Vienna was a major city with a heterogeneous population, the diversity of social classes was reflected in its ballroom culture. This is because the Viennese elite, the nobility and the higher bourgeoisie, was very reluctant to share social space with the lower classes. Although to some degree the amount of social space expanded in the city at the time, the use of the space, however, remained socially diverse.

In nineteenth-century The Hague, the French opera performances in the Royal Theatre were the most important occasions during the winter season at which men and women from almost all social ranks experienced a strong sense of social cohesion in a common leisure pursuit, albeit one in which social hierarchies were clearly demarcated. This article analyses the changing social composition of the opera audience through analysis of subscription and admission records, and evaluates the changing composition of the audience in relation to changes in taste, theatre architecture and policy. Although it was almost impossible to exploit financially and was also a constant object of political, musical and moral criticism, the French opera succeeded in maintaining its central position in The Hague's musical and social life throughout the nineteenth century.

This article links the nature of commercial masked balls in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s to urban development during these decades. The raucous and often destructive character of the balls, which united elites and popular classes under the mask's anonymity, coincided with a society undergoing social and political upheaval. The dress and conduct of revellers were expressions of their ambitions, fears and resentments. Changes in the urban landscape of the 1820s and 1830s – in particular, the construction of the grands boulevards and alignment of theatres sponsoring masked balls along this axis – sharpened potential conflict at such events by placing them in one of the most socially charged corridors of the city.

This article examines the relationship between the processes of urban renovation in European capitals and the internationalization of musical theatre productions, using the example of theatres constructed in Paris and Rome at the end of the nineteenth century. Due to the limited availability of governmental and municipal funding, the more popular theatres in both capitals came to provide an important space for musical productions on an avant-garde level, with international repertoires and casts.

In this article, the origins of the modern metropolis are reconsidered, using the example of Cairo within its Ottoman and global context. I argue that Cairo's Azbakiyya Garden served as a central ground for fashioning a dynastic capital throughout the nineteenth century. This argument sheds new light on the politics of Khedive Ismail, who introduced a new state representation through urban planning and music theatre. The social history of music in Azbakiyya proves that, instead of functioning as an example of colonial division, Cairo encompassed competing conceptions of class, taste and power.

The editors regret that in the article by Mestyan (first published online, 24th May 2013) the dates provided for the captions for Figures 2 and 3 are incorrect. The map in Figure 2 is from the 1860s and that in Figure 3 is from the 1870s.

The topic of this study is the control of urban space in late Ottoman Istanbul, particularly during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909). Issues of the control and surveillance of public gatherings and popular entertainment are investigated by focusing on the Greeks of Istanbul, the largest non-Muslim population in the city. The article is based on an investigation of petitions, the Ottoman Police Ministry records and spy reports on various planned and spontaneous, private and public activities, such as charity concerts, theatrical performances, and collective singing in private and public meetings.

Of the British scholars gathered by H.J. Dyos in 1966 to give substance to his vision of urban history as a distinctive genre of history only a few would claim the study of cities and city life as their prime academic interest. No more than a handful of those involved in the Urban History Group in the mid-1960s went on to publish major work in urban history. That was left to the generation whose careers were established in the early 1970s. The handful included Jim Dyos himself, Tony Sutcliffe, David Reeder, John Kellett and Peter Hennock. For the latter part of his career Hennock concentrated on the history of the welfare state and social policy in Britain and Germany and that is what those historians familiar with his name will associate him with. But his first book, based partly on his doctoral research, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (1973) was as squarely a work of municipal history as one could find, and if a test of a contribution to history is not the quantity of publications but what endures of them, then Ernest Peter Hennock more than justifies our recognition amongst historians of towns and cities.

The present bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History from 1992. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken, though many other journals are also checked. There is an index of towns on p. 775.