The guest editors for this special issue of Urban History are both Canadian, and for many Canadians the hottest conflict of the Cold War might have been the 1972 ‘Summit Series’, eight hockey games played between the Russian Red Army team and an all-star cast of Canadian professionals. Without delving into the sporting glories of the series (Canada won it, four games to three, with one tie), we can aver that the event was as much about diplomacy, national identity and political-economic rivalry in the context of the Cold War as it was about skating and scoring.

Professor Marion Bowley, writing of the housing boom of the 1930s which was uniquely based upon sales to owner-occupiers, remarked that ‘we have no means of knowing statistically the extent of owner-occupation before the Great War…Actually, it is more important to know why the change occurred [in the inter-war period] than to know its actual size, and there is no need to be led astray in a futile search for non-existent statistics’. The same ban would seem to extend to analysis of investment ownership of housing before 1914. What I want to suggest is that it is indeed possible to obtain statistics relating not only to owner occupation but also to the overall structure of the urban housing market; and that far from leading us astray, it is in fact important to acquire precise figures in order to understand with more certainty the structure of the nineteenth-century housing market – something of which we have remarkably little knowledge.

Post-war planning and rebuilding of Britain's towns and cities led to rapid changes in medieval building stock, topography and character, as well as below-ground archaeology. Two case-studies of large, industrial, bomb-damaged yet important former medieval towns are examined in this article: Southampton and Coventry. Together, they illustrate the range of local responses to protecting what we now term the ‘historic environment’ in the period 1945 to 1955 at a time when a limited protection mechanism was introduced through the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The responsibility for compiling lists of protected buildings and providing resources to protect them largely fell to local solutions. Using previously unpublished archive material from both national and local sources, this article offers an alternative ‘bottom-up’, local, organized grass-roots viewpoint to most official ‘top-down’ accounts.

This article examines how modern historiography has developed quite differentiated views on the way medieval cities have given expression to renewal and to creativity. ‘National’ traditions have played a highly influential role in modifying the general views articulated in the major syntheses produced by scholars such as Max Weber and Henri Pirenne at the beginning of the twentieth century. An almost jubilant way of looking at the city as the hotbed of modernity gave room, in the decades after the Great War, to pessimism and a negative view on urbanity, before a more nuanced and positive view has been re-established after World War II and in the course of recent paradigmatic changes.

Three major conclusions are derived from close study of Britain's pioneering directories in the 1770s and 1780s. First, they show that over 30,000 leading townsmen and women were enmeshed into the burgeoning knowledge grid through the public listings of their addresses, status and occupations. Secondly, a close examination of that information reveals a notable extent of occupational specialization – among both men and women, and among individuals and the nascent firms – thus confirming one of Adam Smith's key observations about the nature of Britain's increasingly commercialized, if still largely pre-mechanized, economy. Thirdly, aggregative analysis highlights systematic differences in the socio-economic characteristics of different towns: from manufacturing, commercial and professional centres to the great capital cities to the specialist leisure towns and resorts – all interlocking in an inter-dependent urban network. Hence this evidence suggests that a generic re-interpretation of all large towns as ‘residential leisure towns’ on the strength of their flourishing cultural life (as recently proposed by Stobart and Schwarz) is misleading, as it obscures significant systemic differences between different types of towns. At the same time, however, the interlinked urban network was generating a confidently shared urbanism, bridging between aristocratic and middle-class society. That link was exemplified by the listing of numerous titled and gentlemanly ‘town gentry’ alongside the business leaders – as the directories in effect flourished their collective calling cards.

At the turn of the 1910s, a productive tension opposed two competing kinds of North American city planning actors: urban reformers (such as Benjamin Marsh, founder of the National Conference on City Planning (NCCP) in 1909) and professional city planners (such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, new director of the NCCP in 1911). Analysing the many unsuccessful attempts, between 1911 and 1913, to send the ‘Cities and Town Planning Exhibition’ – a British itinerant exhibition directed by the Scottish thinker and reformer Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) – to tour America, this article examines the transnational similarities and interactions between American and European urbanist milieux; the competing scales (municipal, national, international) in this dialogue; and the strategies of the professionalization of planning.

As it happened in other parts of the world, the ‘Garden City’ was used more as an image than as a model in early twentieth-century Latin America. While attempting to set the regional diffusion of the model in international perspective, the review intends to explore the analogous use of the concept by Latin American historiography, following the two senses according to which it has been simplified: namely for its bucolic resonance, and to denote the suburban layouts that were different from traditional models.

