Pre-1500

One of the key concepts of Max Weber's writings on cities was that in north-western Europe, the landed nobility and urban elites were clearly distinguished. For Weber, this was indeed a main reason to locate the occidental city in the north rather than in the Mediterranean. Christof Rolker tackles this question in his ‘Heraldische Orgien und Sozialer Aufstieg. Oder: Wo ist eigentlich “oben” in der spätmittelalterlichen Stadt?’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 52 (2015), 191–224. The in-depth analysis of one of the largest and at the same time most widespread armorials in the late medieval Holy Empire, namely that of Konrad Grünenberg (d. 1494), demonstrates that in Konstanz (where Grünenberg lived) guilds (and not the nobility) first insisted on patrilineal descent as a proof of status. Traditionally, Grünenberg is seen as a paradigmatic social climber, as he left his guild to join the society of the local nobility (called ‘Zur Katz’). Yet his sumptuous armorial, containing over 2,000 coat of arms mainly from the south-west of the Empire, does not mention any single member of this noble society. Instead, it praises the tournament societies of which Grünenberg was not a member, and highlights chivalric events in which he never participated. This, Rolker argues, indicates that armorials were not only about status already gained or to be gained, but also a manual for contemporaries to discuss the social order in a more abstract way. In his ‘Wappenbuch’, Grünenberg constantly explains why he could not join the noble societies he praised, while at the same time he ignored the ‘Zur Katz’ association of which he was a member. Therefore, Rolker concludes that it was not only members (or would-be members) of the respective social groups who knew and reproduced social codes. So the boundary between noble and urban elites was more blurred than Weber claimed – though Rolker is of course not the first to criticize Weber on this. Clearly, Grünenberg's armorial was part and parcel of a wider discussion of origins and kinship, namely patrilineal kinship that took place in several social milieux, rather than simply a book which displayed inherited status.

Marriage was, of course, also an important instrument for elites to cross social boundaries. The historiography on matrimonial alliances in cities mostly presents husbands as powerful patriarchs negotiating on the marriage market. Corine Wieber's case-study on fourteenth-century Lucca, however, introduces a competing model of youthful masculinity in the late medieval city (‘Unwilling grooms in fourteenth-century Lucca’, J. of Family History, 40 (2015), 263–76). Although one wonders how representative Wieber's study is – she only analyses two marriage disputes – her article complicates the picture of older grooms dominating younger brides. In light of the patterns established by studies of medieval marriage formation in Italy, the presence of grooms young enough to claim legal minority in fourteenth-century Lucca is truly striking. In 1349, the two boys Dino di Lemo Baroncelli and Martino di Vanni Carnidoni both refused to marry girls whom their father had chosen for them. Unlike the grooms usually present in such disputes – adult men confident in their rights – these youths appeared as passive victims of their families' wishes. Italian models of masculinity therefore focused on power, measuring a man's ability to control his possessions, his household and his destiny. In the cases Wieber studied, however, the boys appear as passive participants in marriage negotiations between powerful urban families. Therefore, these cases direct our attention to the dynamic interplay of age and gender, giving us a much more nuanced and less binary understanding of gender constructions in the late medieval Italian city. The vast age difference between (older) husbands and (younger) wives, so foundational to our assumptions about marital relations within the urban elite of Italian cities, may have existed alongside marriages defined by a smaller age difference, younger grooms and, quite possibly, a less dramatic difference in status between husband and wife. But, once again, more evidence is needed to evaluate these hypotheses.

Gender issues also make part of Jeff Fynn-Paul's article on the financial power of the urban elite of fourteenth-century Barcelona, though it mainly focuses on the role played by the elite in state-building processes (‘Occupation, family, and inheritance in fourteenth-century Barcelona: a socio-economic profile of one of Europe's earliest investing publics’, European History Quarterly, 45 (2015), 417–45). It is based on a sample of 187 purchases of government debt shares known as ‘violaris’ and ‘censals’, made by 163 individual purchasers in Barcelona during the period 1358–68. These financial instruments were a variation of the ‘life rents’ that were known across later medieval Europe; ‘violaris’ paid high annual interest (about 14 per cent) because they continued to pay only for the duration of the lives of two beneficiaries named at the time of the purchase, while ‘censals’ paid (in perpetuity) about 7 per cent. The presence of many women, both widows and wives, as both purchasers and beneficiaries of these ‘violaris’, paints a surprisingly egalitarian picture of female economic agency. Furthermore, it appears as though nuclear family structures and property strategies predominated over factional or ‘patrilineal’ structures commonly seen elsewhere (see above). Distinct patterns of wealth allocation are also discernible amongst male and female investors. In general, however, urban elites of all stripes found both financial instruments to be convenient and reliable methods of safeguarding personal and family patrimonies. In addition, Fynn-Paul claims that Barcelona knew a strongly ‘bourgeois culture’, as he calls it, in which nobles and ideas of nobility were shunted aside in favour of notions of a mercantile civic elite. The fact that nobles were almost absent in the list of purchasers of these rents demonstrates that the distinction Max Weber made between urban and landed elites referred to above can also be found in the Mediterranean area.

Another study of the financial background of urban elites and the juridical implications of financial debts is offered by Christopher Beck in ‘Common good and private justice: letters of marque and the utilitas publica in fourteenth-century Marseilles’, J. of Medieval History, 41 (2015), 88–106. Beck, however, uses a different type of source material from that used by Fynn-Paul, namely the ‘letters of marque’. Although often connected with chartering privateers, ‘marque’ in the fourteenth-century context of Marseilles denoted a legal practice used to recover illegally held goods and unpaid debts from citizens of foreign cities or kingdoms. Unlike the licence to levy private force to achieve restitution, these marques authorized private marque-holders to request public officials to make localized seizures of assets on their behalf. Beck uses these letters for a study of the ideological motivation and discursive practices of urban governors when seizing foreign assets because, following his logic, Marseilles' concession and suspension of such letters are indicative of an important concern in economic and political thought during the late medieval period, namely the abundantly discussed interplay between public good and private justice. His examination suggests that the strategic suspension of letters of marque was used ‘for the common good’, as a means to create more favourable economic conditions and to strengthen the council's reputation of just and wise leadership of its citizens. Therefore, these conclusions confirm the assumptions made by many historians who studied similar discursive practices in contemporary cities in the north, namely that the overarching philosophy in urban government – that the public good must be safeguarded against private advantage – was an ideological construct providing urban elites with the discursive means to justify policies. More specifically, the suspensions justified in the language of the ‘utilitas publica’ were declared for two reasons: to protect the integrity of Marseilles' market by ensuring an ample supply of labourers, and to protect the integrity of the town's honourable reputation. As already mentioned, this is a pattern which has also been noted by historians studying legal practices in cities in England, the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. So it seems that, to a greater extent than Beck assumes, Marseilles' council borrowed convenient legal and philosophical concepts to legitimize decisions made solely for economic necessity.

Less the discursive strategies, but more the political background and the geographical origin of urban elites is the main focus of M.E. Bratchel's ‘Vicars and citizen office-holding in the dominions of fifteenth-century Lucca, 1430–1501’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 183–203. Studies of office-holding in Renaissance Italy have largely ignored magistrates of communal origin because the emphasis on princely regimes has caused an abundant interest in offices and officials of developing states. Bratchel instead studies the origins of the urban elite of Lucca, though one should be aware that Lucca was a city-state in the period under scrutiny. The city's territories were divided into consolidated vicariates, each headed by a Lucchese citizen elected as its vicar. Bratchel's prosopographical study of 407 men elected to this office and to several other administrative functions (such as ‘podestà’ and notaries) during the period since the restoration of the republic in August 1430 until the end of the fifteenth century fills, therefore, an important lacuna in the history of Italian office-holding. Clearly, citizen office-holding in Lucca was not transformed by the need – as in other surrounding cities – to accommodate the encroaching power of a prince. The rule of the ‘contado’ (the surrounding countryside including the vicariates) did not become an exercise in the restructuring and manipulation of local autonomies, as was the case in Florence, Venice and Milan. Bratchel convincingly shows that officials were elected by the city councils from the body of citizens at large, though this was compatible with the emergence of an inner core of individuals who were semi-professionals in the role of rural administration. As elsewhere in fifteenth-century Europe (though Bratchel does not compare his findings with those of cities across the Alps), power became increasingly concentrated within the hands of the happy few; a change which seems to have been accompanied by an increasingly patrimonial attitude towards the holding of rural office.

