Pre-1500

Today, migration, refugees and violence against aliens are regular news items. Political crises, war and social conflict elsewhere mean that many people seek happiness, security and economic opportunities in the western world. Often, these people are welcome, but sometimes animosities between local people and the aliens occur. In the popular media, the explanation for these confrontations and the unwillingness of locals to accept migrants within their community is found in the otherness of the newcomers, difficulties of integration and even their economic activities (‘They take our jobs!’). Historical research by Bart Lambert and Milan Pajic, however, shows that an alternative explanation can be given for similar conflicts between locals and foreigners in the past. They argue that governmental policies should also be taken into account when explaining aggression against aliens. In 1381, about 40 Flemings were killed in London and Southwark during a violent episode of the revolt which held England in its grip. Most of these Flemings were immigrants or descendants of exiles and refugees from Flanders. In the mid-fourteenth century, political conflict between artisans and the Flemish count had obliged many cloth workers to cross the Channel. As the authors demonstrate, most of them continued their craft in towns like Colchester, Norwich and London. The violence perpetrated by the English against these people in 1381 up until now has been explained as the result of different identities clashing, and the economic problems of the later fourteenth century: the murderers were native cloth workers dissatisfied with the competition of the newcomers from abroad. Lambert and Pajic, however, convincingly argue that the bloodshed was triggered by the government's policies. In the course of the fourteenth century, the crown developed a new policy aimed at attracting skilled workers from abroad (such as Flemings – most of them were well-off master artisans). Convinced that their activities benefited the common profit of the realm, Edward III had granted the Flemish immigrants favourable privileges, though the king remained deaf to the concern of London's native weavers, who had petitioned repeatedly for similar privileges as the immigrants. An inquiry into these petitions demonstrates that the weavers were not complaining against the presence of the aliens as such, but against the crown who ignored their wishes to improve their economic situation. In 1381, the Flemish weavers produced different kinds of cloth from the English weavers, so they provided no direct competition. Instead, in 1381, the native weavers were expressing their desperation at the lack of support from the English monarchy in the face of challenging trends in the cloth making business. The revolt of 1381 thus provided an outlet for social groups in English society who, for decades, had been frustrated with the inadequacies of government policies. All came to the surface in 1381, with (among others) the London bloodshed as a result. During the vacuum of power in that year, the native London cloth workers had concluded that their economic problems would never be solved politically. Therefore they took up arms with the aim of attacking a group which had been granted economic privileges by the crown. As a result, the Flemings became the victim of the crown's inadequacy to meet with the economic difficulties of English artisans (‘Immigration and the common profit: native cloth workers, Flemish exiles, and royal policy in fourteenth-century London’, J. of British Studies, 55 (2016), 633–57).

The relationship between foreigners and citizens in the local economy is also discussed by Francisco Appellániz, albeit in the Islamic world (‘Judging the Franks: proof, justice, and diversity in late medieval Alexandria and Damascus’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58 (2016), 350–78). All too often, it has been considered that local legal systems in cities at the eastern side of the Mediterranean were kept fundamentally distinct from judicial practices introduced by the Franks until the age of colonization, so that Islamic law maintained the biases against non-Muslims and its main formalist traits. Yet, Appellániz challenges the view of two opposed normative systems. His study of legal practices in Alexandria and Damascus demonstrates that legal relations and collaboration went far beyond the sphere of tolerance and co-existence, because a common notarial culture emerged facilitating transactions between local merchants and strangers. This culture was an amalgam of practices used by notaries sent to the Mamluk cities by the Venetian government on the one side, and royal justice created by the sultans on the other side. Together with the expansion of the jurisdiction of the so-called ‘siyasa’ (new royal courts where justice was dispensed by government officials instead of by traditional judges) over the affairs of foreigners, a much deeper legal interplay was brought about than has previously been understood. Ultimately, this article argues, Mediterranean medieval societies had evolving attitudes toward justice and diversity. They approached their own legal traditions in ways compatible with the conflict resolution, while constantly borrowing legal concepts about differences from each other. As a result, transaction costs of trade were lowered, and economic opportunities for local citizens and foreign merchants improved due to this new notarial culture combining aspects of eastern and western legal systems.

Not only a favourable legal system but also an attractive accommodation was necessary to facilitate commerce and international trade in the medieval town, as is shown by an extensive study of the so-called ‘Poortersloge’ of Bruges (F. Buylaert, J. De Rock and J. Dumolyn, ‘La loge des bourgeois de Bruges. Les stratégies de distinction d'une élite commerçante cosmopolite’, Revue du Nord, 414 (2016), 37–69). In Bruges, one of the main commercial centres of the later medieval North Sea area, the ‘Poortersloge’ (Burghers’ Lodge) was a remarkable building, constructed in various phases from about 1400. This Gothic construction in natural stone still exists today, although in a heavily restored form. Its main function was to serve as a space for the social and cultural life of the urban commercial elite, a place in which local merchants, but also foreign traders and citizens, met. It was not a unique building in Europe, because the authors compare it with the lonjas of the Iberian Peninsula, the Italian loggie, the houses of merchant guilds in the Hanseatic towns or the English guildhalls. Combining iconographical material, archaeological evidence and archival sources, they demonstrate that such buildings created a perfect environment for the commercial elite to invest in informal networks, discuss trade deals and talk about political and cultural ideas. The ‘Poortersloge’, like its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, served as the preferred locus of economic and cultural exchange in a city that functioned as a crossroads between merchants coming from the north and the south, from the industrious Flemish hinterland and the British Isles. In sum, it was a cosmopolite arena facilitating the commerce of economic and social elites.

Another empirical study of urban economic space is Justin Colson's ‘Commerce, clusters, and community: a re-evaluation of the occupational geography of London, c. 1400–c. 1550’, Economic History R., 69 (2016), 104–30. Colson argues that classic assumptions regarding the breakdown of medieval spatial organization are misplaced, and instead presents a narrative of London's merchants and tradesmen responding to the continually evolving influence of locational economics. Often, the medieval city is seen as having been strictly regulated, both in terms of markets, and in terms of space, while the early modern city is associated with the breakdown of rigid regulation by guilds and a new commercial outlook. This article, based on prosopographical data found in 14,700 Londoners' wills dating from between 1370 and 1570, reveals that at the beginning of the fifteenth century many of London's occupations were indeed relatively clustered. However, while some economic activities (such as those of the mercers) became less spatially concentrated in the following centuries, Colson shows that throughout the fifteenth and the majority of the sixteenth centuries, companies which had a strongly defined specialism (such as the fishmongers and the bowyers) largely continued their traditional forms of clustering. Rather than the end of the Middle Ages having marked a dramatic change from guild-based spatial organization, occupational clusters simply continued to evolve because the craftsmen experienced the same agglomeration benefits in their trades. In the early years of craft guilds, the lack of formally sanctioned regulation encouraged strong informal links, fostered by co-location, to ensure the communal goals of quality regulation, training and political representation. In later times especially, small guilds remained clustered despite moving across the city. While the place of ‘best benefits’ to them may have changed, it was still to their advantage to associate together. Bigger companies, however, spread across the city because the increasing specialization, as well as a general evolution in patterns and practices of trade, led to a disconnection between company identity and occupation. This divergence meant that the commonalities of experience and interest that bound companies together to begin with started to erode. As a result, London's economic space evolved into a patchwork of clusters of specialized craftsmen on the one hand, and other types of trade which could be found on different spots in the city on the other.

