Between the sixth and the tenth century, India passed through a new phase of urbanization. This has been identified as the third urbanization in India, setting it apart from two earlier phases. The focus of historical investigations for this period has generally been on capital cities and royal centres, or centres of pilgrimage. Port cities have also received some attention. There are no exclusive studies on unplanned cities from this period other than the overview that a few historians provide. In this article, I am focusing on one of them, Sīyaḍoṇi in central India, in order to understand how urban centres developed in this period without being royal centres, places of pilgrimage or hubs of maritime trade. I propose that Sīyaḍoṇi emerged as a merchant town on an important trade route and its commerce-centred economy was reinforced by deep-seated practices of rent-seeking involving generation of income through ground rent, taxation and interest on loans.

The Military Order of the Knights Templar acquired property within English towns, established residences and chapels for its brethren there and developed new urban settlements and markets. This article argues that the role that the Templars played as urban landlords in England has been seriously understated, and that the Order made an impact through their urban property holdings, their privileges and their urban chapels, and in establishing new towns, which were integral to the wider exploitation of their rural resources.

Scholarship on architecture and urbanism in antiquity has focused on building activity and investment in the fabric of cities as positive processes, typically starting from the assumption that such developments were welcomed by inhabitants – but were they? This article examines objections to urban renewal and the construction of monumental public building in the Roman world. Specifically, it focuses on the city of Prusa and the controversy surrounding the renovation of its civic centre by the local politician Dio Chrysostom in the early 2nd century AD. Using speeches and letters written at the time, the article presents both a new interpretation of this specific episode and brings to the fore the rarely articulated and yet highly controversial nature of building projects that are traditionally thought of as being beneficial. In the conclusion, we also see how this example contributes to research on the issue of heritage as a pre-modern phenomenon.

This article concentrates on the development of an inner-city imaginary, and a linked suburban imaginary, in the era of post-war reconstruction and post-colonial migration. It argues that these two historical processes – reconstruction and migration – need to be seen as interlinked phenomena, which bound the histories of race and class together. First, it proposes that understanding how the inner city developed and was lived as a structure of feeling requires attending to its meaning both among those who peopled its often-nebulous borders, and among those who escaped it but nonetheless measured their escape by it. Second, it proposes that understanding the popular force of inner city and suburb as imaginative spaces means recognizing how they became crucial landscapes in a revived culture of respectability, which in the second half of the twentieth century became a racialized culture. This was the other migration that defined what the inner city meant.

The horses transporting men and merchandise were key actors in urban development at the very time they placed the city's ability to organize and adapt in doubt. Cities of the southernmost Netherlands and the Principality of Liège were forced to cope with the constant challenge represented by traffic in poorly designed arteries, with a morphology inherited from the medieval period and completely ill-suited to the movement of carriages and wagons. The problem posed by traffic in Belgian cities reached a critical threshold in the seventeenth century, a period in which we observe an increase in the number of horses and harnessed teams. The complications caused by this growing surge culminated in the next century and were marked by the formation of a police force obliged to face the challenge traffic represented. Consequently, numerous urban decisions were taken, transforming both the street's ‘lifestyle’ and physiognomy.

This article argues that a micro-historical and comparative analysis of urban burial spaces can provide fresh insight into cities. Two late medieval cemeteries are considered here: the Qarāfa in Cairo and Saints-Innocents in Paris. Despite the former being geographically peripheral and the latter central, both these relatively large cemeteries were integral to their respective urban spheres. Beyond the role of sultans and kings, collective shaping was key to the longue durée formation of both capitals’ cemeteries. They were also shaped by multiple urban communities of the living and the dead at the closer level and offer insight into these communities.

Focusing on the largely unpublished ‘city accounts’ (‘Stadsrekeningen’) of Bruges, this article examines the city's giving of prestigious Baltic beeswax to their lords, the Valois and (later) Habsburg dukes of Burgundy. It sheds new light on urban government by analysing how civic leaders across north-western Europe used the apiary product to manage often fraught relationships with their rulers and reinforce their identities as trading centres or outposts of international repute. More broadly, the gifting of Baltic beeswax points to the political and diplomatic prestige associated with the trade and display of the commodity in the later medieval period and the desire of urban leaders and communities to extract symbolic and political capital from its exchange.

This article analyses the ritualistic aspects of medieval citizenship through the example of fifteenth-century Barcelona. The unique citizenship sources of Barcelona allow for a detailed study of the negotiations between urban dwellers and their institutions in the making of citizens. Accordingly, the article examines how the witnesses of citizenship candidates and municipal authorities framed these negotiations in terms of ritual by promoting a codified notion of belonging that helped them all navigate the ambiguities of status and identification.

Focusing on Lisbon's green urban renewal under the liberal regime between 1840 and 1900, this article shows how the construction of green urban infrastructure became a part of the liberal agenda for modernizing the capital. The history of Lisbon's nineteenth-century public gardens and parks and tree-lined avenues has received scant attention, but this article reveals the pioneering role played by Lisbon City Council Department of Gardens and Green Grounds and the subsequent creative adaptation of Parisian green urban renewal programmes to Lisbon. These two phases corresponded to the leadership of different professional groups – gardeners and engineers, whose authority derived not only from their expertise but from their role in the making of scientific authority. Finally, this article highlights how the value ascribed to engineering as being more ‘techno-scientific’ than gardening dictated the outcome of the rivalry between gardeners and engineers with the eventual demise of the Department of Gardens and Green Grounds.

Applying a spatial lens to the oral histories of heterosexual women who had intercultural romantic relationships in Leicester from the 1960s to the 1980s provides an alternative perspective on their experiences. This article examines these women's movements into and around the inner city, eliciting discussion about the concept of ‘safe’ places and spaces and the factors that determined the transient nature of these spaces. It illustrates opportunities created for intercultural mixing, away from familial gaze and public hostility. Utilizing such spaces to develop and sustain their relationships reveals a previously unacknowledged female agency that also enabled an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in the British city.

The aim of this article is to examine the use of suitable archive sources for the study of the economic space of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research is based on the integration and critical analysis of cartographic, descriptive and quantitative sources of an administrative and fiscal nature, developed by using Geographic Information Systems. The advantage of adopting this approach includes, in addition to the study of spatial relationships amongst economic activities and the urban space, the possibility of investigating discrepancies between the sources, thus facilitating their interpretation.

Urban political ecology (UPE) provides an appropriate framework to consider the ways in which natural elements and concepts of nature have been incorporated into built environments, because of its emphasis on and elaboration of the concept of socio-natures and its focus on how the costs and benefits of these natural elements are apportioned between people of different classes in cities. This article considers how reformers’ ideas about nature shaped the kinds of social housing they developed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London.

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.

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.