A last article under review here about urban elites focuses on the identity and the legitimation of power and status by one of those ‘happy few’, namely Arnold Fitz Thedmar, famous among urban historians of England as the author of the first British town chronicle. In an interesting case-study of two documents found at the back of the manuscript of the chronicle, and which have traditionally been misunderstood as an autobiography, Ian Stone demonstrates that Thedmar was a man under considerable financial and xenophobic pressure. Born in 1201 as a son of German immigrants, Arnold was one of the most important, powerful and richest Londoners of his time; although, he clearly needed the pen to justify his wealth and power in a period of latent xenophobia. With the aim of proving that he was a ‘real Londoner’, Arnold tried to convince his audience by using telling arguments (though it is rather unclear which audience he wrote for). For instance, the alderman described his grandparents as simple people, who came to England for a specific purpose, namely to pray for a child at the tomb of Thomas Becket, London's saint. Any Londoner worth his salt in the thirteenth century would have been keenly aware of just how important a figure Becket was in the religious life of the city, and Arnold's family history must, of course, be read with this in mind. So Arnold described an upright, established family at the centre of city life; not only did they revere the cult of St Thomas, but through other examples he showed that his family had also married among other London families. He stressed these arguments in the documents under scrutiny, as Ian Stone concludes, not in order to tell his audience the story of his life, nor to claim authorship of his book. Rather, the alderman highlighted those aspects of the family history which made him a true Londoner (Ian Stone, ‘Arnold Fitz Thedmar: identity, politics and the city of London in the thirteenth century’, London J., 40 (2015), 106–22).

Popular culture and the history of lower-class groups in cities are studied in two articles dealing with totally different themes, namely criminality and ‘beating the blind’. Rather strange at first sight, but quite understandable when put in its historical context, is the curious history of the latter phenomenon, meticulously studied by Olivier Richard in ‘Le jeu des aveugles et du cochon. Rite, handicap et société urbaine à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Revue Historique, 675 (2015), 525–56. The ‘game of the blind man and the pig’, as it was widely known in many medieval cities, consisted of a few blind men placed in an enclosed circle with a pig. Each of them had a stick, with which they had to beat the animal to death; the winner took the carcass. Yet in the hustle, they would hit each other more than the pig, much to the delight of the crowd. Historians who have dealt with this historical curiosity so far have insisted upon the cruelty of laughter and the stigmatizing of visually impaired persons in the late middle ages. Yet following the insight of disability studies that disability is partly a social and cultural construction, Richard shows that this game can be seen as a catharsis in which the blind are to be seen above all as beggars: the poor, particularly beggars, were subjected to strong social control in late medieval towns. Following Richard, mocking the blind and inflicting violence upon them functioned as a means of exorcising the fear that was caused by their disability. But Richard also interprets the game in the context of urban political communication, as it was always facilitated and even organized by urban authorities. Several features of the show were similar to those of other urban games from the same era, in particular the ones taking place during Carnival: the inversion – here the weak imitating the strong – or the parody (cf. the numerous parodies of tournaments). It can then be compared to other rituals like the prostitutes’ races that both humiliated their participants and gave them a function – that of mocking the enemy or, in other cases, the authorities. Richard furthermore concludes that the ‘game with the pig’ was a typical urban feast in the Low Countries, though only one third of the examples he mentions can be located within the cities of that part of Europe. It seems, however, to have been a more widespread phenomenon in the whole of the Holy Roman Empire (Richard also gives the examples of Lübeck, Stralsund, Speyer, Zwickau, Heidelberg and Cologne), yet more research for other regions is needed before making statements on the geographical appearance of this cruel phenomenon.

The same can be said of the case-study of Jonas Roelens who analysed same-sex acts between women in the cities of the southern Low Countries such as Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp and Brussels. He has found evidence of 25 charges against women between c. 1400 and 1550. That is more than the number of prosecutions for male sodomy in the same period (nearly 1 out of 10 accused sodomites in the region was a woman), though one wonders what the figures are for other regions. Curiously enough, female sodomites were punished in the same way as their male counterparts by the authorities of the cities mentioned while they were clearly differently penalized elsewhere in Europe. Therefore, Roelens argues that the repression of female same-sex acts was the result of the relatively high level of liberty and visibility women enjoyed in the southern Netherlands, compared to other regions. The more visible women were in society, the more women attracted to people of their own sex were at risk of being discovered and punished by the urban authorities. Moreover, those responsible for this repression were not afraid to call a spade a spade where female sodomy was concerned. Judges in other European regions urged secrecy and tried to conceal the true crime of the female offenders as much as possible, whereas urban authorities in the southern Netherlands explicitly labelled female–female sexual activities sodomy. Women who passively submitted to the crime, however, could count on a reduced sentence. This was especially true for married women sodomized by their husbands, who were left completely unpunished. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that urban authorities were most likely to intervene when public order was disturbed rather than acting as judges with the aim of influencing norms on sexual morality (‘Visible women: female sodomy in the late medieval and early modern southern Netherlands (1400–1550)’, The Low Countries Historical R., 130 (2015), 3–24).

Popular violence, legal conflicts and urban revolts are studied by Patrick Lantschner, Christian Liddy and Matthew Phillips. The latter presents a case of urban conflict at mid-fourteenth-century Bishop's Lynn (today King's Lynn, Norfolk) in ‘Urban conflict and legal strategy in medieval England: the case of Bishop's Lynn, 1346–1350’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 365–80. Between 1346 and 1350, the burgesses of Lynn retained possession of the bishop's confiscated liberties. They adopted an innovative legal strategy to challenge episcopal claims to the husting court (which dealt with pleas of contracts, covenants, trespass and lands) and the view of frankpledge (dealing with the presentment and punishment of offences that fell short of felony). This legal strategy involved an appeal to the Statute of Mortmain, as well as the assertion of the king's right to confiscate the urban liberties that had been acquired illegally by the bishop of Norwich in 1309. However, in the end, Lynn's burgesses were unsuccessful and their legal challenge ultimately resulted in the retrenchment of episcopal lordship. The dispute has already been highlighted elsewhere, but Phillips is the first to explore in detail the urban petitions presented by Lynn to the king. Interestingly, these petitions incorporated information about the bishop's own supplications to the king in an attempt to counter campaigns of misinformation led by their adversary. The Lynn case therefore demonstrates that urban petitioners creatively used legal arguments with the aim of challenging opposing views on the exercise of political power. Furthermore, the burgesses' legal strategy may originally have been developed in parliament given that only two years before the conflict began the clergy had made a complaint in parliament against the implementation of the Statute of Mortmain. This possibility provides, therefore, a remarkable insight into the relationship between legislation discussed in London, and how this could then be distorted and put to an almost antithetical purpose in a local legal dispute over urban liberties.

Likewise, Christian Liddy shows us that the language used by urban petitioners in political discussions about enclosure was more sophisticated than historians have hitherto thought. Around 1500, enclosure riots in English towns were provoked by and mediated through a language of rights, but this language was shaped neither by a close reading of the Bible nor by new ideas of a humanist culture of civic republicanism but by a creative interpretation of custom and legal precedents. In ‘Urban enclosure riots: risings of the commons in English towns, 1480–1525’, Past and Present, 226 (2015), 41–77, a detailed study of five enclosure riots in York and seven in Coventry leads Liddy to say that these conflicts turned, ultimately, on the degree of popular inclusion in town government. The enclosure riot was an expression of an unruly civic politics, in which town oligarchs found it almost impossible to contain the clamour of their citizens. Political power in York and Coventry (and elsewhere) increasingly became confined to the governors and councillors who took decisions behind closed doors – as one of the petitions charged them with. In the governors' eyes, citizens were to become subjects; their main political right, the obligation of loyalty and obedience to their political masters. Liddy's close analysis of the petitions demonstrates that urban freemen were resistant to this prescriptive reordering of the political system, which demoted burgesses and citizens to the rank of the lower orders. The ‘commoners’, as the petitioners called themselves, had ‘common rights’ which gave them a voice to be heard in politics. When they tore down the enclosing hedges, the urban freemen not only showed their anger, they also joined together to confront their governors with an alternative view of the meaning of citizenship, Liddy argues. The language of protest was found in the lexicon of citizenship, and not elsewhere.

Patrick Lantschner's ‘Fragmented cities in the later middle ages: Italy and the Near East compared’, English Historical R., 130 (2015), 546–82, also shows that violent political conflict was a reality of urban life. His comparison between such conflicts at both sides of the Mediterranean (namely those taking place in late medieval Bologna and Mamluk Damascus) demonstrates that, despite the different ways in which cities have been understood in ‘western’ and ‘Islamic’ traditions of thought, the tension between order and disorder was common to both. The main point of his article is that the notion of the city as a unitary entity has too long been embedded in the historiography on the medieval city. Again, the posthumously published Die Stadt of Weber forms the point of departure, because in Weber's thinking cities were essentially confederations of individual citizens. Lantschner shows, however, that fragmentation and legal divisions were a dominant characteristic of urban life, though he admits that cities were also shared arenas around which particular forms of conducting politics crystallized. In the case of Damascus, for instance, it is important to demonstrate that the city was not merely passively affected by external warfare, as historians have often assumed. Wars split the city in itself, in which rival groups, partly organized on pre-existing ties (such as factional interests of the groups known as ‘zu'r’, or neighbourhood in suburbs), competed over how best to organize public life: sometimes, this concerned the city as a common space, but at other times only the regulation of particular spheres within the city was at stake. In the case of Bologna, Lantschner emphasizes that its commune was only one among several points of reference for city dwellers, who operated in an urban arena characterized by multiple units of political organization (such as the craft guilds or quartiere/neighbourhoods). In both cases, conflict divided the city, but at the same time also brought together the disparate communities that together populated urban space. Like Christian Liddy, he shows that political violence in cities should not only be understood as the expression of collective frustration, but also as a consequence of the co-existence of divergent meanings on how urban life should be regulated. One could argue that ‘revolt’ is therefore perhaps not the right term to classify these conflicts (as is also notified by Thomas Cohn in a study on high and late medieval protest in the Holy Roman Empire in ‘Aufruhr! Zur epochenübergreifenden Beschreibung beschleunigten sozialen Wandels in Krisenzeiten’, Historische Zeitschrift, 301 (2015), 31–62).

Lastly, the history of that urban space in which commoners and elite met is the main focus of Keith Lilley in ‘Urban planning after the Black Death: townscape transformation in later medieval England (1350–1530)’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 22–42. Conventional historical accounts have stressed the occurrence of urban decline in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England; from the point of view of urban planning, the later middle ages in England have even been called a ‘sterile period’. Lilley instead makes a case that after 1350 urban planning continued to influence towns and cities through the transformation of their townscapes. This view elaborates on the insight that urban planning encompassed more than just founding ‘new towns’ or ‘new quarters’ in existing cities. Detailed morphological studies demonstrated that the redevelopment and renewal of urban landscapes as well as distinct phases of urban expansion and extension are crucial to understand the transformation of towns and their wider economic and social history. Therefore, Lilley re-examines the nature and character of planning itself, by asking the key question ‘What is it to plan?’ Consequently, he studies in detail some cases in which ‘agents of change’ (such as local surveyors and ‘architects’, but also master masons originating from Flanders as seems to have been the case in Colchester) took the lead in planning new quarters of cities. The appearance of new towns is rare in the English middle ages, though the examples of the foundation of Queenborough (1368), Bewdley (1446–7) and Sutton Coldfield (1528) reflect a continuing tradition of urban planning spanning the period 1350–1530. But also within existing, bigger towns civic improvements and transformation of the urban arena took place, as Lilley shows for Norwich and Coventry. Lilley's evidence indicates therefore a concern for and interest in urban development and planning after the Black Death in England across the urban hierarchy, and (as he rightly notices) this conclusion can also be applied for other parts of late medieval Europe as well.

1500–1800

Economic and social inequality has remained high on the agenda of the social sciences in 2015, in the wake of Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Historians have accepted Piketty's challenge and have carefully considered inequality prior to the French and industrial revolutions. As with current-day inequality, however, it is often difficult to find representative sources which adequately capture inequality. Wouter Ryckbosch relies on taxed house values for 15 towns in the Low Countries from the fourteenth up to the nineteenth centuries (‘Economic inequality and growth before the industrial revolution: the case of the Low Countries (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries)’, European R. of Economic History (advance access, published online 25 Sep. 2015). The Low Countries constituted a strongly urbanized region with inter-regional differences in the timing, nature and extent of economic development. Ryckbosch observes an increase of inequality throughout the early modern period and then goes on to explain what drove this increase. Larger cities experienced higher levels of economic inequality because of their strong inflow of immigrants which drove the growth of these towns; port cities were more equal than capital and industrial cities; strong craft guilds and corporations limited the increase of inequality; and no real difference could be found in patterns of inequality between the towns in the northern and the southern Low Countries. Wages and home-ownership proved to be strong determinants of inequality. High real wages limited inequality, while a decrease in home-ownership and the increase of the number of rental houses caused a concentration of capital in the hands of the happy few and automatically led to more inequality.

Besides inequality, a topical theme that keeps on cropping up in social history is the ’nuclear hardship hypothesis’ and the fraying of family relations that were torn asunder as European urbanization gathered momentum. Lynch and others have launched the seminal idea that the bonds between family members have grown weaker since the late Middle Ages,Footnote ¹ while Peter Laslett argued that people, as a consequence, were more prone to poverty and social isolation (the ‘nuclear-hardship’ hypothesis).Footnote ² New institutions, such as craft guilds, brotherhoods and beguinages may have served as a sort of surrogate family, providing care for their old, sick or destitute members, when relatives were unable or unwilling to step into the breach. Commercial homes for the elderly seem to illustrate this trend. In a recent article (see ‘Pap en brood tijdens de oude dag. Gepensioneerden in Amsterdam aan het einde van de middeleeuwen’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, 12 (2015), 23–48), Jaco Zuijderduijn argued that Amsterdam citizens increasingly reserved a place for themselves in one of the city hospitals, which provided commercial care for the elderly, who did not want to bother relatives or appeal to the parish. For a reasonable price, the hospital of Saint Peter offered a basic contract (commensalen) and a more deluxe version (proveniers) to its elderly residents, enabling even middle-class people to check in. Besides cash payments, tenants could settle their bill with labour – they did all sorts of odd jobs, ranging from staffing the hospital kitchen as a retired cook to saying prayers in the chapel as a pensioned-off clergyman – with real estate or with an annuity. Amsterdam citizens were increasingly forced to take such precautions for their old age, as family relations were sapped by urbanization.

While Zuijderduijn seems to endorse the theories of Lynch and Laslett, the Belgian historian Kim Overlaet is much more sceptical in her latest research (see ‘Replacing the family? Beguinages in early modern western European cities: an analysis of the family networks of beguines living in Mechelen (1532–1591)’, Continuity and Change, 29 (2014), 325–47). By scrutinizing the last wills of Mechlen beguines and single women, Overlaet refutes the idea that these religious communities served as a sort of surrogate family. On the contrary, the testaments evidence the lasting importance of family relations, as beguines preferred relatives, when they were looking for a new housemate or when they were drafting their wills. Family members – sisters and nieces in most cases – were bestowed with the most valuable possessions, while fellow beguines hardly if ever cropped up in the list. Even though these elderly beguines may have felt a moral obligation to bequeath their goods and chattels to relatives, some testaments hint at more personal motivations, as legatees were often remunerated for their assistance to their old beguine relatives. The lasting importance of family relations is also emphasized by Annelies de Bie's micro-storia of the Antwerp Boon family (see ‘Modelling the future. Occupational and marital choices of an early modern Antwerp family facing crisis’, Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis, 11 (2014), 1–27). Through a meticulous analysis of marriage settlements, articles of apprenticeship, last wills and other sources, De Bie reveals how the Antwerp family managed to rise within four or five generations from their (relatively) humble origins of fishmongers to their bourgeois status of international merchants with political aspirations. Marriages and education proved vital in this strategy (De Bie prefers the term ‘tactics’); they served as a tool to worm oneself into new occupations, but they also brought resilience to winter out the severe economic crisis that Antwerp endured in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Family relations and the economic slump are also vital in explaining poverty. Yet, Luciano Allegra and Henry French unsettle this obvious link in their latest articles. Even though they are working on regions that differed as chalk from cheese – Turin and Terling – there are striking similarities. Both agree that economic crisis was no sine qua non for poverty; other factors were much more decisive. French emphasizes the importance of lifecycles in explaining poverty (see ‘How dependent were the “dependent poor”? Poor relief and the life-course in Terling Essex, 1762–1834’, Continuity and Change, 30 (2015), 193–222), as the usual suspects for poor relief in rural Terling were elderly women and men above 60 – this seems to corroborate Laslett's ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’ – while the risk of poverty also loomed large in case of sickness, accidents or other mishap. Yet, the claimants were mostly families, who had to apply for poor relief when their children were very young and thus unable to contribute to the family income. Poverty was also immanent for families, whose children had left home. French also convincingly argues that most Terling poor were not really dependent on poor relief. Financial – or material – support was, in most cases, only needed for a short time span and barely accounted for 9 per cent of the family budget, although the ‘dependence’ seemed to rise due to poor harvests, war and other calamities, as the ancien régime came to a close.

