Major fires are essential case-studies of how urban society responds to crisis. How a city organizes its relief reflects its place in larger networks and reveals its charitable priorities. This article will use the example of the Great Fire of London (1666) to show how the city recovered from this catastrophe. It will examine the recovery using the records of a nationwide charitable collection taken for Londoners ‘distressed’ by the Fire, which shows both how and where money was collected in England and spent in London. It will show that London was extremely resilient to the Fire, and that there was significant continuity before and after the disaster.

In this article location theory is used to map and analyse the patterns of retail location in Amsterdam in the eighteenth century. In the city centre as well as along the main axes to markets and the city gates the retailing of shopping goods (textiles, consumer durables) was much more prominent than elsewhere in the city. In contrast, shops selling convenience goods (foodstuffs etc.) were scattered all over the city. The correspondence of empirical data and location theory suggests that the urban government and institutions did not interfere with the location preferences of shopkeepers. An analysis of local acts and guild regulations corroborated this assumption. What did affect the location patterns of shops was history. The morphological and socio-economic legacy of the past acted as an intermediary between general location principles and the implantation of shops in the urban landscape.

British colonial administrators had two strategies for governing towns in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used Sanitary Boards to improve public health and to control populations indirectly, and they relied on police forces for direct forms of discipline. Both strategies reveal the overall weakness of the British colonial regime in that region.

During the period of fascist rule, Mussolini's government radically transformed the built environment by sponsoring a wide range of public works projects intended to bring fascist values of order and hierarchy to cities and towns throughout Italy. A close look at Paolo Mezzanotte's project for a new business district in Milan demonstrates that changes to the urban fabric were often the result of fierce and prolonged negotiations between multiple centres of power, despite fascism's totalitarian ambitions. This project thus serves as an opportunity to consider the particular forces that shaped urban change in Milan as well as a model for evaluating fascist era projects in other urban centres.

Ramblers often voiced reformist ideas about how cities and their inhabitants might be improved. This article demonstrates how the Manchester Ramblers' Federation utilized themes of freedom and order to define and regulate urban movements in rural space. It explores how this group of ramblers defined rambling as a ‘readjustment’ to illiberal aspects of urban life, portrayed other performances in the countryside as harmful and illegitimate and finally sought to utilize technologies drawn from their experience of urban culture to regulate conduct in the countryside.

Manchester's processional tradition began in the nineteenth century and every Whit weekend, until the 1960s, Catholics and Protestants organized separate large celebrations. This article argues that the Catholic Whit celebrations peaked in importance between the two world wars and that this was related to the impact of Manchester Corporation's wider investment in urban redevelopment. It is a story about religion and the self, which reveals important details about the cultural meanings of the inter-war city and contributes to an emerging field of cultural geography that explores the relationship between space and faith.

The implementation of Modern Movement town planning is still regarded as both rapid and relatively unproblematic in the aftermath of World War II. A more complex narrative emerges from an examination of the urban redevelopment policy and practice at Vancouver, British Columbia, during the immediate World War II decades. The analysis focuses on the civic and professional discourse of redevelopment. It illuminates the diverse interests and processes by which Modernist planning theory and practice were introduced, modified and resisted. New concepts and values are shown to have been subject to internal no less than external forces of revision.

This year's publications address seven broad themes: urban growth and migration; the social structure of late medieval towns; women and gender; political communication and the circulation of news; the church in the city; urban decline; and writing about the city.