While town twinning has played a crucial role in reconciliation and reconstruction processes in Europe after World War II, urban historians have not yet paid sufficient attention to it. This special issue thus addresses this historiographical neglect through a set of case-studies that examine the role of twinned cities in post-war reconciliation and reconstruction between former enemy nations and across the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. The framework that underpins all contributions rests on the use of ‘twinned cities’ as an umbrella term to denote various forms of inter-municipal links and builds on similarly broad definitions of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘reconstruction’.

Town twinning is often seen as a linear driving force of European integration. This article argues that town twinning’s historicity is more complex. The initial post-war period, according to today’s practitioners’ accounts, was characterized by a high degree of personal involvement which transformed into an exposure to relationship uncertainty. By way of contrast, twinning practices since the 1990s are reported as being driven by a more managerial logic. The shift from the imaginary of ‘reconciliation’ to that of ‘integration’ comes along with a change in twinning practices, the distribution of responsibilities and the share of personal involvement and exposure.

In 1959, East German Dresden and western Polish Wrocław were twinned to promote cross-border contact between political leaders, worker delegations and cultural groups. Officially formed to promote worker solidarity among friendly East Bloc regimes, in practice the inter-relationship exposed a troubling history that was just below the surface. In the recent aftermath of Nazi defeat, the German population of Breslau (over 600,000 people) had fled or been expelled from a city which had long been German. At the same time that Breslau became Polish Wrocław, a significant number of old Breslauers settled in the East German province of Saxony, especially Dresden. This article uses archival and published sources to show how, under the umbrella of worker exchanges, field trips and official amity, the sister-city programme unintentionally became a venue for German exiles from Breslau to encounter Wrocławian delegations in Dresden and to return ‘home’ to discover Wrocław’s post-war Polish reality.

This article explores how political division manifested itself in the electricity systems of West and East Berlin and analyses the strategies of both throughout the 40 years of the Cold War. It reveals how the goal of full energy independence propagated by both West and East proved illusory for material, geopolitical, institutional, economic and environmental reasons. Apart from vestiges of past interdependence, pressures to collaborate gained impetus from the 1970s onwards. The Berlin experience, the article concludes, generates lessons for navigating socio-technical in-/interdependencies over electricity infrastructures in geopolitically contested contexts by highlighting the material politics of urban energy history.

This article addresses the beginnings of the twinning relationship between Coventry and Kiel to introduce and exemplify the idea of ‘urban internationalism’ as a new lens onto urban histories of town twinning initiatives and a contribution to the historiography of British town twinning. Focusing on paradiplomatic initiatives by municipal officials, religious dignitaries and other citizens in Coventry and Kiel, the article examines the role that cities played in British–German reconstruction and reconciliation in the period from the end of World War II until the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

Despite a long settlement history, empirical investigations of the role of path dependency in the long-term evolution of human populations are scarce in Europe, and especially in the Mediterranean countries. Using spatially explicit econometric techniques, our study discusses the empirical evidence stemming from a quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of population growth rates in 115 districts of metropolitan Athens (Greece) over one century, distinguishing path dependency from the impact of other socio-economic forces on long-term urban expansion. The empirical findings of this study clarify how path-dependent regulation of population growth was heterogeneous over time and space, and depends on the specific stage of the city life cycle. After an initial period when path-independent population expansion reflected the inherent impact of exogenous shocks, path-dependent growth was associated with compact urbanization governed by agglomeration and scale advantages. Path-dependent growth was less intense during suburbanization, when the population spread over larger areas.

This article examines the relationship between public services and the urban middling sort in provincial England from 1550 to 1640 through comparative case-studies of the finance and management of waterworks, the creation of new skilled roles and the cultural import of water systems in Bristol, Chester and Ipswich. It argues that the middling sort were vital in establishing public services and that water provision centred not only on its value as a material and financial resource, but also as an expanding source of patronage and social capital that shaped and entrenched the emergence of middling groups in society.