Poverty is also discussed in the seminal article of Luciano Allegra (‘Becoming poor in eighteenth-century Turin’, J. of Interdisciplinary History, 46 (2015), 153–83). Turin provides an ideal test plot to scrutinize the much-debated links between poverty and economic slump, as the local textile industry faced a steep decline in the eighteenth century. Poverty, as a result, loomed large and the local hospitals were besieged by people applying for poor relief. Yet, Luciano Allegra persuasively argues that these dire economic circumstances do not fully explain why some fell prey to poverty and destitution, while others managed to keep afloat. By using a model developed by Amartya Sen, Allegra tries to identify the decisive factors, which made the difference between hardship and well-being. For instance, sickness was a risk factor for poverty, but hardly decisive, as only a small minority of people applying for poor relief was ill. Living conditions can also be ruled out as a deciding factor, since Turin paupers were not really living in ghettos. By contrast, migration was a serious risk factor, as the majority of men and women applying for poor relief had come from elsewhere. On the one hand, the data evidence a rather successful naturalization process, as poor relief was restricted to Turin citizens, yet, at the same time, the hospital registers elucidate the limits of assimilation, as most newcomers apparently lacked a social network. When things turned bad, there were no colleagues, neighbours or friends, who could be drawn on for assistance.

Luciano Allegra – in line with Henry French – emphasizes the overriding importance of lifecycle in understanding poverty. In Turin, it was not the elderly who applied for poor relief – apparently the ‘nuclear hardship’ hypothesis does not hold for the Mediterranean context, where family members, neighbours, parishioners and friends came to assistance – but young families with children. As in Terling, Turin families had to ask for doles when their offspring were young and unable to contribute to the family income, while the pressure on the household budget eased as the children grew up and were able to support themselves. Families where the parents followed the same occupation ran more risk of becoming impoverished than couples with different occupations. Last but not least, Allegra's article evidences some obvious class difference in poor relief: upper-crust citizens hardly if ever sought assistance, while beggars and vagabonds from the countryside were simply purged away. Whereas ordinary Turin citizens could only apply for doles, the middling sorts were entitled to a bed in the hospital.

Social differences and the exclusivity of institutions are also discussed in Griet Vermeesch's latest article (see ‘The social composition of plaintiffs and defendants in the Peacemaker court, Leiden 1750–54’, Social History, 40 (2015) 208–29). The idea that early modern courts of civil justice were open to a wide social range of plaintiffs and defendants is critically assessed by Vermeesch, who specializes in pro deo procedures. In this article, the Belgian historian scrutinizes the registers of the Peacemaker court in Leiden. In theory, the Vredemakers court was extremely accessible, as the legal fees were low, the procedure simple and no solicitor was required. However, in practice, access to the Vredemakers court was rather limited, as Vermeesch's meticulous comparison between the judicial rolls and the tax registers reveals. The majority of plaintiffs and defendants came from the upper or middle ranks of society, while the larger part of Leiden society hardly if ever showed up. Barely 14 per cent of the complaints came from these lower tiers. Vermeesch argues that they rather resorted to infra-judicial strategies to settle their conflicts.

Europe's labouring classes not only faced poverty and social and legal inequality; they were also more vulnerable to epidemics and plagues. Cummins, Kelly and Ó Gráda have collected an impressive dataset from www.ancestry.com on births and deaths in London in the period 1560–1665 (‘Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665’, Economic History R., early review, published online 5 Mar. 2015). Drawing on the extensive data from the London parish registers, four major outbreaks of plague could be identified: in 1563, 1603, 1625 and 1665 one fifth of the Londoners died. At first, death spread in a relatively uniform fashion across the intra- and extra-mural parishes, but gradually the intra-mural parishes at a distance from the city walls witnessed a decline in plague vulnerability as these neighbourhoods became the preserves of the city's upper classes. The so-called urban graveyard effect was much more the result of mortality in the poorer northern and eastern London parishes where child mortality contributed to a large extent to the general mortality of these parishes. Interestingly, in periods when real wages were higher, mortality in the poorer parishes remained at a lower level. This shows how the inhabitants of these quarters were more vulnerable to plague when they were at the biological subsistence level. This rich analysis of mortality in early modern London builds on both geographical and chronological coding of mortality patterns. This results in highly interesting maps which show how the plague often spread out from the northern suburbs, at times in conjunction with the eastern parishes, and that the high peaks in mortality usually passed through London in autumn, which confirms that the mortality was indeed caused by the plague.

Spatial analysis is also applied to another feature of fast-growing London: occupational clustering in the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries (Justin Colson, ‘Commerce, clusters and community: a re-evaluation of the occupational geography of London, c. 1400–c. 1550’, Economic History R. (early review, published online 8 May 2015). Colson partially refutes the common assumption that medieval towns were characterized by occupational clusters which often provided certain streets and (trade) quarters with their names; this clustering was less pronounced in early modern cities whose spatial patterns were more determined by producers and retailers spreading out in search for a clientele and less by the need to live in proximity to their colleagues. The wills of different tradesmen and craftsmen are used to verify whether colleagues inhabited the same neighbourhoods. The evidence is more nuanced than the assumption: some tradesmen and craftsmen did spread out across London while others, such as the fishmongers and bowyers remained together and continued to make use of agglomeration benefits. Colson connects this finding to the changing characteristics of the London guilds: London companies at first united those who performed the same type of economic activity but gradually they included different occupations in umbrella guilds. Hence, spatial divergence could go hand in glove with continued membership of the same guild. It remains to be evaluated to what extent London was representative. Can similar patterns be observed for other cities? This line of research begs for a long-term and comparative perspective.

Lately, the history of distribution, retailing and consumption has become a powerful strand in historiography and often an urban setting is singled out. In 2015, a new journal was even founded to advance scholarship on issues of retailing and consumption: History of Retailing and Consumption. Original articles on these subjects in early modern history will surely appear in subsequent issues. Van den Heuvel offers an interesting perspective on the history of retailing: the omnipresence of street sellers in early modern towns, the policing and social control of these salesmen and saleswomen and the boundaries of the formal and the informal economy (‘Policing peddlers: the prosecution of illegal trade in eighteenth-century Dutch towns’, Historical J., 58 (2015), 367–92). While often considered as illegal and persecuted by urban and guild authorities, the black market was the only economic activity for many women, religious minorities (including Jews) and immigrants. Although policing street selling may have been limited, the chance of being caught seriously affected colporteurs’ businesses and their clients. Van den Heuvel relies on petitions, court cases and sources produced by guilds such as licences, lists of fines and ordinances of early modern towns in the Dutch Republic. The guild measures mainly aimed to raise the costs street sellers faced: when caught, street sellers were offered the option to acquire a licence in order to avoid formal prosecution and systems were in place for community members to inform on free-riders, which could lead to their arrest and the confiscation of their goods. Jews and female canvassers were especially targeted; women were associated with riots, the disturbance of the public order, the spread of disease and sexual licentiousness. Yet, if one considers the lists of fines, as historians often do, another image emerges: few street sellers were punished and among them were few women or Jews. This leads Van den Heuvel to conclude that guild regulations were often used for interpersonal bullying against outsiders; the sheer possibility of being targeted weakened the position of street vendors. Well-integrated local sellers faced less hostility. In the end, the local community determined which sellers were tolerated, discriminating along lines of neighbourhood and their own economic needs.

Transgressions and illegal activities not only provide insight into the history of the shadow economy and more particularly of retailing; criminal records also reveal preferences for certain types of commodities which were worth the risk of stealing them. Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries and Ken Sneath have meticulously identified 4,600 goods from 780 instances of theft as recorded in the London Old Bailey Sessions Papers and Proceedings for a series of sample years in the period 1750–1821 (‘Consumption conundrums unravelled’, Economic History R., 68 (2015), 830–57). By coding the identities of those who were robbed (title, profession, occupation), they also had a social benchmark for the social profile of the (previous) owners of the stolen goods. The authors observe how consumer goods such as watches, napkins, feather beds, curtains, tea paraphernalia and other commodities were stolen from households further down the social scale over time. The wealthier strata reacted to this ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ type of behaviour by acquiring higher quality and more expensive variants of these consumer goods, such as damask napkins. Novel consumption goods also crop up in in the latest article by Julia Landweber (see ‘This marvelous bean. Adopting coffee into Old Regime French culture and diet’, French Historical Studies, 38 (2015), 193–223), who tries to explain how coffee became a fashionable drink in eighteenth-century France. Contrary to textbook wisdom, Landweber argues that the French were not immediately won over by the ‘marvelous bean’, as coffee was awfully bitter, very expensive and impregnated with (negative) Islamic associations. In order to percolate through the whole of society, a slow-burn accommodation process was needed, whereby coffee was sweetened with a spot of milk (the Café au Lait) and popularized in a bundle of other exotic goods (the Turquerie), which included cashmere dressing gowns, ottoman divans, porcelain and other oriental luxuries. ‘Consumer clustering’ (a concept coined by Jan de Vries) thus explains the rise of coffee as a popular drink. Coffee houses were well aware of this effect and sold their beverages in a luxurious and exotic interior where waiters were dressed in Turkish livery.

