One of the most widespread stereotypes about modern urban life claims that it is more dangerous and crime-ridden than life in the country. Journalists use the evidence of delinquency-rates in big cities to argue for the presence of contemporary crime waves. The police apply new methods of crime prevention such as the so-called ‘zero tolerance’ strategy first in large metropolises. The tabloid press detects ‘murder capitals’. The film industry loves scenes from urban life in their thrillers and we love to watch them. Evidence used in the popular press seems to prove an almost natural link between urban life and crime. This connection, however, is not a contemporary phenomenon. In his famous Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers Henry Fielding described the streets of London in 1751 as places of crime and insecurity. Archives of towns and cities are full of court proceedings and criminal records dating from the late middle ages, when town magistrates started to take measures against so-called delinquency – a contemporary legal term. Violence, in particular, seems to have been endemic in towns and cities. It could be tempting, therefore, to conclude that the link between urban life and crime is self-evident, if not to say timeless. However, historical statutes and town records can also be read in a rather different way. In both normative sources and court proceedings we can discern a clear will to ensure peace and stability in towns and cities. Without this will, our sources would simply not exist, for crime and conflict would have gone by unnoticed and unrecorded.

This article analyses the ways the urban boundary and the landscapes beyond it were culturally conceived and physically manipulated in Munich between about 1890 and 1920. It highlights planning practice outside the ‘canon’ of planning history, showing the importance of localized decision-taking in urban design. The article explores cities as cultural constructs and material artefacts in Germany as part of a broader project linking planning history to broader historical investigation, and tries to bridge the gap between the ‘material’ city as a physical space, and the ‘cultural’ city of language and symbols.

Despite widespread interest in the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban planning and architecture as of late, little is known about the city's historical development. This article suggests as a remedy more concerted efforts in comparative history. Comparison with other cities reveals three anomalies: the condition of ex-capitality; a distinctive focus on civil society as the leading dynamic in the city's evolution; and a self-image as a classic ‘second city’, that is, an economic as opposed to political centre. The essay closes with suggestions for future research, and stresses the need for a specifically cultural approach to the urban past.

In the free towns of Germany we can observe a fundamental shift in the maintenance of urban stability. Whereas in late medieval towns the burghers themselves were responsible for the settlement of conflicts, the town council took over control in a long-ranging process. Burghers lost their traditional right to bear arms in public. Burghers and other town dwellers could henceforth call upon the guards of the council or take a case to law in order to settle a dispute. As a consequence petty conflicts in the public sphere became less ritualized.

This paper explores the relative balance between socio-economic grievance and confessional and political division in urban revolts during the period of the French religious wars. More particularly, it focuses on two such incidents in the town of Troyes in Champagne in the summer of 1586 and what they can tell us about the influence of popular discontent on municipal politics and town–crown relations, as well as the impact of civil war, subsistence crisis and increasing taxation on urban communities. The continuity of the traditions of popular revolt are explored alongside the implications for royal authority of the official response to such unrest. Social tensions and economic concerns dominated events in the town, whilst the crown's right and ability to enforce its will continued to be accepted and upheld. Thus, despite the disruption of civil strife, the competing interests of the municipal authorities, the urban populace and the monarchy were able to maintain a delicate equilibrium through the traditional mechanism of negotiation and compromise.

In Germany, the Revolutions of 1848 and 1918/19 resulted in the martyrdom of opposition leaders and constituents, whose burial sites in Berlin became key sites of memory and commemoration for the working-class movement. Political turbulence and regime change throughout the twentieth century has resulted in contestation over the meaning and use of these places; a trajectory illustrating the dynamic, reciprocal relationship between popular memory and official history, and the interplay between representation, place-based associations and spatial relations in constituting social meaning in the urban landscape.

Oaths of office are generally well preserved for many English towns and cities and they can tell us a great deal about the theoretical and (perhaps to a lesser extent) practical duties of office-holders. In the light of recent scholarly interest in oaths in the context of investiture ceremonies, this article examines the rhetoric of oath texts to highlight some aspects of the political cultures of urban office-holding elites and their attempts to maintain stability.

