This article analyses a case of female patronage in Edwardian Leicester, a drinking fountain surmounted by a statuette dedicated to a female Anglo-Saxon ruler. The bequest, by Edith Gittins (1845–1910), is contextualized within the nineteenth-century perspectives on the past that identified the roots of the English people in the Anglo-Saxon period. The article explores the cultural, social and gender implications of Gittins’ intentions behind the bequest both for women's rights and for the use of the past in the construction of civic identity. These have not hitherto received sufficient attention. In order to address these questions the article exploits the potential of a 3D visualization of the urban setting where the fountain was intended to be erected to help frame the historical inquiry.

The literature on nineteenth-century Newcastle city region is a narrative of industrial progress premised upon technological prowess. But there is another story to be told about the transformation of a relatively small northern town into a conurbation with the attributes of a modern city. This second process of ‘rounding out’ the city with social, cultural and political institutions to accompany the economic prowess is relatively under-reported. In this study, we follow 1,621 individuals and compare their record of being mentioned in the literature to their participation in 343 local institutions. The focus is directed towards those who are much more visible in the literature compared to institutional membership – ‘narrative heroes’ – and those with the reverse pattern, much more to be found in institutions than in the literature – civic builders. The two sets of individuals are discussed and reasons for their contrasting positions are suggested.

Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what was later called the ‘New World’, was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. While it has been called the ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’, discussion of racial exclusion and marginalization is mostly absent in the city's architecture and urban history. This article investigates how architecture and urban design helped reinforce the colonizers’ control over enslaved peoples. Specifically, we explore the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood, its church and the slave warehouse known as La Negreta. Drawing on historical maps and archival documents, we draw attention to how the spatial and material construction of Santa Bárbara constituted and maintained social and racial structures of oppression.

This account of Vera Bacskai's contribution to European urban history after 1990 is a personal narrative, written by a friend and collaborator. It argues that her role was multi-dimensional. It was founded on her major publications on Budapest and small towns, shedding a crucial East Central European light on European urbanization. It was underpinned by her participation in various international projects like the EU TEMPUS programme which created strong institutional bonds with Western universities as well as opportunities for Hungarian students through exchange programmes, international workshops and the like. Not least, she was a strong pillar in the construction of the European Association for Urban History. When she joined the committee in 1991, it was still an embryonic body. In 1996, she organized the successful and important Budapest conference. When she retired from EAUH in 2004, its conferences were attracting many hundreds of researchers, from across Europe and beyond.

For some years, the historiography on Francoist violence has engaged with debates developed by European scholars on the importance of citizen collaboration in authoritarian regimes. In some cases, denunciations made by ‘ordinary men’ have been quantified to establish the extent of violence in everyday life, without taking other qualitative criteria into account. This article explores the importance of urban criteria such as neighbourhood, sociability and mobility in the scope of Francoist violence, taking the military occupation of Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War as a case-study.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English-speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg's black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial considerations determined the council's provision of leisure facilities.

Researching the history of daily greetings is challenging, because references are casual and scattered through many sources. Nonetheless, some broad trends are apparent. In eighteenth-century Britain, the old tradition of deep bowing and curtseying was slowly attenuating into a brisker touching of the cap or head (for men) and a quick bob (for women). Yet that transition was not the whole story. Simultaneously, a new form of urban greeting, in the form of the handshake, was emerging. The strengths and weaknesses of many different sources are here assessed, including novels, plays, letters, diaries, etiquette books, travelogues and legal depositions, as well as artwork. Strategies for analysis are identified, with a warning against generalizing from single references in single sources. Finally, the emergence of the handshake among the middle class in Britain's eighteenth-century towns gives a clear signal that socio-cultural change does not invariably start at the ‘top’ and ‘trickle down’.

