This article suggests that the post-colonial viewpoint could be valuable in understanding Beijing during the colonial crisis between 1900 and 1928. Through the examination of urban space in the Legation Quarter, it pays attention to the emerging special types and forms, as well as the mechanisms behind them, and explains the transposition of a foreign modern cityscape to the local context. The Europeanized district in Beijing was a symbol of Western civilization and the uneven power dynamics in the city, and was regarded as both a spatial model and a competitor for the Chinese government's attempts to create a modern capital.

Since the 1970s, policy-makers and the press have rendered young people, particularly those of black and minority ethnic backgrounds, synonymous with ‘inner-city crisis’. Focusing upon the high-density, multi-storey Hulme estate in Manchester, this article seeks to transcend stereotypical representations of these residents and illuminate their perspectives of the inner city. Conceptualizing the inner city as both a discursive and lived space, the article traces the intersections between its representation and residents’ testimonies to assess how far residents used prevalent understandings of Hulme as a space of crime and social breakdown respectively to shape their narratives of everyday life.

This article examines the sounds and smells of late Renaissance Florence by analysing stone inscriptions posted in public streets and squares by the city's policing officials, the Otto di Guardia, during the Medici grand ducal period (1569–1737). The plaques contain sensory regulations prohibiting sounds, smells and sights considered socially and environmentally polluting. Unpublished archival records, printed materials and material artifacts reveal how sensory legislation developed as an increasingly public element of late Renaissance Florentine governance, while at the same time revealing how Florentines often resisted or ignored sensory regulation. Digitally mapping the sensory legislation plaques visualizes the intersections of sense, space and social history in new ways.

This article traces how the ‘wet’ market was integrated into the infrastructure of public housing estates in Hong Kong through modularization from 1969 to 1975. This includes how spatial modularization concepts extended into administration and management, incorporating responsibilities and categories of goods that ultimately reflected colonial ideas of health, food hygiene and social and spatial order. In doing so, this article theorizes how the modular market embodied the ways colonial government departments, architects and managers navigated notions of the materiality of ‘wetness’ in the market through its design in response to management and customer needs, but nevertheless how consumers found ways to re-narrate such spaces through maintaining ‘wet’ cultural exchanges and practices. Using government documents and photographs, this article combines a design historical approach to materiality with empirical evidence to expand on histories and practices of the ‘wet market’, bringing the everyday discourses of modernity in Hong Kong to the fore.

It is somewhat surprising that music has only recently become a serious subject for urban historians. Musicologists and music historians, urban geographers, planners and all others who deal with diverse aspects of local development, cultural industry and the built environment have fared much better in tackling the fundamental social implications of music in a particular locality. It is not an accident that, for example, the recent volume of Built Environment, ‘Music and the city’, edited by an economic geographer, Robert C. Kloosterman, deals with urban spaces of creativity and the role of black music today, some of which have by now an ascribed ‘urban’ adjective in North America.1 It is also only natural, however, that Kloosterman's enquiry should concentrate on music in the city of the present and rarely venture into the time periods before World War II.

During most of the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the main commercial hub of north-western Europe. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, Bruges lost much of its allure as an economic metropolis. One of the most urgent challenges the urban authorities were facing was the navigability of the waterways in and around the city. While the city government made structural investments to remedy the problems, written sources constantly emphasized how important it was that Bruges remained accessible from the sea. During the same period, the earliest preserved maps of the city and its environment emerged. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that these visual representations were informed by the same commercial ideology. Despite, or exactly because of, the city's decreasing maritime accessibility, they conceived Bruges as a place that could easily be reached by trading ships and where merchants could trade in the best possible circumstances.