Last October I moved to Southampton, ‘City of the Titanic’ – what a strange way to advertise a place. The memory of the sunken ship is still very much alive. I did keep my apartment in Berlin, though, and from time to time I manage to spend a couple of days there. From a distance, the city looks and feels different. When I go shopping in my favourite market hall or for a latte macchiato in Café Atlantic, I try not to step on the stones laid in the ground beside the normal cobblestones. They are of the same size, but painted in something golden; they glitter in the sun and bear an inscription such as ‘Hier wohnte Alfred Hohenstein, Jg. 1920. Deportiert am 10.05.41 Auschwitz’.

In recent years, the idea that Britain and its northern American colonies were part of a single ‘British Atlantic world’ has provided historians of both the Old World and the New with a novel perspective from which to explore their subjects during the long eighteenth century. With a case study of Charleston, South Carolina, this essay extends British categories of analysis across the Atlantic to uncover the origins of an American middle class. Emphasis is placed on the simultaneous consideration of all arenas of identity formation, with a view to demonstrating that examining either the cultural sphere or the economic one cannot bring a genuine understanding of the coherence of this eighteenth-century middling sort. Investigating the emergence of this social group in the widest possible sense, I show how the economic experience of these middling people forged common values which then found their expression in the cultural and political sphere. Since this middle sort achieved such coherence before 1776 I suggest that we must move away from accounts that depict colonial society as a place of binary opposites and occupational groupings, for such models cannot convey the complexity of the British Atlantic urban society that took shape during this era.

British slaughter-house reformers campaigned to abolish private urban slaughter-houses and establish public abattoirs in the nineteenth century. Abolition of London's private slaughter-houses was motivated by the congestion created by livestock in city streets, the nuisance of slaughter-house refuse in residential neighbourhoods and public health concerns about diseased meat in the food supply. The butchers successfully defended their private slaughter-houses, illustrating the persistence of the craftsman's workshop and the importance of laissez-faire sentiments in opposition to municipalization in Victorian London.

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 micro-history of one apartment block in the inner-suburb of Bovisa, Milan over a period of 100 or so years is examined using oral history interviews to trace the development of the block and its residents in relation to that of the city of Milan. The piece is bounded by theoretical reflections on the role of micro-history, oral history and other methodologies as tools for understanding the home and urban history, and concludes that the survival of a rural past, the role of gender, the importance of architecture and of nostalgic memory in a rapidly changing world were important influences.

Aside from the early modern tension between self-governance and the nascent institutions of state administration, towns were also marked by the tension between council and burghers; only the town council could guarantee urban stability. In conflicts between burghers, council mediation was usually concluded with the ritualistic shaking of hands and the threat of punishment in case of a repeat offence. Punishment of burghers was in all cases less important than mediation between offenders. The councils followed on the other hand a multi-layered, participatory model in their attempt to involve all resident burghers in government.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the English seaside and health resort of Torquay abandoned its old practice of municipal waste tipping and invested in a destructor, or incinerator. Technical, legal and financial considerations lay behind this decision. The ensuing protests against the operation of the destructor highlight the tensions between nascent technocrats and the affected residents. At a time when pollution was most often displaced or dispersed, topography conspired against the residents of Torquay, and challenged the accepted spatial and social relationships of waste.

This article examines the architecture and design of the pioneering planned fishing villages established by the British Fisheries Society across the Highlands of Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Society established a utilitarian planning model which fundamentally influenced the subsequent planned village boom that remains so evident in the historic landscape of the Scottish Highlands today. The British Fisheries Society also made a significant contribution to urban history with Thomas Telford's innovative plan for its last development of Pulteneytown. Pulteneytown remains the most complete example of Telford's work as a town planner.

The article looks at urban stability and crime control in cities with large immigrant communities in sixteenth-century England. It outlines the strategies of shared authority between urban magistrates and leaders of refugee communities to tackle conflict and crime. It argues that the Strangers were able to present themselves as useful and welcome members of their host community, which profited from their arrival. At the same time they managed to keep their specific alien networks within their new places of residence over several generations intact.

This article examines how different visions of Tel Aviv as a seaside city in the 1930s were articulated in terms of urban planning and local politics. It expands on the beach as a site of leisure, pleasure, health and recuperation. It further elaborates on the demand to ‘improve the seashore’ in terms of architecture and urban development. At the centre of the discussion is the evaluation of the Grunblatt scheme and the public debate on the benefits and disadvantages of the ambitious project.