It is somewhat surprising that music has only recently become a serious subject for urban historians. Musicologists and music historians, urban geographers, planners and all others who deal with diverse aspects of local development, cultural industry and the built environment have fared much better in tackling the fundamental social implications of music in a particular locality. It is not an accident that, for example, the recent volume of Built Environment, ‘Music and the city’, edited by an economic geographer, Robert C. Kloosterman, deals with urban spaces of creativity and the role of black music today, some of which have by now an ascribed ‘urban’ adjective in North America.1 It is also only natural, however, that Kloosterman's enquiry should concentrate on music in the city of the present and rarely venture into the time periods before World War II.

Historians have suggested that medieval urban guilds played a role in political and commercial networking. Guilds’ commercial protectionism was designed to benefit their membership and close ties have been discovered between merchant guilds and urban oligarchies. This article asks if all guilds should be viewed as commercial networking hubs. It uses evidence from a later fourteenth-century membership roll of St Mary's guild in Nottingham in conjunction with Nottingham's borough court rolls to analyse the commercial connections between members and non-members in that period. It concludes that the guild did not function as a networking hub.

Karel Vladislav Zap, who came of age during the 1830 revolutions in Europe, belonged to a generation of Czech elites determined to promote national consciousness while actively carving out a space within Prague's middle-class social milieu. Zap, as his topographies of the city demonstrate, also called on his countrymen to claim the city and its structures from their German-speaking neighbours, thus contributing to a dynamic that would continue throughout the century.

In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both a concern for and an appreciation of population-level preventative healthcare. Evidence for this shift (which is traceable in and beyond the Italian peninsula) is mostly found in documents of practice such as court and financial records, which augment and complicate the traditional view afforded by urban statutes and medical treatises. The revised if still nebulous picture emerging from this preliminary study challenges a lingering tendency among urban and public health historians to see pre-modern European cities as ignorant and apathetic demographic black holes.

This article seeks to understand how the emergence of public dance hall culture affected the consumption of dance music among different social classes in Vienna between the years 1780 and 1814, when the number of dance halls more than tripled. Using mainly contemporary eyewitness accounts as sources, this article argues that social distinctions, rather than disappearing, were reinforced after the commercialization of the Viennese dance halls. As turn-of-the-century Vienna was a major city with a heterogeneous population, the diversity of social classes was reflected in its ballroom culture. This is because the Viennese elite, the nobility and the higher bourgeoisie, was very reluctant to share social space with the lower classes. Although to some degree the amount of social space expanded in the city at the time, the use of the space, however, remained socially diverse.

The funerals and reburials of prominent Hungarian leaders (Count Lajos Batthyány, Ferenc Deák, Lajos Kossuth and Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II) over the course of the Dualist decades (1867–1918) – a time period when Hungary was integrated into a federal structure with Austria – were important moments in the imagining of Hungarian national identity. The article argues that turn-of-the-century Budapest served not just as stage for patriotic mythmaking on the occasion of these funeral ceremonies but was both affected by and shaped the former's content and significance.

In nineteenth-century The Hague, the French opera performances in the Royal Theatre were the most important occasions during the winter season at which men and women from almost all social ranks experienced a strong sense of social cohesion in a common leisure pursuit, albeit one in which social hierarchies were clearly demarcated. This article analyses the changing social composition of the opera audience through analysis of subscription and admission records, and evaluates the changing composition of the audience in relation to changes in taste, theatre architecture and policy. Although it was almost impossible to exploit financially and was also a constant object of political, musical and moral criticism, the French opera succeeded in maintaining its central position in The Hague's musical and social life throughout the nineteenth century.

Hanoverian London was a city full of people, a city built by people for people. These impressions dominate traditional studies of the metropolis to a remarkable extent. By contrast, historians have largely overlooked the ubiquitous presence of non-human animals in the city and underestimate their impact on urban life. This article challenges key assumptions about the Hanoverian metropolis by highlighting the role of its quadruped architects, and specifically its working horses. In doing so, it urges the recognition of animals as influential actors in social, urban and economic history. The article focuses on the role of the horse in brewing, a major metropolitan industry which relied heavily on equine power. Crucially, it shows that the brewery horse became more, rather than less, influential during the industrial revolution.

