This special issue draws on new research conducted by the PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present project, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (see: www.hiddencities.eu). The project considers how public spaces, from street corners to major city squares, were shaped by the everyday activities of ordinary city dwellers between 1450 and 1700. We have focused on the urban fabric, and the ways in which meanings are attached to specific sites in the city (and objects in museum collections) that are often overlooked – the material culture of public space. Our themes are familiar to urban historians – sociability, the circulation of knowledge, information or gossip, authority and its contestation – although by moving between textual sources, maps, the built fabric and museum artefacts, our interdisciplinary and cross-Europe approach is structured around material objects in the early modern period.

This article will address the transfer of religious knowledge in two north-western European cities from a spatial perspective. Our starting point will be the thesis that immobile knowledge in closed places of knowledge (lieux de savoir) does not exist: (religious) knowledge only becomes functional in the dynamic encounter with users and it is disseminated through social networks. This approach, which involves the movement from closed spaces to processes and practices, also entails a questioning of outdoor and indoor spaces; of private and public spaces. The article will take its start from several case-studies of indoor public spaces, the transmission of religious knowledge and social networks, based on documentation from Deventer in the northern Low Countries and Amiens on the border of the southern Low Countries and France.

In Renaissance Italy, the political power of authorities found one of its expressions in material symbols of sovereignty. The placing of inscriptions, sculptures and columns and the commissioning of frescoes in streets, piazzas and public spaces, for example, were essential ways of communicating political or spiritual authority to the populace. Sometimes perceived as representations of a top-down form of communication, in the urban context these same material emblems of power became political objects through which to express dissent, as in the case of public loggias, speaking statues or graffiti on walls and civic palaces. Presenting case-studies from various cities in northern Italy, this article investigates the dialectics between the people and the authorities in the urban fabric, especially in everyday life. Combining a spatial and a material approach to politics, this article reveals the dynamic and relational nature of political public spaces.

In an attempt to counteract the silence of Exeter’s late sixteenth-century cartographic representation and to explore further the idea of urban social relations expressed in auditory terms, this article investigates the issues involved in the ringing of Exeter’s civic bells, some of which may reflect a fractious relationship between two sources of authority within the city walls. It sets out some of the challenges to recreating this city’s broader sonic identity and outlines the results of initial attempts to do so.

Focusing on seventeenth-century Madrid, this article explores the interplay between urban public space and a specific type of written defamatory statements, the carteles de desafío or letters of challenge, with the aim of examining the implications of this interaction. Letters of challenge were primarily conceived as a communication tool between the participants in duels and challenges. Displayed in public spaces, they could take on new meanings and even replace the combat itself, while at the same time perpetuating the values of a male honour culture that encouraged the use of violence among large sectors of society to settle disputes.

This article investigates the transformation of the body of a female child murderer as she passed through specific spatial configurations in the urban setting of the seventeenth-century capital of Denmark–Norway. By using the case of Gertrud Nielsdatter, we explore the significance of public urban spaces in the bodily and material transformation of a woman from a condemned sinner to an object of scientific wonder. This transformation was facilitated by practices in diverse public spaces – controlled or influenced by government, city, church, as well as academic authorities and stakeholders – such as the city court, the place of execution, the university and, not least, the book shops across Europe selling books containing the print representing internal organs of Gertrud Nielsdatter. The case demonstrates how the physical body of an ordinary – yet outlawed – Copenhagener was repeatedly transformed in interaction with public spaces and the material culture of buildings, fixtures and fittings.

Using the city of Bangalore as a specific instance, this article puts together the framework of metabolic cities and techno-spheres to show how ecology and infrastructure constituted colonial cities. Divided between the colonial cantonment governed by the British and the petah or native market town/village governed by the Mysore prince, colonial medics were concerned by numerous diseases affecting the city. Attempts to control the flows of water from the cantonment to the native town proved futile. Amidst famine like conditions from the 1870s, chronic water shortages affected the city. In the 1890s, the plague struck Bangalore. The plague affected the barracks, streets, neighbourhoods and homes. Together, the diseases and water shortages led to new piped water schemes drawn from outside the city and wholesale changes in housing. The article moves beyond the framework of ‘sanitary cities’, at the confluence of colonialism, the body, fixed infrastructures and micro and macro ecological phenomena.

This article explores and complicates notions of public and private urban mobility through the exploration of one site of transport, the Kowloon railway terminus in Hung Hom, Hong Kong. It considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? This article explores the Hung Hom railway terminus and its tensions and interactions with automobility and other forms of transport, most pertinently the bus network. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further throws into question seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

This article aims to analyse housing solutions used in nineteenth-century Lisbon to deal with explosive demographic and urban development. It particularly focuses on two specific types of industrial housing ensembles created in Lisbon called pátios and vilas operárias. The goal of this article is to analyse the spatial distribution of pátios and vilas operárias in Lisbon. Through the potential of geographic information systems, we aim to understand in a spatial-quantitative way the spatial patterns of these kinds of industrial housing ensembles for the most deprived population. To do so, we used spatial modelling and spatial analysis procedures, including simple spatial distribution, mean centre, standard distance, directional distance and density estimation (hotspots). The new contribution of this article lies in the increase of scientific knowledge about these forms of working-class housing – the pátios and vilas operárias – and their spatial implementation in Lisbon in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This article explores the development of hydrological infrastructure in colonial Hong Kong between the late 1930s and the late 1960s. Utilizing archival sources in Hong Kong and London, it shows how this infrastructure fundamentally reshaped Hong Kong’s geography. By way of concrete catchwaters and metal pipes, both ‘green’ and ‘urban’ Hong Kong became counter-intuitively interconnected. This interconnection created both unintended consequences and novel opportunities for colonial governance, driving forward natural conservation, state intervention into rural society and the development of new carceral institutions. Exploring these developments provides pivotal insight into the urban history of Hong Kong, with implications for global studies of historical urban political ecology.

This article explores social dancing as the setting for moral struggles related to the urban night. Based on analysis of Estonian-language newspapers, I look at the historical context and expressed viewpoints linked with nocturnal public dance events in Estonian cities from 1880 to 1940. The established moral order was endangered by those staying out dancing late into the night. In the context of the multinationalism of urban areas and the national emancipation movement of the ethnic Estonian population, I investigate the transgressions and hazards that night dancing was perceived to bring, most significantly, threat to productivity, health and virtue.