Based on a systematic analysis of local mainstream and activist media, this article reconstructs conflicts over the framing of British and Irish squatters in Leiden during the 1990s. During this decade, several hundreds of English-speaking youths travelled to Leiden and surrounding villages to work as seasonal labourers. Often lacking access to regular housing, many of them resorted to squatting houses and as a result got involved in local urban development conflicts. While proprietors, neighbours, aldermen and the police all tried to gain support via the media, squatters also contacted media outlets to counter bad press. This article reconstructs the ensuing struggle over the image of the foreign squatter in Leiden's local media during the 1990s, and analyses the dynamics between the various groups that attempted to influence the squatters’ framing.

This paper discusses the treatment of space and social interaction in the emerging modern city, and argues that the notion of ‘reserve’ developed by Georg Simmel blurs the key polarity between secrecy and privacy. Case histories of home visiting and gossip are used to examine how the boundaries between the two forms of blocked communication were constructed and negotiated in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury British city. There was no unilinear transition from open to closed personal contacts, but rather a series of conflicts and anxieties generated by issues of class and political authority. The contingent distinction between privacy and secrecy revolved around the question of trust, which was in turn a function of domestic and corporate prosperity.

The IPHS conference in Yokohama demonstrates that the history of planning is in rude health. The discipline now includes the histories of planning around the world, and scholars from many different countries are reflecting deeply on their own and each other's experiences. Planners, the institutes they work in, the evolution and transmission of their ideas and of course their application and success or failure are now considered from a multitude of regional and disciplinary perspectives. The vitality of these debates in the twenty-first-century global urban world holds much promise that historical study can contribute to understanding some of the challenges facing contemporary cities.

Through a case-study of one significant courtyard house owned by the Drapers’ Company and known as ‘The Erber’, this article argues that mercantile livery companies supported London's growing centrality within an expanding network of trade through the use and development of corporate properties. The micro-history at the heart of this article reveals that the ‘everyday’ built environment of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London was shaped not just by the city elite. Also relevant to that process were the different sorts of tenants of the Drapers’ Company, who benefited from the expansion at all levels of London's mercantile activity. The trickle-down effects of global mercantilism affected spaces small and large. The investigation of the Erber highlights the domestic implications of global commercial expansion.

By looking at the spatial cultures of nineteenth-century provincial administrative towns in colonial Bengal, this article problematizes notions of city, town or country and their relationships. It looks at colonial provincial governance within a framework that extended far beyond ‘formal’ governmental administrative spaces and thus engages with the complex overlap between categories like work, home and leisure. It argues that provincial urbanism in colonial Bengal defied clear-cut categories and in effect created a ‘fluid’ spatial culture, which was distinct from, but also calibrated between, metropolitan centres on the one hand and a vast rural hinterland on the other.

The reimagining of Beiping – now ‘Beijing’ – reveals the limits of community in early twentieth-century China. Despite the centrality of the crowd to the imagining, construction and management of other Chinese cities, and despite an emerging local advocacy of ‘revitalization’ for Beiping and the Beiping crowd, literary and official understandings of the city that marginalized the mass of Beiping residents remained dominant, highlighting the tension between symbol and community in the construction of place and nation.

This article focuses on aspects of the economic evolution of La Coruña during the 1940s and 1950s by analysing the entrepreneurial activities in a stage characterized by an urban demographic take-off. The tertiary sector, based mainly on port traffic, fishing, commerce and other traditional urban functions, contributed significantly to the diversification of the economic structure of this town.

A municipal boundary dispute between Dublin's nationalist city council and its independent unionist suburbs in the early twentieth century was symptomatic of a much deeper disagreement over national identity within the United Kingdom. Considering urban councils as the link between the state and local civil society (or subscriber democracy), and using theories proposed by Graeme Morton, R.J. Morris and Norton E. Long, along with illustrative contrasts from municipal behaviour in Edinburgh, this article examines these relationships in Edwardian Dublin. It argues that the modernization of Irish municipal government in 1898 empowered Dublin in unforeseen ways. By amplifying existing divergent identities, and providing a platform for the nascent Irish state, municipal government reforms contributed significantly to the break-up of the UK in 1922.