The York House Books provide much-cited evidence of Richard III's relationship with the City of York in 1485, yet the nature and purpose of the House Books has never been satisfactorily explored. Through a focus on the records of a single year (1476–77), this article places their development within the context of new forms of civic bureaucracy in England and France in which the recording of emotions and speech had particular rhetorical and political significance in the reign of Edward IV. This expanding culture of civic literacy led not only to the creation of fuller records of civic politics and events (including the surviving texts of the Corpus Christi drama), but also enabled new forms of political activity.

Early modern European capitals competed to demonstrate their imperial status, and contemporary urban praise often drew comparisons between them, situating these cities within a shifting hierarchy. Authors frequently combined actual perceptions of cities with metaphors of a New Rome and other classical motifs. This article explores how various writers asserted Lisbon's greatness and civic identity within this shared comparative European discourse. More particularly, it shows how they defended its changing political status as a capital while also developing a strong commercial discourse that centred on the city as an emporium. Views and descriptions of Lisbon and its port paralleled contemporary descriptions of London in particular, as both cities were increasingly defined as paradigms of imperial commerce.

Most colonial Hispanic American cities were originally planned around a main plaza, which was a multifunctional square crucial for urban life. This spatial model for the whole city based on a main square is termed the Plaza Mayor model. Bourbon reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century aimed at transforming this model according to a Plaza de Armas organization. Here, these two models (Plaza Mayor and Plaza de Armas) are characterized, and their contradictions in terms of political projects and quotidian city life are analysed. For late colonial Lima, Bourbon efforts to introduce the Plaza de Armas are shown to have affected both the main function of the central square and the entire urban system.

This article uses data extracted from General Register Office mortality registers to map the localization of infant mortality in Dublin city from 1864 to 1910. It traces how late nineteenth-century social inequalities were deeply rooted in the city's history. In order to contextualize the high infant mortality rates, we draw on a range of approaches to provide an overarching view of the causes of the public health problems cities like Dublin experienced.

From the early 1900s to 1914, an informal, but dedicated, group of English-Canadian actors took up the cause of urban planning, forming connections with the international planning cohort, and circulating foreign innovations and expertise across the country. This article considers such urban planning networking, first exploring the local urban context from which interest in planning emerged, then, through the use of case-studies, studying the four key channels through which English-Canadian actors acquired and disseminated foreign planning information. Through this analysis, the conscious and critical nature of local interactions with the wider urban planning cohort is emphasized.

Despite its National Socialist origins, the post-war use of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport has seen it recast as a ‘symbol of freedom’. Since the airport's 2008 closure, the site has been caught between calls for increased engagement with its use under the Third Reich and economic incentives to repackage it as an attractive events location. Through analysing the different strategies through which Tempelhof's past is negotiated, this article will highlight the contested nature of Berlin's relationship with the past and the complex interaction between memory politics and more pragmatic issues.

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.