A new opportunity, and a new challenge, presents itself to urban historians. In order to obtain a deeper understanding of historical urban space and spatial relationships, the contributors to this Special Issue deploy new techniques of spatial analysis using mapping tools to explore the density, frequency and proximity of various features of towns and cities. The contributors focus on case-studies at various urban scales – from major commercial centres (New York, Rome, Paris and London) – to smaller towns in the urban hierarchy. They also range across the tenth to the twentieth centuries and so challenge a common assumption that mapping the town is essentially an approach best suited to the modern period. Individually and collectively, the authors demonstrate how the urban morphology of the city developed and how durable that spatial patterning can be.

This article examines evidence for community among immigrants in ancient Transtiberim (modern Trastevere), a section of Rome that was both socially and spatially distinctive for much of the city's history. The only part of Rome located on the west bank of the Tiber River, Transtiberim was the heart of Rome's Jewish and Syrian communities. These immigrants and their descendants maintained certain traditions, languages and customs from home; participated in civic institutions that helped foster community at the local level; and laboured in institutions that were vital to the capital's urban economy. Though marginal in some ways, Transtiberim was also a neighbourhood where immigrants and their descendants found community and made vital contributions to the life of the imperial city.

This article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

This article argues for a central role for the concept of de-industrialization in understanding the evolution of the economies of urban Britain in the years since 1945. Above all, it is suggested, this concept is crucial because it focuses attention on the consequences of the transition from an industrial to a service-dominated labour market. To make this argument requires a careful definition of the term, along with recognition of its potential weaknesses as well as strengths. Key issues are highlighted by drawing on three diverse urban areas, which help to show the ubiquity of the process, but also its diverse patterns, chronologies and impacts. These examples are a stereotypical ‘post-industrial city’ (Dundee); a major city where de-industrialization has played an under-regarded role in developments (London); and a medium-size town in the south of England (High Wycombe), where the decline of a core industry (furniture) was crucial to its recent history. The final sections analyse the relationship between de-industrialization and other key frameworks commonly deployed to shape understanding of the recent history of Britain: ‘decline’, ‘globalization’ and ‘the triumph of neo-liberalism’.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly popular in historical research, especially in urban contexts. However, digitizing historical sources in a way that can be mapped using the Cartesian co-ordinate systems of a GIS is often challenging, especially so in the case of records pre-dating centralized property registers or street numbering. This article explores how the vernacular spatial descriptions used in several case-studies of documents from late medieval and early modern London can be translated and geocoded into GIS compatible co-ordinates in a sympathetic way. Translating this data from a historical spatial paradigm into a modern one unlocks a whole range of new insights into spatial patterns, networks and relationships which would not have been feasible to construct using traditional methods

‘Honesty and dissent’ explores strategies of political resistance in Tudor Norwich through an analysis of the city's prestigious Company of St George. Nearly a quarter of those nominated for membership during the second half of the sixteenth century failed to appear when summoned and declined to take up the livery; most eventually complied, but only after fines, threats of imprisonment and delays that could last a year or more. They pursued a strategy of passive resistance that allowed them to register objections while conforming to expectations of ‘honest’ behaviour. That underappreciated approach enabled citizens to push back against urban authorities without compromising their standing in the community.

Current historiography endorses a narrative that the political elite of pre-industrial gateway cities became more ‘open’ in the wake of efflorescence and that their city councils became populated with merchants. Yet, according to the existing literature, Antwerp challenges this narrative, as the influx of merchants was very limited during late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when Antwerp transformed from a medium-sized Brabantine city into the leading economic centre in western Europe. Moreover, scholars disagree on whether the economic expansion had any impact at all on the composition and profile of Antwerp's political elite. By analysing the social composition of the city council and how this evolved from the beginning of Antwerp's commercial expansion around 1400 until its apogee around 1550, I revisit the question whether Antwerp constitutes an exception to the established pattern of elite formation in gateway cities and, if so, why.

This article explores the social history of the political elites of Mechelen, a town that evolved from a seigneurial enclave within the duchy of Brabant to the de facto capital of the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries between the 1470s and 1530. Proceeding from a quantitative analysis of lists of aldermen, fiscal registers and epitaphs, the article argues that the short-lived functioning of Mechelen as a capital city had great impact on its ruling classes. Mechelen was traditionally ruled by a coalition of craft guilds and prominent citizens, but the latter reoriented their social networks to the court elite, as the latter's presence supercharged pre-existing trends towards ennoblement among the urban elite.

