While there has been much interest recently in the early modern history of London there has been little work done on establishing a comprehensive picture of the City, the central core of its economy. The population history of the City has begun to be explored in a systematic way. The social and economic structure of one or two small areas has begun to be examined, both within the City and outside, in districts such as Southwark and the East End. Other studies concentrating on single issues have attempted to establish such things as the economic profile of the metropolis from the occupations given in a sample of parish death registers, resulting in a claim that the London manufacturing sector was more significant than commerce, and not the reverse, as had been assumed previously. Another study, by Power, based on the hearth tax from a small sample of parishes concluded with the comment that ‘the impression is gained of an urban scene where occupations and rich and poor are thoroughly jumbled’.

This article searches for the historic centre of Los Angeles, California, the archetype of urban sprawl. Taking maps and photographs as its principal sources it finds an enduring urban centre in a plaza designed by the Spanish in 1781 and occupied by Mexicans until the US army conquered the city in 1847. The Plaza anchored the dispersed ranch land of the Pueblo of Los Angeles and was the magnet for commercial development during the first decades of American settlement. Between 1850 and 1880, Anglo immigrants built up the south-western side of the Plaza with shops and civic buildings creating a hybrid and bicultural centre, a compression of Main Street and the Plaza. After 1880 a process of spatial mitosis occurred as commerce and municipal functions moved down Main Street and melded into a modern downtown. Since then the skyscrapers downtown have overshadowed but not displaced the old Plaza, which still serves as social, symbolic and ceremonial space for Angelenos, especially immigrants from Latin America. The durability of the Plaza and its direct successors, Main Street and Downtown, not only designate a centre for Los Angeles, but articulate a distinctive urban morphology, that of a centrifugal metropolis rather than fragmented city or sprawl of suburbs.

Over the last century, cultural and scholarly depictions of middle-class suburbia have created a stereotype that suggests detachment, indifference and the decline of community engagement. Yet, such accounts oversimplify the middle-class experience and the evolving nature of the urban/suburban relationship. Offering a review of existing literature, this article seeks to challenge existing stereotypes by revaluating the social networks constructed by middle-class ‘suburbans’. Far from detached and disengaged, the spatial analysis of associational membership in post-war Leicester reveals the need for a much wider revision of the British suburban narrative.

Major fires are essential case-studies of how urban society responds to crisis. How a city organizes its relief reflects its place in larger networks and reveals its charitable priorities. This article will use the example of the Great Fire of London (1666) to show how the city recovered from this catastrophe. It will examine the recovery using the records of a nationwide charitable collection taken for Londoners ‘distressed’ by the Fire, which shows both how and where money was collected in England and spent in London. It will show that London was extremely resilient to the Fire, and that there was significant continuity before and after the disaster.

Modernization and westernization in the urban morphology of Istanbul during the late Ottoman period has frequently been presented by Turkish scholars in a linear process, linking urban development plans and later changes to the influence of historic figures, such as Helmuth von Moltke, a Prussian military adviser of the 1830s. A more holistic reading of this phenomenon based on primary sources, including letters in German by von Moltke, reveals a complex array of forces, responses and reactions, and simultaneously, a more modest and less seminal role for von Moltke in the development of the historic city.

During the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been ‘reading’ streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were ‘reflected’ in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volume The Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade after The Victorian City's first publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

Liverpool grew remarkably in the century after 1650 outpacing long-established ports like Bristol and Hull. In part this was due to advantages of location, in part to the ambitions of its merchants. The council opened a wet dock in 1715, a pioneering project which gave the port an unusual trading advantage. This paper explains that event by tracing the emergence of merchants on the council in the late seventeenth century and, by analysing port book evidence, argues that they assumed a trading dominance in the town which was especially strong about 1700. Their powerful position on the council was, in part, the result of a new town charter of 1695. Political and economic factors worked together to propel the town towards its spectacular eighteenth-century economic development.

By 1974, northern England had become one of Europe's most urbanized areas, though it had very few towns in 1500. However, the dense population of the industrial regions lived in towns which were unusually crowded together and which had not developed conventional hierarchical structures. No dominant northern metropolis ever emerged, and this unusual urban system displayed intense rivalry at all levels. Was this coincidental, or can it help explain the region's nineteenth-century dynamism?

The building industry's organization has been relatively invariant down through history due to housing's unique characteristics: durability, fixity in location, complex co-ordination of various trades on site and financing its great costs. That organizational form has allowed speculative development to flourish periodically during large increases in urban population, despite considerable risk. The same building and speculative processes occurred in ancient Rome and cities in England and the US at greatly different periods of time but those histories do not acknowledge the similarities of development processes that each reports. A separate ‘housing literature’ that steps back from particulars possibly explains why these accounts are so alike.

While the Victorian ideal of the public park is well understood, we know less of how local governors sought to realize this ideal in practice. This article is concerned with park-making as a process – contingent, unstable, open – rather than with parks as outcomes – determined, settled, closed. It details how local governors bounded, designed and regulated park spaces to differentiate them as ‘spaces apart’ within the city, and how this programme of spatial governance was obstructed, frustrated and diverted by political, environmental and social forces. The article also uses this historical analysis to provide a new perspective on the future prospects of urban parks today.

