In this article, the origins of the modern metropolis are reconsidered, using the example of Cairo within its Ottoman and global context. I argue that Cairo's Azbakiyya Garden served as a central ground for fashioning a dynastic capital throughout the nineteenth century. This argument sheds new light on the politics of Khedive Ismail, who introduced a new state representation through urban planning and music theatre. The social history of music in Azbakiyya proves that, instead of functioning as an example of colonial division, Cairo encompassed competing conceptions of class, taste and power.

The present article investigates how everyday people shaped the outcome of discriminatory measures during the Nazi persecution of Budapest Jews, primarily by looking into micro-level social interactions between superintendents and confined Jews during ghettoization in the Hungarian capital (1944). I argue that besides a multiplicity of relevant political, social and military reasons determining the fate of Budapest Jews, the urban specificity of the Holocaust also needs to be taken into account, given that location and access to urban space enabled different personal strategies to contest or aggravate anti-Semitic persecution. Especially older, nineteenth-century apartment buildings fostered the autonomy of superintendents, who could act independently of various authorities, exploiting certain Jews while aiding others. The article demonstrates how many superintendents made use of this power effectively as the successive regimes toughened their anti-Semitic policies. In addition, the investigation of individual motives and the micro levels of segregation and discrimination highlight major differences between and within apartment buildings, despite the supposedly homogeneous discrimination against Jews envisaged by Nazi policy makers.

Drawing on life stories, this article considers the relationship between urban working-class men and domesticity. Focusing on the spaces, objects and rites of men's homecoming, it questions perceptions of working-class men as peripheral to the inter-personal dynamics of family life and assesses how men's occupation of domestic space and time could be invested with emotive meaning by adult children. The article suggests that fathers were not simply figures of authority or masculine privilege but, rather, that the domestic interior was a space where men and their children navigated family roles and filial obligations to enjoy nurturing and intimate relationships more commonly associated with mothers. In doing so, the article stakes a claim to reconsider the idea that working-class homes were ‘a woman's place’ and view them more dynamically as inter-personal domains.

Histories of the ‘mass tourism’ of sunshine and beaches, and of the ‘package holiday’, in post-war Europe have tended to focus on the activities of big international companies and the role of governments. This has certainly been the case in Spain. This article recovers an earlier version of the urban history of coastal tourism in southern Europe, focusing on the resort of San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country, and thereby drawing attention to the neglected Atlantic dimension of Spanish coastal tourism. It then examines the responses of an established resort and summer capital to the new developments of the post-Civil War years, and shows how the decline of an older model of aristocratic tourism was counterbalanced by the development of new holiday markets and practices, many of which arose spontaneously beyond the regulatory and promotional gaze of the local authorities.

‘Inspiring Capital’ is the sign that confronts visitors and residents alike at the boundaries of the Edinburgh administrative area. It is a consciously ambiguous message of self-promotion: the logo proclaims the dual standing of the city of Edinburgh as a European capital city and a city of international capital. The article uses a long-run approach to explore how, by inventing and nurturing a myth about Edinburgh as a non-industrial city, councillors and planners privileged the ancient and historical character of the city and so conditioned policies associated with urban renewal and land use.

Industrial policy has long been considered a federal responsibility. Indeed, most scholars date modern local economic development programmes as starting in the 1960s. Before that, in this view, industrial policy was ad hoc, unco-ordinated and fragmented. In this article, I argue that the origins of modern industrial policy initiated by the local state slowly emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in Chicago. Using an assortment of sources, I show that a new type of industrial policy was forged in the conflict over the 1923 zoning ordinance. The city's real-estate, financial and political elites were able to mobilize information, science, funding, individuals and arguments to convince industrialists that zoning was to their advantage. In the process, the city's industrial interests were able to frame the new zoning ordinance to their ends.

With few dissenting voices, the historiography of twentieth-century urban civil society has been relayed through a prism of continuing and escalating elite disengagement. Within a paradigm of declinism, academics, politicians and social commentators contrast a past offering a richness of social commitment against a present characterized by lowering standards in urban governance. Put simply, the right sorts of people were no longer volunteering. Yet the data for such claims is insubstantial, and the applied methodology flawed. What are lacking are detailed empirical studies which offer flexible measures of status across a range of voluntary and political activities, so that we can better understand the social trends of urban volunteering across the first 50 years of the twentieth century.

