This article examines the thriving lodging house sector in early modern Venice, arguing that such spaces of temporary accommodation offer a valuable key to understanding how mobility and migration shaped the daily lived experience of the city. Lodging houses were important both to the many Venetian residents who profited from renting out rooms, and to the people who stayed in them, and found there companionship, conversation and access to social and professional networks. Considering the kinds of encounters, conflicts and exchanges that unfolded in these shared spaces, the article offers new insight into the functioning of a pre-modern multicultural metropolis.

Scholarship on brewing in early modern London is torn between two irreconcilable stories, one positing stunning growth before 1560 and the other insignificant change until after 1720. Careful attention to company and court records as well as state papers, however, reveals that by 1600 London brewing had boomed, likely making it Europe’s largest brewing centre, led by individual houses operating on scales close to the largest of the mid-eighteenth century. Such breweries were accurately perceived to be large scale and highly profitable, clustered along the Thames in urban industrial zones.

This article analyses the role of LaClede Town, a nationally lauded housing development in St Louis (USA), in metropolitan and national contests over race, segregation and urban equity from the 1960s to 1990s. Built on the site of a massive slum-clearance project, the federally supported complex gained widespread fame for its startlingly heterogeneous racial mix and ostensibly colour-blind lifestyles. As the article argues, the quasi-utopian language applied to the neighbourhood illustrates the contours and limitations of a 1960s racial liberalism that sought to overcome structural inequalities through face-to-face neighbourly contact. Yet the project's 1990s demise signals that older ideology's supersession by a newly dominant urban neoliberalism.

Professionals and volunteers in inter-war England and France advanced a ‘modern’ health movement, placing particular emphasis on children's physical condition. The use of the urban clinic in this process has been considered. However, the mass relocation of young people to the countryside and attempts to generate intra-urban spaces of ‘nature’ for the young were also integral to this movement. Surprisingly, the pioneers of modern urban healthcare supported a ‘return to nature’ by mobilizing anti-urban and pro-rural discourse. Comparing Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, this article addresses the politics that produced this paradox.

The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

Early modern European capitals competed to demonstrate their imperial status, and contemporary urban praise often drew comparisons between them, situating these cities within a shifting hierarchy. Authors frequently combined actual perceptions of cities with metaphors of a New Rome and other classical motifs. This article explores how various writers asserted Lisbon's greatness and civic identity within this shared comparative European discourse. More particularly, it shows how they defended its changing political status as a capital while also developing a strong commercial discourse that centred on the city as an emporium. Views and descriptions of Lisbon and its port paralleled contemporary descriptions of London in particular, as both cities were increasingly defined as paradigms of imperial commerce.

This article explores how political division manifested itself in the electricity systems of West and East Berlin and analyses the strategies of both throughout the 40 years of the Cold War. It reveals how the goal of full energy independence propagated by both West and East proved illusory for material, geopolitical, institutional, economic and environmental reasons. Apart from vestiges of past interdependence, pressures to collaborate gained impetus from the 1970s onwards. The Berlin experience, the article concludes, generates lessons for navigating socio-technical in-/interdependencies over electricity infrastructures in geopolitically contested contexts by highlighting the material politics of urban energy history.

In nineteenth-century The Hague, the French opera performances in the Royal Theatre were the most important occasions during the winter season at which men and women from almost all social ranks experienced a strong sense of social cohesion in a common leisure pursuit, albeit one in which social hierarchies were clearly demarcated. This article analyses the changing social composition of the opera audience through analysis of subscription and admission records, and evaluates the changing composition of the audience in relation to changes in taste, theatre architecture and policy. Although it was almost impossible to exploit financially and was also a constant object of political, musical and moral criticism, the French opera succeeded in maintaining its central position in The Hague's musical and social life throughout the nineteenth century.

Accounts of nineteenth-century burial practice in England borrow heavily from French historiography, which describes the way that scientific agendas drove a shift from traditional churchyard use to secular, municipal cemetery management. A challenge to this meta-narrative uses the example of Sheffield. In this highly industrialized city, the nineteenth century did not see a dichotomized translation from churchyard to cemetery; the Church Building Act (1818) was more effective in meeting burial demand than the 1836 General Cemetery; the formal closure of churchyards did not always lead to a cessation of burial; and by the century's end, church burial provision remained substantial.

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.

This article addresses the beginnings of the twinning relationship between Coventry and Kiel to introduce and exemplify the idea of ‘urban internationalism’ as a new lens onto urban histories of town twinning initiatives and a contribution to the historiography of British town twinning. Focusing on paradiplomatic initiatives by municipal officials, religious dignitaries and other citizens in Coventry and Kiel, the article examines the role that cities played in British–German reconstruction and reconciliation in the period from the end of World War II until the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

Despite its National Socialist origins, the post-war use of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport has seen it recast as a ‘symbol of freedom’. Since the airport's 2008 closure, the site has been caught between calls for increased engagement with its use under the Third Reich and economic incentives to repackage it as an attractive events location. Through analysing the different strategies through which Tempelhof's past is negotiated, this article will highlight the contested nature of Berlin's relationship with the past and the complex interaction between memory politics and more pragmatic issues.