The briefest inspection of the English urban hierarchy during the long eighteenth century reveals this as a period of immense change. However, regional analysis of the temporal and spatial patterns of these pre-census developments relies on using a variety of non-demographic sources to produce a series of urban demographic ‘snap-shots’ of the urban population. Employing this ‘demographic photography’ in early modern northwest England allows detailed investigation of the dynamics of the entire urban system. This reveals the deep roots of urban development in the region and points to an eighteenth-century urban revolution. Towns grew faster than the overall population, but this growth was unevenly distributed; both large and small towns exhibited strong and weak growth, making changes in the urban hierarchy inevitable and far-reaching. The most notable trend was the changing geography of the system: Cheshire towns grew far less rapidly than their increasingly industrial neighbours in Lancashire and the urban locus underwent a definite shift northwards. The fact that the urban patterns of growth appear to have preceded the period of maximum industrial growth by some forty to fifty years forces us to rethink the relationship between industrial and urban development.

This article examines the role played by local councillors in constructing new housing in Scotland during the inter-war period. Rather than view local authorities as simply the objective agency of central government's ambitions to construct council houses, we argue that the self-interest and motivations of councillors have to be recognized as significant factors in this process. It is argued also that the concerns of private landlords were neither ignored nor sacrificed in the rush to build new housing. Rather, given that councils remained dominated by local business men, many of whom were private landlords, councillors acted in ways to protect their own material and class interests. In so doing, they consciously, if implicitly, shaped the social geography of twentieth-century Scotland.

Urban history and urban cartography are closely linked. The analysis of spatial relationships through cartography enables a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of studied phenomena, and thus can be a valuable support to urban historians. In this context, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cadastres represent a fertile ground for experimentation in the quantitative analysis of urban space. The explicit relationships between the descriptive data of the cadastral registers and cadastral maps facilitate the computerization of this historical source and the construction of the spatial database. This article illustrates the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geostatistical methods applied to urban historical studies, focusing on the analysis of socio-economic information retrieved from the Pio-Gregorian cadastre of Rome, from 1818 to 1824.

The question ‘what is the city’ raised by Martindale in his edition of Max Weber's The City is an omnipresent one in urban history. This analysis of urban historiography since 1840 explores two definitional strands, each with many theoretical dimensions. The first is a somewhat self-contained conception of the city and relies on rural-urban contrasts; the second is a more open conceptualization of the city. The article tries to unravel the different approaches rather than preferring one approach to the other

This article explores the genesis of small parks in Tokyo following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. It sheds new light on an example of innovative urban design and post-disaster reconstruction, and highlights the growing place that children occupied in the minds of bureaucrats and urban planners. The small parks were designed for children first and foremost. Originally conceived as a means to increase space for school children to play and exercise, all 52 parks were strategically located beside primary schools. As the state's goals of social management expanded, however, officials increasingly recognized the potential to use small parks as sites of rest and guided recreation, as well as emergency refuge. A history of Tokyo's small parks thus offers a window in to the growing understanding about the relationship between the built environment, health and society in inter-war Japan.

Historical pageantry emerged in 1905 as the brainchild of the theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker. Large casts of volunteers re-enacted successive scenes of local history, as crowds of thousands watched on, in large outdoor arenas. As the press put it, Britain had caught ‘pageant fever’. Towards the end of the 1920s, there was another outburst of historical pageantry. Yet, in contrast to the Edwardian period, when pageants took place in small towns, this revival was particularly vibrant in large industrial towns and cities. This article traces the popularity of urban pageantry to an inter-war ‘civic publicity’ movement. In doing so, it reassesses questions of local cultural decline; the role of local government; and the relationship of civic responsibility to popular theatre.

Over the past decade a number of scholars have examined the rise of the mass production and distribution of goods, and the concurrent emergence of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer society or ‘culture of consumption’. This body of work has featured the department store prominently in several roles: as a venue for the distribution of consumer goods; as a material fantasyland in which women were encouraged to play out their dreams of conspicuous consumption; and as a place of white-collar employment for working-class clerks. Whatever their focus, these accounts generally view all department stores as homogeneous middle-class institutions, located in a similarly consistent ‘downtown’ in any (and all) large American and European cities. There are serious flaws in such a portrayal. Very real distinctions between department stores in a given city and the social implications of these differences in terms of social status and class are not addressed. Further, the contribution of the built environment and urban topography to the shaping of these status and class distinctions and, ultimately, women's shopping experience, is likewise overlooked. This article examines a set of surveys and marketing reports prepared in 1932 for the Higbee Company of Cleveland, Ohio, in order to situate more precisely one department store within its urban context. These sources document the relationship of the Higbee Company to the city's other department stores and in so doing reveal some of the ways in which stratification between and among classes was interpreted in terms of geographical and social space. Examination of the hierarchy of stores that existed in what was at the time the nation's sixth largest city provides a corrective to the image of the department store as a homogeneous democratic phenomenon, and thus provides an invaluable basis for a reinterpretation of the department store as an urban institution in early twentieth- century America.

This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

This article examines the development of the Nottingham Arboretum (1852), the centrepiece of one of the most ambitious schemes of urban enclosure and improvement in mid-Victorian Britain. It contends that the provision for parks and green spaces in the town was inspired by local naturalists and sanitary reformers as well as cultural emulation and civic rivalry with other urban centres such as Derby and Manchester. Analysis of the design and management of the Arboretum and green spaces and local controversies about funding and access reveal major local disagreements concerning uses of such spaces reflecting continued divisions in Victorian urban society beneath the public rhetorical and celebratory façade.

Altogether, as a place of education Adelaide falls far short of the mark; as a place of amusement it is hopeless; and as a village — well, it is tolerably clean, and comparatively healthy.

