Historians have suggested that medieval urban guilds played a role in political and commercial networking. Guilds’ commercial protectionism was designed to benefit their membership and close ties have been discovered between merchant guilds and urban oligarchies. This article asks if all guilds should be viewed as commercial networking hubs. It uses evidence from a later fourteenth-century membership roll of St Mary's guild in Nottingham in conjunction with Nottingham's borough court rolls to analyse the commercial connections between members and non-members in that period. It concludes that the guild did not function as a networking hub.

Eastern Europe has recently received much attention from scholars irrespective of diverse focus and specialization, and the special section of this distinguished journal is yet another proof that the region remains an extraordinarily interesting place for research and analysis. Scholarly interests have, however, often been related to the emergence, establishment and eventual demise of state socialism in this heterogeneous place, the horrors of World War II and the profound transformations that swept through its many old-new countries during recent decades. The predominance of political, social and intellectual history, as well as sociology and political science, and scholarly interpretations of the condition of modernity in Eastern Europe come therefore as little surprise. This methodological apparatus at hand, significant aspects of the region's development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have sometimes been overlooked, while others appeared teleological. Within the traditions of both Western and Eastern European academia, the region has until recently been perceived as having followed a very distinct, special path to modernity characterized in a variety of ways as arrested development, Sonderweg and backwardness. At the same time, the profound change that occurred in these diverse territories as part of a European and in fact global process of modernization during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries has often not been given its true significance in relation to its later historical development. An array of recent post-colonialist responses that have fundamentally reshaped the history of the modern ‘Third World’ have touched Eastern Europe only in passing, Hence, an occasional intellectual indecisiveness as to how to analyse the region's development in a greater historical context, as is immediately evident in the diversity of names ascribed to its supposedly different geographical areas – Eastern Europe, East Central Europe, Central Europe, Mitteleuropa and South-East Europe, to name but a few – each with their own political and ideological bias.

This article examines the image of the city and notions of urban management in the discourse of elite groups in Belgrade between 1830 and the late 1860s. It focuses on the negotiation of modernity in heterogeneous cultural spaces, particularly looking at the textual interplay of power, orientalized exoticism and notions of backwardness. These discourses were integral to the processes of managing urban populations and homogenizing the cityscape. The city's specific political situation as a site of dual authority, however, left room for minor acts of contestation which questioned the primacy of exclusion and dispossession as bases for modern urban transformation. This dynamic interplay framed the city as a site of conflict between mutually defining forces of ‘Europeanization’ and ‘backwardness’.

This article examines the social topography and the housing patterns of Moscow workers in the context of their social status and experience of immigration. It argues that in the early twentieth century Moscow was characterized by extremely poor housing conditions and the absence of clear residential segregation of social classes due to the lack of profound planning policy and urban reforms.

The present article investigates how everyday people shaped the outcome of discriminatory measures during the Nazi persecution of Budapest Jews, primarily by looking into micro-level social interactions between superintendents and confined Jews during ghettoization in the Hungarian capital (1944). I argue that besides a multiplicity of relevant political, social and military reasons determining the fate of Budapest Jews, the urban specificity of the Holocaust also needs to be taken into account, given that location and access to urban space enabled different personal strategies to contest or aggravate anti-Semitic persecution. Especially older, nineteenth-century apartment buildings fostered the autonomy of superintendents, who could act independently of various authorities, exploiting certain Jews while aiding others. The article demonstrates how many superintendents made use of this power effectively as the successive regimes toughened their anti-Semitic policies. In addition, the investigation of individual motives and the micro levels of segregation and discrimination highlight major differences between and within apartment buildings, despite the supposedly homogeneous discrimination against Jews envisaged by Nazi policy makers.

Industrial policy has long been considered a federal responsibility. Indeed, most scholars date modern local economic development programmes as starting in the 1960s. Before that, in this view, industrial policy was ad hoc, unco-ordinated and fragmented. In this article, I argue that the origins of modern industrial policy initiated by the local state slowly emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Chicago. Using an assortment of sources, I show that a new type of industrial policy was forged in the conflict over the 1923 zoning ordinance. The city's real-estate, financial and political elites were able to mobilize information, science, funding, individuals and arguments to convince industrialists that zoning was to their advantage. In the process, the city's industrial interests were able to frame the new zoning ordinance to their ends.

The article presents the short urban history of Tel Aviv as a case-study for critical readings in urban planning. Focusing on Patrick Geddes’ celebrated plan for the city (1925) and its various interpretations along the years, the main claim made in the article is that when present planners are confronted with a past which does not suit current needs, history is contested, or reinvented entirely. The appreciation of Geddes’ plan over the years always reflected the city's contemporary image and its planners’ attitudes, which initially reflected the pioneering spirits of the city's Zionist creation. The plan was later blamed for the city's deterioration; and finally celebrated again, alongside the city's new found architectural heritage and urban spirit.

This article argues that the Edwardian municipal park represents a significant transition from the highly regulated and formal space of the Victorian park. It takes as a case-study Heaton Park in Manchester purchased in late 1901 and suggests that this park represented a transition from a Victorian people's park to an Edwardian citizen's park in which each visitor accessed facilities and amenities appropriate to their individual or group leisure interests. It addresses the comparative neglect of the Edwardian park by urban historians and suggests the importance of the emerging concepts of citizenship and social responsibility.

Urban development corresponds with economic shifts. In the second half of the twentieth century, when traditional forms of industrial production declined in many western cities, this posed new kinds of challenges. Cities were in need of a new economic base and at the same time had to cope with the abandonment of industrial sites. This article highlights the agency of local societies in shaping this process of deindustrialization and redevelopment. It interprets deindustrialization and redevelopment as a process of transformation which was open-ended and a matter of intense negotiation between diverging interests at the local level. In analysing the highly contentious case of the disused Stollwerck chocolate factory in Cologne, the article traces a complex set of site-specific factors of deindustrialization and redevelopment.