The editors regret that in the article by Mestyan (first published online, 24th May 2013) the dates provided for the captions for Figures 2 and 3 are incorrect. The map in Figure 2 is from the 1860s and that in Figure 3 is from the 1870s.

This article offers a theoretical overview of the urbanization legacy of China's great cities since 1949. It shows a persistent contradiction between ideology/planning and urban sprawl/cellular urbanism. The symbolic function of city planning reflects official ideology giving the city a unified formal structure, but the implementation of the city plan is compromised in the process of urban development. The state governance fragments Chinese urban society into emplaced groups. This social division takes effect through the spatial division of various compounds that negotiate with rather than conform to city planning. Using a case-study of Guangzhou's urban development, the article shows how the state-led spatial practices continue in the post-socialist era and how a new kind of developmental ideology informs urban developments.

The topic of this study is the control of urban space in late Ottoman Istanbul, particularly during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909). Issues of the control and surveillance of public gatherings and popular entertainment are investigated by focusing on the Greeks of Istanbul, the largest non-Muslim population in the city. The article is based on an investigation of petitions, the Ottoman Police Ministry records and spy reports on various planned and spontaneous, private and public activities, such as charity concerts, theatrical performances, and collective singing in private and public meetings.

This article examines the localized nature of leisure provision and consumer taste in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on an analysis of the cinema-going habits of naval personnel and dockyard workers and their families in the naval town of Portsmouth, this article reveals how closely consumers’ tastes were predicated on their social and cultural identities. By mapping film booking patterns at one cinema, this article reveals how cinema managers chose to book films which responded directly to the tastes of their patrons. The article concludes that the film preferences of this community were shaped by their close connections with naval life.

The article presents the short urban history of Tel Aviv as a case-study for critical readings in urban planning. Focusing on Patrick Geddes’ celebrated plan for the city (1925) and its various interpretations along the years, the main claim made in the article is that when present planners are confronted with a past which does not suit current needs, history is contested, or reinvented entirely. The appreciation of Geddes’ plan over the years always reflected the city's contemporary image and its planners’ attitudes, which initially reflected the pioneering spirits of the city's Zionist creation. The plan was later blamed for the city's deterioration; and finally celebrated again, alongside the city's new found architectural heritage and urban spirit.

This article examines the role played by local councillors in constructing new housing in Scotland during the inter-war period. Rather than view local authorities as simply the objective agency of central government's ambitions to construct council houses, we argue that the self-interest and motivations of councillors have to be recognized as significant factors in this process. It is argued also that the concerns of private landlords were neither ignored nor sacrificed in the rush to build new housing. Rather, given that councils remained dominated by local business men, many of whom were private landlords, councillors acted in ways to protect their own material and class interests. In so doing, they consciously, if implicitly, shaped the social geography of twentieth-century Scotland.

Of the British scholars gathered by H.J. Dyos in 1966 to give substance to his vision of urban history as a distinctive genre of history only a few would claim the study of cities and city life as their prime academic interest. No more than a handful of those involved in the Urban History Group in the mid-1960s went on to publish major work in urban history. That was left to the generation whose careers were established in the early 1970s. The handful included Jim Dyos himself, Tony Sutcliffe, David Reeder, John Kellett and Peter Hennock. For the latter part of his career Hennock concentrated on the history of the welfare state and social policy in Britain and Germany and that is what those historians familiar with his name will associate him with. But his first book, based partly on his doctoral research, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (1973) was as squarely a work of municipal history as one could find, and if a test of a contribution to history is not the quantity of publications but what endures of them, then Ernest Peter Hennock more than justifies our recognition amongst historians of towns and cities.

This article argues that the Edwardian municipal park represents a significant transition from the highly regulated and formal space of the Victorian park. It takes as a case-study Heaton Park in Manchester purchased in late 1901 and suggests that this park represented a transition from a Victorian people's park to an Edwardian citizen's park in which each visitor accessed facilities and amenities appropriate to their individual or group leisure interests. It addresses the comparative neglect of the Edwardian park by urban historians and suggests the importance of the emerging concepts of citizenship and social responsibility.

