This article explores the visibility of the cyclist in Dublin from the 1930s to the 1980s. This visibility is explored in three ways: how the historian can and has apprehended the figure of the cyclist within the city, how the cyclist made him or herself visible within the urban environment and how cyclists were seen within techniques and conventions of urban planning. I suggest that a close examination of the place of the cyclist within the city provides a suggestive tool for understanding the implicit assumptions of urban change at mid-century.

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. This article examines the background to and the impact of the Moneylenders Act (1927) which was designed to reduce the number of working-class lenders, widely perceived as disreputable, in order to protect vulnerable borrowers, most of whom were women. Using Liverpool as a case-study, I also examine the possible reasons for the dramatic decline in the number of licensed moneylenders and analyse the implications of this for the provision of working-class credit.

The final phase of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975 is widely regarded as the high point of détente. This article discusses the staging and legacy of the CSCE from the perspective of its host city, Helsinki. The article examines 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. The article further highlights the Helsinki Summit as a public spectacle with which a large number of local residents engaged.

This article 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. This article, which aims at complementing rather than contradicting existing research, will show that the different perspectives and practices of city dwellers widen our understanding of the history of urban green spaces. The article will also consider the value of often marginalized, unofficial green spaces like ramparts and wastelands at the urban fringe.

One of the world's great Victorian-era suburban metropolises, Melbourne, Australia, 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, this article charts demographic and morphological change across the Melbourne metropolitan area and in two particular suburbs in the mid- to late twentieth century. In doing so, it both responds to McManus and Ethington's recent call for more histories of suburbs in transition, and seeks to embed the role of immigration and immigrants into Melbourne's urban historiography.

Leaving education and gaining employment is a significant life course transition for most people. This article explores the processes by which young people gained their first job in mid-twentieth-century urban Britain, and examines the ways in which this changed in relation to major shifts in society, economy and culture. Key themes include the role of parents and other family members, changes in levels of autonomy and control and the impacts of societal change. Data are drawn from oral testimonies collected in three major urban areas: Glasgow, Manchester and London, and span a period from the 1920s to the 1980s.

The Cold War era created a gap between two opposing ideologies manifested on all social, economic and spatial levels. However, cities and their material expression maintained their significance, acting as valuable ideological resources.The specific position of Yugoslavia during the Cold War shaped the political background in which Belgrade and its planning and architectural scene developed intensive professional activities and international interactions thus overcoming global tensions. Covering the period from 1948 until 1980, this article identifies the main channels of professional exchange and dissemination beyond the constraints of the Iron Curtain, as well as their influence on the production of urban space in Belgrade.

The provincial press played a significant role in forming local attitudes and senses of civic identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Local and regional newspapers often adopted a ‘boosterist’ language, a style that enthusiastically promoted the particular qualities of places. The persistence of boosterism into the early twenty-first century makes it a concept worthy of further exploration. This study considers just one ‘booster’, Bernard Samuel Gilbert, and his illuminating series of articles on Lincoln for the Lincolnshire Echo in 1914. His correspondence illustrates the contrasting stances towards improvement typically employed within the local press – including the boosterist alongside the more critical.

This article examines multiplex cinema development and its close association with shopping centre expansion programmes in Australia. The article argues that while multiplex cinema construction in Australia echoed international developments, it also resulted from coalescing 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.

The last military dictatorship to come to power in Argentina is most well known 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. The military sought to provide responsive administration as a means to pacify the nation. In the national capital, Buenos Aires, the military pursued a comprehensive set of urban reforms meant to streamline and control the metropolis. Cold War ideologies deeply penetrated the every-day and profoundly changed how citizens lived in Buenos Aires.

Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, this article exposes the wreckage of urban renewal on LeBreton Flats – a mixed industrial and working-class neighbourhood in Ottawa, Canada. Photographic and textual fragments of urban life retrieved from government expropriation files are used to expose the spell of progress embodied in the urban renewal plan for the neighbourhood. This article shows how urban historians can deploy Benjamin's methodological approach to reclaim the memory of everyday life on LeBreton Flats from the realm of official planning documents. This article shows how despite an official narrative of decline scrap-dealers, craft-workers and residents continued to value the Flats and participate in an imaginative urban life.

This article examines 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. 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 Diet (Parliament).

The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.

The author would like to amend the incorrectly labelled segments of the scale bar he used in Figure 1 of the above article. Segments on the scale bar should read 100, 200 and 300 rather than 10, 20 and 30. The author would also like to remove from the scale bar, the ratio scale, which is reported to be 1:50,000, because this is inaccurate. The corrected figure is published on the following page.

Given the dominance of economic matters in the daily news, this article speculates why the topic has attracted relatively little attention amongst urban historians over the last 40 years, and why it is important that the local economy gains a wider acceptance as a powerful determinant of a city's fortunes.

Urban studies and urban history have, in recent decades, become a booming field in Russia. The most likely explanation for this is the post-Soviet development and transformation of Russian cities. It is not only the demographic growth – although for some cities it has been quite substantial in the last 25 years – but rather the striking changes made to urban space, economy, governance, social organization and residential patterns that have provoked interest in urban research among scholars and the general public. Reflecting this wave of interest, several new centres of urban studies emerged in Russia during the 2000s (for example, the Strelka Institute, the Graduate School of Urban Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and the programme in urban studies at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences).