The Portuguese discovered the uninhabited Azores archipelago in 1427 and started to settle it during the fifteenth century. Angra, located on Terceira Island, soon became the most important Azorean city, leading to rapid urban development. This article investigates the overlooked role of streams in the rise of Angra as a pivotal Atlantic urban centre. Through the intersection of historical and flood modelling methods, it makes a unique contribution to our understanding of Angra's urban morphologic development, highlighting the potential of applying urban flood modelling to analysis of the rise of coastal urban settlement.

This year's publications address seven broad themes: urban growth and migration; the social structure of late medieval towns; women and gender; political communication and the circulation of news; the church in the city; urban decline; and writing about the city.

New Zealand's national myths have emphasized the rural frontier. The archetypal and most commonly celebrated colonist has been the backblocks settler, the cow cockie, and to some extent the gold miner. New Zealanders have never seen much glamour in their towns. Yet from the very beginning New Zealand has been a mainly urban society. Many towns were founded in the early stages of European settlement, and New Zealand has exhibited in modified form the tendency to ‘metropolitanism’ characteristic of other countries that were settled in the mid-nineteenth century. The urban historian could have a very important role to play in helping New Zealanders to come to terms with, and absorb into their sense of national identity, this major aspect of their national existence.

The present bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History from 1992. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken, though many other journals are also checked. There is an index of towns on p. 552

In the history of crime and criminal justice, the city of Goerlitz represents a rather special case. The city magistracy did not feel politically responsible towards the burghers and therefore did not strive to legitimize its rule by administering efficient social control. As a consequence, the formal and inefficient procedures of archaic Saxon law were largely kept intact. Due to this, the level of violence seems to have been higher than in other cities.

The appearance of the Urban History Yearbook marks an important and exciting stage in the development of its subject, not only in this country but wherever it is studied. The study of the urban past is no new thing but what has been so striking about it in the course of the last decade or so has been the almost overwhelming growth in the numbers of scholars taking part in it and the immensely wider range of topics and techniques they have been pursuing.

This article, based on western primary sources, seeks to investigate the relationship between western imperialism in China and the making of modern Chinese statecraft in urban form, focusing on the French perspective and on historical institutionalism. Both internal rebellions and western empires shaped modern Chinese cities. The Chinese response to western intervention is a more complicated story. Pace Paul Cohen, we do need to know about foreign activities in modern China – not as ‘impact-response’ and ‘tradition-modernity’ paradigms – but rather as part of local history, both in terms of local administration and urban landscape. Euro-American expansion and exploitation are not part of a unitary or totalizing enterprise, and warfare and Franco-British conflicts facilitated the making of modern municipal administration in the French Concession of Shanghai; on the other hand, Chinese forces indirectly shaped the structure of the institutions of imperialism, as well as pointing to divergent national approaches to imperialism.

Since the path-breaking work of prominent North American historians such as Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, as well as more recent roundtables in Europe, urban environmental history is now a mature research field, at the intersection of various related approaches. Time has passed since a leader of environmental history, William Cronon, could write that ‘cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received’. In this field, urban history necessarily crosses with environmental history, but also with the history of technology and social and cultural history; whilst its scholars not only emanate from a traditional historical background, but also from geography, science and engineering. Urban environmental historians, as they are referred to here, have duly established the importance of studying the relationships between ‘nature’ (including non-humans) and humans in and around cities. This ‘nature’ is a complex and shifting entity: recent doctoral studies have, for instance, documented rivers transformed by human action, weeds growing in the spatial and social margins of cities and tidal wetlands progressively filled in and built upon. The recently completed Ph.D.s reviewed in this essay see the built environment more as a hybrid of natural elements, like water, plants, animals and human action. Aided by the environmental lens, the scope of the urban historian has also been broadened by studying the ways in which residents’ lives were transformed by the invention, spread and environmental impact of new technologies, as well as the political responses to environmental crises.

This article explores the tendency of citizens to liken their city to other cities in an effort to promote particular visions of their hometown. It examines three mythic visions of fin-de-siècle Cracow – the Polish Mecca, the Little Vienna on the Vistula and modern Big-City Cracow – as reflected in contemporary accounts and historical scholarship, demonstrating how they functioned to promote national, imperial and interurban identification. Most critical of the national vision, the article advocates a broader perspective.

In the 2000s, Berlin saw the formation of so-called Baugruppen (construction groups) – associations of small-scale investors who pooled their modest capital to commission an architect and construct a multistorey building in which they would own and occupy a flat. They were mostly middle-class families united by a belief in community values and neighbourly contact as well as the qualities of urban living. This article will present the construction groups as an example of bottom-up architecture in an industrialized western country, in which individual initiatives and user-centred design had to be negotiated within a highly professionalized environment, as well as with contradictory political positions. It will show that construction groups brought together various threads of Berlin's recent urban history: the gradual integration of radical post-1968 lifestyles into mainstream society, the ‘return to the inner city’ connected with the increasing popularity of ‘new tenements’, and the evolution of innovative, post-functionalist architecture.

This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

Federally funded ‘urban rehabilitation’ began with the Housing Act of 1954 in the United States. Baltimore's Harlem Park was selected to pilot this experimental programme; a logical choice seeing how the pilot largely built on a programme dating from the prehistory of legislated urban rehabilitation that originated in Baltimore. This article lays bare the history of this programme, known as the ‘Baltimore Plan’, which offered empirical evidence that substantiated the potential of participatory urban planning. Beyond transferring upon minority communities a level of control over housing that black communities had seldom possessed before, the Baltimore Plan also constituted in an alternative to public housing.

In this article, I rethink the genre of urban biographies and argue that it can be given new potency when remodelled to become a means of reinvigorating the critical public. In the first part, I reflect upon some of the recent biographies of cities in the Czech Republic. In the second part, I discuss promising strategies, drawn from a sample of innovative urban biographies. In the final part, I outline the guiding principles of an adapted model for urban biographies. I propose that the cities must be repoliticized and recentred in the biographies, which entails adopting a political concept of the city, a deconstructive approach, utilization of the urban presence and a more urban-sensitive treatment of time.

Researching the history of daily greetings is challenging, because references are casual and scattered through many sources. Nonetheless, some broad trends are apparent. In eighteenth-century Britain, the old tradition of deep bowing and curtseying was slowly attenuating into a brisker touching of the cap or head (for men) and a quick bob (for women). Yet that transition was not the whole story. Simultaneously, a new form of urban greeting, in the form of the handshake, was emerging. The strengths and weaknesses of many different sources are here assessed, including novels, plays, letters, diaries, etiquette books, travelogues and legal depositions, as well as artwork. Strategies for analysis are identified, with a warning against generalizing from single references in single sources. Finally, the emergence of the handshake among the middle class in Britain's eighteenth-century towns gives a clear signal that socio-cultural change does not invariably start at the ‘top’ and ‘trickle down’.