This article explores social dancing as the setting for moral struggles related to the urban night. Based on analysis of Estonian-language newspapers, I look at the historical context and expressed viewpoints linked with nocturnal public dance events in Estonian cities from 1880 to 1940. The established moral order was endangered by those staying out dancing late into the night. In the context of the multinationalism of urban areas and the national emancipation movement of the ethnic Estonian population, I investigate the transgressions and hazards that night dancing was perceived to bring, most significantly, threat to productivity, health and virtue.

This article aims to analyse housing solutions used in nineteenth-century Lisbon to deal with explosive demographic and urban development. It particularly focuses on two specific types of industrial housing ensembles created in Lisbon called pátios and vilas operárias. The goal of this article is to analyse the spatial distribution of pátios and vilas operárias in Lisbon. Through the potential of geographic information systems, we aim to understand in a spatial-quantitative way the spatial patterns of these kinds of industrial housing ensembles for the most deprived population. To do so, we used spatial modelling and spatial analysis procedures, including simple spatial distribution, mean centre, standard distance, directional distance and density estimation (hotspots). The new contribution of this article lies in the increase of scientific knowledge about these forms of working-class housing – the pátios and vilas operárias – and their spatial implementation in Lisbon in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In 1964, Australian writer Donald Horne observed that ‘whatever differences there are between the Australian cities are differences within a range of similarity’. He proposed that Australia had 11 major cities and yet, in general, there existed a singular national urban culture, a one-city Australia. Unpacking the story of Australian urban history, its national trends and local nuances, has been an ongoing project ever since. What follows is an analysis of the field, which suggests how historians might begin to unpack Horne’s assertion. The final section of the article explores the contribution of Australian urban history in the national and global contexts.

In contrast to the well-studied shopkeepers, little empirical evidence exists on the locational patterns of artisans in transforming urban spaces. By GIS mapping a dataset on Brussels construction entrepreneurs (c. 1830–1930), long-term changes in their patterns of spatial clustering and dispersal become clear, showing which urban areas provided advantageous conditions for artisans to thrive, but also how and when these conditions subsided. While confirming earlier observations of a broad scattering of artisans throughout the city, the analysis also shows how remarkable clusters emerged in cheap, densely built, both central and suburban neighbourhoods. The importance of clustering decreased over time, however. Confronting locational patterns with their potential underlying causes shows that planning policies for the renewal of urban infrastructure and the resulting dynamics on the real estate market acted as the first drivers of urban de-industrialization, affecting the displacement of artisans from inner cities since at least the late nineteenth century.

This study estimates the cost of living in three cities – Florence, Bologna and Milan – in eighteenth-century northern Italy. Although they do not allow an understanding of the differences between social groups or seasonal consumption patterns, the calculation of living costs and the implied modelling have a twofold aim. First, they allow the calculation of real wages, which are obtained by dividing nominal wages by the cost of a consumption basket; therefore, broadly, they allow the Italian case to be put into great debates of economic history, such as the one on the Little Divergence between northern and southern Europe at the end of the early modern period. In this regard, we will show that the existing calculations used for this purpose have many criticalities, and we will solve them. Second, determining the cost of consumption baskets allows us to observe the role played by urban public institutions in mediating between the market and consumers, with relevant effects on price trends and, therefore, on the purchasing power of the urban population.

At the conclusion of the 1950s in Japan, plans to reclaim and develop Tokyo Bay were proposed by the Japan Housing Corporation's president and a private think tank on economic affairs. The vision was incompatible with dispersion, the basic direction of the state's policy, so it was quickly rejected, but its legacy lived on as the trans-Tokyo Bay highway in 1997. This article argues that the lack of an effective national policy led to contradictory initiatives and divisions among the stakeholders, leaving open the way for the large-scale reclamation and development of Tokyo Bay.