This article seeks to understand how the emergence of public dance hall culture affected the consumption of dance music among different social classes in Vienna between the years 1780 and 1814, when the number of dance halls more than tripled. Using mainly contemporary eyewitness accounts as sources, this article argues that social distinctions, rather than disappearing, were reinforced after the commercialization of the Viennese dance halls. As turn-of-the-century Vienna was a major city with a heterogeneous population, the diversity of social classes was reflected in its ballroom culture. This is because the Viennese elite, the nobility and the higher bourgeoisie, was very reluctant to share social space with the lower classes. Although to some degree the amount of social space expanded in the city at the time, the use of the space, however, remained socially diverse.

Shortly into his path-breaking study of The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London, Peter Guillery remarks that ‘houses are principally interesting because people live in them’ (p. 10). To urban historians the observation might seem unexceptional, even banal. To many architectural historians his comment would be incomprehensible. Therein lies the difficulty for the urban historian with a concern for housing, public buildings and planning. There is a wealth of serious academic studies of architecture, but the majority are written in a language which can seem arcane to the uninitiated and address an agenda which appears little interested in those who inhabited the buildings. At the heart of the problem lies the requirement to treat the built form primarily as a work of art, so that what is studied has to justify itself as an object worthy of aesthetic consideration, and has to relate to an established stylistic canon and chronology. Judged in this light, considerations of user and usage are largely irrelevant, and can appear an invitation to slip into the sort of popular architectural discourse, common in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, in which dwellings are valued primarily for the celebrities and anecdotes associated with them. People are germane only to the extent that they designed buildings, as architects, or commissioned them, as patrons of the arts. Among the two most influential figures in developing and in particular disseminating the art-history perspective on architecture in twentieth-century Britain were Nikolaus Pevsner and John Summerson. Today their presence is felt not only in the world of scholarship, where it has not gone unchallenged, but also and more importantly in popular perceptions of architecture, as mediated through guide literature, the amenity societies (like the National Trust, the Georgian Group and the Victorian Society) and the conservation movement. It is an influence which has been ambivalent. On the one hand, it has led to a far deeper popular understanding and appreciation of architectural form and its history, and has saved many fine buildings. On the other hand, it is has led to a dissociation of form and human usage, a devaluation of structures and traditions not defined as canonic and a blindness to the subjective and ideological nature of architectural history itself.

The emergence of tap water supplied through water grids changed the spatial structure of cities. As a commercial port containing foreign settlements and divided urban political systems, Tianjin became host to two major, long-term water supply systems. Different social environments and systems of municipal government meant that tap water was accepted by urban society in different ways. In the settlements, the supply of tap water was the foundation for the formation of a modern community. In the Old City, the introduction of tap water for the most part had a different effect: it manifested the ways in which traditional and new lifestyles conflicted and mingled with each other. Yet, in any case, as tap water entered the lives of the people from the end of the Qing to the Republican period, new ideas of health and hygiene associated with tap water were gradually accepted, and modern urban lifestyles gradually took shape.

Readers of the Yearbook may readily ascertain from its register of research and bibliography that the energy applied to the urban history of Victorian England has not only been substantial but is far from expended. The attraction of huge amounts of raw material, both quantitative and literary, is difficult to resist. However, the challenge of seeking less solidly founded insights with the less abundant and more indirect sources of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries has met with a far less enthusiastic response. In any case the sparseness of eighteenth-century sources is less stark than at first appears. Although by no means as reliable or as widely ramified in content as census data, Anglican parish registers offer considerable scope for anyone willful enough to resist the census honey pot. Particularly when supported by ancillary sources, such as maps and directories, they provide sufficient information for at least a tentative exploration of the beginning and unfolding of an urban process whose mature expression is revealed in the cornucopia of the middle-nineteenth century.

The constitutional change which was embodied in the Union of Parliaments in 1707 provided for the retention of distinctive Scottish codes governing banking, the church and the law. Such a guarantee ensured that the economic, social and cultural idiosyncracies of Scotland would not be absorbed or Anglicized, and that in the long term the unique institutional framework would continue to stamp its character upon most aspects of daily Scottish life, urban and rural. The tacit acceptance of these legal and institutional differences in certain parts of the kingdom became compounded over the decades so that attempts to modify most aspects of Scottish urban life required separate treatment rather than an extension of British Statutes. Indeed tables of parliamentary statutes in most years display a significant number of purely Scottish bills, thereby reflecting the necessity of specialized legal draughtsmanship, skilled in the peculiarities of Scots law, to accommodate the changes desired north of the border. Two important consequences of these arrangements are worth noting. First, the basis of the Scottish legal and administrative structure was distinct, and second, to amend that framework, separate Scottish bills were frequently required, and thus the timing, coverage and intent of the law were at variance with the remainder of the country.

