In this article, we present an exploration of the social meaning and functions of marketplace sounds – including language, yelling and hailing – in two adjacent, yet very different sites in Copenhagen, Gammel Strand and Højbro Plads. We argue that the marketplace soundscapes played central functions as means of constructing customer-oriented semiotic spaces while negotiating territories and branding and selling products. Language by way of dialectal speech, yelling, street cries, cursing and swearing was an integral part of such processes. The two sites, by virtue of their physical placement in close proximity to each other, reinforced the contrasts between them, hence, co-constructing contrasting sonic territories – a concept which we employ and develop as part of the analysis. Central to our argument is that a sensory approach, including the sound of language, to a semiotic description of the urban marketplace requires a historical contextualization of the marketplace and its functions in the urban space, as well as of the life and culture of the marketplace vendors themselves; that is, the case in point, the female vendors from Amager and Skovshoved.

This introductory essay establishes the site of the neighbourhood and the social fact of urban proximity as crucial, conflicted and volatile conditions of colonial society. We show that the colonial neighbourhood was a highly contested space where diverse populations, stark inequalities and asymmetric power distributions played out in the most palpable manner. At the same time, it also emerged as an incubator of sociability, solidarity and protest across communal lines. The constant tension between physical proximity and profound inequality defined much of the social dynamics in the colonial city, making neighbours and neighbourhoods a most promising terrain of enquiry.

Nineteenth-century Calcutta was a premium port city and the nerve-centre of the British Empire’s commercial activities in South Asia. In many ways it was presented as a promising mercantile global metropolis – a symbol of efficiency, infrastructure and urban modernization – celebrated in contemporary colonial accounts and literature.1 However, looking beyond, it is possible to locate other perspectives that challenge the colonial narrative. Reading both against the grain of colonial archives and closely examining Indian accounts, this article highlights the gaps in its smooth functioning, and uncovers local practices that challenged metropolitan blueprints. As seen here, it was possible for the everyday city to pose a serious challenge to European – purportedly universal, and therefore global – models of urbanization implemented by the colonial government. Calcutta here emerges as much a product of its own social, cultural and natural environment, as that of global modernization regimes unleashed by colonialism, the legacy of which can be seen even today.

The article analyses the project to move the Argentinian capital from Buenos Aires to Viedma, a small city located in the south, in 1986. The project enlightens the period as a juncture of both technical and political transitions. In technical terms, the proposal had a hybrid nature, articulating developmentalist planning perspectives with innovative objectives for the time. In political terms, the proposal reflected the contradictions of the period, in which re-foundational illusions and severe economic and political limitations were articulated. Crossing the technical and political dimensions, the initiative is suggestive of the role given to technicians within the democratic transition.

This article examines Coimbra City Council’s role in meat supply from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on public–private dynamics, it highlights how private contractors were tasked with providing fresh meat. The article explores how transaction costs and risk influenced contract delegation, revealing the council’s risk-averse preference for indirect supply. While this approach shaped contract decisions, it proved insufficient in limiting rising real meat prices or boosting per capita consumption. Using Coimbra as a case study, the article illustrates broader challenges in municipal supply systems and their limited ability to ensure both the affordability and availability of essential foodstuffs.

Examining the early post-colonial Beirut International Airport (BEY), we make two arguments. First, BEY had the potential to become the Middle East’s largest airport only because from the mid-1800s Beirut, which had a large maritime port, had been the Arab East’s global cultural, commercial, communications and transport hub, which created a path dependency. Second, BEY deepened Beirut’s regional-global role throughout the 1960s, making it an aero-city piggybacking on a port-city. We explore four dimensions. First, in urban planning, the government was exceptionally interventionist where BEY was concerned; second, BEY’s construction triggered sociopolitical conflicts; third, BEY intersected with Palestinian and Lebanese unskilled labour flows; and, finally, air-travel, including tourism, affected Beirut’s cityscape deeply yet unevenly.

This article argues that the infrastructural and regulatory politics of Accra’s town council in the early twentieth century highlight competing and transforming understandings of ‘neighbour’ and ‘neighbourhood’. British officials and their elite African allies on the town council championed new forms of physical, social and economic infrastructure, which they touted as ‘modern’ improvements that would bring Accra in line with other major cities and improve life for its inhabitants. Accra residents did not reject all reform or innovation, but they did insist that urban development take place on their terms and in ways that would support their interests, informed by indigenous notions of civic virtue, social responsibility, moral community and spatial organization.

