This article investigates the socio-economic and morphological aspects of how the city of Cork, having lost the salient elements of its medieval character in the early 1600s, transformed into a prosperous Atlantic port city during the period of renaissance it experienced between 1660–1700. Despite the political upheavals caused by the expulsions of the Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s, the city increased in size and population from the early 1660s onwards as it began to thrive on the provisions trade to the colonial plantations of British America. In the process, Cork assumed a higher rank in the general European urban hierarchy.

In January 1969, the Israeli minister of housing announced his intention of declaring a set of neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, known as Zikhronot-Nahlaot, an urban-renewal area. For the next seven years, the topic of renewal would be central in a public struggle led by two organizations of residents against a brace of establishment players. The resulting trail of documentation tells the story of a community struggle. By focusing on the role of the residents in shaping this transformation, we aim to uncover the residents’ perceptions of the renewal plans, their actions to make sure their point of view would be taken into account, and the extent of their influence on policy-makers, planners and implementers. We claim that residents’ ideas became part of the policy-makers’ and planners’ discourse. The internal discussions reveal a transformation from the ‘bulldozer era’ to the urban-renewal approach and then to first flickerings of equity planning.

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 In the process even comparatively recent works such as those edited by Butlin in 1977 have become thoroughly outdated, while the papers presented to the 1979 Irish Conference of Historians, which were intended to act as ‘both a framework to be consulted and a map of the way to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.

This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. It shifts historiographical interest from major urban centres in colonial India (such as Bombay or Calcutta) and instead attempts a greater understanding of smaller urban centres. In the process, it also interrogates the category of hill stations, which have been understood as exotic and scenic sites rather than as towns that were integral to the colonial economy. In arguing that hill stations, particularly Darjeeling, were not merely the scenic and healthy ‘other’ of the clamorous, dirty and diseased plains of India, it refutes suggestions that the ‘despoiling’ or overcrowding of Darjeeling was incremental to the purposes of its establishment. Instead, it suggests that Darjeeling was part of the colonial mainstream; its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy was effected from the time of its establishment. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic and its functional elements persisted throughout.

Charles Dickens visited Preston in January 1854 to report on the cotton lock-out of that year. What he saw contributed to his vision of the archetypal northern, urban industrial centre, Coketown:

It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled.

Three years later a rather different topographical account appeared in Charles Hardwick's history of the borough:

Notwithstanding the occasional carpings of a few splenetic travellers, Preston is generally and deservedly recognized as one of the cleanest and most pleasantly situated manufacturing towns in England. The cotton factories are chiefly erected to the north and east of the old aristocratic borough …. and do not as yet materially interfere with the more ‘fashionable’ or picturesque sections of the district.

The contrast illuminates the shortcomings of the town history both as literature and historical geography; but indicates the tenor of Prestonian self-justification. It is precisely this prosaic subjectivity which makes the histories a rich source. As Peter Clark asserts, ‘even fifth-rate urban historians sometimes have an important story to tell.’

Unlike many other towns with long-established traditions of urban chronicling, history writing in Preston did not blossom until the nineteenth century.

British colonial administrators had two strategies for governing towns in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used Sanitary Boards to improve public health and to control populations indirectly, and they relied on police forces for direct forms of discipline. Both strategies reveal the overall weakness of the British colonial regime in that region.

Whilst the historian of the nineteenth-century town is able to turn to the censuses for information about the demographic and occupational character of a particular community, nothing comparable survives for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lists of the entire population are extremely rare and records enumerating sections of the community only, such as tax lists, are difficult to use without firm evidence of the proportions exempted and the levels of evasion. An impression of the social and occupational structure of the early modern town can be obtained only by deriving material from a range of local as well as national sources.

The early nineteenth-century manufacturing town was a diverse and transient environment that inspired a varied canon of printed imagery. Alongside folio engravings and souvenir prints, one of the most prevalent genres of urban imagery was the commercial advertisement. This article demonstrates the value of early pictorial advertisements in accessing contemporary attitudes to urban manufacturing and to provincial urbanization in general. It argues that in a climate of urban rivalry, artists and publishers inherited and invented new visual formulae with which to promote manufactories and commercial premises to tradesmen, consumers and tourists. It concludes that the resulting imagery throws into question the prevalent historical caricature of the early nineteenth-century manufacturing town as a place of deprivation, disorder and decay.