A much more prestigious sales venue and site of consumption than the streets and squares of Dutch towns or the markets for stolen goods in the London metropolis was the Parisian Palais de Justice, on the Isle de la Cité in the heart of the city (Nicolas Lyon-Caen, ‘Les marchands du temple. Les boutiques du Palais de Justice de Paris aux XVIe – XVIIIe siècles’, Revue historique, 674 (2015), 323–52). The medieval residence of the French king had been turned into a court of law and gradually assumed another role: that of a shopping centre with hundreds of small, yet luxuriously and comfortably adorned shops (nearly 600 by 1700) where luxury items such as jewelry, lace and gloves, but also books, were sold besides small catering businesses. This commercial transformation was initiated by the monarchy, in close conjunction with the merchants who ran the shops. Little attention was paid to the demands of judges who were professionally active in the court rooms while commerce was conducted in the nearby hallways, courtyards and galleries. Indeed, the lively court scenes themselves were a force of attraction for those visiting the Palais. The result was the formation of a public space for commercial exchange. Location is/was everything: rents and leases of shops in the old galleries fetched much higher prices than those in the inner courtyards or the streets around the Palais. The shopping centre of the Palais de Justice faced decline after 1680 when Paris’ upper class and nobility moved to western Paris (rue Saint Honoré) or to Versailles.

Today, we expect our politicians and government administrators to be accountable for their deeds; misappropriation of public funds, when found out, mostly results in political scandals. We often have our own political culture and society in mind when we look at the politics and government of the past. Indeed, historiography has been looking for the precursors of modern systems of accountability and transparency which Max Weber deemed essential for the development of modern bureaucracy. Often parallels are drawn between the past and current-day developing countries: in both cases, public offices are treated as private property, officials’ salaries are low or non-existent, there is little transparency or accountability, there is no normative framework which stigmatizes corruption and clientage tendencies are omnipresent in politics and government. Although there has been some work on the significance of corruption and the resulting reforms, Mark Latham argues that corruption itself, its causes and extent and its impact on institutional development have received little attention from historians, who, moreover, consider corruption from the socio-political side and only rarely from an economic perspective (‘“The city has been wronged and abused!”: institutional corruption in the eighteenth century’, Economic History R., 68 (2015), 1038–61).

To remedy this, Latham relies on a case-study of the well-documented London Bridge House, the institution which was responsible for the maintenance of old London Bridge. Both the administrative (that of the Bridge Master) and workman positions of the Bridge House could be purchased. Revenues from real estate and expenditure on the maintenance of London Bridge were in the hands of different officials none of whom was accountable to the others. Bridge Masters blatantly used Bridge House raw materials and working hours for the embellishment of their own houses and workmen sent excessive bills (working hours which were not actually executed and raw materials at inflated prices) to the administration. The administrators had no incentives to set the surpluses of one year aside to fund larger works in the future; all revenue was usually spent during the same year. The accounts of the Bridge House clearly demonstrate how corruption worked. By the 1740s, the culture of corruption had come to an end: the Bridge House faced acute financial pressure due to declining revenue from real estate, the cumulative effect of corruption scandals set in and gave way to new attitudes and expectations of honesty, probity and professionalism. A salaried inspector was installed who verified whether maintenance was actually done on the bridge, who checked the accounts and who was accountable to the city government (at risk of being fired).

London Bridge also figures prominently in the latest research of Leslie Tomory (see ‘Water technology in eighteenth-century London: the London Bridge Waterworks’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 381–404), as the home base of the London Bridge Water Works (LBWW). During the seventeenth century, the LBWW provided thousands of customers with water that was pumped from the Thames by enormous tidal-driven wheels under the arches of London Bridge and spread through the city by a maze of mains, pipes and valves. As one of the oldest and largest water companies, the LBWW had been a pioneer in the invention of new water technology. Yet, in the late eighteenth century, the decline set in as competing companies were not only able to provide much cleaner water – the Thames was ever more polluted – but also experimented with high-pressure pipes. Moreover, the LBWW lost customers, as the city of London gradually turned from a residential area into a business district. New infrastructure – or the hardware of the city – also figures in the research of the promeneur of Laurent Turcot (see ‘The rise of the promeneur: walking the city in eighteenth-century Paris’, Historical Research, 88 (2015), 67–99). Drawing on evidence from novels, etiquette books, travelogues and other sources, Turcot argues that the traditional academic emphasis on Baudelaire's flâneur and Haussmann's renovation of Paris has downplayed the importance of earlier developments. Walking (se promener) had already become a favourite pastime in late seventeenth-century Paris, when the royal engineers razed the city walls and laid out the boulevards. Due to their design, with a central lane for traffic and contre-allées for pedestrians, the new urban infrastructure bolstered the fashionable appeal of walking. The rise of the promeneur, in its turn, remodelled the urban infrastructure, as footpaths became a stock ingredient in urban renewal.

Citizens were not only walking, but also exercised. Militias were the apex of Dutch civic pride, of which Rembrandt's Nightwatch (1640–2) is the most powerful epitomy. The group portrait was commissioned by members of Amsterdam's citizens' militia. Maarten Prak wonders whether those civic militias had not been rendered obsolete by early modern state formation and the military revolution (‘Citizens, soldiers and civic militias in late medieval and early modern Europe’, Past and Present, 228 (2015), 95–123)? Were professional soldiers not better at military activities? Had the military initiative not shifted from urban governments to princely standing armies throughout the early modern period? Prak reveals both the political theories and the daily lives of civic militias in the Dutch Republic and early modern Europe. Treatises by Machiavelli, James Harrington, Andrew Fletcher and Johan Derk, baron Van der Capellen tot den Poll all stressed the necessity of arming citizens to avoid reliance on dangerous professional soldiers and potential oppression by rulers and to foster civic pride. In late medieval Europe, different types of civic militias were present; they differed according to the type of recruitment and the extent of training. Militia members could be recruited through guilds or territorially according to neighbourhood systems. Usually only full citizens could become members of one of the city's civic militias or shooting guilds. Ideas of friendship, equality and harmony were stressed in civic militia circles and strengthened via meals and collective drinking.

The early modern period – and its processes of state formation and the military revolution – did not spell the end of civic militias; Rembrandt's Nightwatch was not a forced effort to reinstate civic pride or a relic of past glory. Civic militias retained policing duties in the towns and remained a political force to be reckoned with. Their military function did decline because of the increasing use of professional soldiers. The state's monopoly on violence, however, was never absolute: citizens were still allowed to have weapons and were at times called upon for military duties. Civic militias drew their strength from their numbers (many urban men belonged to one militia or another) and their political role: they expressed ideas of citizenship and they were able to maintain or threaten the political order, depending on the circumstances. They were part of the identity of the urban community and gave voice to it. The findings of Prak's article contrast somewhat with Hammersley's analysis of concepts of citizenship in France (‘Concepts of citizenship in France during the long eighteenth century’, European R. of History, 22 (2015), 468–85). Antique concepts of citizenship had somewhat declined by the seventeenth century, especially in the wake of Bodin: citizenship was no longer limited to inhabitants of towns, a national concept of citizenship started to develop. Political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled with defining who were citizens (were the less affluent, women and slaves to be included as well?) and with the mechanics of democracy (should there be a direct voice or was a system of representation through assemblies to be installed?). Did France differ from the Dutch Republic in its conception of citizenship because of their differences in degree of urbanization?

Civic ideology was also represented in other media. Frederik Buylaert, Jelle De Rock and Ann Laure Van Bruaene make use of Pieter De Keysere's 1524 elaborate woodcut featuring a city-view of Ghent (a large town in the southern Low Countries), its City Virgin and a series of heraldic depictions of prominent families and the city's craft guilds to demonstrate, on the one hand, that civic religion was as powerful in north-western Europe as in Italy, and, on the other hand, that civic religion did not cater solely for the ruling elites of towns (‘City portrait, civic body, and commercial printing in sixteenth-century Ghent’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68 (2015), 803–39). Civic religious and memorial practices were not only meant to solidify the political power of a small elite but could also be used for local community building. Civic religion could also be professed by other urban actors, such as families, confraternities and guilds. Pieter De Keysere sought to appeal to this feeling of local community with his commercial print which was specifically intended for Ghent's corporate middling groups.