Some merchants, however, lived on the margins. Formal markets, licensed and overseen by public authorities, were not the only commercial outlets in the medieval city. Throughout the medieval period, informal circuits, where trade was conducted without official authorization, regulation and taxation, abounded across Europe. A study by Bart Lambert on the informal market in fifteenth-century Bruges and Sluys (the port town on the waterway between Bruges and the North Sea) demonstrates that the regulatory environment of the formal economy created barriers and costs that drove people into informality. The accounts of the so-called ‘water-bailiff’ of Bruges (preserved from 1400 until 1411 and from 1450 until 1479) contain 245 cases in which individuals acted against staple regulations. The city's privileges made the staple obligatory and exclusive for several trades. Many people however, were prosecuted for economic, fiscal and monetary violations of the staple rights. Remarkably, 28 per cent of them were women. Their high involvement in low-level work, the most distinguishing characteristic of which was the absence of rules and guild control, emphasizes the particularly straitened economic circumstances endured by women due to staple restrictions, something also attested to in literary sources. Classic studies on the economic success of late medieval Bruges ignore such groups because they have not taken the informal market into their analysis. Therefore, they fail to do justice to the whole story of commercial hustle and bustle in and around the city. Bruges' role as a depot for goods from all across Europe, securely buttressed by the staple system, gave thousands of merchants access to lucrative trading possibilities, but at the same time closed the door to many others. They had to look for other ways to benefit from the city's success. As a result, they operated in an ‘informal’ market ignoring the rigid regulation of trade – presumably similar groups were at work in other port towns in late medieval Europe (‘Merchants on the margins: fifteenth-century Bruges and the informal market’, J. of Medieval History, 42 (2016), 226–53).

Urban space was not only transformed because of economic change, as we have seen, but also for political purposes. Indeed, an important evolution in the political history of cities, namely the increasing rights of political participation of citizens, has changed the outlook on urban space dramatically. Studying a linguistic development, namely the use of the word ‘platea’ in texts describing the urban space of communal Italy, Hendrik Dey shows that a significant evolution took place in the morphology of towns like Siena, Florence and Lucca (‘From “street” to “piazza”: urban politics, public ceremony, and the redefinition of platea in communal Italy and beyond’, Speculum, 91 (2016), 919–44). In the earlier Middle Ages, ‘platea’ referred to broad streets and monumental routes serving (among other purposes) as the backdrop for ceremonial processions by ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries. Such ceremonies proclaimed the majesty of their rank and the prestige of the institutions which they represented. In later centuries, however, piazzas and big squares, also called ‘plateae’, increasingly prevailed as focal points for political and ceremonial intercourse. The change from the ‘platea-street’ to ‘platea-piazza’, in other words, appears to be a semantic index of a watershed moment in the urban trajectories of Italian cities. The late antique ‘platea’ was no longer the most representative and symbolically charged urban public space in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries because it was eclipsed by a new focus on circumscribed islands of open space on which the commune gathered in order to govern the city autonomously (as happened likewise in cities north of the Alps). In the Italian communes, a self-conscious civic icon was born, the piazza, a topographical centrepiece destined to be the epicentre of commercial, political and ceremonial intercourse, just as the monumental avenues built at cities like Milan, Ravenna and Verona in the fourth to the sixteenth centuries had been in their time. From 1100 on, however, the central market squares, mostly closely located to other symbols of communal power such as city halls and bell towers, predominated. When they began to do so, topographically and institutionally speaking, Dey shows, they usurped the name together with a large share of the political, symbolic and even economic associations of the urban thoroughfares formerly also known as ‘plateae’.

Two articles show that such central squares were the preferred location for urban governors to display their power in late medieval Europe, but at the same time they also functioned as places of contest when their power was challenged by citizens. Mario Damen's discussion of the material and spatial features of tournaments that took place on the central market square of Brussels (‘Grote Markt’) investigates how the tournament acquired meaning in the urban space in which it was organized (‘The town as a stage? Urban space and tournaments in late medieval Brussels’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 47–71). Using archival, iconographical and narrative sources, Damen shows us the dynamics of an inherently courtly festival within an urban setting. In close collaboration with the Brussels' political elite, the duke of Brabant and his household used the public space of the ‘Grote Markt’ and the facilities of the adjacent town hall to display their wealth and status during tournaments. The market square was of course a practical arena with outstanding facilities, both for tourneyers and spectators, but it also served as a place in which the courtly and urban elite displayed their power. It is of course not a coincidence that citizens who wanted to contest the government of the elite tried to occupy these squares during moments of revolt. For instance, Valentina Costantini demonstrates that the butchers in fourteenth-century Siena occupied the market place when they rebelled against the Nine, as the government of the city was called. For practical reasons, but also using its symbolic meaning, the butchers used the square to express their discontent – as they did elsewhere. Indeed, Costantini systematically compares urban uprisings and conspiracies of butchers' guilds in late medieval Europe with the aim of showing that a pattern of rebellion can be distinguished. Social and political tensions within the butchers’ guild in many cities forced a two-way split within the guild and its elites. The 1318 rebellion in Siena, for instance, shows that the guild's elite sided with the urban governors, while at the same time the rank and file of the guild rebelled against the latter's policies. Occupying central spaces in this revolt was an important feature to let it succeed, though the internal divisions within the butchers’ guild of Siena made it ultimately fail (‘On a red line across Europe: butchers and rebellions in fourteenth-century Siena’, Social History, 41 (2016), 72–92).

Artisans' revolts and counter-attacks of urban elites are the topics discussed in two other articles, namely Jelle Haemers' ‘Révolte et requête. Les gens de métiers et les conflits sociaux dans les villes de Flandre (XIIIe–XVe siècle)’, Revue Historique, 677 (2016), 27–55, and ‘Die verlorene Ehre der Patrizier. Reformen in oberrheinischen Städten im 15. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Beihefte, 53 (2016), 159–77, by Olivier Richard. In the cities under scrutiny in both articles, craft guild associations were at the centre of the major disturbances. In cities such as Ghent, Bruges and Ypres (in the article by Haemers), or Basel, Strasbourg and Bern (Richard's piece), the crafts engaged in similar forms of collective action, such as petitioning, collective assembly and the occupation of public space. Bargaining with the urban elites was in both regions, Flanders and the Upper Rhine, a continuous process which could take different forms. In Flanders, as Haemers demonstrates, written collective petitions seem to have been the main means by which the craftsmen influenced urban politics. Rather than being the first option for guild leaders to use in times of conflict, violence however was committed by ordinary craftsmen in the first place. Guild governors regularly tried to restrain the violence used by commoners with the aim of improving the chances of their petitions being approved. An in-depth study of these bills dating from the late thirteenth until the late fifteenth centuries demonstrates that several of the social, economic and political claims of the craftsmen led to fundamental transformations of the urban government in the Low Countries. Similarly, in the towns of the Upper Rhine, the collective actions of craftsmen caused a series of political reforms which deprived patricians of a large part of their political power. Through one of his case-studies, a petition composed by the urban nobility of Strasbourg, Richard demonstrates not only that it used written means to influence decision-making processes (as was also done by the Flemish artisans), but that violence was also an option for them to regain power. Furthermore, their last attempt to recover power during the so-called ‘Dachstein war’ in 1418 can be compared to similar events in Basel (the ‘Basel secession’ of 1414) and the ‘Twingherrenstreit’ in Bern in 1469–71. In all three cities, the patricians or urban noblemen mainly insisted upon the loss of honour they were suffering when complaining about their loss of power. Collectively leaving the city (as artisans in Flanders also did) was used as a means to put pressure on their political opponents, but in the end they remained unsuccessful in their attempt to regain control over the cities. Richard concludes that only one option was left to the patricians if they wanted to regain their honour: accepting integration into the new institutional order of these cities.