In early modern violence, location mattered, and where something took place communicated much to early modern urban residents about the people involved, the significance of the act and the likely judicial repercussions for their communities. This article uses GIS to trace the locations of homicides in early modern Bologna, Italy, with a ‘prepositional cartography’ that translates early modern Italian spatial mentalities into modern GIS analyses. Mapping homicides reveals much about their meaning and significance. From private buildings, streets and churches, early modern killers spoke a language of space to their audience.

This article presents a comparative study of the industrial energy consumption in Ghent and Leiden, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It asks whether or not industrial development depended on the availability of coal. Whereas the Southern Low Countries had recourse to cheap coal from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, the Northern Low Countries remained trapped in its ‘proto-fossil’ trajectory based on peat, lacking a full fossil-fuel transition. By using production data to estimate the fuel consumption by industry, it is argued that energy divergences did not matter for industrialization. Both in Ghent and in Leiden, industries such as brewing, sugar refining, glass making and textile production had already largely switched to coal by the end of the seventeenth century. Explanations for these early coal-burning trajectories should be found, not in the ‘lucky’ location of coal supplies, but in the demand and organization of coal-specific industry itself.

Dublin at the turn of the nineteenth century had limited permanent employment opportunities compared to Belfast, and for poor families financial instability manifested in limited life expectancy. This article focuses on young adult cohorts in Dublin city. By cross-referencing names and addresses from death records with census, court and prison records, it casts new light on the lives of the city's most disadvantaged people. It applies a digital humanities framework and uses historical Geographical Information Systems to explore patterns in cause of death, and to reveal more about household income, casual labour, women's work and community networks. We contend that the cautions about the occlusion of commercial sex work in historical data should be extended to the lowest strata of the working classes more generally and that it is only through granular analyses that the fine lines between poverty and destitution can emerge.

This article explores and complicates notions of public and private urban mobility through the exploration of one site of transport, the Kowloon railway terminus in Hung Hom, Hong Kong. It considers the question: how did the conflicts and tensions between public and private forms of mobility affect policies for the urban environment in colonial Hong Kong? This article explores the Hung Hom railway terminus and its tensions and interactions with automobility and other forms of transport, most pertinently the bus network. Hong Kong's imperial and colonial context further throws into question seemingly straightforward divisions of public and private mobility.

The ordinary city of Bir al-Saba’, situated within an urban world stretched across southern Palestine, has a story to tell, of dramatic spatiotemporal transformations, presence and absence, capture and resilience. Such connected urban history is profoundly shaped through the world-making relations of those who lived and dwelt within the always-becoming material and ideational spatial geography of the Naqab. Research gathered from diverse archival sources and interview data offers insight into the voices, actions and imaginaries of the Saba'awi as they worked the shifting assemblages of this landscape between 1840 and 1936, making Bir al-Saba’ a thick multiscalar cosmopolitan place of meaning and opportunity.

Medieval Bruges was an important international economic hub in the late Middle Ages. Similar to other luxury goods, manuscripts produced in Bruges were intended for both local and international audiences. This article scrutinizes the specific urban context of Bruges as a multilingual contact zone focusing on quantitative data of extant manuscripts and case-studies of professional and non-professional book production. The dominance of francophone manuscripts in a Dutch-speaking town is noteworthy and called for an actively bilingual community of book professionals. Furthermore, the social competition of locally embedded social groups (court, merchants, craft guilds) influenced language choice as well. Both ‘official’ production of books for trade by professional writers and librarians, and the ‘private’ multilingual literary accomplishments of Bruges city-dwellers, illustrate the multilingual dynamics of urban contacts in Bruges.

The aim of this article is to offer a new conceptual framework for the study of various spaces in Istanbul during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. I contend that rather than the sharp distinction manifested with the public–private dichotomy, we need to focus on gradations of privacy. I offer qāpū and bāb as two new concepts borrowed from the period's own repertoire for representing the macro and micro ends of the spatial gradation. Theoretically, I draw on George Simmel's definition of doors as the interfaces of spatial formation.