Worldly powers – both civic and royal – had to compete with the religious realm in most European cities. In his latest research, Timothy Walker shows how the Portuguese king Dom José and his brilliant minister, Sebastião José de Carvalo de Melo, alias the Marquês de Pombal, took advantage of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to tip the balance (see ‘Enlightened absolutism and the Lisbon earthquake: asserting state dominance over religious sites and the church in eighteenth-century Portugal’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 48 (2015), 307–28). In their new plans for Lisbon, the symbolic power of the church was clipped, by tampering with the perceptibility and the centrality of churches, monasteries and other religious hotspots. New building regulations not only limited the height and width of ecclesiastical buildings, as they had to be tirée à la ligne, but also prescribed a more sober, classical style for the façade. Monasteries and churches had once been a conspicuous visual beacon in the urban environment with their impressive and flamboyant Gothic and Baroque architecture, but they were shrunk to more modest dimensions by the Pombal regulations. For passers-by, these ecclesiastical buildings were almost invisible from a distance. Bell towers and steeples were curtailed, while most churches also lost their graveyard and other sacred space. Timothy Walker persuasively argues that these interventions were part of a deliberate enlightened policy to rein in the limitless power of the church in Portugal. Pombal even voiced this motive in his personal writings. According to Walker, this plan is at odds with Jonathan Israel's claim that the Enlightenment and religion were all but irreconcilable. Enlightened reformers showed their less tolerant face in the Lisbon case.

Whereas Timothy Walker zooms in on the visual aspects of religious cultures, Philip Hahn's research is more concerned with soundscapes (see ‘The reformation of the soundscape: bell-ringings in early modern Lutheran Germany’, German History, 33 (2015), 525–45). Inspired by the seminal research of Alain Corbin, David Garrioch and other pioneers, sound has become a fashionable topic lately. Hahn makes a link with religion, as he puts the auditory regulations of early Lutheran communities in Germany under the microscope. Through laws and rules, popish sounds had to be silenced, muted or – in most cases – fine-tuned. City governments acted against rowdy bell-ringing, chiming, pealing and tolling, as Catholics traditionally used the church bells to summon people to mass, to marriages and funerals; to pray for all sorts of Saints and Our Lady; or to fend off epidemic diseases, thunderstorms and other foreboding disasters. Lutherans were obviously sceptical and tried to restrain such popish insolence, even though there was much regional variation in such regulations and city governments kept an increasingly loose rein as the seventeenth century came to a close.

Post-1800

It will be interesting to see whether Richard Rodger's thought-provoking piece, ‘Putting the economy back in to the city’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 157–68, elicits a revival of research into economic matters as they affect the city. Rodger speculates why economic matters have received little attention from urban historians over the last 40 years despite the proliferation of world bodies concerned with economic oversight (OECD, EEC, GATT), the micro-management of state economies by controlling different measures of money supply in the 1980s and the vexed matter of government spending versus debt. The question that arises, of course, is what impact do such economic issues have on urban history, specifically urban development, and the political economy of cities? His analysis of the annual bibliography of Urban History and the articles published in Urban History Yearbook, Urban History (1974–2013) and the Journal of Urban History over the same period reveals that despite the significance of economic issues to urban life the category, ‘economy’, accounts for a mere 13 per cent of references. Indeed, since the 1990s, economic matters have receded further, being displaced by research focused on literary, cultural and environmental themes. This ‘turn’ of events may seem obvious as history and its specialist branches have always been ‘dedicated followers of fashion’. But there are significant issues concerning undergraduate programmes as well as the strictures of the Research Excellence Framework et al.

The explanatory force of urban history would be strengthened, Rodger argues, by the study of the motor forces of capitalism – profits, costs, prices, markets – especially as they relate to urban development. A revival of interest in economic matters would potentially make urban history ‘greater than the sum of its many individual parts’, he concludes. There is undoubtedly a paucity of research at present published in British-based periodicals. This may be a generational shift as so many of the urban historian pioneers had been economic historians by training and disposition. All may not be lost, however, as a foray into the American-based Journal of Urban History may reveal. The consequences of deindustrialization for ‘rust belt’ cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh are prime cases for economic analysis. Marie-Alice L'Heureux provides a timely insight into Kansas City, which struggled to reinvent itself in the later twentieth century. City leaders since the early 1980s have focused on large-scale urban projects to attract convention and tourist dollars to spur urban revitalization. She examines the role of what she calls urban ‘boosters’ in promoting urban recovery (‘The creative class, urban boosters, and race: shaping urban revitalization in Kansas City, Missouri’, J. of Urban History, 41 (2015), 245–60). Additionally, Patrick Vitale's ‘Decline is renewal’, J. of Urban History, 41 (2015), 34–9, provides a valuable approach to the classic ‘rust belt’ city, Pittsburgh, by explaining how economic recovery was so problematic.

If there has been a decline in economic-based research, the gap has been more than filled by studies of urban planning and this is amply demonstrated in this last year's articles. Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 17–38, provides a valuable starting point with Andre Soren's introduction to ‘historical institutionalist’ factors and their impact on ‘path dependence’. His outline of a research agenda is an informative tool for those seeking to specialize in this area. Quentin Stevens’ ‘Master planning public memorials’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 39–66, examines three New World democratic capital cities – Washington, Ottawa and Canberra – where the growing number of public memorials spurred the development of official plans and policies to regulate the siting and design of future memorial proposals. Through analysis of a range of planning strategies that significantly influenced the design of individual memorials, including large-scale memorial precinct plans, the social meanings of surrounding sites and existing memorials is revealed. Dovina Pojani's ‘Urban design, ideology and power: use of the central square in Tirana during one century of political transformations’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 67–94, investigates the history of urban design in the centre of Tirana, capital of Albania, during five political periods from the Ottoman period through to western-style planning. Starting before World War I, Pojani offers an explanation of the manner in which successive regimes have imposed their urban design visions for a grand city-centre, each time attempting to erase the built heritage of their predecessors. In the post-communist era, the city government has made attempts to develop a new grand vision for its use but this has met with failure. Pojani reasons that this outcome can be discerned in the contemporary nature of the state, as well as the nature of development in a market economy.

For specialists and enthusiasts for Raymond Unwin and the English Garden City movement, there is a feast of materials in Mervyn Miller, ‘Commemorating and celebrating Raymond Unwin’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 129–40, and David Andrew Davidson, ‘One hundred years in the making: the creation and protection of Raymond Unwin's legacy at Hampstead Garden Suburb’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2105), 141–52. Centenaries and anniversaries invariably trigger special interest: thus Raymond Unwin's birth in 1863 has provided an opportunity in 2013 for reviewing his contributions to town planning and housing in their international context. His socialist values, derived from John Ruskin, William Morris and Edward Carpenter, provided the basis for democratizing design. Evolution of housing design themes and space standards enabled a consistent application of his intentions. His influence spread through his tract, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, and the 1919 Housing Act, which required Garden City standards for public housing. Miller's analysis of the Housing Act, administered by Unwin in the Ministry of Health, and Unwin's dialogue with planners and housing officials in the USA, is especially illuminating. Davidson's ‘One hundred years in the making: the creation and protection of Raymond Unwin's legacy at Hampstead Garden Suburb’ examines how Unwin developed his role as master planner and consultant architect to the Garden Suburb Trust and the mechanisms he used to ensure the quality of site planning and architecture. Finally, the work of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust in protecting the character of the area is outlined, including some details on the background to the current statutory mechanisms of protection and the tools the Trust uses to carry out its role. In 1903, the world's first garden city was founded in Hertfordshire, England: John Lewis’ ‘Preserving and maintaining the concept of Letchworth Garden City’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 153–6, demonstrates how the utopian dream to combine the best of town and country living was translated from concept to reality. He shows how the legacy of the original garden city masterplan by Parker and Unwin has been protected and considers how the town manages its architectural heritage while striving to maintain its economic viability and responsiveness to today's challenges.

Planning has, until relatively recently, been perceived as a male domain, so Robert Freestone's ‘Anti-planning in the 1940s: the paradox of Florence Taylor’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 191–209, and Mark Clapson's ‘The rise and fall of Monica Felton’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 211–29, may help to qualify such an impression. In her lifetime, Florence Taylor was celebrated as an advocate of town planning reform in Australia. Based in Sydney, she trained as an architect but spent most of her long professional life as a publisher and journalist, developing strong ties with the building industry. Inspired by a strong environmental determinist position, her early preoccupation with eradicating slums developed into numerous practical suggestions for improving city efficiency, urban renewal and traffic planning. Taylor was nonetheless often critical of planning in practice. As a businesswoman, she became antagonistic to planning as an activity of the modern state because of its apparent privileging of the public sector and over-regulation of private enterprise and everyday life. Clapson's article on the relatively obscure Monica Felton, reflects a growing academic interest in the careers of professional women town planners. Her career was certainly short-lived, beginning as it did on the London County Council in 1937 and ending spectacularly while she was chairman of Stevenage Development Corporation in 1951, but Clapson emphasizes her distinctive contribution to the evolving roles of women in British town planning during the mid-twentieth century and shows how this contribution was obscured by her fall from grace. For a transatlantic perspective and its application in Canberra, Australia, Christopher Vernon's ‘Recovering Walter Burley Griffin's final American city plan’, Planning Perspectives, 30 (2015), 625–37, again reveals the role of a woman, albeit an apparently secondary one. In 1912, Walter Burley Griffin famously won the international design competition for Australia's national capital, later named Canberra. In 1914, Griffin – along with his wife and professional partner Marion Mahony Griffin – moved from his native Chicago to Australia to manage the Canberra plan. On a return visit to the USA in 1925, Griffin was commissioned to lay out an extension to the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge which proved to be his final American commission. Finally, Junichi Hasegawa, ‘Urban planning by obliteration of both waterways and opponents: the infilling of canals during the 1950s reconstruction of central Tokyo’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 483–506, reveals how pragmatic approaches could still prevail in planning matters. The infilling of canals constructed in early modern times and subsequent development on newly created land in central Tokyo in the 1950s, following the curtailment of official war-damage reconstruction after World War II, are outlined. New developments included a high-rise central station building, a four-storey amusement complex, an underground entertainment street and an elevated motorway. The Tokyo metropolitan government and Japanese national railways were driving forces in infilling and development, which resulted in enormous political and social reactions in the local communities, newspapers and the national parliament.