In order to maintain their power, urban elites could use religious rituals. In modern historiography, ceremonies such as processions which served a political goal are often conceptualized as forms of ‘civic religion’. A part of the purpose of an article by Andrew Brown is to reassess the value of this term that has proved remarkably persistent: after half a century of use, and despite criticism, historians continue to deploy it (‘Civic religion in late medieval Europe’, J. of Medieval History, 42 (2016), 338–56). Brown shows, however, that the meaning of this term differs widely, and he distinguishes three main clusters of research, loosely called the North American, the Francophone and the German approach. While North American scholars have emphasized the importance of charity, confraternities and the friars in creating a particular kind of collective religious life (for instance in Italian city-states), German historiography focuses on the role played by ‘memory’ and in particular by commemorative foundations when studying ‘civic religion’. French scholarship, in turn, sees ‘religion civique’ as the collection of religious phenomena in which civil power plays a determining role, principally through the action of municipal authorities. Brown points at several problems arising for historians when they use such an anachronistic term, but concludes that it is still a useful term to describe the nature of municipal attempts to develop the sacred potential of the authority of urban governors. A second part of the article illustrates, therefore, the ‘usefulness’ of the concept ‘civic religion’ for historical research. With a comparative study of the examples of late medieval Zaragoza, Bruges and Salisbury, Brown demonstrates that the term can be used productively for an analysis of key religious practices within the medieval urban environment. In claiming the authority to orchestrate processions, supervise charity and order street life, the governors of these three cities, Brown argues, could claim to rule for a sacred common good. When organizing religious ceremonies, the men who ran city governments sought to demonstrate that the goals of the governing few and those of the urban many were one and the same at a moral and sacred level. These changes did not happen at the same pace in all late medieval cities: as American scholars above all have outlined, Italian city-states were more precocious than most, and did not need to incorporate the interests of overlords into their promotion of the civic good. But the difficulties their ruling bodies faced, and the investments they made in administrative structures and in semi-religious ceremony, were similar in kind to towns elsewhere.

In an article on the charity organized by the main hospital of late medieval Chartres, Armand Colin elaborates on one of these expressions of civic religion (‘Le salut par les œuvres: les bienfaiteurs laïcs de l'Aumône Notre-Dame de Chartres à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Histoire, Économie & Société, 35 (2016), 12–38). During the Middle Ages, donations to hospitals were regarded as particularly commendable since they were thought to be redemptive. Consequently, in order to earn redemption, Chartres' elite made numerous donations to the Notre Dame hospital. A detailed study of 536 charters containing information on these donations, dating from the foundation of the institution in the second half of the eleventh until the beginning of the sixteenth century, shows that not only urban elites found their way to the hospital. Only 24 per cent of the donors could be linked to the wealthy families in the town, though one third of the total population under investigation remained unidentified. Clerics and artisans also provided the hospital with money, annuities and goods. Last but not least, the French king also patronized it, by granting favourable rights. With their generosity, the donors tried to reach one and the same goal: the salvation of their souls. The assistance given to the hospital community together with the establishment of masses in the name of the donor were the main medium through which this redemption was made possible. Of course, Chartres was not the only city in which such a pattern of alms-giving has been observed by historians, but unfortunately the author has not taken the effort to compare his findings with similar phenomena happening in other towns outside France in the same period. A comparative approach of urban history across Europe is however worth the effort!

1500–1800

In recent years there has been a surge of studies on disasters. Plague, poverty, dearth and other calamities have been meticulously scrutinized, yet less paper and ink has been spent on fire. Drawing on the classic Gazetteer of Urban Fire Disasters and a series of new sources, John Morgan analyses how small English market towns coped with such infernos (‘The representation and experience of English urban fire disasters, 1580–1640’, Historical Research, 89 (2016) 268–93). First, Morgan analyses how urban administrations tried to raise emergency funds from other towns, noblemen, the privy council or even the king by launching a media campaign. Broadsheets and ballads shared several discursive strategies, whereby the former beauty, elegance and stately nature of the town was craftily juxtaposed by a grim image of wreck and ruins, illustrated with gloomy figures on the scale of the devastation. Next, Morgan moves on to analyse how the emergency funds were actually spent to rebuild the town. As a rule, the financial relief was barely more than a drop in the ocean, as the collection rarely covered more than 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the actual damage. Therefore, urban administrations had to be selective as to where to invest the money. In the first weeks after the blaze, funds were used to alleviate the most stricken victims, yet in the following months most of the emergency aid went to merchants and master craftsmen, who could fuel and finance the rebuilding of the town. Yet, even in their case the refunding of the loss was partial and paltry. Most of the victims of the blaze were – also literally – left out in the cold, which may have caused a spike in the mortality rates in the longer term.

Fire is also a central theme in David Garrioch's latest article ‘1666 and London's fire history. A re-evaluation’ (Historical J., 59 (2016) 319–38). Contrary to textbook wisdom, Garrioch argues that the Great Fire did not really spark a modern and more efficient fire prevention system, which – in the end – helped to end the repeated blazes of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, but should, on the contrary, be regarded as one of the first – yet the most spectacular – conflagration in a series of large infernos, that became ever more devastating and frequent as time wore on. According to Garrioch, this slow-burn evolution was fuelled by a series of causes. First of all, the soaring population density took its toll. As living conditions deteriorated, medieval fire prevention measures were disregarded. Five- or six-storey buildings were too high for the water pumps, narrow passages to prevent the fire from spreading were annexed, while the use of wood – and especially the combustible pine – was on the rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as cheap building material, especially in the suburbs. Climate change may also have sparked larger and more devastating fires, as the last convulsions of the Little Ice Age not only caused blistering cold in winter, but also excessive heat in summer. Likely, consumer changes also played their part, as fire hazards increased with the insidious spread of candles and fireplaces in domestic interiors, as well as the dissemination of curtains, furniture, wall-paper and other combustible items. Yet, the most important factor in Garrioch's hypothesis was the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rise of London as a hub for global trade. With warehouses stocked with pitch, tar, flax, hemp and gunpowder, cellars full with barrels of brandy, oil or butter, attics cramped with sacks of tobacco, hops and other inflammable goods, even the tiniest fire could easily grow into a cataclysmic inferno.

Daniel Curtis challenges the assumption in current scholarship that plagues were, to a large extent, an urban phenomenon in north-west Europe (‘Was plague an exclusively urban phenomenon? Plague mortality in the seventeenth-century Low Countries’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 47 (2016) 139–70). The article discusses an impressive new set of data from burial records across the seventeenth-century Low Countries, including both commercialized and urbanized regions and more rural zones. Curtis is able to identify spikes in mortality by year through a comparison of the numbers of burials with those in preceding years. It was not always possible to confirm whether an individual mortality spike in a particular location was effectively due to plague (and Curtis has collected supplementary information from ordinances, tracts, medical and moral pamphlets and instructions to plague masters to identify plague years) – diseases could be mixed in burial records. Major outbreaks of plague are documented in the years 1624–25, 1635–36 and (a lesser one in) 1664–66. The plague of 1624–25 hit more settlements severely, while that of 1635–36 hit the more populous settlements of the Low Countries harder. The likelihood of individual centres being spared from plague was also fairly low which indicates the pervasiveness of the disease in the seventeenth century. Curtis finds that rural societies in the seventeenth-century Low Countries were as badly afflicted by plague as cities. Commercial relations and migration between countryside and towns – both of which were particularly strong phenomena in many of the Low Countries regions – are not a sufficient explanation for the similarities in mortality spikes and the severity of the disease across urban and rural societies; military conflicts and troop movements were also a part of the explanation.

Disasters could also be used to further particular interests, even when the actual disaster did not directly affect a certain region. Cindy Ermus uncovers how the Bourbon state used the Great Plague of Marseille, or better: the Plague of Provence in 1720–22 – which never entered Spain itself – and how this affected trade in the port of Cádiz (‘The Spanish plague that never was: crisis and exploitation in Cádiz during the peste of Provence’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 49 (2016), 167–93). Upon receiving word of the epidemic in late July 1720, the Spanish court in Madrid quickly used the news as a pretext to impose a commercially debilitating embargo against their French competitors, along with other supervisory controls that complemented King Philip V's centralizing policies. The Bourbon state put the crisis to their advantage in two ways: to oust French traders in Cádiz, the so-called Gateway to the Indies and one of the eighteenth-century world's most important ports, from transatlantic trade and to take over the regulation of trade, industry and society which previously rested in the hands of local corporations or municipal authorities. Ships coming from France and ships flying a French flag were put under mandatory quarantine and were subject to inspection. This allowed officials to inspect the ships and their cargos to verify whether there was no illicit commerce – countering the Spanish monopoly on trade with the Indies – going on. This tied in with the general resentment against French merchants who controlled an important share of transatlantic trade, through middlemen or naturalization. Health certificates (patentes sanitarios) were required for travellers. In Valencia, for instance, residents rushed in great numbers to obtain health certificates in case they needed to leave the city. Queues formed ‘from dawn until very late in the evening’. In the end, the attempt to ‘nationalize’ Spanish trade proved futile. French traders were harassed but maintained their stronghold in trade, as did other foreigners. Moreover, responses to the plague in Provence at this time demonstrate an increase in the monopolization of power and the expansion and intensification of Bourbon state interference in previously regional or local matters. Clearly, the decision to take measures against disease had both medical and political motives.

