To what extent are margins of a pre-modern city truly part of the city? Contributing to this ongoing debate, Peter Clark and Denis Menjot presented a main session of the Helsinki Conference of the European Association of Urban History in August 2016 entitled ‘Spaces on the urban margin and periphery in the pre-industrial period: Marges et périphéries urbaines (Moyen Âge/Temps Modernes)’. Eleven contributions to this session (nine in French and two in English) have been gathered together in this volume edited by Peter Clark and Denis Menjot and published as the 46th volume of the Studies in European Urban History series.

This volume aims not only to explore the heterogeneous aspects of pre-modern cities and their margins, but also to consider the relevance of the concept of subaltern urbanism. First used to refer to the economies and the developments of urban spaces organized by informal processes in the Global South, subaltern urbanism is now more broadly used in urban studies. Following Ananya Roy, the study of subaltern urbanism is intended to stimulate researchers to consider peripheries as evolving spaces, but also spaces of informality, zones of exception regarding regulations and grey zones.Footnote ¹ The editors of the present volume asked authors to address the extent to which these ideas could be applied to the margins of the pre-modern city they studied. Some contributions have embraced the ideas and vocabulary of subaltern urbanism, but others are more diffident on the question, or have preferred to refer to different notions – fabrique de la ville, urbanisme impensé – which nonetheless clearly connect to the ambitions of subaltern concepts. In the end, every chapter of this book underscores for the reader a series of dualisms (urban/rural, city/suburbs, centre/periphery) that clearly constitute important limits to our understanding of the urban phenomenon in the pre-modern era.

This reassessment is first done by showing at different levels of study how diverse the reality is hidden behind the words ‘periphery’, ‘suburbs’ or ‘margin’ in widely varying historical and geographical contexts. For instance, at the regional level Catherine Xandry shows how different the peripheries of three French cities (Metz, Strasbourg and Reims) looked during the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries in terms of collective facilities and type of environment. At the city level, Mathieu Béghin explains in his contribution that the northern and the southern suburbs of Amiens were organized according to different socio-spatial dynamics during the Middle Ages, as does Charlotte Berry for three London extramural neighbourhoods (Aldersgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate) in the fifteenth century. Carolien Boender and Olivier Zeller, who have been respectively studying the woods of Haarlemmerhout located close to Haarlem in the eighteenth century, and different suburbs of Lyon between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, show the extent to which functional diversity is obvious both in space and time at the suburban level. Using this diversity as a criterion to identify levels of urbanity in fourteenth-century Paris, Boris Bove demonstrates for his part that some extramural neighbourhoods may have been more urban than some intramural neighbourhoods. This observation urges the reader to reconsider the idea of the existence of homogeneous cities.

A reassessment of certain classical dualisms regarding periphery is also carried out by showing that some divisions were not as strong as might be expected. While some contributions tend to present suburbs that were clearly spatially separate from the rest of the city, they usually also identify robust connections existing between the two. Dominique Valérian shows, for instance, that the inhabitants of the self-governing enclaves (fondouks) of Islamic cities – many of whom were merchants – were strongly connected to economic actors in the city itself during the Middle Ages, while Eleonora Canepari emphasizes the great daily mobility of seventeenth-century inhabitants of the parish of San Giovanni in Laterano between their suburb and Rome. While, as Catherine Denys explains, the massive fortifications around Lille and Brussels prevented any expansion of those cities outside their walls in the eighteenth century, the non-aedificandi spaces, devoted to military defence, attracted many varied activities, organized by people from inside or outside the city, but which the city governments attempted to control step by step.

The desire of city governments to control more space is specifically addressed in two contributions that assist the reader in understanding the origins of the classical idea of compact cities: Paulo Charruadas and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze describe the many efforts made by city governments throughout the late Middle Ages to integrate all the centres making up Brussels in order to organize the city's cohesion, while Julien Puget shows how the city government of Marseille managed, sometimes against the will of suburban inhabitants, to control the city's expansion into its surroundings in the seventeenth century.

To conclude, more than any attempt to apply subaltern studies concepts to pre-modern reality, it is in fact the variety of case-studies and wide range of topics tackled which constitute the wealth and interest of this volume.