In European towns of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sounds people heard were very different from those of today. Yet the difference goes much deeper: whereas today we try to escape city noise, for the inhabitants of early modern towns sound served as a crucial source of information. It formed a semiotic system, conveying news, helping people to locate themselves in time and in space, and making them part of an ‘auditory community’. Sound helped to construct identity and to structure relationships. The evolution of this information system reflects changes in social and political organization and in attitudes towards time and urban space.

The history of suburbs has received so much scholarly attention in recent decades that it is time to take stock of what has been established, in order to discern aspects of suburbs that are still unknown. To date, the main lines of inquiry have been dedicated to the origins, growth, diverse typologies, culture and politics of suburbs, as well as to newer topics such as the gendered nature of suburban space. The vast majority of these studies have been about particular times and places. The authors propose a new perspective on the study of suburbs, one which will begin to investigate the transformations of suburbs after they have been established. Taking the entire era from the mid-nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century as a whole, it is argued that suburbs should be subjected to a longitudinal analysis, examining their development in the context of metropolises that usually enveloped them within a generation or two of their founding. It is proposed that investigation of these ‘transitions’ should be undertaken in parallel with the changes that occur in the life-cycles of their residents. It is suggested that an exploration of the interaction of these factors will open a broad new research agenda for suburban history as a subfield of urban history.

The provision of space for burial is a common but rarely discussed feature of urban existence. Shifts in cemetery aesthetics reflect changing views on what might be thought appropriate landscapes in which to bury the dead. This article, for the first time in a UK context, describes and analyses the introduction of the lawn cemetery in the twentieth century, and gives the rise of cremation a central place in explaining the need to ‘reinvent’ the cemetery aesthetic.

This article explores the construction of publicly financed low-income housing complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s. These housing developments were possible thanks to the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance from the Alliance for Progress. Urban scholars, politicians, diplomats and urbanists of the Americas sought to promote middle-class habits, mass consumption and moderate political behaviour, especially among the poor, by expanding access to homeownership and ‘decent’ living conditions for a burgeoning urban population. As a result, the history of low-income housing should be understood within broader transnational discourses and practices about the ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ of the urban poor.

Venetian printmakers in the sixteenth century were enthusiastic participants in what became a project of civic self-promotion as they looked beyond the local market to an international one. In response to the fascination of foreigners who marvelled at the city's singular topography and its reputation for liberty and licentiousness, the bird's-eye view and images of local social types – such as the doge and courtesan – became transmuted into icons of the city's urban identity. The medium and modes of representation used to reproduce the republic's social and physical organization on paper are crucial here, for it was the repetition and sedimentation of visual conventions that forged iconicity. Venice was redefined as a centre in which all the world could be seen. And the mechanisms for this redefinition, as this article argues, emerged, in part, out of print, for it was because the city could be seen from the eye of a bird, on paper as an image, by foreigners – that it could be re-envisioned from the outside in.

The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and the landscape of regulated prostitution that resulted, are read as part of a mid-nineteenth-century crisis of government. Ultimately, the political and discursive construction of Chinese racial/cultural difference reveals the limits of ‘imperial governmentality’ as much as the ambition of colonial sexual discipline.

The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of ‘leisure towns’ as the chief resorts of wealthy consumers of a new range of goods and services. Their prosperity related closely to the growth of consumerism, but little attention has been given to the ways in which shopping and shops linked into the changing social, economic and physical structure of such towns. This paper explores these processes in the context of Chester – a classic, but largely neglected leisure town – and concludes that shopping streets became central to the economy of the city and amongst the most important of its social spaces.

This article offers a reconsideration of planning and development in English towns and cities after the Black Death (1348). Conventional historical accounts have stressed the occurrence of urban ‘decay’ in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here, instead, a case is made that after 1350 urban planning continued to influence towns and cities in England through the transformation of their townscapes. Using the conceptual approaches of urban morphologists in particular, the article demonstrates that not only did the foundation of new towns and creation of new suburbs characterize the period 1350–1530, but so too did the redevelopment of existing urban landscapes through civic improvements and public works. These reveal evidence for the particular ‘agents of change’ involved in the planning and development process, such as surveyors, officials, patrons and architects, and also the role played by maps and drawn surveys. In this reappraisal, England's urban experiences can be seen to have been closely connected with those instances of urban planning after the Black Death occurring elsewhere in contemporary continental Europe.

