This paper seeks to extend the knowledge of small-town structures and of conflict in late medieval urban society by utilizing the unusual survival of a variety of sources for the English small town of Lydd in Kent. The main focus is an analysis of conflicts over capitalizing enclosure in Lydd in the mid-fifteenth century from which it then seeks to generalize, and to implicate towns in the feudalism to capitalism debate previously overwhelmingly confined to rural society.

This article investigates the socio-economic and morphological aspects of how the city of Cork, having lost the salient elements of its medieval character in the early 1600s, transformed into a prosperous Atlantic port city during the period of renaissance it experienced between 1660–1700. Despite the political upheavals caused by the expulsions of the Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s, the city increased in size and population from the early 1660s onwards as it began to thrive on the provisions trade to the colonial plantations of British America. In the process, Cork assumed a higher rank in the general European urban hierarchy.

This article is concerned with the Cotton Famine affecting the towns of north-west England between 1861–64. It examines charitable responses to the Famine and especially the impact of the charity relationship between recipient and donor. Understanding the complexities of this relationship, based on a reciprocal arrangement and establishing behavoural norms, leads to a wider appreciation of the role of charity in determining class cohesion and in managing the urban environment.

During the 1950s the Conservative Government initiated a policy of private housing in new towns in order to temper the financial burdens of the programme and encourage local electoral support for the party. This enquiry, by focusing on Crawley New Town, argues that the policy succeeded in exposing the contradictions of post-war new town philosophy whilst reflecting the wider economic and social changes that had begun to unfold in Britain by the late 1950s.

This article focuses on the disparity between two urban reports of the Gómez regime (1908–35). Relying on the theoretical platform provided by European positivism, there is, on the one hand, the erudite ideologists' justification of the material achievements of the dictatorship. On the other hand, there is the critique present in the literary characters of the works written by the young political class, where the parochialism of Caracas served as an excuse to attack the social abuses and cultural obscurity of one of Latin America's longest dictatorships.