The importance of legal institutions as mediators of social relations in early modern towns has long been recognized. However, opinion differs over the extent to which early modern courts generated social conflict or resolved it through promoting consensus. This article brings to light a neglected jurisdiction and argues that while the university courts inevitably generated conflict when pursuing their regulative agenda, they nonetheless offered Cambridge inhabitants a considerable resource which was used extensively in both the speedy resolution and the vexatious prolongation of a wide range of disputes which tended to cut across rather than deepen town–gown hostilities.

The article considers the relationship between the middle class and urban place in England. Using the concept of identity, it examines changes in the meaning of the term ‘middle class’ between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century and how these changes were related to the configuration of urbanity. In the earlier twentieth century, it is argued, state and nation replaced the urban as the principal referent for middle-class identity.

This article explores the relationship between colonial ideologies and urban planning in the context of the pre-war Japanese empire. It does so by examining the second largest city in what was Japan's first formal overseas colony of Taiwan. By exploring some of the key texts through which the city of Takao (Kaohsiung) was depicted and its future debated in the colonial era, the ways in which imperial ideologies, such as the ‘southern advance’ of the Japanese empire, influenced and were reflected in urban space will be considered.

Pressures for cleanliness in inter-war Tel-Aviv stemmed from the British government, the autonomous Jewish Municipality, local residents and visiting Zionists. This article reconstructs Tel-Aviv's sanitation during the 1920s and 1930s, describes and analyses attempts to clean the urban public space and their limited success. It is argued that the sanitary reality and the issue of cleanliness and squalor in Tel-Aviv, ‘The First Hebrew City’, reflected British colonial policies, Zionist national ideologies, ethnic and social stereotypes.

The rise and decline of Changchun is examined focusing on its urban character in terms of symbolic identity and built form. Based on an analysis of physical characteristics of the urban fabric and architectural forms of the state buildings, the study explores and identifies the ideological underpinnings of city planning and the methodological sources of architectural design to understand how the city was shaped and why.

The article tries to identify the factors that led to urban growth in India in the period we style ‘early medieval India’, viz the centuries between the decline of the Gupta empire and the rise of the Islamic sultanates in northern India. In doing so, the author obviously responds to the seminal work of R.S. Sharma, without, however, even mentioning it. Sharma is one of the most influential advocates of the school of ‘Indian feudalism’, and he linked the decline of cities in India during the period under review to the decline of long-distance trade (caused especially by the decline of Roman trade with India) on the one hand and the feudal transformation of agrarian relations on the other. The economic crisis (the emphasis on which easily identifies Sharma as a staunch Marxist) went along with a socio-religious crisis, during which people expected the fourth age of Hinduism, the age of Kali, to draw to a close. Thakur does not deny the importance of economic factors completely, but tries to weigh them against other factors, which he styles ‘technological and ecological’ and ‘institutional and political’. His conclusion in this respect is somewhat inconclusive as ‘no single factor initiated urban growth’, though in a surprising move, he adds that three phases can be made out which are characterized by agrarian expansion (AD 600–750), emergence of empires (750–1000 – this phase is obviously related to the institutional and political factors) and finally the predominance of trade (1000–1200). In what sense this development is based on ‘mechanisms’ (as alluded to in the title), remains completely open.