This study highlights the simultaneous existence of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ forces in an incorporated borough and their relevance to civic society and governance in a spatial context. Loosely organized networks of men and women of different ages and status were evidenced in credit arrangements, small-scale dealings and sociability in markets, streets and residential houses. These public and private spaces were also subjected to a civic government which attempted to integrate uncontrolled activities into the society of freemen. It is argued that the actions and decisions taken by informal groups and associations were constitutive of the progress of civic society in early modern England.

This article explores the statutory limitations faced by the metropolitan commissioners of sewers. It is largely based on an analysis of judicial decisions in cases involving the commissioners and their taxation policy from 1812 to 1845. It argues that the commissioners pursued a potentially radical agenda for sewers financing and taxation, but that their agenda was resisted by ratepayers and thwarted by a generally though not completely hostile judiciary. This article thus contributes to the ongoing revaluation of the metropolitan commissioners of sewers and illustrates the constructed nature of statutory limitation.

This article analyses the problems encountered by municipal authorities in containing social unrest in the aftermath of World War I. Focusing on the Peace Day disturbances of 1919, the article examines how the civic elite failed to respond to the challenges of the post-war period and instead reverted to a Victorian model of governance that emphasized civic ritual and deference. It will explore how the towns that experienced the most severe disturbances were governed by elites who were unable to appreciate the significance of changing demographics, new political landscapes and the popular dissatisfaction with municipal traditions that the war had ushered in.

By investigating the historical evidence for the Parisian department stores' campaigns of property acquisition in the nineteenth century, this article argues that not only was an increase in physical scale desired by managers to enlarge their businesses, but that the space of the store was deliberately moulded into a particular cultural form associated with the monument. The economic decisions involved in leasing and acquiring land, and the negotiation of the preferences for building form implied by building regulations, reveal more about how department stores constructed an image for themselves to embody the myth of a new order of commerce.

This article analyses the spread of public utilities and urban development through a wide-ranging comparison of European cities. It considers variables that are not simply demand-based to explain the diffusion of the telephone. The article explores the relationship between variables, city size, position in the urban hierarchy, urban growth and the function of the city in relation to the spread of the telephone. It concludes that the scale and the function of the city, together with the terms of concession and management strategies, were crucial for the diffusion of the telephone throughout Europe's cities.

As public spaces, such as plazas and parks, were increasingly aestheticized and commercialized in late nineteenth-century Mexico, these visual and accessible shared spaces became subject to the competing visions of different urban groups. This article argues that these transformed public spaces enabled a wide range of city residents, not just the elite class, to assert their own claims to the city. Street vendors and petty entrepreneurs, in particular, found the opportunity to demonstrate their contributions to public aesthetics, the local economy and consumer needs, while simultaneously claiming their rights as political actors and their identity as civic-minded residents. Through a close analysis of letters written by working residents, the article suggests how enterprising men and women performed their ‘public civility’, ‘honest occupation’ and ‘morality’ in the ‘Lettered City’ through their written dialogues with municipal and state officials. These exchanges also reveal how the slippage between the categories of vecino (literally, neighbour) and cuidadano (literally, citizen) functioned in the everyday politics of the provincial Mexican city, highlighting how citizenship in Mexico was not just an outgrowth of nineteenth-century liberalism, but also rooted in local customs and much earlier historical notions of community membership.

This article searches for the historic centre of Los Angeles, California, the archetype of urban sprawl. Taking maps and photographs as its principal sources it finds an enduring urban centre in a plaza designed by the Spanish in 1781 and occupied by Mexicans until the US army conquered the city in 1847. The Plaza anchored the dispersed ranch land of the Pueblo of Los Angeles and was the magnet for commercial development during the first decades of American settlement. Between 1850 and 1880, Anglo immigrants built up the south-western side of the Plaza with shops and civic buildings creating a hybrid and bicultural centre, a compression of Main Street and the Plaza. After 1880 a process of spatial mitosis occurred as commerce and municipal functions moved down Main Street and melded into a modern downtown. Since then the skyscrapers downtown have overshadowed but not displaced the old Plaza, which still serves as social, symbolic and ceremonial space for Angelenos, especially immigrants from Latin America. The durability of the Plaza and its direct successors, Main Street and Downtown, not only designate a centre for Los Angeles, but articulate a distinctive urban morphology, that of a centrifugal metropolis rather than fragmented city or sprawl of suburbs.

In Denmark, the first actual towns can be dated to the eighth and ninth centuries. The establishment of towns became more significant in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in connection with the state-building process, and these towns were distinctly consumer towns serving as administrative, religious and military centres. From 1200 to 1350 Denmark, similar to the German area, underwent considerable urbanization; a large number of market towns were created, and in contrast to the older ones they were mercantile towns. Denmark thus clearly became the most urbanized country in Scandinavia. As Copenhagen grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the urban system decisively changed its character in the direction of a primate system. The characteristics of the primate system are particularly distinct within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Denmark, but less pronounced if the entire monarchy is included in the period in which Denmark was a conglomerate state. The institutional conditions must in general be attributed considerable importance in explaining Danish urban development. Thus, Denmark is one of the countries where town privileges were of great significance until the middle of the nineteenth century.