This article first explains why the London County Council (LCC) was, by the 1930s, the largest provider of hospital beds in Britain. It then examines contemporary perceptions of the LCC hospital service showing how the complex series of responses to it fed into debates about the nature of the post-war National Health Service. Finally, an assessment is made of the service's place in the history of the health services.

South Cardiff was once dependent on the export of coal and the production of steel, but these activities had faded by the 1970s, creating economic stagnation and physical dereliction. However, the area was rechristened ‘Cardiff Bay’ in the mid-1980s and was the focus of an ambitious and contested state-funded regeneration. This article argues that regeneration was broadly successful, although not without failures, and that government remained willing to intervene heavily in some small areas. The main contribution is to identify and analyse how local authorities retained influence over regeneration, in contrast to approaches taken elsewhere by central government.

This article offers the first detailed history of the children's playground in Britain in the early twentieth century. Despite being a common feature of towns and cities, the playground has rarely been examined by historians. In response, the article charts how changing conceptions of childhood, alternative visions of the city, technological innovation and shifting ideas about health and exercise shaped both the imagined function and material form of the playground ideal. Making visible the historical assumptions hidden in playground swings and slides helps to contextualize both existing scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century adventure playground and present-day efforts to create more equitable urban environments.

To the historian the map has traditionally been used as little more than a descriptive or illustrative device which helped clarity of exposition by enabling events to be located, campaigns comprehended and treaties interpreted. It was not in itself regarded as a critical instrument of analysis, other than in highly specialized, peripheral studies such as the history of exploration. Maps simply illustrated arguments based on documentary evidence; the map as a document, original or secondary, was regarded with great suspicion. Undoubtedly the inaccuracy of early maps was partly to blame, especially to an historian more concerned with delineatory accuracy than with what was contemporary perception of the world. But even if historical maps were acceptable in evidence, the derivation of conclusions from mapped material was barely permissible and usually, in reviews, the subject of severe warning if not actual stricture. These attitudes have largely disappeared over the last decade in line with changes in direction of historical research. Perhaps the earlier influence came from pre-historic archaeology, where in the nature of things there was no documentary evidence and inference had to be made from the distribution of characteristic artifacts. This, in itself, taking its methodology from geographical or locational analysis, has been translated into a study adopting sophisticated methods for the analysis of distribution patterns. Another important influence has been the majestic work of H. C. Darby in interpreting Domesday in cartographic terms and thereby demonstrating the significance of such an approach to a widely known historical document. Even so, it is in urban history that the use of map evidence and mapped material has made the greatest impact.

Irish historians have been rather slow to recognize that urban history constituted a valid area for scholarly research. Publications in this field prior to 1960 were few in number, while as late as 1979 Gearoid MacNiocaill criticized the discipline for its undue bias towards three areas: the antiquarian, the topographical and geographical and the legal. This criticism retains some validity today: antiquarian or topographical publications relating to Irish towns have a flourishing popular market, but following decades of neglect the history of Irish towns and cities is being explored with an unprecedently high level of attention, while areas totally unknown are being opened up and new dimensions are emerging. In the process even comparatively recent works such as those edited by Butlin in 1977 have become thoroughly outdated, while the papers presented to the 1979 Irish Conference of Historians, which were intended to act as ‘both a framework to be consulted and a map of the way to future progress’ also present an inadequate picture of contemporary urban history scholarship. In the process of this scholarly awakening, however, Irish urban history is emerging as a discipline with an individual personality. While the directions of research are strongly influenced by work in England, the U.S. and Europe, the specific Irish preoccupations are a reflection of both mainstream Irish history and, to some extent, of contemporary Irish politics and society.

Belfast, with its history of communal violence, is normally seen as lying outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century British urban development. The queen's visit, however, reveals a community characterized by much the same mixture of civic pride and diffidence that characterized other provincial centres. The episode also casts light on the ambivalent attitude of the British and Irish political establishments to the new industrial town, and on Belfast's ambiguous position within the Irish urban hierarchy.

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.