The York House Books provide much-cited evidence of Richard III's relationship with the City of York in 1485, yet the nature and purpose of the House Books has never been satisfactorily explored. Through a focus on the records of a single year (1476–77), this article places their development within the context of new forms of civic bureaucracy in England and France in which the recording of emotions and speech had particular rhetorical and political significance in the reign of Edward IV. This expanding culture of civic literacy led not only to the creation of fuller records of civic politics and events (including the surviving texts of the Corpus Christi drama), but also enabled new forms of political activity.

This article explores the relationship between ‘national identity’, the urban environment and its religious practices. As a gateway city, where locals met foreigners to an unusual degree, late medieval Bruges provides a useful case-study. The focus is on the processes that shaped expressions of identity. These often involved religious rhetoric and practices. Foreign merchants, such as the Biscayans and Castilians, were grouped into ‘nations’, and identified with their homelands, especially in their chapels; but why and how they did so was not the result simply of patriotism or a sense of otherness, but of urban and strategic agendas, their own and those of native citizens.

This short essay sets the context for the special section on communities, courts and Scottish towns. Scottish burgh records generally, and Aberdeen's UNESCO recognized collection in particular, are considered in light of their legal character. The changing features of pre-modern political society between the fifteenth century and the early nineteenth century are introduced as a shared problem for investigation, and an ancien régime framework is examined as a comparative tool in this field. A vital concern of these articles is with the construction and sometimes contested use of vocabularies of law and authority, privileges and liberties, and ideas of urban ‘community’. Courts at the municipal level, and in the world beyond the burgh, are appreciated as legal and governmental fora. The ambition of this special section is to prompt European comparisons, and encourage greater dialogue with and consideration of Scottish urban records in future research.

Variations in the fortunes of six late medieval ports in Sussex are considered using data derived from archaeological excavations. Several indicators are used to assess differences in urban fortunes and to critique the concept of urban ‘decline’. The interpretive framework of assemblage theory is then used to examine why the fortunes of these ports varied. The article argues for a turn from discussions of decay and decline towards considerations of changes, continuities and transformations in urban life in late medieval England.

In investigating urban culture, historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made and the modern, and have paid less attention to the role of nature and the past, which seem the opposite of what the town stands for. This survey, which takes as its case-study England, argues that nature and the past have always been part of urban life, but as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, they became if anything an even more important element in city and town culture.

The political ecology of historical urban water systems can yield information on the long-term, social organization of resource infrastructure and its management. In this article, the water system of Piacenza, Italy, is examined through its history and the documents of the Congregazione sopra l'ornato, the committee in charge of water management in the city, under the Farnese dukes, from 1545 to 1736. The documents include letters from residents, responses and orders from the committee, tax documents and engineering reports. These records tell a story of a water system and its relationship to the city residents.

The political culture of Scotland's late medieval towns has been neglected in recent scholarship. This article seeks to provoke discussion through an analysis of communitarian language and its use by urban elites in the fifteenth century. The Scottish urban community, as elsewhere, could be positioned as a location, a legal construct and a group of people. This provided the burgh council with a variety of political tools which could be employed – consciously or otherwise – in order to legitimize its authority.

Early modern European capitals competed to demonstrate their imperial status, and contemporary urban praise often drew comparisons between them, situating these cities within a shifting hierarchy. Authors frequently combined actual perceptions of cities with metaphors of a New Rome and other classical motifs. This article explores how various writers asserted Lisbon's greatness and civic identity within this shared comparative European discourse. More particularly, it shows how they defended its changing political status as a capital while also developing a strong commercial discourse that centred on the city as an emporium. Views and descriptions of Lisbon and its port paralleled contemporary descriptions of London in particular, as both cities were increasingly defined as paradigms of imperial commerce.

