The question ‘what is the city’ raised by Martindale in his edition of Max Weber's The City is an omnipresent one in urban history. This analysis of urban historiography since 1840 explores two definitional strands, each with many theoretical dimensions. The first is a somewhat self-contained conception of the city and relies on rural-urban contrasts; the second is a more open conceptualization of the city. The article tries to unravel the different approaches rather than preferring one approach to the other

In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English-speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg's black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial considerations determined the council's provision of leisure facilities.

This article explores the genesis of small parks in Tokyo following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. It sheds new light on an example of innovative urban design and post-disaster reconstruction, and highlights the growing place that children occupied in the minds of bureaucrats and urban planners. The small parks were designed for children first and foremost. Originally conceived as a means to increase space for school children to play and exercise, all 52 parks were strategically located beside primary schools. As the state's goals of social management expanded, however, officials increasingly recognized the potential to use small parks as sites of rest and guided recreation, as well as emergency refuge. A history of Tokyo's small parks thus offers a window in to the growing understanding about the relationship between the built environment, health and society in inter-war Japan.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the state-operated Maharashtra Housing Board and its successor organization Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) responded to Mumbai's exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure to fight the housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. In Mumbai's northern suburbs, housing compounds were built for designated income levels, such as Kannamwar Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar for the ‘low-income group’ and DN Nagar or Sahakar Nagar for the ‘middle-income group’. This article argues that Mumbai's state-sponsored tower blocks adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. The designers took up influences from both local Maharashtrian and European housing typologies of the mid-twentieth century, including upper-class art deco apartments, socialist housing compounds and serially built working-class chawls. In contrast to mass housing developments in Chicago, Moscow or Paris, Mumbai's tower blocks were built individually rather than from prefabricated parts, offered rather high standards of living compared to that of the majority and, as a result, became increasingly inhabited by comparably wealthy groups. Since the beginning of economic liberalization in the 1990s, many have been converted into private co-operatives. Once designed to house the masses, they are now visible symbols for a growing minority that constitutes Mumbai's new middle class. At the same time, they are an example for the local evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.

This article argues that cultural capital in the Victorian town contributed to spatial as well as social differentiation, helping to bolster the power of civic elites and the image and identity of the town. Evidence drawn from north Staffordshire Pottery towns demonstrates how the value of cultural capital reflected the scale, timing and geography of investment, and its ability to represent and communicate the taste and judgment of the civic elite to those of neighbouring towns. In the hothouse of local rivalry that led up to the creation of the borough of Stoke-on-Trent, investment in cultural capital took on extra significance as each town strove for political ascendancy in the nascent conurbation.

This article examines multiplex cinema development and its close association with shopping centre expansion programmes in Australia. The article argues that while multiplex cinema construction in Australia echoed international developments, it also resulted from coalescing interests between local retail developers and film exhibitors, was guided by planning legislation and shaped by escalating institutional investment in the retail industry. Data mapping the emergence, growth and consolidation of multiplexes in Sydney, Australia's largest city, is used to illustrate this development, contributing to urban histories of the city and understandings of the ways in which its contours have been reshaped by consumer capitalism.

Although it is widely acknowledged that urban oligarchy pre-dominated across medieval England, oligarchy's foundations are only partly known. This article argues that part of oligarchy's success derived from close social interaction between oligarchs and the rest of the citizens. A case study of social networks and arbitration within the city of Wells demonstrates how the elite insinuated themselves into the town's social web, establishing and securing their influence and power. Moreover, such a social role brought the oligarchs together often and helped to define the elite. Such power encouraged a more benevolent form of oligarchy than later prevailed.

Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Those living in naval sailortowns were geographically and culturally marginalized from the centres of economic and political power and their relationship with the civic and naval authorities was one which varied between compromise and resistance.

This article brings together two Geographical Information Systems (GIS) datasets – building-level land-use data from the 1852–54 Perris Fire Insurance Atlas, and geocoded home addresses from the 1854 city directory – to explore how desirable and undesirable conditions of the built environment accounted for new dynamics of residential separation in mid-nineteenth-century New York. Using spatial analysis, it shows how early forms of residential separation were driven by the desire of elites to create secluded residential neighbourhoods. Further, although stark contrasts delineated the extremes of wealth and poverty, the city's dominant landscape was defined by in-between conditions and subtle variations in built environment and residential distance.

The micro-history of one apartment block in the inner-suburb of Bovisa, Milan over a period of 100 or so years is examined using oral history interviews to trace the development of the block and its residents in relation to that of the city of Milan. The piece is bounded by theoretical reflections on the role of micro-history, oral history and other methodologies as tools for understanding the home and urban history, and concludes that the survival of a rural past, the role of gender, the importance of architecture and of nostalgic memory in a rapidly changing world were important influences.

