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.

This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, non-humans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

How did the complex relationship between working worlds and urban spaces change in Hamburg in times of de-industrialization? To answer this question, I focus on Hamburg's history from 1960 to 2008. Starting from the idea of a cumulative structural break, I develop a typology of Fordist and neo-liberal urban spaces and distinguish seven dimensions of change: from international division of labour to globalization, from industrial production to creativity, from rationalization to digitalization, from centralization to networks, from functional zoning to blurred boundaries, from social security to precarity and from suburbanization to the renaissance of the inner city. Finally, I consider whether this typology is valid for other European cities.

Public monuments are considered an important tool in the nineteenth-century nation-building project. Yet while the intended (nationalist) message of the monumental landscape is often clear, the popular perception of the statues and memorials has been little problematized. This contribution analyses the popular interaction with public monuments in late nineteenth-century Amsterdam and questions whether ordinary people understood the nationalist meaning. With the help of visual sources – engravings, lithographs and the novel medium of photography – we become aware of the multilayered meanings and usages of the monuments in daily urban life, thus tackling the methodological challenge of studying the monumental landscape from below.

This article analyses the changing options for the provision of burial places between the Reformation and the mid-nineteenth century in two major provincial cities, Bristol and Exeter. The two cities experienced very different patterns of change, especially in their Anglican provision, reflecting medieval differences of organization as well as the differential impact of dissent. Common factors include the effect of epidemics (plague, cholera) and population pressure, but also great conservatism regarding use of inner-city burial places. The major changes are associated with the three great shocks to church–state relations: the Reformation, the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and the reform period of the 1830s and 1840s.

This article examines the decline of the craft guilds in early modern England by way of a case-study of the Tuckers’ Company in Exeter. From the 1980s, this case figured prominently in the historiographical debate concerning guild decline; however, it has not been examined recently. The current study reveals the Tuckers’ Company is not a case of decline in guild membership so much as a case of the loss of guild monopoly and a concomitant transition to charitable functions. On the basis of empirical sources, this study also reveals the mechanisms and context of this transformation in the post-Civil War politics of the city of Exeter. Specific attention is given to first, the decline of royal authority bolstering the guild against the city government and secondly, the shift of power in the guild with the ascendance of the merchant fullers. Finally, the historiographical implications of the article's findings are discussed.

How are deep relationships between city and club identification formed, and are they inevitable? The aim of this article is to provide a historical analysis of the rivalry between two football clubs, Vitesse Arnhem and NEC Nijmegen, explicating their various ‘axes of enmity’. Supporters, club officials and observers of these two clubs created and selectively maintained similarities between respective city image and club image. The process of ‘othering’ influenced both city and club images and helped create oppositional identities. Herein, football identification reflects broader societal needs for a place-based identity, and for a coherent image of both self and other.

This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.

Analysing the urban renewal of Boston's West End during the 1950s, we examine how psychiatrists, social scientists and urban planners understood the relationship between the urban environment and mental health. For psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, the West End offered a unique opportunity to study how acute stress and loss affected populations, thus contributing to social psychiatry, which sought to prevent mental illness by addressing factors in the social and physical environment. While Lindemann's project provided a sophisticated response to the often simplistic arguments about the cities and mental health, it also highlighted the challenges of applying social psychiatric theory in practice.

This article examines public health spending, health outcomes and political complexion in London's 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils (MBCs) in the inter-war period. It describes the place of the MBCs in the governance of the capital and demonstrates the variety of experience across the different boroughs in terms of wealth, politics and mortality. Searching for potential causes of differences in outcomes, it discovers some positive statistical relationships between the extent of Labour party presence on the councils, local spending and health outcomes. Our tentative conclusion is that local democratic processes could lead to distinctive and beneficial public health policies, albeit within the context of other local and structural determining factors.

Historical pageantry emerged in 1905 as the brainchild of the theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker. Large casts of volunteers re-enacted successive scenes of local history, as crowds of thousands watched on, in large outdoor arenas. As the press put it, Britain had caught ‘pageant fever’. Towards the end of the 1920s, there was another outburst of historical pageantry. Yet, in contrast to the Edwardian period, when pageants took place in small towns, this revival was particularly vibrant in large industrial towns and cities. This article traces the popularity of urban pageantry to an inter-war ‘civic publicity’ movement. In doing so, it reassesses questions of local cultural decline; the role of local government; and the relationship of civic responsibility to popular theatre.

Variations in the fortunes of six late medieval ports in Sussex are considered using data derived from archaeological excavations. Several indicators are used to assess differences in urban fortunes and to critique the concept of urban ‘decline’. The interpretive framework of assemblage theory is then used to examine why the fortunes of these ports varied. The article argues for a turn from discussions of decay and decline towards considerations of changes, continuities and transformations in urban life in late medieval England.

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.

We currently know civic societies as a widespread part of the amenity lobby, yet their history is little explored. Focusing on the emergence and growth of civic societies before 1960, this article examines some of that history. The first section provides a background context, linking civic groups to shifting ideas about architecture and space, and to reform movements of the nineteenth century. The second section explores the growth in numbers of associations and their memberships. The third section develops a discussion of the ideas and activities of societies, focusing particularly on their articulation of social and spatial interconnection, their use of a prescriptive urban aesthetic and their political influence.