This article focuses on Otl Aicher's design and Günther Grzimek's garden architecture for the 1972 Munich Olympics. We argue that the functionalist aesthetics of the Munich Olympic site should be interpreted as a translation into graphic and landscape design of 1960s progressivism in West German society and democracy. In the process Aicher and Grzimek somewhat paradoxically drew on the tradition of the Olympic Gesamtkunstwerk inaugurated in Berlin in 1936.

Divided into three separate phases, different causative factors are presented for the emergence of urban centres in India from AD 600–1200. Agrarian expansion and the growth of markets encouraged trade, both internal and external, and the foundation of towns owed much to this interplay and to the establishment of religious centres.

This article examines the level of expenditure on health care provision in English and Welsh county boroughs during the inter-war period. It focuses in particular on key individual services such as maternity and child welfare to show that while there was a general trend to increased municipal health care expenditure, when this is disaggregated significant variations emerge between services, between boroughs and over time. It is argued that such analysis is of itself revealing, previously neglected and necessary for further qualitative analysis of the as yet little understood inter-war municipal medicine sector.

In Renaissance Italy clothing, particularly of women, was strictly regulated; individuals were regularly denounced when walking through the city. Modesty was a virtue in a republican state and dress played a major part in urban identity, reflecting social values and those of the political regime. Sumptuary laws were a major mode of control, particularly of patrician women, whose dress reflected both their own and their family's wealth and status. Despite increased availability of luxurious fabrics encouraged by urban policies, legislation was used to prohibit new forms of dress and raise money for state coffers. At the end of the fifteenth century Pandolfo Petrucci (1452–1512) took control of Siena. The inner elite of his regime, particularly its female members, were given exemptions from the strict legislation and were able to flaunt their elevated status and the new social order.

The intention of this paper is to review the ways in which the role of urban elites has been examined and interpreted, and to show how the traditional concepts of social control and hegemony have required modification. The paper identifies two phases of study. The first phase was descriptive, concerned primarily with the identification and categorization of elites. The second phase, which began in the 1980s, was interactional and explored the influence of elites in inter-class relationships. The interactional role of elites is discussed in detail in relation to the exemplar of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester. The paper continues by considering the changes which elites began to undergo in the transitional conditions of the late nineteenth century. The significance of recent work is assessed and the paper concludes with some comments regarding the future direction of study on urban elites.

Finnish children today enjoy a relatively high level of independent mobility. This article discusses how different urban planning professionals defined children's needs in a post-World War II Helsinki that was undergoing rapid urbanization, and how these discourses relate to childhood memories of the time. The emphasis on family by the planning professionals led to major changes in the city structure, including developed play areas, safer streets and shorter distances to schools. This study suggests that a dominant understanding of the importance of outdoor activities has contributed to the relatively stable level of independent mobility of the children in Helsinki.

Despite its National Socialist origins, the post-war use of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport has seen it recast as a ‘symbol of freedom’. Since the airport's 2008 closure, the site has been caught between calls for increased engagement with its use under the Third Reich and economic incentives to repackage it as an attractive events location. Through analysing the different strategies through which Tempelhof's past is negotiated, this article will highlight the contested nature of Berlin's relationship with the past and the complex interaction between memory politics and more pragmatic issues.

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 stresses the need to develop a more systematic approach to data sources in a context of greater European comparative study. The work and initial findings of the European Directories Project to provide a resource guide of one universal European data source, the town directory, are outlined here. Pathways and mechanisms of directory evolution are considered with special reference to Germany. This is succeeded by a discussion of the problems associated with the compilation of a pan-European directory database and the potential difficulties associated with directory use in urban historical research.

The fortunes of late medieval towns seem to have become rather a contentious topic. That is probably a good thing. It is a poor historical proposition that cannot be illustrated by some evidence, but proof of an historical phenomenon like general decline or decay requires something more than illustration and something that argument may help to secure. So far, however, as S. H. Rigby points out, the debate has suffered from an uncertainty over terms that may frustrate the advance of knowledge and understanding. Two words which he did not mention but which seem to me particularly unclear are ‘decline’ and ‘decay’ themselves. Until they are examined more closely we may not be sure enough of what anyone is trying to prove to know whether he has succeeded or not.

The criticisms of the early nineteenth-century metropolitan water supply by contemporary interest groups have been largely accepted by present day historians. This article argues that these criticisms were undeserved. It is argued that the London water companies provided an adequate amount of water; charged reasonable prices, given their large capital investments; and that, although the quality of water may have been poor compared to modern standards, it was far purer than sometimes supposed.