This article re-examines the geography of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Havana through the gendered lens of Black freedom and enslavement. The author uses fragmentary evidence surrounding the disappearance of Margarita, a young, enslaved girl in 1820s Havana, to suggest how the city’s African and African-descended residents navigated urban space in opposition to colonial design and function. In the process, the author suggests the ways in which the interventions of Black residents, influenced by the ecologies internal to the port, were pivotal to the production of urban space and the geographies of slavery.

This article examines land disputes in Epetedo, a Lagos neighbourhood established in 1862, to explore how city dwellers interpreted their past and defined their area’s identity. After its establishment, Epetedo became the centre of conflicts over the ownership of its 21 compounds. From 1927 to 1947, two factions produced competing historical narratives in an effort to change property laws and disseminate their quarter’s history. Drawing on disputants’ records like petitions and letters, I demonstrate how residents articulated the meaning of a neighbourhood through historical writing, as well as through their socio-political and spatial engagements.

The 20th biennial conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS) was held in Hong Kong, China. Through a comprehensive analysis of the keynote speeches, panel presentations, roundtable discussions, excursions and IPHS awards, this report highlights key insights from the conference that are especially relevant to urban historians. It suggests that planning history not only acts as a tool for informing urban strategies but also offers critical perspectives on socio-political, environmental, and cultural dimensions of urban transformation. The report presents three key insights for urban historians: (1) the entangled planning histories of Hong Kong and Shenzhen reflect broader political, ideological and international ambitions of dominant powers; (2) the evolution of environmental histories when rethinking human–natural relations in urban transition; and (3) the emerging attention to marginalized voices and alternative archives to enrich dominant planning narratives. These together demonstrate how planning history offers a critical historiographical lens for interpreting urban transformation.

This article explores a unique case of Jewish–Muslim cohabitation in colonial Algeria: the harat in the town of Sétif. Families from different religious communities shared communal facilities, private spaces and everyday activities in these housing complexes. At the same time, these neighbours arrived in the city under different historical conditions, possessed different legal statuses and occupied different positions in colonial society. Through a study of the setting, architecture and oral traditions of the harat, this article shows that being neighbours in colonial Algeria fostered a locally grounded sense of cohesion in an age when abstract forms of belonging gained ground.

Summarizing the key findings of this special issue, our conclusion embeds them into the long-term history of cities extending to our present age. Some of the cities treated in our special issue have since turned into megacities marked by environmental hazards and extreme socio-economic inequalities. Their combination invites rethinking the interdependence of natural, built and social environments in urban contexts in the longue durée. Interweaving nine case-studies of cities in different world regions, our special issue demonstrates that a sustained environmental focus and the longue durée approach enriches current scholarship on port cities, and also nurtures discussion on the long-term consequences of the coastalization of the world population, thereby contributing to the fields of global and imperial history as a whole.

This article explores the dynamics of urban peripheries in Mandate Palestine, focusing on the Jewish neighbourhoods of Bat Galim in Haifa and HaTikvah near Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It argues that the social and geographical isolation of these peripheries created a dual dynamic: strengthening bonds within the neighbourhood communities while also giving rise to significant conflicts, both within the Jewish society and in Jewish–Arab relations. Drawing on archival sources, letters and interviews, the research examines resident agency, social tensions and inter-communal interactions, demonstrating how these peripheries shaped urban society and culture under British colonial rule through processes of separation and connection.

This article explores the social history of Sandakan and Jesselton (Kota Kinabalu) by studying how their urban environments were organized and navigated. Although the neighbourhood was not officially recognized as a category of space, it argues that analogous quarters existed within the towns during the early twentieth century. As the commercial capitals of British North Borneo, the towns contained migrant people of various ethnicities that formed separate communities. The socio-spatial boundaries of these quarters were nevertheless permeable, enabling cross-communal interactions. Life in Sandakan and Jesselton was characterized by a contingency and complexity suitable for comparison with larger colonial cities.

This article examines the development of colonial public culture in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, over the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on two moments of extended colonial ceremony: the city’s 250th anniversary in 1869 and the inauguration of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898. The analysis shows that over the course of the century, colonial ceremonial increasingly sought to assimilate facets of local cultural practices, while also expanding spatially into a more diverse set of neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, this new and superficially more representative order still maintained a strict internal hierarchy embedded in spatial and socio-cultural boundaries.