Though the phrase ‘public services’ is a nineteenth-century invention, which was supported by a developed rhetoric of political economy, this article shows that the concept, practice and supply of such services could also be found in the medieval city. It specifically analyses three areas of urban service provision: jurisprudence and legal security, infrastructure and finally health care and poor relief. Although the available sources tend to stress the involvement of municipal authorities in providing public services, it turns out that in fact the furnishing of services was highly multi-layered. In all three areas studied, a wide range of public and private institutions offered services to specific groups within late medieval urban society. In contrast to what the notion of ‘public services’ lets us presume, however, public services in the medieval city were not available to all inhabitants. Instead, the provision of services was usually quite restrictive, and targeted particular groups in society.

This article explores the intricate relationship between guidebooks and place-making in an early modern Chinese city, Nanjing. Despite all apparent similarity to a modern guidebook, the seventeenth-century guidebook Jinling tuyong (Illustrated Odes on Nanjing) offers no information regarding shopping, dining or lodging; instead, it catalogues all the possible experiences of sites in and around the city. Such a concentrated focus on spatial experiences brings to light an important change in the social role of guidebooks in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. As landscape appreciation developed into an important venue for status performance and social networking, the representation of space became an integral element to the construction of urban communities. In the case of Tuyong, its images even supplied a critical source of cultural continuity for Nanjing-neses during transition between the Ming and Qing empires, a finding that sheds a new light on the links between urban space and empire and serves as a useful entry for cross-cultural comparison.

Despite the fact that sporting spaces reflect key shifts in thinking about town planning, sports architecture is still an underexplored area in the historiography of urban design. The architects, engineers and designers attempting to regenerate and rejuvenate cities after World War II were aware of the popular interest in competitive sports. Stadia and landscape design were intended to help erase the negative urban images of nationalism and totalitarianism. By starting a dialogue with the past, town planners questioned the grandeur and monumentalism prevalent in architecture since the late nineteenth century. They sought to rediscover and redefine the modern.

The Moscow Luzhniki stadia (1954–56) were constructed at the beginning of Khrushchev's reforms as a representative object to launch a rejuvenated and modernized socialism. The article seeks to situate the stadia complex in the crucial processes of urban transformation that occurred in the post-war Soviet Union; in questioning the Stalin monumental style, the planning of Luzhniki opened a more relational understanding of public space to Soviet people.

This article focuses on Otl Aicher's design and Günther Grzimek's garden architecture for the 1972 Munich Olympics. We argue that the functionalist aesthetics of the Munich Olympic site should be interpreted as a translation into graphic and landscape design of 1960s progressivism in West German society and democracy. In the process Aicher and Grzimek somewhat paradoxically drew on the tradition of the Olympic Gesamtkunstwerk inaugurated in Berlin in 1936.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics acted as a rite of passage for post-war Japan, symbolizing the modernization of the city and the country. This was reflected by the space and architecture of the venues. Urban development of Olympic cities has been scrutinized recently but the symbolic implications have been touched upon only in passing, most especially in Tokyo's case. This article will show how symbolic layers of architecture and space aimed at linking history and modernity while bypassing the highly problematic legacy of ultra-nationalism and World War II. An important hub for transmitting this message was the Meiji Shrine dedicated to the first emperor of modern Japan. The hallmark building of the 1964 Games, Kenzo Tange's National Gymnasium, interacted with the shrine by way of an architectonic axis connecting them. This contrasted with the different spatial styles evident at the 1960 Olympics in Rome and 1972 Olympics in Munich, which testified to their different relationships to the national past. While developing infrastructure such as canalization and traffic was very important for Tokyo, symbolic revitalization of the city's fabric was equally crucial.

Using film and archival evidence, this article focuses on post-war urban redevelopment in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. During this period, two federal institutions, the National Capital Commission and the National Film Board, worked in tandem to disseminate the promise of post-war urban renewal. Film and planning techniques perfected during World War II would be used to sell national urban renewal to Canadians. Rooted in centralized planning, steeped in militarist rhetoric and embedded in authoritarian tendencies, federal plans for a new modern capital had tragic implications for the marginalized and dislocated residents of the inner-city neighbourhood of LeBreton Flats.

The ways in which the organization of local government and the practice of political power locally have changed over time has attracted heightened interest from urban and administrative historians over recent decades. Much of this burgeoning interest has paralleled the concurrent decline in the status and powers of local government since the 1980s. In recent years, a shifting focus from government to governance has allowed the historian to re-conceptualize approaches to urban political power. Urban governance denotes a wider system of government by encapsulating the complex range of actors, interests and resources, which straddle the public, private and voluntary sectors, each with a vested interest in the way that political power is organized and practised locally. By broadening their approach to urban political power, urban historians have, since the late 1980s, elicited new perspectives on municipal administration, reattaching it with the national and juridical frameworks of analysis from which it had been fractured. In general, this growing number of local, regional and cross-national historical studies hints at a more complex and interesting municipal dimension which transcends previously impermeable divisions between the private and the public spheres, between political democracy and administrative bureaucracy, between the central state and municipal administration, and between national and transnational contexts of administrative thought and practice.