It is encouraging that cities are still seen as sites of political activity by urban historians. Tom Hulme's ‘Putting the civics back into citizenship: civics education and local government in Britain 1918–1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (2015), 26–51, is of special interest to those concerned with inter-war Britain. Perhaps, too, those researching the broader issue of civil society should read Hulme's article. Civic education as a practical expression of local citizenship is an important area for historians and social scientists. He builds on recent analyses in urban history that have reassessed the perception of municipal and civic decline and suggests that historians must now also challenge the historiography that views citizenship as indivisible from national identity. It was common for both children and adults to be taught that it was locally, and in the city especially, that the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were promoted. Hulme traces this distinctive conception of citizenship to the ideological resilience of the Victorian idealist philosopher Thomas Hill Green whose justification for state intervention to ensure individual liberty meant that educators regarded municipal government as the guardian of the life and health of both individuals and communities – an educational approach they termed civics. This was apparent in organizations such as the National Association of Local Government Officers, Workers’ Educational Association and the Association for Education in Citizenship, and expressed through the flood of civics textbooks published following World War I. Concentrating on Manchester, he reveals the points of contact between these organizations and the individuals connected to Green, showing how civics was applied in both formal and informal sites of education. Daisy Pailing's ‘Socialist republic of South Yorkshire: grassroots activism and left wing solidarity in 1980s Sheffield’, Twentieth Century British History, 25 (2014) 602–27, makes an important contribution to the historiography of the crisis and renewal of the British left in 1980s urban Britain. By looking at the relationship between local government and new social movements in Sheffield through the dual lenses of Stuart Hall's notion of left-wing renewal and 1980s political scientists’ ‘local socialism’, it demonstrates how the left attempted to build new constituencies to rival Thatcherism. Hall's vision of renewal stemmed from a merging of class and identity politics, and historians have located successful examples of this in the policies of the Greater London Council. Less work has been completed outside the metropolis and this study of Sheffield fills an important gap. By close analysis of Sheffield City Council's policies on peace, race and gender, Pailing shows how class politics and old left concerns were prioritized over new left identity politics in Sheffield. Pailing makes the case that this still represented a dynamic form of renewal and one that suited Sheffield's residents, and in doing so, she brings a new dimension to the study of local movements and their engagement with established political forms. In North America, also, Jessica Ann Levy explores the changing dynamics of mayoral politics in Atlanta, Georgia, during the first two decades of black governance in ‘Selling Atlanta: black mayoral politics from protest to entrepreneurism, 1973 to 1990’, J. of Urban History, 41 (2015), 420–43. Levy charts the efforts of Atlanta's first two black mayors, Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, to negotiate the changing economic, political and social climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Compelled to abandon a pro-labour, community control politics in favour of policies favouring Atlanta's tourism industry, Atlanta's mayors developed a new liberal politics that appealed to the city's diverse electorate; and in doing so, they appropriated the city's civil rights legacy to secure new alliances.

Matthew Farish and David Monteyn, the guest editors for the special issue of Urban History, 42 (2015), 543–6, provide an instructive overview on a wide range of articles that illuminate the manner in which the Cold War and the prospect of nuclear war impacted upon cities. Eric Singer, in ‘Civil defence in the city: federal policy meets local resistance in Baltimore, 1957–1964’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 547–63, explains that between 1950 and 1964, as a result of federal policy shifts, Cold War civil defence was transformed from a pro-urban policy dedicated to the preservation of communities to an anti-urban policy focused on public order in the wake of an attack. Civil defence volunteers in Baltimore along with some of the city's civil defence paid staff, who had accepted the federal message that they could protect themselves and their communities from nuclear war, allied with anti-nuclear activists against an increasingly militarized programme. Suzanne Schregel's ‘Nuclear war and the city: perspectives on municipal interventions in defence: Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany, USA, 1980–1985’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 564–83, examines municipal interventions in defence and evaluates the role of cities and towns in relation to state Cold War policies. It reveals the manner in which in the early 1980s, urban residents in Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany and the USA claimed responsibility for defence and disarmament policies in the name of their respective city or home town. To justify their claims, protagonists portrayed urban settlements as probable targets of nuclear war and analysis of such initiatives reveals that municipal activities for peace and disarmament developed in complex spatial relations. Jonathan Hogg, ‘Cultures of nuclear resistance in 1980s Liverpool’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 584–602, examines Liverpool in the early 1980s and argues that localized approaches to Cold War cities can help us understand the impact of national nuclear policy on cultures of local government and everyday life. His account of the city's cultural politics in the early 1980s suggests that anti-nuclear cultures were shaped by ideas and assumptions that were discursively reinforced at both a national and local level. Timo Vilen's ‘Where east met west: Helsinki and the staging of the 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 603–21, examines the staging of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975. It was widely regarded as the high point of détente The legacy of the CSCE from the perspective of its host city, Helsinki, reveals how the Finnish initiative to host the conference became enmeshed with Helsinki's municipal politics and how the CSCE's and Finland's neutrality were used by the Helsinki authorities to project an attractive image of their city by means of public spectacle. Aleksandra Stupar's ‘Cold War versus architectural exchange: Belgrade beyond the confines?’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 622–45, analyses how the Cold War imposed not only ideological polarity but also social, economic and spatial dichotomies. Cities and their materiality acted as ideological resources. Further, the ambivalent position of Yugoslavia during the Cold War shaped the political background in which Belgrade and its planning and architecture developed. She identifies the impact of the main channels of professional exchange and the constraints of the Iron Curtain on planning dialogues as well as on the production of urban space in Belgrade. Jennifer Hoyt's ‘Fast, clean and green: Cold War ideologies and urban reforms in Buenos Aires, 1976–1983’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 646–85, explores how the last military dictatorship came to power in Argentina and was infamous for its atrocious human rights violations. However, this campaign of terror represents just one act carried out in the regime's efforts to counter leftist activities which had drawn inspiration from the Cuban Revolution. The military dictatorship sought to provide responsive administration as a means to pacify the nation. In Buenos Aires, modernization and a comprehensive set of urban reforms were intended to streamline and control the metropolis.

Working-class history and urban history have frequently converged, and with Selina Todd's ‘Phoenix rising: working-class life and urban reconstruction c. 1945–1967’, J. British Studies, 54 (2015), 679–702, we have a fascinating approach to the matter of the working-class experience of city redevelopment after World War II in British cities. Rather than seeing the working class as passive recipients of architectural and planning programmes, which has been the emphasis of much of the writing of this post-war period, Todd argues that working-class people were ‘active agents’ in the planning and redevelopment process which produced a sense of ‘entitlement’ for a better urban environment. Peter Fearon's ‘A “social evil”: Liverpool moneylenders 1920s–1940s’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 440–62, illuminates the economic importance of moneylenders in a city characterized by significant casual labour and under-employment. During the 1920s and 1930s, many working-class families needed emergency credit. Their use of pawnbrokers is well documented but the presence of a network of moneylenders, most of whom were women operating from their own homes, is not. Fearon examines the background to and the impact of the Moneylenders Act (1927) which was designed to reduce the number of working-class lenders who were widely perceived as disreputable. Simon Abernethy examines the role played by workmen's trains in allowing working-class families to move out into London's suburbs in his ‘Opening-up the suburbs: workmen's trains in London 1860–1914’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 70–88. Previous scholarship has argued that these trains benefited skilled artisans and the labour aristocracy. Abernethy suggests that from the 1880s onwards, the benefits were spread to include unskilled workers in casual employment. He also addresses wider gender issues, pointing out that these trains were used by women and children earning low wages in subsidiary employment. Colin Pooley's ‘My father found it for me: experiences of entering the work force in twentieth-century urban Britain’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 290–308, is an intriguing piece that reveals important insights into the lives of the young working class. He explores the process whereby young people entered the urban labour market in mid-twentieth-century Glasgow, Manchester and London and how such a rite of passage was transformed by economic but also by cultural shifts. In North America, Isabela Seong Leong Quintana penetrates the world of the Chinese and Mexican immigrant in the working-class world of Los Angeles in her ‘Making do, making home: borders and the worlds of Chinatown and Sonoratown in early twentieth-century Los Angeles’, J. of Urban History, 41 (2015), 47–74. The racialized and gendered regulations of national borders through the industrialization of neighbourhood geographies had a tremendous impact on daily work, home architecture and social relationships in the Chinatown and Sonoratown neighbourhoods of Los Angeles during the early twentieth century. Using space and gender as analytic lenses, this article examines the built environments of house courts in Sonoratown and Chinatown as windows into the everyday lives of Mexican and Chinese Angelenos. Women's ordering of domestic space and intimate labour in and around the home and in the surrounding courtyards challenged the categories that city officials had designated for family, home and nation.