Eastern Europe has recently received much attention from scholars irrespective of diverse focus and specialization, and the special section of this distinguished journal is yet another proof that the region remains an extraordinarily interesting place for research and analysis. Scholarly interests have, however, often been related to the emergence, establishment and eventual demise of state socialism in this heterogeneous place, the horrors of World War II and the profound transformations that swept through its many old-new countries during recent decades. The predominance of political, social and intellectual history, as well as sociology and political science, and scholarly interpretations of the condition of modernity in Eastern Europe come therefore as little surprise. This methodological apparatus at hand, significant aspects of the region's development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have sometimes been overlooked, while others appeared teleological. Within the traditions of both Western and Eastern European academia, the region has until recently been perceived as having followed a very distinct, special path to modernity characterized in a variety of ways as arrested development, Sonderweg and backwardness. At the same time, the profound change that occurred in these diverse territories as part of a European and in fact global process of modernization during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries has often not been given its true significance in relation to its later historical development. An array of recent post-colonialist responses that have fundamentally reshaped the history of the modern ‘Third World’ have touched Eastern Europe only in passing, Hence, an occasional intellectual indecisiveness as to how to analyse the region's development in a greater historical context, as is immediately evident in the diversity of names ascribed to its supposedly different geographical areas – Eastern Europe, East Central Europe, Central Europe, Mitteleuropa and South-East Europe, to name but a few – each with their own political and ideological bias.

This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. It shifts historiographical interest from major urban centres in colonial India (such as Bombay or Calcutta) and instead attempts a greater understanding of smaller urban centres. In the process, it also interrogates the category of hill stations, which have been understood as exotic and scenic sites rather than as towns that were integral to the colonial economy. In arguing that hill stations, particularly Darjeeling, were not merely the scenic and healthy ‘other’ of the clamorous, dirty and diseased plains of India, it refutes suggestions that the ‘despoiling’ or overcrowding of Darjeeling was incremental to the purposes of its establishment. Instead, it suggests that Darjeeling was part of the colonial mainstream; its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy was effected from the time of its establishment. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic and its functional elements persisted throughout.

This article explores the tendency of citizens to liken their city to other cities in an effort to promote particular visions of their hometown. It examines three mythic visions of fin-de-siècle Cracow – the Polish Mecca, the Little Vienna on the Vistula and modern Big-City Cracow – as reflected in contemporary accounts and historical scholarship, demonstrating how they functioned to promote national, imperial and interurban identification. Most critical of the national vision, the article advocates a broader perspective.

This article examines the image of the city and notions of urban management in the discourse of elite groups in Belgrade between 1830 and the late 1860s. It focuses on the negotiation of modernity in heterogeneous cultural spaces, particularly looking at the textual interplay of power, orientalized exoticism and notions of backwardness. These discourses were integral to the processes of managing urban populations and homogenizing the cityscape. The city's specific political situation as a site of dual authority, however, left room for minor acts of contestation which questioned the primacy of exclusion and dispossession as bases for modern urban transformation. This dynamic interplay framed the city as a site of conflict between mutually defining forces of ‘Europeanization’ and ‘backwardness’.

This article links the nature of commercial masked balls in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s to urban development during these decades. The raucous and often destructive character of the balls, which united elites and popular classes under the mask's anonymity, coincided with a society undergoing social and political upheaval. The dress and conduct of revellers were expressions of their ambitions, fears and resentments. Changes in the urban landscape of the 1820s and 1830s – in particular, the construction of the grands boulevards and alignment of theatres sponsoring masked balls along this axis – sharpened potential conflict at such events by placing them in one of the most socially charged corridors of the city.

This article examines the social topography and the housing patterns of Moscow workers in the context of their social status and experience of immigration. It argues that in the early twentieth century Moscow was characterized by extremely poor housing conditions and the absence of clear residential segregation of social classes due to the lack of profound planning policy and urban reforms.

This article examines the relationship between the processes of urban renovation in European capitals and the internationalization of musical theatre productions, using the example of theatres constructed in Paris and Rome at the end of the nineteenth century. Due to the limited availability of governmental and municipal funding, the more popular theatres in both capitals came to provide an important space for musical productions on an avant-garde level, with international repertoires and casts.

In the 1890s, the London County Council began a project to photograph old buildings in the capital. The common interpretation is that this was preservationist activity to record architectural treasures being ‘lost’. However, after 1899, many images appear not to fit neatly into a story of selective preservation. By examining metropolitan improvement schemes and the politics of housing, this article examines alternative contexts in which the images were made. It suggests the photographs acted in political dialogues about geographies of light and air, time and space, and the right place of working Londoners, as well as more mundane concerns over spending.

This article analyses female agency within the religious confraternities active in an early modern town in the Southern Netherlands in order to gain an insight into women's positions within a (semi-)public urban network and thus beyond the household. The analysis suggests that confraternities did not provide women with opportunities to develop a significant public role within the town. Nonetheless, while there is little evidence that early modern religious confraternities functioned as social networks, female agency on the religious level of confraternal life did exist. It is argued that many of these women were active agents in their own spiritual lives.