In British urban populations, 10 to 20 per cent of deaths were due to smallpox in the eighteenth century. While there was no effective treatment, two methods could prevent the outbreak of the disease: inoculation and vaccination. The former involved a deliberate infection with a mild form of the disease while the latter introduced cowpox, a rather benign virus, into the patient's body. Both methods were intended to induce a long-lasting immunity against smallpox. Inoculation was used from the 1760s onwards until vaccination much more successfully reduced smallpox mortality after 1800. Since inoculation risked triggering an epidemic of smallpox, it was usually done only in rural villages and small towns and simultaneously. Inoculation was relatively rare in the larger British towns. Davenport, Boulton and Schwarz are interested in the contribution of inoculation to the fall in mortality prior to 1800, more specifically the fall in the mortality rates among adults and older children in the last quarter of the eighteenth century (‘Urban inoculation and the decline of smallpox mortality in eighteenth-century cities – a reply to Razzell’, Economic History R., 69 (2016), 188–214). Drawing on evidence for Manchester and London, they find that smallpox mortality was on the rise among young children in the eighteenth century. The authors argue that the costs of smallpox to institutions such as the parish of St Martin in the Fields were low which might explain why these institutions did not prioritize inoculation. There certainly were inoculation programmes, resulting from philanthropic concerns among non-conformists in particular. Yet, overall these programmes must be considered as inadequate given the increase of smallpox mortality among small children in large urban populations.

Illness is one of the most closely examined risks of the early modern period, ever since the ‘bodily turn’ drew our attention to the sick and the unhealthy. Even though the rise of medical provision in England has been thoroughly scrutinized by Ian Mortimer, Roy Porter and other experts, less is known about the Italian peninsula. Alexandra Bamji took up the challenge for early modern Venice in ‘Medical care in early modern Venice’ (J. of Social History, 49 (2016) 483–509). Drawing on literally thousands of entries in the death registers (the Necrologi) of the Provveditori alla Sanità, Bamji not only presents a fine-grained, statistical overview of medical care in the Republic, but also uncovers some sweeping evolutions. From barely 38 per cent in 1645, the number of people who had seen at least one medico, doctors, barber-surgeons before death, increased to 82 per cent in 1797. On the whole, the barber-surgeons lost some ground in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the influence of (university-schooled) doctors and midwives was on the rise. Bamji also teases out some social features. Wealth obviously took its toll, as the nobili (patricians) and cittadini (citizens) were more likely to have been attended by a medico than the popolani, although the chasm became less deep as time wore on. Especially in the city hospitals, medical provision became ever more professional. Unsurprisingly, the density of medical care was higher in the city centre than in the outskirts. Elderly people (above 55) increasingly appealed to a medico. Yet, Bamji was unable to identify major differences according to gender or religious denomination. Fever, smallpox, tetanus and respiratory disorders (pneumonia, tuberculosis) were the most common diseases. A thought-provoking concluding remark is that the gradual professionalization of medical care in Venice did not diminish the opportunities for all sorts of quack doctors, herbalists and other practitioners in the margins.

Venice also serves as background in Joanne Ferraro's recent study of sexual abuse of children, adolescents and other minors (‘Youth in peril in early modern Venice’, J. of Social History, 29 (1015), 1–23). Based on painstaking research of the Bestemmia court registers, Ferraro argues that the hypothesis launched by Larry Wolff et al., i.e. that minors were rarely if ever shielded from sexual violence before the eighteenth century, does not stand the test. In a compelling way, the article establishes that the urban administration actively tried to safeguard minors from prostitution, domestic child abuse and sexual predators roaming the streets. Moreover, Ferarro's piece corroborates the idea that early modern urban administrations were virtually powerless to deal with the problem of underage sex without the collaboration of vigilant neighbours, priests and passers-by, who discovered all sorts of abuse through thin walls, doors and shutters left ajar, or exposed courtyards. Last but not least, Ferarro argues that the concept of youth (giovanni), who had to be shielded from adult sexual behaviour, was extremely elastic. Despite formal laws, outlawing sex with children under the age of seven, child-abusers were often severely punished for sodomy even when their victim was in their late teens. In theory, Venetian bylaws set other rules for boys and girls, as the latter were labelled as passive victims well into their late adolescence, yet in practice paedophiles, who had violated older boys, were also penalized.

Urban administrations not only faced the problem of child abuse but also had to deal with the issue of illegitimate birth. Lately, the topic has fuelled some intense debates. From a gloomy perspective, launched by Laslett, Tilly and other experts, the literature has recently evolved into a more positive interpretation, whereby unmarried teenage mothers were armed with agency to press the father of their illegitimate baby into marriage. In her latest publication, ‘The legal agency of single mothers. Lawsuits over illegitimate children and the uses of legal aid to the poor in the Dutch town of Leiden (1750–1800)’ (J. of Social History, 50 (2016), 51–73), Griet Vermeesch puts the assumption to the test and refutes it. Even in Leiden, where courts were relatively cheap and accessible, most teenage mothers decided not to take legal action when the alleged father of their child denied paternity. Through an ingenious combination of sources – including baptismal and marriage registers – Vermeesch estimates that the prospects of this last group to force the father into marriage were rather grim. Only a very small group of children were given their father's name, while the family on the father's side rarely if ever showed up when the baby was baptized. For mothers who took legal action, the prospects were slightly better. In most cases, the intention to prosecute – as evidenced by a petition for legal aid – was enough to force the father into marriage (no more than 10 per cent took this option) or at least to claim compensation and alimony. As mentioned before, these women taking legal action where a minority – barely 10.7 per cent at best – is clear evidence for their fairly limited agency and the relative inaccessibility of early modern courts.

In January 2016, the J. of Urban History featured a special issue on singles in the towns of the Low Countries (1600–1940). In the introduction to the issue, the editors Isabelle Devos, Ariadne Schmidt and Julie De Groot (‘Introduction: unmarried and unknown’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2015), 3–20) provide a highly useful state of the art and try to provide an answer to the question why singles were present in disproportionately large numbers in urban areas. Singles are certainly not a recent phenomenon and the history of these men and women can shed light on urban economies and societies. The issue understands towns and cities not just as a backdrop where singles worked and lived; cities attracted and created singles and differed in degree of attractiveness (resulting from the structure of their labour market and the presence of (and access to) poor relief institutions). By turning to Dutch and Belgian towns, the editors and authors redirect the historiographical perspective which has largely focused on the English experience. While most of the evidence relating to single men and women comes from demographic sources, the authors in the issue also draw on court records, lists of poor relief recipients, probate records, guild regulations and workhouse documents to study singles’ lives. The introduction indicates that singleness – even its permanent form – did not necessarily imply a gloomy life of loneliness; singles often did not live alone and their life circumstances varied according to financial status, marital status, gender and age. Singleness could even provide a level of autonomy for women which could not be attained by married women.

