This article argues that the extent and longevity of dry conservancy systems in urban England between the 1870s and 1920s is underappreciated for its impact on health and disease. Using Birmingham as a case-study, it advances knowledge on the systemized development of municipal pail systems and offers a deeper understanding of living with conservancy. It draws out the importance of looking at the fly problem and the transmission relationship, largely ignored until the second decade of the twentieth century. It also explores and challenges existing ideas in the debates surrounding investment in sanitation infrastructure and mortality decline.

This article traces how urban communities operating with a humoral or Galenic medical paradigm understood and confronted the health challenges facing them, using the extraordinarily well-documented case of Bologna, Italy. Working within a GIS environment, the authors spatially analyse over 3,500 events recorded by the Ufficio del fango concerning violations of the city's health-related ordinances, augmented by other demographic and material data. As such, the study not only adds specificity to recent attempts to enrich the field of pre-modern public health, but also demonstrates that the Bolognese administration had a sophisticated and evolving understanding of communal health risks, and exposes several discrepancies between policy and practice.

The automobile is often misconstrued as being exclusively responsible for the decline of traditional street culture. This paper argues that the marginalisation of street vendors may also be related to developing definitions of the street as the locus of respectability, unobstructed circulation, nationalism and civic pride. Street entrepreneurs of the 1850s became urban nuisances by the 1900s, associated more with obstruction and underservedness as with convenience and enterprise. Licensing records of bootblacks and coffee-stall keepers as objects of municipal benevolence reveal their economic and social roles in the micro-geography of the city. While nostalgia can distort the realities of historical and contemporary public spaces, the street evacuated of social density and diversity is one of the great losses of modern urban life.

The creation of a colonial police force in Tanganyika after the First World War and its elaboration over the next four decades is described, as are its role in the attempted assertion of urban order and its relations with the Dar es Salaam public. The force was a central component in the colonial state's efforts to assert control over the urban arena. Lacking both resources and legitimacy it was only partially effective in this regard, with intermittent enforcement of colonial legislation being the norm. More concerted efforts to supervise the urban African population at a time of rapid urban growth in the post-Second World War period led to a deterioration in – already poor – police-public relations, which served further to undermine colonial authority.

This article explores how notions of African authenticity informed urban planning in post-colonial Africa. It examines an attempt by Tanzania's ruling party to build a new national capital in the sparsely populated region of Dodoma. Paradoxically, Dodoma's planners sought to build a modern African city based on the social principles of the traditional African village. This vision of African village authenticity legitimized Tanzania's ruling party by linking its authority to a purely African, rather than colonial, past. At the same time, it allowed politicians to criminalize urban poverty by attributing it to racial betrayal rather than broader structural failures.

The paper uses unusually rich evidence from a manuscript life history written in 1901 from personal diaries to explore the changing relationship between home and workplace in Victorian London. The life history of Henry Jaques demonstrates the way in which decisions about employment and residence were related both to each other and to stages of the family life course. The uncertainty of work, lack of income to support a growing family, rising aspirations, the constant threat of illness, the ease of moving between rented property, close ties between home and workplace, the stresses produced by home working, and the attractions of suburbanization all interacted to shape the residential and employment history of Jaques and his family. The themes exemplified by this detailed life history were also relevant to many other people. Evidence collected from a large-scale project on lifetime residential histories is used to place the experiences of Henry Jaques in a broader context, and to show how they related to the changing social and economic structure of Victorian London.

Based on notarial and municipal sources in Madrid from the late sixteenth century to 1808, this article challenges current views of Castilian urban elites as mere reflections of noble hegemony. It assesses the implications of widespread venality of offices, as well as the real meaning of the estatuto of 1603, which formally excluded non-nobles from the city council. Ultimately, it argues that the system of preferment contributed in part to the long-term backwardness of seventeenth-century Castile.

This article sets out the incidence of clandestine marriage in Restoration London. Analysis of parish registers of large suburban parishes suggests that such private unions peaked twice in the capital's history, immediately after the Restoration and again in the first half of the eighteenth century. Understanding the phenomenon is important since the increase in private weddings on the scale encountered was unique to London. Historians have failed to explain the growth in such unions satisfactorily. The practice is unlikely to be explained by the growth of religious dissent, by a desire to save money or to circumvent parish or parental control over choice of spouse. The custom's popularity can be explained more convincingly by reference to wealthier Londoners′ traditional predilection for private weddings, which was sanctioned by the church, and to emulation of the habit by those lower in the social scale. Adoption of the practice was further facilitated by increasing levels of disposable income and by the commercialization of the wedding ceremony after the Restoration.

