In referring to the sociological concept of community as a cultural field with a complex of symbols, the article examines the language of urban communities as applied by pre-1800 urban historiography. The analysis of mostly (East) Central European urban chronicles, burgher diaries and panegyrical texts discloses the strong presence of a normative vision of an idealized community which was projected, however, into the life of a real city.

Three major conclusions are derived from close study of Britain's pioneering directories in the 1770s and 1780s. First, they show that over 30,000 leading townsmen and women were enmeshed into the burgeoning knowledge grid through the public listings of their addresses, status and occupations. Secondly, a close examination of that information reveals a notable extent of occupational specialization – among both men and women, and among individuals and the nascent firms – thus confirming one of Adam Smith's key observations about the nature of Britain's increasingly commercialized, if still largely pre-mechanized, economy. Thirdly, aggregative analysis highlights systematic differences in the socio-economic characteristics of different towns: from manufacturing, commercial and professional centres to the great capital cities to the specialist leisure towns and resorts – all interlocking in an inter-dependent urban network. Hence this evidence suggests that a generic re-interpretation of all large towns as ‘residential leisure towns’ on the strength of their flourishing cultural life (as recently proposed by Stobart and Schwarz) is misleading, as it obscures significant systemic differences between different types of towns. At the same time, however, the interlinked urban network was generating a confidently shared urbanism, bridging between aristocratic and middle-class society. That link was exemplified by the listing of numerous titled and gentlemanly ‘town gentry’ alongside the business leaders – as the directories in effect flourished their collective calling cards.

The edges of Indian cities have become nebulous, their morphology uncertain. They appear to extend for miles in Mumbai and Kolkata as an ‘assorted chaos’ of middle-class residences, slums and bazaars, blurring into smaller provincial towns. The latter seem to distinguish themselves through the sameness of their ‘taste for strident politics, violent films, ostentatious architecture, lewd music, rumour-mongering newspapers and overcooked food’. The stretch between Delhi and Gurgaon is a series of real estate fictions of spurious capital and inadequate infrastructure. Spurred by the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s and supported by state policies that have lifted many of the restrictions on rent and land use, the structural transformation of Indian metropolises manifests itself on the edges of the city as a struggle between vast slums and corporate developers’ vision of up-scale real estate, between landscapes of rice and wheat fields and expanding airports and golfing greens.

By looking at the spatial cultures of nineteenth-century provincial administrative towns in colonial Bengal, this article problematizes notions of city, town or country and their relationships. It looks at colonial provincial governance within a framework that extended far beyond ‘formal’ governmental administrative spaces and thus engages with the complex overlap between categories like work, home and leisure. It argues that provincial urbanism in colonial Bengal defied clear-cut categories and in effect created a ‘fluid’ spatial culture, which was distinct from, but also calibrated between, metropolitan centres on the one hand and a vast rural hinterland on the other.

This article shows the centrality of movement – the freedom to move, the inability to move and being forced to flee – to the suburban development of Bombay. The reason as well as the spatio-temporal rhythm of movement differed among population groups inhabiting the city. The early suburbs of colonial Bombay were predicated on the ability of a tiny European elite to move to different parts of the city according to the seasons. By the mid-nineteenth century, their movement would no longer be restricted to the several islands that constituted Bombay. Instead, tracing the governor's footsteps they would move many miles away, from Bombay to Poona during the monsoons, to Mahabaleshwar after the rains and back to Bombay for the cool winter season as the seat of governance shifted according to the season. In late nineteenth-century Bombay, the growth of the mill industry would force Europeans to retreat to other areas of the city from their former suburban homes, which were now transformed into mill districts. In contrast to the freedom of movement that underlay the early foundation of European suburban development in Bombay, Indian suburban development was based on the necessity to flee the crowded and insalubrious native city districts. The bubonic plague that first struck the city in 1896 was most virulent in the native districts of the city, long subject to municipal neglect. After 1896, large numbers of Bombay's native citizenry were forced to flee their homes each year during the plague season. Moving to different locations, often along the railway lines, they formed small communities that became the foundation of Bombay's future suburban development.

This article begins with an examination of how rural and urban society in India were conceptualized in relation to one another at different moments during the twentieth century, arguing that rapid urbanization during the middle decades forced important changes in those conceptualizations. If in an earlier period analysts saw the world of the village dweller as radically separate from that of the urban dweller, then rapid urbanization destabilized this idea and forced analysts to entertain the implications of there being a kind of ‘sliding scale’ between the two. This discursive shift helped produce a new object of concern in mid-century urban sociology – that of the ‘villager in the city’. While this sociological object formed the core of numerous mid-century (and later) studies of existing large cities, it played a more determinate role as a priori grounds for planned new towns than it did for perhaps any other model of urban growth. The article argues that proponents of planned new towns favoured their conservative potential: namely, the new town promised to nurture ‘inherited tendencies and habits’ in first-generation urban migrants, rather than produce wholly new modes of urban subjectivity.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the state-operated Maharashtra Housing Board and its successor organization Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) responded to Mumbai's exponential growth with what at the time was internationally considered to be the most effective measure to fight the housing shortage: large estates of standardized apartment blocks. In Mumbai's northern suburbs, housing compounds were built for designated income levels, such as Kannamwar Nagar and Sahyadri Nagar for the ‘low-income group’ and DN Nagar or Sahakar Nagar for the ‘middle-income group’. This article argues that Mumbai's state-sponsored tower blocks adapted an internationally discussed urban design concept to specific local conditions. The designers took up influences from both local Maharashtrian and European housing typologies of the mid-twentieth century, including upper-class art deco apartments, socialist housing compounds and serially built working-class chawls. In contrast to mass housing developments in Chicago, Moscow or Paris, Mumbai's tower blocks were built individually rather than from prefabricated parts, offered rather high standards of living compared to that of the majority and, as a result, became increasingly inhabited by comparably wealthy groups. Since the beginning of economic liberalization in the 1990s, many have been converted into private co-operatives. Once designed to house the masses, they are now visible symbols for a growing minority that constitutes Mumbai's new middle class. At the same time, they are an example for the local evolution of the modernist housing block type that is only apparently similar all over the world.

The 1910 International Town Planning Conference is rightly seen as a major moment in the development of modern urban design. It drew together more than 1,000 architects and planners from across the world. At first sight, the conference consequently appears to provide further evidence for the importance of transnational town planning networks in this period. This article, by contrast, highlights the domestic agendas which underwrote the event. It shows that the conference was considerably less successful and less international than has previously been argued. It thus stresses the limitations of the town planning movement: underscoring the continued importance of national differences and national debates.

This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagined in post-war Britain. From the ethnographers and street photographers who emerged in Bethnal Green in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the planning concept of ‘streets in the air’, to modern geodemographics, the street has been a way of thinking through shifting ideas about civil society and collective social life. Imagined as a space of spontaneous community when set against the rational, contractual operations of both the market and the state, the street has been a means of articulating hopes for and anxieties about social change.