Ariadne Schmidt and Manon van der Heijden reconsider the rather pessimistic view on the situation of single women in early modern towns: these women are said to have been highly vulnerable, lacking the support of husbands and parents on the one hand and access to charity on the other hand and facing strong labour market restrictions (‘Women alone in early modern Dutch towns: opportunities and strategies to survive’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2015), 21–38). Schmidt and van der Heijden show that there were strong regional variations: in the Dutch Republic, women had more opportunities to be independent than is often assumed in the historiography. They distinguish not-yet, never-married women, widows, married women living alone (many Dutch wives had husbands who were away, working as sailors) and divorced women. For each category, they provide statistics, information on the legal status of the category, on the presence of women in these categories in court cases, on their access to the labour market and poverty relief. Schmidt and van der Heijden arrive at the nuanced statement that women living alone were overrepresented among the lower social layers of urban society and lacked strategic privileges; yet some women, living independently, had the opportunity to engage in public activities and could rely on the support of their respective families, neighbours and churches (for example in cases of divorce or separation). Vulnerability and assertiveness could be two sides of the same coin.

In the beginning of the sixteenth century, groups of so-called ‘Egyptians’ or ‘Gypsies’ appeared in England. These groups were the tail end of a Romani diaspora that reached western Europe in the fifteenth century. David Cressy reads Tudor and Stuart legislation and court cases against ‘Egyptians’ ‘against the grain’, since these men and women left no sources of their own and were mostly referred to in rather pejorative ways (‘Trouble with Gypsies in early modern England’, Historical J., 59 (2016), 45–70, doi:10.1017/S0018246X15000278). Cressy in this sense contributes to the social history of marginal groups. At first, the Gypsies travelled as entertainers and fortune-tellers, capitalizing on their novelty, and performed at aristocratic parties. By 1530, they had outstayed their welcome and started to acquire a reputation for theft and deceit. Although attempts were made to deport them and to subject those staying in the country to capital punishment, enforcement of these laws was not very strict. The travellers continued to evade the authorities. A few lists of confiscated goods previously owned by arrested bands of Egyptians show their ownership of horses, a few luxury textiles and silverware. Although accused of idleness, Gypsy men and women found work in the economy of itinerancy, offering particular goods and services to those interested in them: horses, animals, games of chance and fortune-telling. People wondered at the Gypsies, who were deemed strange and unknowable. They were still considered as offensive but were not subjected to the hardening prejudice and persecution witnessed in continental Europe.

In recent years, urban history has also witnessed a revived interest in religion. The Low Countries Historical R. delves into this topical theme with a special issue on the sixteenth-century iconoclastic fury. Especially Pollmann and Van Bruaene explore the link between the outbreak of religious violence and the urban environment in more detail. In her seminal article, Judith Pollmann tries to answer the question why the identity of the image breakers remained blurred for such a long time (‘Iconoclasts anoymous. Why did it take historians so long to identify the image breakers of 1566?’, Low Countries Historical R., 131 (2006) 155–67). It was not until recently that historians asserted the true identity of the iconoclast mob, recruited from all rungs of society, ranging from the high nobility to the great unwashed. Moreover, it took centuries before experts set out to list all possible motivations behind the iconoclast outbreaks, such as dearth and unemployment, political turmoil or the collective chimaera, that these statues were possessed by demonical powers. Yet, this uneasy truth was much too painful for seventeenth-century people. Urban governments in the northern Netherlands deliberately supported a process of mnemonical cleansing: the iconoclast outbreaks were sparsely treated in history books and linked to an anonymous mass. In the southern Netherlands the amnesia concealed the active participation in image breaking and bolstered the fantasy of loyal Catholicism. Clearly, the past was malleable according to the political agenda.

Together with statues of saints, religious paintings, tombstones, stained-glass windows and other material objects, the imposing sacrament houses were an easy target for iconoclast violence. Sacrament houses were tabernacles, usually made of stone and in the form of a high-rising tower, wherein the consecrated host – or the Eucharist – was stored and displayed. Anne-Laure van Bruaene draws attention to these daunting – yet barely explored – manifestations of Catholic devotion in ‘Embodied piety. Sacrament houses and iconoclasm in the sixteenth-century Low Countries’ (Low Countries Historical R., 131 (2016), 36–58). Van Bruaene explores the material and physical responses of Protestants and Catholics prior to the iconoclast violence. Calvinists saw these impressive sculptured towers and the veneration of Corpus Christi, whereby the holy wafer was solemnly carried around the town, as a foul epitome of popish materialism and superstition, but – rather surprisingly – reacted in a material way themselves, by turning their back to the procession, by taking a leak or by lowering their pants. Others defiled the holy wafer by crumbling or trampling on it. Catholics did not suffer these provocations passively, yet energetically promoted the construction of even taller and more spectacular sacrament houses. They were smashed into smithereens during the iconoclast outbreaks, but restored to their former glory in the aftermath. Even though both denominations acted as theological opponents, the example of the sacrament towers evidences that they shared a materialist – and even deeply physical – stance towards religious objects.

Many European towns adhering to the Catholic faith had cathedral chapters. Ribeiro da Silva shows how Portuguese cathedral chapters competed with city councils, lay confraternities, bishops, Inquisition officials and monks to preserve or advance their privileged status, a rivalry which often became visual and tangible in public ceremonies (‘Projecting power: cathedral chapters and public rituals in Portugal, 1564–1650’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69 (2016), 1369–400). Often, the crux of such conflicts around ceremonies, both inside and outside the cathedral, lay in procedure and precedence. Cathedral chapters often consisted of members of urban elite families. Every gesture and attitude in the context of public ceremonies in Portuguese towns such as autos-da-fé, the entry of a new bishop or religious processions was measured and evaluated in detail by the parties involved and bystanders. As such, the celebration was a reflection of the current local hierarchy in the town. The stakes were high for the loss of symbolical power had a negative effect on a particular institution's reputation. Moreover, the loss of power also negatively reflected on the elite urban families which composed the cathedral chapter. Portuguese cathedral chapters had to cope with the increased authority bestowed upon bishops after the Council of Trent; this threatened cathedral chapters which were now relegated to legitimizing episcopal power. Yet, cathedral chapters, often with strong local roots, were able to both resist this authority and to negotiate to avoid a total loss of prestige and the absolute shift of power to the bishop, who did not necessarily have strong ties to the town.

Witchcraft is another theme that is, once again, centre stage. New hypotheses have been launched and have successfully revived interest in the topic. Alison Rowlands focuses on the underexplored phenomenon of ‘witch family trials’ – or Hexenfamilienprozess, a concept that was originally coined by Wolfgang Behringer – in the small Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in ‘Gender, ungodly parents, and a witch family in seventeenth-century Germany’ (Past and Present, 232 (2016), 45–86). Drawing upon one exceptionally well-documented case of the eleven-year-old Hans Adam Knöpsel, Rowlands analyses the emergent stereotype of witch families in Lutheran Germany. A masterly ‘thick description’ of the cross-examinations shows that the Rothenburg magistrate was well acquainted with the idea that witchcraft could pass from one generation to another. These anxieties also echo in the testimonies of the neighbours. It did not take long to link Hans Adam's story to the rumours about witchcraft that dogged Knöpsel's parents. They, for their part, had been haunted by the bad repute of their parents, who had been tacitly (on the maternal side) or actively (on the paternal side) branded as witches. A small box – containing the salve that could allegedly turn the fire iron into a flying object – served as the ultimate proof of this intergenerational passing down of witchcraft and wizardry.

Material culture has evolved into a mature subdiscipline of urban history quite recently. In this context, it is not always easy to develop a new perspective, yet some recent articles manage to set out a new course. Embroidering on the theme that experts have devoted too much attention to the insidious spread of new and fashionable consumer goods and all too often have disregarded the resilience of second-hand markets, Bruno Blondé and Dries Lyna set out on a compelling analysis of the Flemish old masters that were auctioned en masse in late eighteenth-century Antwerp and Brussels (‘Neophilia and old master paintings: changes in consumer choice and the evolution of art auctions in the eighteenth century’, Continuity and Change, 31 (2006), 361–89). Despite an obvious upscaling – auctions were increasingly organized in exclusive venues, while catalogues were written in French and seasoned with a flavour of connoisseurial expertise – the prices fetched for Rubens, Van Dijck, Teniers and other masters remained stable and even plummeted in the late eighteenth century, which is a clear indicator that Flemish and Brabantine consumers had no taste for the old and the antique. The evidence of Customs registers shows that these masterpieces were bought by smart, local art-dealers, who shipped them – literally by the thousands – to foreign countries where they fetched a better price.