City gates and walls were among the most striking features of the pre-modern city, yet we still know relatively little about their impact on daily life and what it meant to enter a city at that time. The present article explores precisely these questions. The first section outlines the general significance of city gates and walls in pre-modern times. In the second, I examine the four distinct functions of city gates in the early modern period. The third and main section presents a detailed description of the various practices, procedures and problems that accompanied the entrance to a city. Finally, and to conclude, the history of city gates is viewed in conjunction with the broader history of the early modern city and its transformation in the transition to modernity.

This article forms a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of an English urban renaissance. We draw on Schwarz's designation of residential leisure towns to explore the spread of leisure and luxury through a broad range of towns. Our analysis reveals that leisure facilities and luxury service and retail provision were widespread, but that residential leisure towns appear as qualitatively different places, the status of which was contingent upon social profile and cultural-economy, rather than demographic, political or socio-economic make up. We conclude by arguing that urban typologies based on specialization should be tempered with older-established and more subjective categorizations based on the status of the town.

In September 1896, a virulent plague epidemic broke out in the colonial port city of Bombay. Central to existing interpretations of the epidemic has been the pervasive assumption that colonial policies aimed at suppressing the disease were principally informed by ‘contagionist’ etiological doctrine. However, this article argues that long-standing ‘localist’ etiological theories continued to exercise a critical influence over colonial policies. It thereby highlights the explicit ‘class’ bias that informed the colonial state's anti-plague offensive, which was largely directed at the urban poor.

Altogether, as a place of education Adelaide falls far short of the mark; as a place of amusement it is hopeless; and as a village — well, it is tolerably clean, and comparatively healthy.

Thistle Anderson (1905)

This article explores the relationship between dwelling space and the lifestyles and social identities of the Roman bourgeoisie during a period of great social and cultural change. Concentrating on a few exemplary situations, the neighbourhoods and homes of the bourgeoisie are examined through the analysis of elements such as forms of behaviour, social relations, dress codes, building typologies and domestic interior furnishings. What emerges is the importance of dwelling space to the development and expression of bourgeois social identities, as well as the plurality of the latter and their evolution over the period examined.

Using film and archival evidence, this article focuses on post-war urban redevelopment in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. During this period, two federal institutions, the National Capital Commission and the National Film Board, worked in tandem to disseminate the promise of post-war urban renewal. Film and planning techniques perfected during World War II would be used to sell national urban renewal to Canadians. Rooted in centralized planning, steeped in militarist rhetoric and embedded in authoritarian tendencies, federal plans for a new modern capital had tragic implications for the marginalized and dislocated residents of the inner-city neighbourhood of LeBreton Flats.

Recent work on ‘civil society’ has made claims for the past capacity of mutual aid associations to generate ‘social capital’: self-help, trust, solidarity. Friendly societies in nineteenth-century Bristol are examined to test these claims. Their origins and growth are explored, as well as their membership and social, convivial and medical roles. Solidarities of class and neighbourhood are set against evidence of exclusion and division. Trust and close personal ties proved insufficient to avert the actuarial risks that threatened financial security.

This article examines a moment of uncertainty in early 1970s Glasgow motorway history: the planning of the East Flank of the Inner Ring Road and the potential removal of the Barrows Market. As sociological influences against wholesale urban clearance came into maturity in planning and community action, Glasgow planners carried out a feasibility study into the socio-economic costs of uprooting the commercial life of the Barrows. I suggest that reading this technocratic document for its cultural assumptions, ambiguities and tensions, rather than its engineering vision, opens up a different approach to the history of motorway planning.

The city of Ferrol was designed ‘ex-novo’ by military engineers to serve the Spanish monarchy and to house its naval base and dockyards. The principles of stratification on which society was based, and the need to defend the city from enemy attacks and to discipline workers led to a spatial plan that segregated the Navy officers and the working classes. In the nineteenth century, the naval base and the enclave economy of Ferrol became obsolete. Furthermore, the new political culture of the nation state and liberal democracy complicated further the task of controlling the working class. The Spanish Civil War allowed for the updating of Ferrol's spatial plan thanks to the identification of a single enemy both inside and outside: the political repression of the working-class became a major issue in the victory against the II República. The Franco regime meant the return of a segregated and militarized Ferrol, whereas in the 1980s, European integration and the transition to democracy made this model obsolete.

It was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.Augustinus, De Civitate Dei

This article offers a case study of urban improvement in Dundee, where the unco-ordinated efforts of different interest groups were largely adequate for the needs of the town in the first half of the nineteenth century, after which a more centralized approach evolved to address urban problems on a new scale. The Dundee case offers some explanations for this shift, which was mirrored in many other British towns.

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.

This article examines the changing images of the city of Milan over a period of two decades spanning the 1980s and 1990s. The article considers theoretical debates concerning city images. Milan is then analysed through the various spatial forms which encompass this modern city – political space, populated space, geographic space, urban space and economic space. The next section assesses the changing images of the city through shifting historical phases and crises. Finally the article draws together the fundamental economic and social changes which have marked the deindustrialization and reinvention of Milan.