Urban historians have become increasingly interested in the matter of environmental disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and fires – upon cities. Nathan Clarke has studied the Peruvian city of Chimbote and his ‘Revolutionizing the tragic city: rebuilding Chimbote, Peru, after the 1970 earthquake’, J. of Urban History, 41 (2015), 91–115, shows how the anti-oligarchical military government seized on the destruction resulting from the earthquake to assert its power in ways it could not have previously exercised. The generals set out to remake Chimbote in their image, preparing a 9-volume, 2,000-page plan that would convert the port into an industrial powerhouse. While this plan proved too ambitious, subsequent modifications exemplify the role of creative destruction and its limitations. The earthquake provided the generals with their only opportunity to get Chimbote's growth under control and to implement their ideas of creating a progressive and participatory Peru. Similarly, David Johnson Lee's study ‘De-centring Managua: post-earthquake reconstruction and revolution in Nicaragua’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 663–85, explains how the reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the USA's alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy during the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, the Americans promoted a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and created a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the USA helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground. James Siodla studies the San Francisco fire of 1906 in ‘Razing San Francisco: the 1906 disaster as a natural experiment in urban redevelopment’, J. of Urban Economics, 89 (2015), 48–61. He shows how urban developers faced conflicts in the process of redeveloping land, which could depend on many economic factors. The 1906 San Francisco Fire caused a huge reduction in the city's building stock having significant effects on residential density across razed and unburned areas between 1900 and 2011. In prominent residential neighbourhoods, density increased by at least 60 per cent in razed areas relative to unburned areas by 1914. These density differentials still exist today, demonstrating that cities can face substantial redevelopment consequences.

The shape of the urban fabric can often be determined by overlapping patterns laid down in successive periods of time and urban historians have long been fascinated by the city as palimpsest. Miquel-Angel Garcia Lopez, Adelheid Holl and Elisabet Vildecans-Marsal have used complex geographical and statistical models to give weight to the phenomenon showing how suburbanization of Spanish cities since the end of the Civil War in 1939 has been shaped by main arterial road building overlaying the urban landscapes of earlier times: ‘Suburbanization and highways in Spain when the Romans and the Bourbons still shape its cities’, J. of Urban Economics, 85 (2015), 52–67. Spain's modernization from 1939 to the oil shocks of the 1970s and from the 1970s to the twenty-first century relied heavily on road construction, which affected the patterns of suburbanization draining the older city centres of their population and spawning new suburbs. Again, statistical models are evident and the importance of European Union Regional Funds are neatly captured to show that Spain has the fifth largest road network in the world exceeded only by China, Russia, Canada and the USA.

Public health continues to fascinate urban historians, but in case you think this might be a case of new wine in old bottles, it is not. Deborah Brunton, ‘Regulating filth: cleansing in Scottish towns and cities, 1840–1880’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 424–39, delves into the little explored regulations in the form of laws and byelaws which formed an important facet of nineteenth-century government. This article explores the implementation and enforcement of two sets of regulations regarding the keeping and disposal of dirt imposed by Scottish local authorities: one on behaviours around the disposal of domestic refuse, the other on the keeping of dung – a form of property. While behaviours around refuse were more stringently policed than those affecting property, in both cases regulations were not the basis of a strict disciplinary regime, but a means of informing, educating and persuading residents into cleanly habits.

The histories of particular towns and cities remain the stock-in-trade of urban history. From Antwerp to Melbourne and Haifa to Sydney, there is a wealth of fascinating research. Seamus O'Hanlon's ‘A Victorian community overseas transformed: demographic and morphological change in suburban Melbourne, Australia, 1947–1981’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 463–82, examines one of the world's great Victorian-era suburban cities, Melbourne, Australia. He shows how it was transformed by mass immigration and the redevelopment of some of its older suburbs with low-rise flats and apartments in the post-war years. Drawing on a range of sources, including census material, municipal rate and valuation books, immigration and company records, as well as building industry publications, O'Hanlon charts demographic and morphological change across the Melbourne metropolitan area. In doing so, he both responds to recent calls for more histories of suburbs in transition and seeks to embed the role of immigration and immigrants into Melbourne's urban historiography. Erika Hanna's ‘Seeing like a cyclist: visibility and mobility in modern Dublin, c. 1930–1980’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 273–89, examines the visibility of the cyclist in Dublin from the 1930s to the 1980s. This visibility is explored in three ways: how the historian has apprehended the figure of the cyclist within the city, how the cyclist has made him or herself visible within the urban environment and how cyclists were seen within techniques and conventions of urban planning. She argues that the cyclist's perception of the city can be a suggestive tool for understanding the implicit assumptions of urban change at mid-century. Michael Talbot in ‘The Exalted Column, the Hejaz Railway and imperial legitimation in late Ottoman Haifa’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 246–72, examines the political and social tensions of late Ottoman Haifa through the history of the Hejaz Railway and a particular monument, the ‘Exalted Column’, erected in 1903 to commemorate the beginning of Ottoman construction on the Haifa railway branch. By first establishing the use of railways and railway architecture as a means of exerting state power in a comparative and local perspective, the railway structures in Haifa are analysed in the context of that city's other monumental buildings. The symbolism of the column's iconography is shown to reflect a variety of problems that the Ottoman state faced in Haifa at the turn of the twentieth century. Matthew Bailey's ‘Shopping for entertainment: malls and multiplexes in Sydney, Australia’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 309–29, examines multiplex cinema development and its close association with shopping centre expansion programmes in Australia. He argues that while multiplex cinema construction in Australia echoed international developments, it also resulted from amalgamating interests between local retail developers and film exhibitors, was guided by planning legislation and shaped by escalating institutional investment in the retail industry. Data mapping the emergence, growth and consolidation of multiplexes in Sydney, Australia's largest city, is used to illustrate this development, contributing to urban histories of the city and understandings of the ways in which its contours have been reshaped by consumer capitalism. Michael Barke and Peter J. Taylor, ‘Newcastle's long nineteenth century: a world-historical interpretation of making a multi-nodal city region’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 43–69, describes and analyses how Newcastle was transformed from a relatively stagnant British city at the dawn of the nineteenth century to one of the most vibrant cities in the world by the early twentieth century. They use two frameworks to chart and explain this momentous change: Wallerstein's model of hegemonic cycles to locate Newcastle's late development in a world-historical context, and Jacobs’ theory of city economic growth to understand the processes of change within the city and its region. These lead to an empirical focus on three investigations: first, how Newcastle grew geographically to become a multinodal city region (Tyneside and Wearside); second, how the Newcastle city economy grew and developed a complex division of labour; and third, how this generated a new modern metropolitan cultural world.

The provision of green space in cities continues to attract interest. Bart Tristmans' ‘Versatile green: an alternative perspective on urban green space in late nineteenth-century Antwerp’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 89–112, argues that a one-sided focus on official sources has dominated historical research on urban green space. The absence of the users’ perspective obscures a substantial part of its significance. He aims at complementing rather than contradicting existing research to show that the different perspectives and practices of city dwellers widen our understanding of the history of urban green spaces. In the USA, Kara M. Schlichting provides a fascinating insight into the politics of green space in ‘“They shall not pass”: opposition to public leisure and state park planning in Connecticut and Long Island’, J. of Urban History, 41 (2015), 116–42. Estate owners in Greens Farms in Westport, Connecticut, and on the North Shore of Long Island doggedly fought inclusive, state-sponsored public recreation in the 1910s and 1920s. Private land-use goals shaped localism and, in turn, exploited home rule governance to control public land use. This study of local politics in the New York metropolis contributes to the ongoing regionalization of urban history. These home rule fights against state parks reveal the extent to which local elite interests systematically exploited ineffective county government to block Progressive-era regionalism.