Based on the different type of ecclesiastical institutions, an analysis of the plots owned and developed by the different orders reveals that some spatial characteristics endure in the modern city. The degree of fragmentation and the nature of subsequent urban development is shown to be a function of the type of church established in the medieval period. The examples are based on detailed plot analysis in Paris.

Urban renewal in the British Isles in the long eighteenth century was based on new municipal powers made possible by parliament. Focusing on Jamaica between 1770 and 1805, which passed legislation for the ‘policing’ – in the broader Scottish sense – of its towns, demonstrates that it was a global phenomenon common to the whole British Atlantic. However, the solutions it produced were also specific to local circumstances. Jamaican elites feared invasion, revolt and the dissolution of the slave society. Their police acts reflected these concerns, and demonstrate the alternative pathway that urban modernity took in this part of the British Atlantic.

How did the complex relationship between working worlds and urban spaces change in Hamburg in times of de-industrialization? To answer this question, I focus on Hamburg's history from 1960 to 2008. Starting from the idea of a cumulative structural break, I develop a typology of Fordist and neo-liberal urban spaces and distinguish seven dimensions of change: from international division of labour to globalization, from industrial production to creativity, from rationalization to digitalization, from centralization to networks, from functional zoning to blurred boundaries, from social security to precarity and from suburbanization to the renaissance of the inner city. Finally, I consider whether this typology is valid for other European cities.

The composition of the political elites in sixteenth-century Ghent, one of the political and economic centres of the county of Flanders, changed from a relatively open elite group that included representatives from the craft guilds into a compact, aristocratic class. This article analyses the reasons for this transformation. First, the number of office-holders in the city council declined and power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller political elite because of interventions in the urban political framework by the Habsburg authorities in the wake of a fiscal rebellion (1537–40) and a Calvinist takeover of power (1578–84). Secondly, the once dominant position of the craft guilds on Ghent's two benches of aldermen was weakened by institutional reforms, a Catholic backlash against Calvinism and an economic recession. Thirdly, the growing wealth gap between rulers and the ruled, coupled with an influx of noblemen into Ghent City Council, gave urban politics a more aristocratic character. Consequently, a series of interconnected changes gave rise to a trend towards oligarchy and aristocracy on the city's benches of aldermen.

De-industrialization and the rise of the service sector have formed the basis of recent attempts to develop a new metanarrative of economic change in twentieth-century Britain. Their effects have been taken as writ through labour market statistics or aggregate measures of gross domestic product. However, by focusing on particular micro-economic spaces, a different story emerges. Using the inner areas of Liverpool as a case-study, this article shows how the city's social and economic problems were underwritten by the decline of the service sector, located around the port. By reading the effects of social and economic change through accounts of the physical environment, it demonstrates how urban decay and dereliction provided material resonance to Liverpool's economic decline. The city's landscape of urban decay and dereliction encompassed the infrastructure of everyday life – housing, roads and even trees – as well as that of economic activity, including the docks and warehouses. Taken together, this article shows how this landscape of urban decay and dereliction came to be constituted as an agent within Liverpool's continued economic decline in the 1970s rather than simply being a reflection of it.

The spatial growth of German cities in the years of upheaval in the nineteenth century has been, and remains, the subject of intense historical research. However, the origins of the socio-economic processes underlying these transformations actually predate the epochal transition into the modern era. This article deals critically with the popular conception of a ‘town–country dichotomy’ by comparing, on an empirical basis, urban, semi-urban and rural settlements in a sub-region of the north-west of Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. With the aid of a Geographical Information System (GIS), the cartographic and serial material of the ‘Brunswick Land Survey’ is evaluated in terms of its relevance to a socio-topographic comparison of the spatial micro-structures of the three respective settlement segments. The comparison focuses on the general morphology of the settlement segments, the conditions accompanying the growth of the settlements and the spatial structures of the agricultural activities pursued. In addition, it identifies the factors which led to the erosion of differences between town and country.

Through the example of Danish provincial town, Odense, the article explores the role of visual culture in the construction and transformation of nineteenth-century provincial identities and placemaking in an industrial town. It demonstrates that while representations may follow certain aesthetic conventions of urban imagery and ideas of urban prestige, they both reflect and contribute to the construction and reproduction of a specific local, imagined geography; an imagined geography where initially history and nature and as time progresses signs of industriousness and in particular an infrastructure of civic culture merges into a narrative of an ancient and industrious place.