The eighteenth century has been singled out by many historians as a pivotal period in the history of material culture, consumption and retailing. Eighteenth-century consumers in England had a range of new products and materials at their disposal which they actively desired. Rachael Morton draws on the English metal ware sector (focusing on Birmingham and Sheffield) to demonstrate how producer-retailers marketed their metal products in various ways: through trade cards in which the range of products offered and production itself figured, through marks on the products themselves, through an emphasis on the fact that the products were produced by the advertiser himself which acted as a quality indicator and even through ‘manufactory tours’ for potential customers in ‘Perceptions of production and the retailing and marketing of quality metalware in eighteenth-century England’ (History of Retailing and Consumption, 2 (2016), 143–63.) The producer-retailer sought to cultivate a reputation of trustworthiness, of novelty and of quality. The sources used in this study and the way in which they were analysed – with attention to both the visual evidence of the trade cards and the linguistic conventions – are particularly noteworthy. This article adds to our understanding of marketing, advertising and the social construction of quality at a time of widening consumer choice. Production of metal ware itself also became a curiosity, worthy of tourist visits along with other shops and landmarks in English cities.

For quite some time now, probate inventories have been mined by historians of material culture and consumption. Articles and books drawing on these inventories usually include lengthy sections on the opportunities and limitations of this source. Donald Spaeth changes the perspective from the content of the inventory to its form and the way in which they were prepared in ‘“Orderly made”: re-appraising household inventories in seventeenth-century England’, Social History, 41 (2016), 417–35. Spaeth highlights the role of the appraisers involved in the process of recording the probate inventory, how they approached appraising the growing number of household goods and spaces and how their understandings of possessions changed over time. The focus of his study of inventories as subjective representations is seventeenth-century Thame, a small market town in Oxfordshire. Inventories could vary considerably in form since appraisers often had different principles on how to organize their documents. Although most appraisers adhered to the format of ordering items by room in the first half of the seventeenth century, items could still be valued together, regardless of the room they were located in. This changed in the last three decades of the seventeenth century when half of Thame's inventories adopted the summary format in which all household possessions were valued together, without references to rooms or individual objects, an indication of how appraisers’ thinking about possessions changed. This new format was developed to cope with the proliferation of household goods. Leading Thame appraisers belonged to the chief inhabitants of the town, yet experience in appraising could increase one's social status as well. Since most inventories were prepared by two or three individuals, appraising went hand in hand with negotiation, with other appraisers but also with family members of the deceased, his or her servants and testators. As such, the inventory is the documentary result of negotiation and choice on behalf of the appraisers and thus a representation.

Material culture is also at the heart of Daniël Jutte's latest article ‘Living stones: the house as an actor in early modern Europe’ (J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 659–87). In this exciting article, Jütte argues that houses were perceived in the early modern psyche as living things. Not only did they receive a proper name, but they were also bestowed with anthropomorphic features, linking – often even etymologically – windows with eyes, doors with mouths, beams with bones, roofs with hats and the hearth with the heart. Understanding this mode of thought is, according to Jütte, essential to grasp the meaning of early modern rituals that seem ludicrous, strange or sinister in our eyes. Jütte argues that the meaning of acts of violence – such as the smashing of the windows, the daubing of shit on the door, the breaking of the hearthstone, the deconstruction of the roof or the razing of the entire house – can only be understood if we keep the anthropomorphic qualities in mind. Early modern abodes were anything but lifeless shells, but rather an embodiment of family honour and social status.

Post-1800

The last two years have seen a flurry of television series set in the post-war environs of American cities. Whether it is the burnt-out but culturally vibrant Bronx, romanticized in The Get Down (2016), the mean streets of Harlem, portrayed in Luke Cage (2016), or the racially divided suburbs and housing projects of Yonkers, as depicted in Show Me a Hero (2015): New York City serves as both background and protagonist. Students in urban history probably know more about urban America from Netflix than from reading books, which might not always be a bad thing. The series makers have neatly tied their screenplays into the city's narrative of post-war decline, depicting New York as the embodiment of the nation's urban crisis, which reached its peak during the mid-1970s. Lecturers in modern urban history will know this era brought forth a great genre of ‘asphalt jungle’ films itself, of which The French Connection (1971) and Taxi Driver (1976) might be the best-known examples. What these more dated and recent urban dramas have in common is not only their stereotyping of New York as a city of sin and moral decay, but also the connection they make between people's behaviour and the environs in which they live.

In this regard, Matt Delmont's plea for a better understanding of the intrinsic links between visual culture and urban history is timely. As he explains in ‘Urban sights: visual culture and urban history’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 635–8, viewing urban themes through the lens of photography, film, television and advertising encourages scholars to examine the ways in which people imagine, remember and forget urban spaces. In the same special issue, Laura Grantmyre's ‘Conflicting visions of renewal in Pittsburgh's Hill District, 1950–1968’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 639, proves the relevance of a visual approach for examining counter-narratives in the field of post-war urban renewal. The African-American residents of an allegedly blighted section of Pittsburgh's downtown, slated for demolition without consultation, took matters into their own hands by taking and publishing pictures of the area's thriving social life. By doing so, they emphasized the inequalities underpinning urban renewal, ultimately stopping it from the late 1960s onwards. Using the online Scalar format, the contributors to this special issue put words into action, combining traditional academic analysis with a wide range of visual sources.

Visual protests were of course not the only means to criticize post-war residential segregation in the United States. Based on editorials published by daily newspapers, letters to the editor and responses from Milwaukee's mayor, in ‘Opposing forces: the “open housing” debate among citizens, the daily press, and the mayor in Milwaukee, 1967–1968’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 919–37, Peter Janecky sheds new light on the ways in which racism played out in the public sphere of mid-sized American cities. Janecky meticulously demonstrates how the civic rights of black residents, who demanded equal access to housing, conflicted with the property rights of white homeowners. The ensuing debate, central to the plot line of Show Me a Hero as well, makes this study informative for contemporary debates over citizenship, segregation and racial discrimination. The same could be said of Tracy Steffes’ critical article ‘Managing school integration and white flight: the debate over Chicago's future in the 1960s’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 709–32, and Beryl Satter's original contribution ‘Cops, gangs and revolutionaries in 1960s Chicago: what black police can tell us about power’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 1110–34. While Steffes focuses on the ways in which the narrative of urban school failure fuelled the migration of white families to the suburbs, Satter investigates a group of black police officers who protested against structural racism within the Chicago corps. The Afro-American Patrolmen League (AAPL) successfully put its aims and objectives into a wider societal context in which blacks, in the words of Satter, were economically exploited, politically marginalized and abandoned to both racist police officers and violent gang members. The Chicago events even inspired a highly popular television series, examined in tandem by Satter, which brought the AAPL's complex perspective on policing and institutional violence to a wider, black and white, audience.

The work of police corps is also the topic of interest in a special section in Urban History, in which the relationship between rapidly growing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities and changes to policing systems are investigated. In Italy, the foundation of the national state in 1861 put tremendous pressure on officers in major cities, who had to prevent revolutionary forces from overthrowing the government on a daily basis, mainly by monitoring subversive activities and ditto subversive elements. In ‘The police and urban “dangerous classes”: the culture and practice of public law and order in Milan after national unity’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 266–84, Simona Mori describes an interesting contradictory situation for Milan's police force, which on the one hand had to respect and uphold newly founded laws and civil rights, but had to keep a close eye on local communities at the expense of the liberties of individuals on the other. In neighbouring France, the police corps of a rapidly growing Marseille was facing similar dilemmas. Céline Regnard's ‘Urban growth and police reform in Marseille (1855–1908)’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 249–65, links extreme urbanization rates to feelings of despair within the municipal government, which seemed unable to properly maintain law and order. Despite this crisis situation, there was no substantial reform until local police were placed under state control in 1908. This was different in Paris, where a more proactive police force was immediately discredited by the crisis moments of 1848 and 1871, during which Parisians rejuvenated the idea of policing by and for the people. Quentin Deluermoz successfully connects the revolutionary experiences of these moments to the Revolution of 1789–93 in ‘Police forces and political crises: revolutions, policing alternatives and institutional resilience in Paris, 1848–1871’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 232–48, calling for more attention to what a political crisis might do to a police force, the city and the relationship between the two. By extension, this observation could direct the attention of urban historians towards the organization of other city-based public services in relation to crisis situations, amongst others fire departments and hospital facilities.

