The articles gathered in this special section explore the complex and layered relationship between meat and the nineteenth-century city. For urban historians interested in food provisioning, meat represents a critical juncture because no other food item was so deeply and, in so many ways, tied to urban modernity. This introduction outlines five central themes of the urban meat nexus: city and country relations, geography and urban space, technology and infrastructure, government and regulation, and changing nutritional standards. The four articles speak to these larger issues in specific and novel ways. They advance the existing scholarship by opening up new questions and approaches, focusing on hitherto understudied locations, while also collectively covering the entire spectrum of meat provisioning from supply hinterlands to urban consumption.

Meat consumption increase since the nineteenth century is a good indicator of the key stage of the so-called nutrition transition. This article is based on primary sources, predominantly municipal slaughterhouse bookkeeping data, and examines the changing patterns of supply, distribution and consumption of different types of meat, in order to avoid the risk of an over-simplified historical view. Long-term analysis shows that between 1740 and 1840, a period of economic and demographic growth, meat consumption levels dropped dramatically. After that time, the liberalization of agriculture and the new rail network boosted the supply of meat. Other sources and spatial analysis help us examine the ways that the city was supplied with meat, the meat retail distribution within it and the changing diet of the different urban social strata.

In the nineteenth century, meat production underwent radical changes, turning into a mass-scale and industrial process that was based on the new norms of hygiene and veterinary medicine. Anthropologists and cultural historians have pointed out that, in a western European context, this also entailed the marginalization of the slaughterhouses, which were excluded from urban life and made anonymous and invisible. This article examines the case of the Moscow public abattoir (1886–88) and argues that, instead of being marginalized, it emerged as one of the city's landmarks due to its important symbolic role in the Russian discussions on modernization and ‘Europeanness’.

This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.

Between 1868 and 1950, when meat production facilities were expelled from the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina became one of the largest producers of meat in the world. Beginning in 1945, bringing the city into the countryside and the countryside into the city, agriculture was instrumentalized as an urban function. Revealing the convergence of two usually separated movements – hygenics and eugenics – the meat industry in the province of Buenos Aires created a scientifically supported arena for the biopolitical appropriation of human and non-human resources, bearing out a unified ideology of medicalization, aestheticization, urbanization and productivity.

Privately owned, for-profit, seasonal, walled-off venues that boasted a variety of flora and fauna in addition to other services like stages, buildings, thespians, musicians, exhibits and victuals, New York City's Vauxhall and Ranelagh commercial pleasure gardens blossomed by the mid-eighteenth century. An in-depth analysis of these pleasure gardens not only contributes to how we understand colonists’ endeavours to support a more complete leisure sector, but also reveals the nuanced nature of the ‘rural vs. urban’ or ‘wilderness vs. civilization’ dyads. Ultimately, urban colonists hoped to embrace the rural nature of their surroundings to make their ‘cities in the wilderness’ more accessible, healthy places.

From 1884 until the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908, international and national exhibitions had a fad for including reconstructed historic urban streets in their attractions. This article investigates the meaning of such forms of urban heritage in the light of modernizing cities. It shows that ideas about historical authenticity were complex, and traces this to the ways in which staff and employees, and also the big crowds at the displays, co-produced this meaning. It suggests that visitors particularly constructed meaning through haptic and emotional encounters with the past, providing evidence of the development of new memory practices for modernity.

This article is a study of Zhongshan in South China, which took on the responsibility for modernizing its public health system after it was promulgated as a model county by the Nationalist government in Nanjing in 1929. However, the county was not ready to become a model. Insufficient budget, lack of experience, medical skills and directions limited the scope of the enterprise and its chances to succeed in a number of projects. Zhongshan's urban residents, on the other hand, were going through a transition from traditional to new public health practices. There were widely divergent views on the subject. For instance, some did not only accept the authorities interfering in and controlling their personal and environmental hygiene, but regarded this role as their right. Yet, many others did not see the need for changes. Ultimately, Zhongshan was caught between pressure exerted by Nanjing and the social tensions created by reform programmes that the authorities failed to implement properly.

Historians are held hostage by the sources that are available to them, and for that reason, the historiography of medieval towns is dominated by research on thirteenth-, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century case-studies. In preceding centuries, literacy was largely the monopoly of ecclesiastical milieus, who were often hostile or simply not interested in describing the urban settlements which then emerged all over Europe. An interesting exception, however, is the Breton town of Redon, which took shape around an abbey that was established in 832 with support of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious. By navigating the unusually extensive set of Carolingian cartularies of this abbey, as well as the available cartographic and archaeological evidence, Julien Bachelier has developed an incisive sketch of the development of a town in the shadow of the Carolingian abbey in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (‘Une ville abbatiale bretonne. Redon du IXe au XIVe siècle’, Histoire Urbaine, 48 (2017), 133–54). This case-study confirms once again that the urbanization of medieval Europe was more than a side-effect of the rebirth of long-distance trade as the canonical Pirenne thesis would have it. The Redon case provides a valuable contribution to the revisionist perspective that stresses the importance of local demand from abbeys, episcopal palaces and castles as a stimulus for urban development (see esp. the seminal work of A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1999)).