By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the continued and rapid growth of cities had given rise to acute problems of municipal policy on both sides of the Atlantic. America had come to its urban experience relatively late – the population of Chicago at the time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened was 50 people – but between 1880 and 1910 the critical shift had taken place in the United States to a population which was over 50 per cent urban. The fifty million town dwellers in America not merely outnumbered the whole population of the UK, but included a large number of recent immigrants from the poorer, non-English speaking countries.

British slaughter-house reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughter-houses and establish public abattoirs in the nineteenth century. Abolition of London's private slaughter-houses was motivated by the congestion created by livestock in city streets, the nuisance of slaughter-house refuse in residential neighbourhoods and public health concerns about diseased meat in the food supply. The butchers successfully defended their private slaughter-houses, illustrating the persistence of the craftsman's workshop and the importance of laissez-faire sentiments in opposition to municipalization in Victorian London.

The paper explores the links between changing transport technology, individual mobility and urban form in the British cities of Manchester and Glasgow in the mid-twentieth century. The variability of individual commuting preferences is stressed, and it is argued that decisions about the provision of public transport rarely took into account the views of individual commuters. It is also suggested that factors governing modal choice have remained quite stable from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Despite widespread interest in the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban planning and architecture as of late, little is known about the city's historical development. This article suggests as a remedy more concerted efforts in comparative history. Comparison with other cities reveals three anomalies: the condition of ex-capitality; a distinctive focus on civil society as the leading dynamic in the city's evolution; and a self-image as a classic ‘second city’, that is, an economic as opposed to political centre. The essay closes with suggestions for future research, and stresses the need for a specifically cultural approach to the urban past.

Recent work on ‘civil society’ has made claims for the past capacity of mutual aid associations to generate ‘social capital’: self-help, trust, solidarity. Friendly societies in nineteenth-century Bristol are examined to test these claims. Their origins and growth are explored, as well as their membership and social, convivial and medical roles. Solidarities of class and neighbourhood are set against evidence of exclusion and division. Trust and close personal ties proved insufficient to avert the actuarial risks that threatened financial security.

The houses in early modern European cities almost all had names and signs. These are usually taken to be an early form of advertising, or else a way of finding one's way around the city in times before street names and numbering. This article argues that their primary purpose was to mark the individual, family or ethnic identity of the house owner or tenant. During the eighteenth century the names and signs changed in character, and by the mid-nineteenth century they had almost disappeared from city centres, primarily as a result of changes in individual and family identity among the urban middle classes, and of the transformation of neighbourhood communities under the pressure of urban economic and social integration. The evolution of house names and shop signs therefore illustrates the changing relationship between the city's residents and the urban environment.

The Hobrecht Plan of 1862 is the framework for Berlin's urban development. The changing assessments of this plan over the past 150 years can be followed using contemporary evaluations of street and park layout and the Mietskaserne (tenement). Following early suggestions that it was authoritarian, and persistent criticism that it was responsible for bad housing, it later came to be seen more positively, as renewal and conservation took over from clearance and when reunification highlighted its significance as a common factor in the new capital city.

The article begins by showing the differential impact of slum clearance on regions, conurbations and major cities through the three decades of the slum clearance campaign which began in 1955. It discusses the main methods of clearance procedure, the nature of compensation and the relation of clearance to ‘unfit’ housing. House condition surveys revealed an increasing mismatch between patterns of unfit housing and those of slum clearance and this began, it is argued, in the 1960s. Factors such as the development of property markets, and the rise of owner occupation, had differential economic and political effects which in turn reacted on the incidence of clearance.

This article addresses a range of conceptual issues relating to the history of European port cities in order to construct a framework for comparative research. Port cities played a key role in European urban development and their growth was often determined by common factors. Particular attention is paid to the demography of port cities, their specific labour markets and the dominant ideology of merchant capital. The article establishes a basis for analysing case studies of individual port cities and for exploring their location within the overall process of European urbanization.

In analysing the practicability of Victorian proposals to dispose of urban wastes, valuable insights may be gained from the commentaries of agriculturalists and their scientific advisers. The paper reconstructs the debate as to how the sewage of towns and cities might be transferred to farmland, the developing concepts of sewage farming and the ‘sewage farm’, the increasing disillusionment of farmers with sewage irrigation and, finally, the acknowledgement by the turn of the century that the recycling of such wastes was irrelevant to the needs of town and country alike.

This article is a contribution to comparative research between specific urban markets trajectories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and it aims to juxtapose southern European food market experiences, particularly the Barcelona case, with west European ones. Like other big cities in southern and central Europe, Barcelona consolidated a sturdy polycentric system of district markets between 1876 and 1936, just when such markets were beginning to decline in ‘first comers’ cities of Britain and France. In the inter-war period, the market halls of southern European cities played a prominent role in the everyday food trade and as functional and socializing centres in neighbourhoods. They were poles of dense residential and kinship relations for stall vendors, especially women vendors, and foci of a large part of the food retailing business in many neighbourhoods. Barcelona's particular historical circumstances made the public covered market system a fundamental element of neighbourhood commerce and a long-term urban asset.