Historians have suggested that medieval urban guilds played a role in political and commercial networking. Guilds’ commercial protectionism was designed to benefit their membership and close ties have been discovered between merchant guilds and urban oligarchies. This article asks if all guilds should be viewed as commercial networking hubs. It uses evidence from a later fourteenth-century membership roll of St Mary's guild in Nottingham in conjunction with Nottingham's borough court rolls to analyse the commercial connections between members and non-members in that period. It concludes that the guild did not function as a networking hub.

Fires are often seen as a constant in early modern European towns, changing only in the modern era when inflammable building materials replaced wood. This article argues that the incidence, nature and risk of fire shifted repeatedly over time. Fire danger was determined not only by building materials but also by forms of construction, by the everyday uses people made of flame and by wider factors such as climatic variation and shifts in world trade and consumer demand. It was influenced by urban social and political change, including the way governments and populations responded to the risk. Responses to new fire dangers in turn helped change the way urban government functioned.

During the nineteenth century, police, magistrates, reformers and the press noticed a rising tide of juvenile crime. Child-stripping, the crime of stealing young children's clothes by force or deception, was an activity of this type which caused alarm among contemporaries. As the century progressed, improved policing, urbanization and Irish migration, allied to growing social concern, caused more cases of child-stripping to be noticed. Accounts by Dickens, Mayhew and others characterized child-stripping as an activity indulged in by old women who were able to make money by victimizing the weakest strata of society. However, research in the British Library's digitized newspaper collections as well as in parliamentary papers conclusively demonstrates that child-stripping, far from being the domain of Dickensian crones, was actually perpetrated by older children, notably girls, against children even younger than themselves. Despite widespread revulsion, which at times approached a ‘moral panic’ prompted by the nature of the crime, progressive attitudes largely prevailed with most child-stripping children being sent to reformatories or industrial schools in the hope of reforming their behaviour. This article thus conforms with Foucauldian notions of the switch from physical to mental punishments and aligns with the Victorians’ invention of children as a category of humanity that could be saved.

This article uses a quantitative and qualitative methodology to examine the role that women played as property owners in three mid-nineteenth-century English towns. Using data from the previously under-utilized rate books, we argue that women were actively engaged in urban property ownership as part of a complex financial strategy to generate income and invest speculatively. We show that female engagement in the urban land and property markets was widespread, significant and reflective of local economic structures. Crucially, it also was more complex in form than the historiography has previously acknowledged. The article delivers a final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of women's investment activity, demonstrating that women were active investors in the urban land market as well as the managers of landed estates, business owners and shareholders, thereby opening up new questions about how gender intersected with economic change and growth in the rapidly changing world of nineteenth-century England.

This paper analyses the notion of neighbourhood in Haarlem, a Dutch town in the province of Holland, in the seventeenth century. During the first decades of the century the city magistrates were challenged by huge immigration, religious and cultural pluralism, and, due to the Dutch Revolt, a lack of a strong central power. In spite of these ingredients for social unrest, peace was preserved without too many difficulties. One of the mechanisms that kept society from falling apart was neighbourhood. Several levels of neighbourhood will be studied here and an answer is given for the growing interference of city magistrates with neighbourhood life.

The Cold War era created a gap between two opposing ideologies manifested on all social, economic and spatial levels. However, cities and their material expression maintained their significance, acting as valuable ideological resources.The specific position of Yugoslavia during the Cold War shaped the political background in which Belgrade and its planning and architectural scene developed intensive professional activities and international interactions thus overcoming global tensions. Covering the period from 1948 until 1980, this article identifies the main channels of professional exchange and dissemination beyond the constraints of the Iron Curtain, as well as their influence on the production of urban space in Belgrade.

Oral accounts of life over seven decades in Dashalanr, a popular neighbourhood in central Beijing, reveal a social world that despite being shaped by the state's policies of social and political classification, housing and employment, has been resistant to complete appropriation by them. Based on research in the neighbourhood since 2005, and drawing on Xuanwu District archives, this article examines local residents’ accounts of long decades of hardship and neglect. With an analytical framework that links gender with temporality, place and space, it suggests ways in which their singular experiences can be read as historical narrative.

The multifarious ‘objective’ indicators used to place individuals by class (for example, occupation, wealth, income), or proxies thereof, capture only a part of who we are. More important is our ‘style of life’: our tastes, how we spend what we earn and how this interplays socially to include or exclude us from ‘society’. Of these the most significant cultural site was an individual's house and home, against which, using local property tax records, we can place a defined numeric value. This article analyses class in relation to housing and property values in Nottingham in the first half of the twentieth century.

The article looks at urban stability and crime control in cities with large immigrant communities in sixteenth-century England. It outlines the strategies of shared authority between urban magistrates and leaders of refugee communities to tackle conflict and crime. It argues that the Strangers were able to present themselves as useful and welcome members of their host community, which profited from their arrival. At the same time they managed to keep their specific alien networks within their new places of residence over several generations intact.