Most colonial Hispanic American cities were originally planned around a main plaza, which was a multifunctional square crucial for urban life. This spatial model for the whole city based on a main square is termed the Plaza Mayor model. Bourbon reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century aimed at transforming this model according to a Plaza de Armas organization. Here, these two models (Plaza Mayor and Plaza de Armas) are characterized, and their contradictions in terms of political projects and quotidian city life are analysed. For late colonial Lima, Bourbon efforts to introduce the Plaza de Armas are shown to have affected both the main function of the central square and the entire urban system.

A striking feature of the history of the Scots burgh in this period, and of bodies within it, was their readiness to resort to legal redress in the Court of Session, Scotland's leading civil court. The law was a regular and often intrusive presence in burgh life, a means by which burghs, guildries and trades incorporations defended their privileges. This article will explore this propensity in relation to what it can tell us both about urban identity and the constitution of urban community in this period, but it will also begin to examine the role which the law may have played in the re-constitution and re-shaping of urban community. In other words, it will consider the law and judgments made in the Court of Session as active forces in a wider process of governance. We know relatively little, in fact, about this dimension of urban governance, but the surviving record is a rich one and demands much more systematic examination.

Suburbs are significant to any understanding of Australian urbanization as they have been the dominant organizational element in the morphology of metropolitan areas. A case-study of suburban growth in Adelaide, South Australia, in the period from 1850 to 1930 suggests that dominant accounts of Australian suburbs of the era, as places of tranquillity, leisure, home and family, whose growth was driven by aspiration and social mobility, are largely illusory. Suburban growth was instead driven by speculation and economic opportunity. Accounts of commercial, recreational and industrial activity in Adelaide's suburban municipalities of the time suggests economically and socially diverse communities. Whereas the desire for the quarter or half acre block in the suburbs was most often due to its productive potential rather than bourgeois aspirations for seclusion and semi-rural tranquillity.

This article examines the social, economic and political origins of what was a new, distinctly elitist, culture of ‘non-competitive’ sport, and how these values, which emerged from a small group of metropolitan elites, spread throughout the south-east of England. It argues that a long-term analysis of sport provides a valuable contextual tool for urban historians. In this case, how the gradual adoption of a distinctly ‘metropolitan’ culture throughout Surrey, and the associated changes in the social structure and purpose of cricket, may contribute towards a more nuanced assessment of that county's ‘suburbanization’, and how this region interacted with the urban core.

This article uses data extracted from General Register Office mortality registers to map the localization of infant mortality in Dublin city from 1864 to 1910. It traces how late nineteenth-century social inequalities were deeply rooted in the city's history. In order to contextualize the high infant mortality rates, we draw on a range of approaches to provide an overarching view of the causes of the public health problems cities like Dublin experienced.

This article explores the understudied riots which occurred in Aberdeen in mid-October 1785. It charts the climate of politicization that characterized the burgh's civic life in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and before the outbreak of the equivalent process in France. In doing so, it challenges interpretations of the socially exclusive nature of the Scottish reform movement, the dynamics of continuity and change between this phenomenon and later political ‘radicalism’ and the role of Aberdeen as a ‘provincial’ metropolis in the Age of Revolution.

In common with many British cities, but unlike the rest of Ireland, late nineteenth-century Belfast experienced rapid industrialization and physical expansion. Women formed a significant proportion of the city's workforce, attracted by the employment opportunities represented in the burgeoning textile industry. Many of them were economically vulnerable, however, and could find themselves destitute for a number of reasons. This article sets Belfast's Poor Law workhouse in the landscape of welfare in the city, exploring how its use reflected the development of the city and the ways in which the female poor engaged with it in order to survive.

Following a spate of anarchist bombings and assassinations in Europe, the gente decente of Guatemala City began to describe local events using the language of anarchism. The 1894 anarchist furor spoke to two tendencies that had shaped Guatemala City since the 1870s. The first was the cosmopolitan desire of the gente decente. Facilitated by cosmopolitan bridge figures, trends and fashions from Europe and especially Paris shaped the cultural lexicon of Guatemala City's elite. Secondly, the anarchist furor reflected the misgivings of the gente decente toward urban disorder and malcontents as they conflated anarchism and anarchy.