This article traces territorial and discursive shifts in the landscape of homosexuality in San Francisco during the AIDS pandemic. I argue that a ‘de-sexualization’ of the urban landscape occurred, which I trace in debates about bathhouse closures (1983–85) and in the analysis of ARC/AIDS Vigil, a downtown activist encampment (1985–95). I trace ‘de-sexualization’ in the development of divergent forms of ‘emplaced empathy’ and the professionalization of AIDS activism between 1983 and 1990. Bathhouse iconography and associated affective forms of protest highlighted sex and eroticism, whereas representations of homosexuality at the Vigil highlighted the iconographies of domesticity and death.

In 1960s Tokyo, late-night noise became a source of annoyance for urban-dwellers in residential areas. The problem was primarily due to young people who congregated around small food establishments eating and drinking. The situation led to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to attempt to remove such small businesses through the 1969 Environmental Pollution Prevention Ordinance. However, the section of the ordinance dealing with late-night noise hazards was diluted by the political parties, who supported the interests of such businesses, hence failing to satisfy local residents who were victims of the problem.

This article examines the proposals for Stonehouse, designated as the sixth Scottish new town in 1972 but abandoned in 1976. Several themes emerge, with lessons for the wider urban and political histories of 1970s Britain. First, the evolving plans demonstrate the ‘malleability’ of the post-war ‘new town idea’, conceptually and organizationally. Second, cancellation was the consequence of short-term factors, changing strategic objectives and local government reform, rather than being the result of a sudden ideological pivot towards inner-city renewal. Third, Stonehouse counters established narratives of the practice and decline of regional planning in post-war Britain. At least in a Scottish context, regional planning took on new forms during the mid-1970s.

Taking its cue from the ‘material turn’ of recent years, this survey examines the connections between infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in north European cities in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that connections between these different constructs were fundamental not only to how cities functioned but how citizens themselves were imagined. As such, the survey critiques histories of welfare and citizenship that foreground the national and neglect the urban origins of the modern state. It does so by examining infrastructure, welfare and citizenship in smaller European nation-states such as Belgium, Denmark and Ireland rather than in the more familiar cases of Germany, France and Britain. Asking questions about the inter-relationship of infrastructure, welfare and citizenship, the survey suggests, offers an important way to reinterpret what the ‘modern city’ meant in twentieth-century northern Europe.

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.