This essay surveys major themes and developments in the recent study of late antique urbanism. First, re-evaluations of the late phase of classical urbanism are discussed, whereby a simple narrative of ‘decline’ has been replaced by a much more chronologically and geographically nuanced picture. The importance of regional, indeed local, specificity is stressed, with different areas of the ancient world experiencing often radically different urban trajectories. Key aspects of late antique urbanism are considered, including the relationship between town and country, economic urban life, political versus social and religious urban history, before concluding with consideration of areas where future research is particularly needed.

Doctoral theses have always had an important place in the historiography of crime, and indeed much of the discipline's most influential research has emerged from postgraduate study. For many years, the investigation of crime and justice in Britain was a staple topic of doctoral research, and theses by members of E.P. Thompson's ‘Warwick School’ had a shaping influence on the early debates of the discipline. In the British context, these early debates were concerned with questions about who could access the law and the extent to which the courts were used to enforce the values of particular social groups. More recently, scholars have given an increased amount of attention to the influence of newspaper reporting on perceptions of crime, and on the importance of printed accounts of crimes, trials and executions as texts which represented the function and effectiveness of the law in particular ways. Furthermore, over the last few decades our knowledge of policing and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe has greatly expanded, providing important insights into two very important aspects of the judicial process.

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. 775.

Urban development corresponds with economic shifts. In the second half of the twentieth century, when traditional forms of industrial production declined in many western cities, this posed new kinds of challenges. Cities were in need of a new economic base and at the same time had to cope with the abandonment of industrial sites. This article highlights the agency of local societies in shaping this process of deindustrialization and redevelopment. It interprets deindustrialization and redevelopment as a process of transformation which was open-ended and a matter of intense negotiation between diverging interests at the local level. In analysing the highly contentious case of the disused Stollwerck chocolate factory in Cologne, the article traces a complex set of site-specific factors of deindustrialization and redevelopment.

Financial and economic crises are recurrent in history. A special issue of Histoire Urbaine (33, 1 (2012)), entitled ‘Villes européennes et crises financières (XIVe-XVIe siècles)’, shows that in the medieval and early modern period cities played a crucial role in the development of such crises, just as they do today. Several case-studies on France, Spain and the Low Countries demonstrate that cities are and were financial and commercial centres which were governed by a small group of merchants, bankers and powerful families. And, as David Sassu-Normand notes in his introduction, medieval and early modern municipal authorities were even more adept than their twenty-first century counterparts in disposing of political power in order to tackle economic and financial difficulties. The close relationship between money and power in those cities made it easier for elite factions to abuse public revenues, because they could autonomously decide about urban spending and its fiscal consequences. Yet, he argues, the tied relationship between urban governors and the city's economy and finances could also have positive effects. Markets and budgets were not autonomous entities, because they were embedded in urban societies and manipulated by those who govern them. As a result, urban governors disposed of the political means to deal with financial crises, or at least to remedy some of their consequences. The case of late medieval Brabant, studied by Claire Billen and David Kusman in the same issue, shows that not only urban oligarchs but also less powerful citizens could intervene in the financial politics of a town (‘Les villes du Brabant face à la crise des finances du duché de Jean II. La crise d'une société entière?’, 63–80). In the duchy of Brabant, in around 1300, the ducal and urban finances were under considerable pressure due to warfare, manipulation of the mint and an economic downturn. In the principal cities of the duchy (Brussels, Antwerp and Louvain), discrete groups of citizens, such as craftsmen and self-made merchants, forcefully protested against the monetary and fiscal measures taken by the urban authorities. Their protests were not initially successful. By the 1360s, however, urban society had changed in Brabant. Both Billen and Kusman argue that the ideas that inspired the urban protests of the 1300s led to new, more successful revolts in the 1360s and afterwards. As a result, craftsmen gained rights of political participation in the cities mentioned. Using their newly gained political power, the rebels proposed constructive solutions to resolve the ongoing financial crisis in the cities of the duchy. The measures taken reflected the existence of a belief that the urban government should be fiscally sound and stable, and that it should not live beyond its means. Fiscal reforms led to more stable urban finances, though new challenges in the fifteenth century would upset the balance again. In short, the Brabantine case shows, once again, that politics and finance are closely knit together in the medieval city, but also, and more surprisingly, that social protest against headstrong governors ultimately led to far-reaching political and fiscal reforms. Therefore, this stimulating issue of Histoire Urbaine demonstrates that financial crises can have an unpredictable outcome.