The theory and methods of space syntax can help to rebalance the prevailing cultural perspective, which views maps as ideological representations, with an analytical approach that emphasizes maps as sources for understanding space and spatial relationships embedded in built forms. The quantitative descriptions of urban street networks produced by space syntax analyses can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about patterns of urban movement, encounter and socio-economic activity in the past that can help in the interpretation of other historical source materials to give an overall account of urban spatial culture. In this article, the authors explain how space syntax, a theory and method originally developed in the field of architectural research, is making a distinctive contribution to research in social and urban history. The key principles of the method are explained by clarifying the relationship of space syntax to HGIS (Historical Geographical Information Systems) and through a worked example of research undertaken into political meeting places. A survey of research into the urban history of the nineteenth-century city using space syntax is used to highlight a number of important methodological themes and also demonstrates the range of innovative contributions that this interdisciplinary approach is able to advance. A final, theoretical, section reflects on maps and the practice of ‘mapping’ from a space syntax perspective.

In September 1896, a virulent plague epidemic broke out in the colonial port city of Bombay. Central to existing interpretations of the epidemic has been the pervasive assumption that colonial policies aimed at suppressing the disease were principally informed by ‘contagionist’ etiological doctrine. However, this article argues that long-standing ‘localist’ etiological theories continued to exercise a critical influence over colonial policies. It thereby highlights the explicit ‘class’ bias that informed the colonial state's anti-plague offensive, which was largely directed at the urban poor.

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

This article argues that development and modernity have had spatial manifestations. It considers understandings of modern space in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria through the study of University College Ibadan, the country's first university institution founded in 1948. It contends that the university was shaped by existing West African conceptions of modern space and university buildings took on new meanings with the shifting politics of decolonization. The article also suggests that colonial development involved a range of groups and forms of knowledge. It seeks to recognize the strength of colonial institutions and cultures but also the limits to and contingencies in late colonial power.

This article reviews an unusual and subtle form of place promotion, that contained in the series of British post-war reconstruction plans produced up to c. 1952. These were not explicitly designed as place-promotional literature, and we suggest that they should be seen as subverse promotion of towns and cities, as well as vehicles for civic boosterism. Evidence of this is discussed with respect to the production of these plans, for example in the commissioning of eminent and expensive consultants; in the texts of plans; and in the often striking and colourful imagery used.

This discussion seeks to provide a context for the emergence of so-called ‘urban musicology’, both within nineteenth-century antiquarian endeavour and in response to scholarly trends in the 1970s and 1980s. The strengths, weaknesses and possible future directions of ‘urban musicology’ are also identified.

The published literature that has thoroughly treated the history of European planning in sub-Saharan Africa is still rather scanty. This article examines French and British colonial policies for town planning and street naming in Dakar and Lagos, their chief lieux de colonisation in West Africa. It will trace the relationships between the physical and conceptual aspects of town planning and the colonial doctrines that produced these plans from the official establishment of these cities as colonial capitals in the mid-nineteenth century and up to the inter-war period. Whereas in Dakar these aspects reflected a Eurocentric meta-narrative that excluded African histories and identities, a glimpse at contemporary Lagos shows the opposite. This study is one of few that compares colonial doctrines of assimilation to doctrines of indirect rule as each affects urban planning.

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin became the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Ruth Rogaski has argued that Tianjin's distinctiveness deserves the appellation ‘hyper-colony’, a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This article focuses on the representations of the ex-Italian concession in Tianjin, a site which is currently renegotiating its identity between reinvention of the past (1901–45) and property-led regeneration. The article employs the concept of heterotopia to explore ‘semi-colonial’, ‘hyper-colonial’ and ‘globalizing’ representations of Tianjin's built form.

How might one tap the idioms of vanished communities once local knowledge has faded? How might one chart the mental landscapes of locales that have been overlaid by other people's understandings and whose material forms have been erased by urban redevelopment? This paper integrates history and archaeology as it attempts an ethnographic re-reading of one such precinct in Melbourne, Australia.

This article explores the failure of urban renewal in Bombay city during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It shows how colonial rule structured a class-driven process of uneven urban ‘improvements’ that actually exacerbated the problems of congestion, bad housing and environmental blight. In this process, the new forces of modernity were selectively appropriated to accentuate the differentiation in built forms and urban spaces. Finally, through implicit comparisons with contemporary developments in Europe, it reveals the limitations of urban regeneration in a laissez-faire colonial capitalist environment where the search for quick returns by competing economic actors precluded the adoption of long-term policies and interventionist strategies necessary to create the good city life.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the English seaside and health resort of Torquay abandoned its old practice of municipal waste tipping and invested in a destructor, or incinerator. Technical, legal and financial considerations lay behind this decision. The ensuing protests against the operation of the destructor highlight the tensions between nascent technocrats and the affected residents. At a time when pollution was most often displaced or dispersed, topography conspired against the residents of Torquay, and challenged the accepted spatial and social relationships of waste.

This article explores the nature of trust in the fast growing and rapidly changing urban environments of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England through an examination of medical advertisements published in newspapers in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield between 1760 and 1820. The ways in which medicines were promoted suggest not just a belief that the market in medicines operated both rationally and fairly, but also a conception that a trustworthy ‘public’ existed that was not limited to the social elite but was instead constituted of a more socially diverse range of individuals.