Being the capital of nineteenth-century modernity, Paris, as is often the case, features in more than one article in the periodical literature of this year. Most urban historians will ascribe the physical transformation of the French capital during the 1850s and 1860s to Baron Haussmann, whose work has come to epitomize state-led urban renewal. What most accounts of this period do not take into account is that the prefect of the Seine faced great opposition from property owners, as is rightfully pointed out by Antoine Paccoud in ‘Planning law, power and practice: Haussmann in Paris (1853–1870)’, Planning Perspectives, 31 (2016), 341–61. Based on letters and petitions from landlords and responses by government agencies, Paccoud addresses how bodies of law were used by both parties to advance their goals. The planning apparatus had to wrest back planning power from property owners to ensure they contributed to Haussmann's grand projects, or at least co-operate with them to alleviate the costs of urban renewal. On a more general level, Paccoud demonstrates that urban historians could be more sensitive to the role played by private enterprise in the field of urban renewal in other areas and periods as well. A much lesser-known feature of the mid-nineteenth-century Parisian landscape than the works of Haussmann was the network of compressed air underneath the city, introduced to provide services in a variety of economic domains. Mustafa Dikeç and Carlos Lopez Galviz, ‘“The modern Atlas”: compressed air and cities c. 1850–1930’, J. of Historical Geography, 53 (2016), 11–27, reveal how pneumatic technologies, as of yet thoroughly under-researched by urban historians, once rivalled electricity in the provision of urban utilities. Compressed air made its entrance in cities to relieve the burden on congested transportation and communication systems, but ultimately failed to match the pace of urbanization, which in a wonderful metaphor by Dikeç and Lopez Galviz ‘became the force that pierced the pipes and deflated the dreams of compressed air’ (p. 27).

Whereas most contributions on urban transformations in nineteenth-century Paris investigate top-down interventions, Elizabeth Sage takes a different approach in ‘Jaytalking in fin-de-siècle Paris: streets, graffiti and the police’, J. of Social History, 49 (2016), 855–80. Sage explores graffiti during the turn of the century as a means by which ordinary Parisians ‘hijacked’ the streets, turning them into a canvas for their opinions, resentments and rage – despite efforts by the local police force to curb this unsolicited behaviour. A much more acceptable form of urban speech, at least from the perspective of the powers that be, was and is commercial advertising. In ‘Planning for private consumption and collective beauty: regulating outdoor advertising in Los Angeles, 1881–2014’, J. of Planning History, 15 (2016), 191–209, Bryce Lowery investigates the ambivalent nature of outdoor advertising in Los Angeles, an excellent case-study for urban historians interested in commercial landscapes due to its car-centred infrastructure and media-rich consumer culture. By introducing a long-term perspective (1881–2014), Lowery innovatively exposes a continuous tension between citizens wanting to protect the city from visual nuisance and stakeholders ‘who viewed outdoor advertisements as an essential component of economic development and an indicator of consumer opportunity’ (p. 192). Local police played an important role in determining the use of public space once again here, this time by trying to enforce regulations set out by planners seeking for a balance between commercial interests and demands for a pristine urban environment. Just as in nineteenth-century Paris, however, regulating land use proved difficult due to private interests.

While Paris might have been a reference point for many other western cities seeking to modernize their central areas, Olga Petri teaches us we should be careful not to associate modernity with boulevards and pneumatic air tubes only, labelling the bathhouses of tsarist St Petersburg as an equally distinctive space of urban modernity. In ‘At the bathhouse: municipal reform and the bathing commons in late imperial St. Petersburg’, J. of Historical Geography, 51 (2016), 40–51, she questions the Foucauldian perspective of liberal governmentality on the provision of public services in nineteenth-century cities, in the case of St Petersburg proposing an alternative model in which the failure of government-led sanitary reforms should be understood as the result of the interplay between an authoritarian state and a well-established commercial bathing culture. Seeing bathhouses as urban ‘quasi-commons’ might also explain why communal bathing was never overtaken by private bathing as it has been in the west, according to Petri. Whereas historians have paid ample attention to bathing and other forms of urban health care in the nineteenth century, they have given less consideration to the fundamental shifts health care providers and industries have been experiencing in more recent decades, especially when it comes to the urban implications of these changes. This is particularly the case in the United States, argues Jared Day in ‘Health care and urban revitalization: a historical overview’, J. of Urban History 42 (2016), 247–58. Day calls upon historians to treat cities as an ‘intricate ecosystem’ rather than mere backdrops to developments in health care. In ‘Building the world that kills us: the politics of lead, science, and polluted homes, 1970 to 2000’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 323–45, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz take up the gauntlet by investigating the inextricable links between lead poisoning and housing in the United States, underlining the relevance of post-war historians as detectives of the recent past.

Sometimes a specific theme recurs in the periodical literature for no apparent reason. Clarence Perry's concept of the neighbourhood unit, a planning model for functional, self-contained and desirable residential development in metropolitan areas conceived during the early 1900s, was a popular trope amongst urban historians this year. Stefan Couperus and Harm Kaal, ‘In search of the social: neighborhood and community in urban planning in Europe and beyond, 1920–1960’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 987–91, have compiled a special section in which they introduce a much broader perspective on ‘planning the social’ than the town or spatial planning perspective newly developed neighbourhoods and communities are usually associated with. Couperus convincingly expands on this suggestion in ‘Building democracy anew: neighborhood planning and political reform in post-blitz Rotterdam’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 992–1008, explaining how Rotterdam's post-war neighbourhood councils were set up to decentralize municipal power and promote local democracy. As such, the councils would simultaneously strengthen democratic politics and foster the reconstruction of social norms and values. In the same section, Kenny Cupers, ‘Mapping and making community in the postwar European city’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 1009–28, examines the ways in which post-war planners and sociologists used mapping methods to make the concept of community legible and operable for future planning. Cupers rightly presents mapping as the handmaiden of policy-makers, employed not just to understand but also to remodel cities. His contribution reminds us that once a map has been drawn, a new reality comes into existence, which is often the starting point for far-reaching and quite often dramatic policy interventions.

While Couperus and Cupers aim to shift our focus away from architecture and urban design, James Greenhalgh draws our attention to the positioning of retail venues within British neighbourhood units conceived during the 1940s and 1950s. In ‘Consuming communities: the neighbourhood unit and the role of retail spaces on British housing estates, 1944–1958’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 158–74, Greenhalgh argues that scholars have overlooked design assumptions about the sociability of shopping, and have neglected the attitudes of both consumers and shop owners concerning where and how shopping should be situated on housing estates. Working from this socio-spatial perspective, Greenhalgh elaborately examines the planning practices of local corporations in Manchester and Hull, from which he draws the conclusion that planners indeed thought they could create social interaction and thus more sociable communities by a careful positioning of shops, an ideal that was challenged by the preferences of the residents and retailers they worked for. The ideas underpinning neighbourhood unit concept served all types of governments, as David Kuchenbuch wonderfully demonstrates in ‘Architecture and urban planning as social engineering: selective transfers between Germany and Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s’, J. of Contemporary History, 51 (2016), 22–39. In a paradoxical way, planners in Nazi Germany and an overwhelmingly Social Democratic Sweden were firm believers in a scientifically planned yet organically organized community. Kuchenbuch understands their spatial interventions as clear-cut examples of social engineering, which could be implemented in a variety of political contexts precisely because they were regarded as apolitical methods to bring about social cohesion. A shared frame of reference, inherited from the first half of the twentieth century, smoothed the transfer of knowledge between German and Swedish planners, even as World War II was looming.