Thistle Anderson (1905)

By examining a major port, a capital and a planned model city, this article links the diffusion of street lighting in nineteenth-century Latin America to changing notions of the night and of technology. In these three cities, lighting emerged as an eminently flexible strategy of modernization. Street lighting attracted urban officials and elite residents, who could economically install it as an antidote to crime, a complement to night life, or an emblem of progress.

The traditional open-air markets on the central squares of Danish cities were thriving in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the markets were soon challenged by new urban ideals of the city centre as a place for shopping and capital investment. At the same time, urban reformers made efforts to improve the market trade to meet modern standards. The rivalling interests struggled over the question of modernization or relocation of the central square markets and ultimately the definition and use of the central urban space. In particular, this article will examine the struggle over the construction of a fish market hall in Odense as it serves to reveal the different conceptions of the central urban space that affected the fate of the street markets.

The turbulent years around c. 1200 BC in the eastern Mediterranean are known as a period of the collapse of states and empires. Yet by zooming in on three important royal cities, Tiryns, Hattusa and Carchemish, we can question this collapse narrative whilst at the same time exploring the now popular concept of resilience, in this case urban and cultural resilience. First these ancient cities are presented as interactive and meaningful spaces in which architecture and art were used to shape people's experience of them and the world in which they lived, before their urban fabric and functions are examined in turn. It will become clear that they had radically different fates through c. 1200 BC. Some of the difficulties in applying ideas from resilience thinking and how it might or might not be useful as an approach in studying these and other examples are then discussed.

The small medieval town has recently captured the attention of historians, geographers and archaeologists. Documentary work is, for example, not only disentangling the fluctuating history of local markets, but also demonstrating that, despite their small size, seignorial boroughs of the later thirteenth century had a diverse occupational structure that entitles them to be regarded as genuinely urban. Indeed, Hilton has recently argued that as much as half the urban population lived in these small towns. This research has also emphasized the economic vitality of the smaller towns in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and has raised the possibility that they were prospering at the expense of the provincial capitals, a trend to be seen in the context of the movement of industry from the towns to the countryside.

The provincial press played a significant role in forming local attitudes and senses of civic identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local and regional newspapers often adopted a ‘boosterist’ language, a style that enthusiastically promoted the particular qualities of places. The persistence of boosterism into the early twenty-first century makes it a concept worthy of further exploration. This study considers just one ‘booster’, Bernard Samuel Gilbert, and his illuminating series of articles on Lincoln for the Lincolnshire Echo in 1914. His correspondence illustrates the contrasting stances towards improvement typically employed within the local press – including the boosterist alongside the more critical.

The development of modern water supply systems has varied widely in terms of speed, paths and results, and each supply system has been strongly conditioned by its spatial, socio-economic and cultural context. Barcelona provides a useful illustration of how such a modern system came into being in a particularly dynamic southern European setting. Despite being Spain's leading industrial centre, the driving force behind the introduction of its new water supply system did not come from an industrial imperative but rather from the city's expansion plan, approved in 1859, which gave rise to a proliferation of private initiatives. Later, decisive changes around the turn of the twentieth century led to a concentration of water companies, sewer renewal projects and the entry of water into the domestic sphere, and the extension of the water supply to people's homes. The development of a modern water supply system in Barcelona, however, required a period of a hundred years – from 1867, when the first steam-powered pumping station was built, to 1967, when the water from the Ter River transfer reached the city, allowing new consumption patterns to spread rapidly.

Using film and archival evidence, this article focuses on post-war urban redevelopment in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. During this period, two federal institutions, the National Capital Commission and the National Film Board, worked in tandem to disseminate the promise of post-war urban renewal. Film and planning techniques perfected during World War II would be used to sell national urban renewal to Canadians. Rooted in centralized planning, steeped in militarist rhetoric and embedded in authoritarian tendencies, federal plans for a new modern capital had tragic implications for the marginalized and dislocated residents of the inner-city neighbourhood of LeBreton Flats.

Australian cities were transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by the spread of the automobile and suburbanization. This article examines the patterns of retail diffusion that followed and the resultant adoption of the shopping centre form. Further, it considers the broader implications of retail innovation during a period of urban disruption, revealing intersections between urban geographies, business innovation and retail hierarchies. In the Australian case, dominant firms were able to leverage their market power to adapt to shifting retail geographies and new technologies, while some small entrepreneurial developers catering to the needs of these established retailers laid foundations for national and international expansion. A by-product of these processes was the creation of a unique Australian shopping centre form.

Civic ritual and pageantry have been mainstays of urban culture since the Middle Ages, but it has been suggested that they entered a period of decline from the 1870s onwards. This article suggests that instead, local authorities reformed and revised their use of civic ceremony, celebration and commemoration, in order to keep pace with contemporary culture and to maintain public interest. The towns of Darlington and Middlesbrough are considered to highlight the use of recreational and sensory-rich ritual in the urban setting. It is suggested that historians should therefore adopt a broader methodology and broaden their definition of what constituted civic ritual in the twentieth century.

For urban historians and urban historical geographers, the relevance and meaning of the city as a driver of human history is central to what we do, both theoretically and empirically. For some, the question of how to define what a city does is a pressing one. For many of us, though, the question is rarely raised; it resides in that murky place behind our writing and thinking, and has little direct or conscious play over how we go about doing our daily work. Historical geographers, with their greater emphasis on theory and spatial relations, are more likely than historians, trained as they are to think through narrative, empirical evidence and temporality, to explore the city's role in explaining social change. Despite this difference, the fact remains that only a handful of urban historical scholars of whatever stripe are actively interested in thinking through the scope and significance of urban agency. The fact that few openly grapple with the question of urban agency, of course, does not mean that we do not work with some understanding of the city's ontological status. All of us do, for better or worse.