Swift's poetic jibe was aimed at the ever-friendlessliterary critic; but there were many others whoshared in the polymorphic business of ‘givingdirections’ to the unwieldy town. Some veryliterally so: the makers of the early directoriesprovided names, addresses, and occupations ofleading urban residents, plus staple informationabout transport services, posts, banks andmiscellaneous local offices. Itemizing andclassifying a complex urbanity took a certainconfidence. ‘I have taken upon me the arduous Taskof compiling a Complete Guide, forthe easy finding out of every inhabitant of theleast Consequence…’, asserted Elizabeth Raffald,publishing the Manchester Directoryin 1772, while confessing the difficulties of thetask. Not everyone may have been convinced by hercomputation that the significant citizens numberedonly 1,500 men and women, in a growing conurbationof over 30,000 residents. But that was not thepoint. A directory offered immediacy rather thancomplete accuracy or comprehension. Indeed, mostcompilers were careful not to claim too much.‘Errors and Deficien- cies must unavoidably appearin every Work of this Kind, from the extremeDifficulty of procuring Information in some Things,and the fluctuating Variety of others’, as ADirectory of Sheffield explained firmlyin 1787. Many compilations made a caveat of thissort, and indicated a willingness to acceptcorrections and additions for future editions.

The study of the urban experience in Lisbon, the former capital of the Portuguese empire, creates a specific observatory to interpret the colonial process and its post-colonial developments. Following an itinerary from colonial to post-colonial times, this article examines the continuities and discontinuities of Lisbon's urban dynamics linked with Portugal's colonial history through three interlinked processes. First, the material inscription of policies of national identity in the memory space of the city since the late nineteenth century until today. Second, the expansion of a network of economic relations that affected Lisbon's industrial, commercial and urban life. And finally, the development of a system of social and political organization, where spatial distribution and civil and political rights were unequally distributed.

The thesis of ‘urban decline’ in the late Middle Ages has been largely based on changes within incorporated boroughs. Loughborough was a small town in Leicestershire, closely involved in intra-regional exchange between three different farming regions. By the late fourteenth century, if not before, its central precinct had a definite urban form, including a specialized marketing form. Indicators (such as demographic estimates, litigation, and property-holding) suggest that the town did not suffer any substantial decline in the late Middle Ages. Structural changes in the countrysides, with a greater emphasis on specialization of production, may have maintained the town as a centre of exchange and consumption.

This article is concerned with the Cotton Famine affecting the towns of north-west England between 1861–64. It examines charitable responses to the Famine and especially the impact of the charity relationship between recipient and donor. Understanding the complexities of this relationship, based on a reciprocal arrangement and establishing behavoural norms, leads to a wider appreciation of the role of charity in determining class cohesion and in managing the urban environment.

The social relationships of housing tenure shape urban life. One of the most peculiar tenure regimes emerged in the towns of East and Central Africa during the colonial period. In accordance with the colonial policy of trusteeship, employers and municipalities were together responsible for housing all permanently employed Africans, who constituted the majority in most urban centres. Contemporaries noted that employers and municipalities commonly failed to do their job, a judgement that historians have endorsed. In fact, their contribution varied greatly from place to place and, though generally insufficient, was still substantial. This paternalistic tenure regime created dependency and open-ended commitments that could not be met.

Advocating a closer relationship between urban and epidemiological history, the paper concentrates, firstly, on a critical overview of the McKeown thesis. It next identifies components from the work of John Landers as a means of constructing a structural model of mortality experienced during the period under review. The paper goes on to examine the manner in which this model might be applied to London during an era in which the classic killing infections of the mid-nineteenth century were gradually replaced by non-infectious causes of death. Returning, by way of conclusion, to the theme of an integration of urban and epidemiological methodologies, attention is drawn to the explanatory potential of a fully historical economy of health and disease.

Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long shadow cast by mining and the urban metropoles, with their centripetal pull on labour and the state, making the company town an archetypal urban form on the rural periphery.

This article challenges perceptions about the origins and objectives of the ‘neighbourhood unit principle’ that emerged in 1944, by focusing on the location and purpose of shops. It argues that the positioning of retail spaces was central, but largely overlooked, to the socio-spatial schema that lay at the heart of the neighbourhood principle. Planners saw shops as a hub of face-to-face interaction, through which nebulous objectives like ‘community spirit’ might be engendered. However, planners did not account for the way that their need-based model of shopping might be undermined by the consumer habits of inhabitants and the changing objectives of retailers.

De-industrialization and the rise of the service sector have formed the basis of recent attempts to develop a new metanarrative of economic change in twentieth-century Britain. Their effects have been taken as writ through labour market statistics or aggregate measures of gross domestic product. However, by focusing on particular micro-economic spaces, a different story emerges. Using the inner areas of Liverpool as a case-study, this article shows how the city's social and economic problems were underwritten by the decline of the service sector, located around the port. By reading the effects of social and economic change through accounts of the physical environment, it demonstrates how urban decay and dereliction provided material resonance to Liverpool's economic decline. The city's landscape of urban decay and dereliction encompassed the infrastructure of everyday life – housing, roads and even trees – as well as that of economic activity, including the docks and warehouses. Taken together, this article shows how this landscape of urban decay and dereliction came to be constituted as an agent within Liverpool's continued economic decline in the 1970s rather than simply being a reflection of it.

This article provides a detailed study of the Liber Albus, a London custumal compiled in 1419 by John Carpenter, Common Clerk of the City, under the direction of the mayor, Richard Whittington. It explores how the manuscript demonstrated a growing conservatism in early fifteenth-century London government, especially in relation to the regulation of the food trade and matters of public order, linking this to memories of late fourteenth-century turbulence in the City and poor relations with the Crown.