In 1959, East German Dresden and western Polish Wrocław were twinned to promote cross-border contact between political leaders, worker delegations and cultural groups. Officially formed to promote worker solidarity among friendly East Bloc regimes, in practice the inter-relationship exposed a troubling history that was just below the surface. In the recent aftermath of Nazi defeat, the German population of Breslau (over 600,000 people) had fled or been expelled from a city which had long been German. At the same time that Breslau became Polish Wrocław, a significant number of old Breslauers settled in the East German province of Saxony, especially Dresden. This article uses archival and published sources to show how, under the umbrella of worker exchanges, field trips and official amity, the sister-city programme unintentionally became a venue for German exiles from Breslau to encounter Wrocławian delegations in Dresden and to return ‘home’ to discover Wrocław’s post-war Polish reality.

The unique status of the city of Mysore arose from the fact that it was divested of all administrative functions save that of the Palace establishment. Principles of city planning were innovatively pursued, through a combination of sovereign authority and diverse forces, techniques and devices more properly associated with ‘governmentality’. It was among the first cities in India to have a City Improvement Trust in 1903. An investigation of the work of the Mysore City Improvement Trust in its negotiations with the municipality on the one hand and the Palace establishment on the other foregrounds the ‘monarchical’ as a specific form of power. What were the specific forms of material and temporal ‘ordering’ that came to distinguish Mysore city from its counterparts? This article looks at four distinct moments of this journey, related respectively to sanitizing, botanizing, ornamentalizing and spectacularizing, together producing a ‘depth of historical distance’.

The ordinary city of Bir al-Saba’, situated within an urban world stretched across southern Palestine, has a story to tell, of dramatic spatiotemporal transformations, presence and absence, capture and resilience. Such connected urban history is profoundly shaped through the world-making relations of those who lived and dwelt within the always-becoming material and ideational spatial geography of the Naqab. Research gathered from diverse archival sources and interview data offers insight into the voices, actions and imaginaries of the Saba'awi as they worked the shifting assemblages of this landscape between 1840 and 1936, making Bir al-Saba’ a thick multiscalar cosmopolitan place of meaning and opportunity.

This study estimates the cost of living in three cities – Florence, Bologna and Milan – in eighteenth-century northern Italy. Although they do not allow an understanding of the differences between social groups or seasonal consumption patterns, the calculation of living costs and the implied modelling have a twofold aim. First, they allow the calculation of real wages, which are obtained by dividing nominal wages by the cost of a consumption basket; therefore, broadly, they allow the Italian case to be put into great debates of economic history, such as the one on the Little Divergence between northern and southern Europe at the end of the early modern period. In this regard, we will show that the existing calculations used for this purpose have many criticalities, and we will solve them. Second, determining the cost of consumption baskets allows us to observe the role played by urban public institutions in mediating between the market and consumers, with relevant effects on price trends and, therefore, on the purchasing power of the urban population.

At the conclusion of the 1950s in Japan, plans to reclaim and develop Tokyo Bay were proposed by the Japan Housing Corporation's president and a private think tank on economic affairs. The vision was incompatible with dispersion, the basic direction of the state's policy, so it was quickly rejected, but its legacy lived on as the trans-Tokyo Bay highway in 1997. This article argues that the lack of an effective national policy led to contradictory initiatives and divisions among the stakeholders, leaving open the way for the large-scale reclamation and development of Tokyo Bay.

In contrast to the well-studied shopkeepers, little empirical evidence exists on the locational patterns of artisans in transforming urban spaces. By GIS mapping a dataset on Brussels construction entrepreneurs (c. 1830–1930), long-term changes in their patterns of spatial clustering and dispersal become clear, showing which urban areas provided advantageous conditions for artisans to thrive, but also how and when these conditions subsided. While confirming earlier observations of a broad scattering of artisans throughout the city, the analysis also shows how remarkable clusters emerged in cheap, densely built, both central and suburban neighbourhoods. The importance of clustering decreased over time, however. Confronting locational patterns with their potential underlying causes shows that planning policies for the renewal of urban infrastructure and the resulting dynamics on the real estate market acted as the first drivers of urban de-industrialization, affecting the displacement of artisans from inner cities since at least the late nineteenth century.

This article focuses on Jaipur city, capital of the Kachhawa Rajput state of Jaipur in the Rajputana region of north-western India (present-day Rajasthan). It seeks to braid the narrative of modernity in Jaipur with the tripartite networks of capital, knowledge and infrastructure that were contemporaneous to different phases of the city's transformation. Through a genealogical analysis of Jaipur's modernity from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the article will present three distinct periods of its urbanization.

The heritage of World War II left an indelible mark on the relations between Italy and Yugoslavia. During the détente period, however, these two countries were able to overcome many historical resentments and established a fruitful co-operation in Cold War Europe. This article questions the engagement on state, regional and municipal levels and analyses the role of twin cities in this multilayered process. With the help of primary sources, we learn how the heritage of World War II played an important role in building new forms of post-war co-operation. In fact, post-war twinning is often the result of shared anti-fascist activities from the war years. However, this is not confined to communist municipalities or ‘red’ regions in Italy on one side, and socialist Yugoslavia on the other, but is a more fluid and flexible practice which involves historical ties, geographical positions, personal capacities and economic needs.