Early modern Londoners had access to weekly reports on the numbers of deaths. These weekly ‘books of death’ that the Parish Clerks' Company compiled provided the base for a city-wide system whereby the number of deaths in every parish was reported to the Lord Mayor and the monarch. Under James and Charles royal interest led to the extension of the parishes listed in the Bills of Mortality to cover the wider metropolis while readers developed strategies for interpreting these weekly figures. In 1662 statistics derived from the annual summaries of the London Bills provided the base for John Graunt's path-breaking actuarial calculations. However, despite Graunt's demonstration of the importance of supplementary data that the Bills had incorporated, a system geared to report the weekly ebb and flow of epidemics was unable to provide the statistics that statisticians wanted. Rather than blaming the Bills, disappointed scholars claimed that the female parish searchers were incompetent.

This special section of Urban History explores the spatial histories of urban house numbering and the calculative rationalities of government since the Enlightenment. More than a mere footnote to the history of postal communications, the house number was first introduced as an inscriptive device to serve a wide range of governmental purposes, from military conscription and the quartering of soldiers to census-taking and the policing of urban populations. The spatial practice of house numbering can therefore be seen as a ‘political technology’ that was developed to reorganize urban space according to the dictates of numerical calculation. The articles in this special section examine the historical emergence of house numbering, and related practices, in different geographical circumstances, illustrating the spatial strategies of governmentality and the tactics of resistance that shaped the spatial organization of the modern city.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics acted as a rite of passage for post-war Japan, symbolizing the modernization of the city and the country. This was reflected by the space and architecture of the venues. Urban development of Olympic cities has been scrutinized recently but the symbolic implications have been touched upon only in passing, most especially in Tokyo's case. This article will show how symbolic layers of architecture and space aimed at linking history and modernity while bypassing the highly problematic legacy of ultra-nationalism and World War II. An important hub for transmitting this message was the Meiji Shrine dedicated to the first emperor of modern Japan. The hallmark building of the 1964 Games, Kenzo Tange's National Gymnasium, interacted with the shrine by way of an architectonic axis connecting them. This contrasted with the different spatial styles evident at the 1960 Olympics in Rome and 1972 Olympics in Munich, which testified to their different relationships to the national past. While developing infrastructure such as canalization and traffic was very important for Tokyo, symbolic revitalization of the city's fabric was equally crucial.

The paper uses unusually rich evidence from a manuscript life history written in 1901 from personal diaries to explore the changing relationship between home and workplace in Victorian London. The life history of Henry Jaques demonstrates the way in which decisions about employment and residence were related both to each other and to stages of the family life course. The uncertainty of work, lack of income to support a growing family, rising aspirations, the constant threat of illness, the ease of moving between rented property, close ties between home and workplace, the stresses produced by home working, and the attractions of suburbanization all interacted to shape the residential and employment history of Jaques and his family. The themes exemplified by this detailed life history were also relevant to many other people. Evidence collected from a large-scale project on lifetime residential histories is used to place the experiences of Henry Jaques in a broader context, and to show how they related to the changing social and economic structure of Victorian London.

This article examines the problem of illicit labour from the perspective of transformations in the (local) distribution channels. Rather than large masters circumventing the guilds’ rules regarding labour market entry or large merchants shifting from a Kauf to a Verlag system, early modern manufacturing guilds in Antwerp confronted mercers and wholesalers who entered into production without being masters. In response, the guilds extended their rules, so that their regulations actually matured in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than (labour market) deregulation and proto-industrialization, the issue was the disappearance of the straightforward link between production and retailing, tied together by mastership.

Few theories have left their mark on urban studies to the extent that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has in the last few decades. Its background in Science and Technology Studies (STS), its critique of the explanatory value of such abstractions as ‘class’ and ‘society’ and its efforts to transcend society/nature and local/global binarisms inevitably challenged conventional views on cities, urbanization and urban phenomena. Economic and Marxist approaches to the city in particular have been challenged, at least to the extent that they invoke the explanatory force of the economy or capitalism as a global social system and, thus, fall back upon the binarisms under attack from ANT. The network approach questioned architectonic explanatory models (substructure vs. superstructure) and deepened our understanding of actors and agency (both emerging from networks of humans and non-humans). However, ANT has always been subject to criticism too.

Civil society remains the most challenging and all-pervading of concepts, yet too rarely is it examined empirically. The potential of civil society is that it better allows understanding of local political structures as well as cross-class associational activity. Its alternatives, while many, are principally ‘public life’ and ‘influence’, both of which have their own highly respected traditions. It is argued here that civil society offers a powerful analysis of structure and action in the urban world, and that it is one mediated by municipal government. To operationalize this definition, this article will introduce three further concepts: ‘enshrinement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘legitimacy’. Each of these is linked to the relationship of the municipal state with that at Westminster, the formal mechanism through which the stability of civil society in nineteenth-century Britain was negotiated.