The spectre of war was haunting planners and cities in more than one way, as the periodical literature demonstrates in 2016. According to Adam Page, ‘Planning permanent air raid precautions: architecture, air war and the changing perceptions of British cities in the late 1930s’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 117–34, the expectation of aerial warfare greatly influenced the thinking of British planners in the late 1930s, especially in the run-up to the Munich crisis of 1938. Focusing on London, in particular its underground network, Page investigates how anticipated warfare was translated into the perception and design of the built environment, and discovers how military and civilian concerns found a surprisingly common language in urban planning. Preparing British cities for aerial warfare could not prevent some of them being obliterated by the Luftwaffe, but losses were small in comparison to German cities. Shelley Rose investigates the sense of placelessness among Germans in the aftermath of World War II, when there were but few physical anchors left to which citizens could attach their feelings of Heimat. In ‘Place and politics at the Frankfurt Paulskirche after 1945’, J. of Urban History, 42 (2016), 145–61, Rose puts Frankfurt's Paulskirche forward as a case-study of how and why some buildings were envisioned as foundations of a German nation still untainted by the Nazi regime. In her words, it was ‘the need for a clear sense of place grounded in space’ (p. 147) that compelled social-democratic leaders to rebuild the Paulskirche, which after all was the site of the first German parliament in 1848. As observed by Rose, it was not only the act of reconstruction that made the church an embodiment of political meaning, but also the post-war efforts to control and gain access to the church's symbolic grounds by respectively city officials and social movements.

Rebuilding and renewing western European cities took shape in less symbolic ways as well, as exemplified by Alistair Kefford's research into the post-war redevelopment of British cities and industries. Kefford, ‘Disruption, destruction and the creation of “the inner cities”: the impact of urban renewal on industry, 1945–1980’, Urban History (FirstView online publication), argues that economic histories of deindustrialization have not sufficiently included cities in their analyses of structural economic change, which is remarkable given the urban surroundings in which the demise of industrial production and manufacturing took place. In a similar way, urban historians have not incorporated much of an economic dimension in their post-war histories, which leaves us with a fragmented field of research. Kefford fills the gap by focusing on the economic underpinning of urban renewal efforts in Manchester and Leeds, where city officials and planners were aware of industrial decline even before World War II. Although with the best intentions, their plans for rehousing industries on purpose-built suburban estates did more harm than good, disrupting and destroying many existing businesses, which were reliant on the low overhead costs and accessibility of inner-city locations. In ‘De-industrialization not decline: a new meta-narrative for post-war British history’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 76–99, Jim Tomlinson suggests we might as well get rid of the term ‘decline’ altogether, as it was much more a conscious policy of deindustrialization that led Britain to lose so many manufacturing jobs during the 1970s and 1980s. Tomlinson is extremely critical of the societal effects of deindustrialization, which as he rightfully points out brought about a huge increase in inequality and economic insecurity in British cities and towns.

Whether described as decline or deindustrialization, it is clear that by the 1970s many British cities were facing an urban crisis of epic proportions. This situation had as much to do with structural economic change as the physical reordering of the urban landscape in which this change had resulted. Otto Saumarez Smith, ‘The inner city crisis and the end of urban modernism in 1970s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, first published online 11 Aug. 2016, investigates the role played by political and planning elites in the disavowal of modernist renewal schemes. Saumarez Smith contends that by the 1970s the inner cities, which were the main targets of comprehensive redevelopment, had become a ‘spatially materialized locus’ for all the wrongs in post-war urban societies; a place where Britain's disillusionment with modernism was tangible. As Saumarez Smith persuasively points out, the alternatives were often put forward by the same architectural bureaus and officials that had advocated redevelopment only a decade earlier. Therefore, we should understand the shift from urban to social renewal, which left parts of the physical fabric of inner cities intact, much more as the result of policy feedback than as the work of oppositional forces, e.g. action groups and conservationists. In the Italian post-war context, such forces did play an important role in stopping the urban renewal machine, at least according to Bruno Bonomo in ‘“The vandals at home”: Antonio Cederna's denunciation of the devastation of Italian cities in the postwar period’, J. of Modern Italian Studies, 21 (2016), 764–88. By the 1950s, Antonio Cederna, a public intellectual concerned with urban heritage, had already developed a sophisticated and all-encompassing critique on urban renewal, which struck a chord with Italy's cultural elites. Contrary to most conservationists, Cederna did not concentrate on saving the country's great monuments, but focused instead on the picturesque, closely knit fabric of inner-city neighbourhoods. Bonomo's contribution suggests urban historians should always remain sensitive to the far-reaching voices of individual freethinkers.

Although Saumarez Smith and Bonomo do touch upon urban renewal's alternatives, they do not discuss such plans at length. In ‘Freedom planned: enterprise zones and urban non-planning in post-war Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 266–89, Sam Wetherell discusses the policy of enterprise zones, which during the 1980s were designated in economically depressed areas such as London's Docklands and Salford's Quays. Wetherell lays bare the unusual intellectual roots of the planning concept, leading us from a Conservatives’ pub meeting, where the term was first coined in 1978, to the New Left sociological ideas and New Right economic practices of the 1960s, which had their origins in places as far away as California and Hong Kong. Therefore, it would be incorrect to see enterprise zones as the neoliberalist city's purest policy expression, as innovatively argued by Wetherell. It is safe to say enterprise zones would redirect some commercial pressures from city centres to urban fringes, resulting in room for experimentation in central locations. Lara Schrijver, ‘Transatlantic crossings: new forms of meaning in the city of the 1970s’, Planning Perspectives, 31 (2016), 103–13, examines alternative approaches to designing central urban areas, as put forward during the 1970s by architects Colin Rowe, Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas. All three of them conceptualized existing cities as a composite fabric of history and new developments, unsuitable for a tabula rasa approach. The early 1970s disillusionment with modernism was followed by a marked interest in innovation and technological solutions, popular culture and architectural history. In the work of the three aforementioned architects, Schrijver discerns individualism and contextualism as central tenets, which directly translated into how their designs linked up with their urban surroundings.

Of course, planning urban expansions and new towns can be equally difficult as renewing or regenerating already existing parts of the city. The periodical literature is rich with examples of grandiose schemes for a better urban future in Third World countries this year. In ‘Towards Brasília and Ciudad Guayana. Development, urbanization and regional planning in Latin America, 1940s–1960s’, Planning Perspectives, 31 (2016), 31–53, Arturo Almandoz discusses Latin America's so-called developmentalism, according to which outer regions were to be taken up into the maelstrom of modernization that was sweeping through counties such as Brazil and Venezuela. Due to a lack of comprehensive regional planning, co-ordination and citizen consultation, both the new towns of Brasília and Ciudad Guyana failed to achieve their goals of developing the hinterlands. Another not so successful example of new town building is the story of Dodoma, Tanzania's plan for a new national capital in a sparsely populated region far away from the colonial capital Dar es Salaam. Emily Callaci, ‘“Chief village in a nation of villages”: history, race and authority in Tanzania's Dodoma plan’, Urban History, 43 (2016), 96–116, explores ideas about racial authenticity in urban planning in post-colonial Africa, using Dodoma as a case-study. Its 1972 master plan took inspiration from the original layout and architectural styles of African villages, by which it turned against Tanzania's coastal urbanism, seen by nationalist intellectuals as a leftover from colonial times. Ultimately, the plan failed for logistical, financial and political reasons, but what is more important, cogently argued by Callaci, is to understand that notions of authenticity are not only philosophical or cultural constructs but also ‘a logic through which to make sense of everyday urban life and governance’ (p. 116): an important observation most urban historians and other disciples of the material turn will probably agree with, reaffirming the relevance of our way of looking at cities in the past as well as the present.