From the nineteenth century onwards, municipal authorities vested increasing amounts of power in experts, those who could provide specialist knowledge on areas outside the remit of local councillors. This, though, was attached with risk, as municipal resources could be wasted. This article takes the example of the Ure Valley waterworks project, a scheme developed by Leeds Corporation at the start of the twentieth century. What was deemed a necessary and straightforward project to alleviate future water shortages became embroiled in engineering difficulties and financial issues which resulted in only one of the five planned reservoirs being built. This case-study shines a light on the inner workings of local government, as well as the confluence between politics, economics and the urban–rural hinterland environment.

To this point, nineteenth-century Bombay – including its urban development, economy and population – has most often been analysed in relation to the city's position within British imperial, and overseas maritime, networks. In contrast, this article calls into question established scholarly definitions of ‘colonial’ and ‘princely’ spaces in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, through an in-depth examination of Bombay's socio-economic ties with wider Indian networks. It focuses on connections that stretched across colonial borders and into the princely states, suggesting that both the city's economy and its business elite were rooted in cross-border Indian capital networks. It further highlights the contributions of Indian princes, their states and populations to the development of urban culture in Bombay.

Town twinning is often seen as a linear driving force of European integration. This article argues that town twinning’s historicity is more complex. The initial post-war period, according to today’s practitioners’ accounts, was characterized by a high degree of personal involvement which transformed into an exposure to relationship uncertainty. By way of contrast, twinning practices since the 1990s are reported as being driven by a more managerial logic. The shift from the imaginary of ‘reconciliation’ to that of ‘integration’ comes along with a change in twinning practices, the distribution of responsibilities and the share of personal involvement and exposure.

Dublin at the turn of the nineteenth century had limited permanent employment opportunities compared to Belfast, and for poor families financial instability manifested in limited life expectancy. This article focuses on young adult cohorts in Dublin city. By cross-referencing names and addresses from death records with census, court and prison records, it casts new light on the lives of the city's most disadvantaged people. It applies a digital humanities framework and uses historical Geographical Information Systems to explore patterns in cause of death, and to reveal more about household income, casual labour, women's work and community networks. We contend that the cautions about the occlusion of commercial sex work in historical data should be extended to the lowest strata of the working classes more generally and that it is only through granular analyses that the fine lines between poverty and destitution can emerge.

The use of the pesthouse in early modern England has received limited attention by scholars, in particular, how it was used in London. The study of the pesthouse tells us about the nature of parochial government in the capital, the early development of public health policies and the relationship between national and civic authorities and the suburban parishes, where plague was a long-term problem and intersected forcefully with poverty. This article explores how suburban parishes used the pesthouse in their repertoire of response to plague between c. 1600 and 1650, which is situated in the context of experiments with the pesthouse in England's provincial towns and cities. The article considers the development of the City of London's pesthouse in St Giles Cripplegate, its limited use by suburban parishes under the City's jurisdiction, and the establishment of a local pesthouse by some suburban parishes beyond the jurisdiction of the City.

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.

This article builds on recent works which challenge the dichotomy between religion and modern urban planning. The article focuses on a case-study in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse during the nineteenth century. Over a period of 30 years, Catholic parishioners and clergy repeatedly petitioned the town’s Calvinist industrial and municipal elite for a church to be built in the paternalist cités ouvrières housing district, culminating in the eventual construction of the church of Saint-Joseph by 1883. Through a close analysis of the archival records of these petitions, the discussions they sparked and the shifting local and national political dynamics of the city, this article argues that religious groups used myriad tactics to engage in modern planning and that municipal authorities were won over by these tactics if they were politically expedient.

The late nineteenth-century harbour districts, or so-called ‘sailortowns’, are generally depicted as deterritorialized ‘enclaves’ of heightened globalized transience. However, these neighbourhoods were just as much shaped by semi-durable local labouring communities. This article studies lodging houses as facilitators of global and local entanglements in harbour districts from a socio-cultural perspective, with Antwerp in the late nineteenth century as a case-study. Analysing the spatiality, materiality, sociability and people of the lodging phenomenon, it reveals that next to the highly transient seafarers, sailortown accommodated a diverse yet largely local population of small entrepreneurs and their families right between transience and permanence.

This article examines the nature of sociability, communication and the ‘practical public sphere’ of Hamburg's early coffeehouses (1677–1714) and provides insight into the ‘social life’ of these coffeehouse spaces during the ‘early’ Enlightenment. Using licensing records, administrative sources and supplications, it shows how novelty, popularity, political partisanship and fashionability were characteristic of these early coffeehouses, creating a fluid and capricious dynamic of custom and communication that stressed established notions of honourable sociabilities and communication in urban public spaces. It argues that these destabilizing social and communication practices led to social stratification and a redefinition of ‘honourable’ burgherly behaviour in the normative public sphere. Strategies to govern the coffeehouses sought thus to bind these spaces and their actors to this newly articulated ‘normative’ burgherly public sphere.

Despite a long settlement history, empirical investigations of the role of path dependency in the long-term evolution of human populations are scarce in Europe, and especially in the Mediterranean countries. Using spatially explicit econometric techniques, our study discusses the empirical evidence stemming from a quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of population growth rates in 115 districts of metropolitan Athens (Greece) over one century, distinguishing path dependency from the impact of other socio-economic forces on long-term urban expansion. The empirical findings of this study clarify how path-dependent regulation of population growth was heterogeneous over time and space, and depends on the specific stage of the city life cycle. After an initial period when path-independent population expansion reflected the inherent impact of exogenous shocks, path-dependent growth was associated with compact urbanization governed by agglomeration and scale advantages. Path-dependent growth was less intense during suburbanization, when the population spread over larger areas.