The article focuses on the actions of the High Council for Immovable Historic Works and Monuments (HC), which was active from 1951 to 1983 as the sole decision-maker in issues of historic preservation for all historic structures and sites in Turkey. The HC archives reveal a historical and political framework for understanding the context within which the HC operated. Expert knowledge, especially in the conservation of historic cities, has been a powerful instrument, although the use of this instrument depended on the political context. The HC extended its authority in the 1950s, operating under a conservative autocratic government. In the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, when central power was lacking and society was dominated by political violence, chaos and economic instability, the HC could reinforce and exercise its power to raise standards in historic preservation in line with the international conservation movement.

In 1927, the Nationalist government launched an ambitious project to transform Nanjing into a modern capital. During this reconstruction process, private lands were seized in the name of public interest for the construction of public works. In the face of opposition from affected landowners, Nationalist leaders shifted the emphasis from ‘public interest’ (gonggong liyi) to ‘public obligation’ (shimin zeren), stressing the duty of urban residents to support capital reconstruction and stigmatizing opponents as anti-development. This article examines compulsory land expropriation in Nationalist China and shows how the government turned discourses of public interest and public obligation into modern land laws.

Late medieval sources reveal an annual handover of a marine mammal between the council of the small coastal city of Blankenberge and the aldermen of Bruges. The reason for the transfer is not disclosed by the sources, and there is no consensus among historians as to the interpretation of this behaviour. This article explores the role of the presentation and consumption of a porpoise in the relationship between Blankenberge and the nearby medieval metropolis of Bruges. I argue that a porpoise supported the crucial, mutually beneficial ties of solidarity between two communities favouring their position and opportunities in the competitive maritime landscape.

The years 1945–55 were a period of reconstruction for Italy; the following decade was one of economic growth. An aspect of this transition is analysed here, in relation to the forms of social integration created in working-class neighbourhoods. The case-study focuses on Milan, and the two organizations studied are the consulte popolari (the ‘people's councils’), created by the left in the immediate post-war period, and the ‘social centres’ created in the mid-1950s by the IACP (the Autonomous Institute of Public Housing). Both were attempts to involve the new, outlying suburbs in the city's political life, each of them trying to adapt to different political phases. Both, I would like to suggest, succeeded in achieving certain results.

Zooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking.

This article analyses the role of LaClede Town, a nationally lauded housing development in St Louis (USA), in metropolitan and national contests over race, segregation and urban equity from the 1960s to 1990s. Built on the site of a massive slum-clearance project, the federally supported complex gained widespread fame for its startlingly heterogeneous racial mix and ostensibly colour-blind lifestyles. As the article argues, the quasi-utopian language applied to the neighbourhood illustrates the contours and limitations of a 1960s racial liberalism that sought to overcome structural inequalities through face-to-face neighbourly contact. Yet the project's 1990s demise signals that older ideology's supersession by a newly dominant urban neoliberalism.

Post-catastrophic damage cartography constitutes a serious research gap in the field of urban history. While fire and war damage maps have been made for centuries, qualitative analyses of these documents, especially from a comparative and transnational perspective, have appeared only recently. In response, this article tracks the coeval emergence of urban archaeology, heritage zoning and war damage mapping across Europe. Based on detailed studies of early post-war Munich and Warsaw, it demonstrates that damage mapping was as much about recording loss as it was about reshaping and reimagining Europe's historic city centres.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Shanghai became China's most important film centre, for both production and distribution. The city hosted the largest number of movie theatres in the country. After the establishment of the first theatre in 1908 by a Spanish national, the distribution of movie theatres gradually transferred and expanded from Hongkew District, north of Suzhou Creek to the south bank of the International Settlement. This article examines the characteristics of the distribution of movie theatres in the city from the perspective of authorities’ policy, population density, population structure, traffic and cultural space. It analyses the factors leading to the particular geographical distribution and discusses the possible links between the space of cinema, urban development and urban cultural space.

In this article, we rely on a census of French residents in 1942 to conduct a quantitative micro-history of the French community in the wake of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. On the basis of this snapshot, we examine this group from the perspective of long-term demography combined with a spatial approach drawing on the geospatial resources built over a decade in Shanghai. We argue that the system of power in the French Concession shaped the structural traits of the French population as a self-contained community. It created a politically, culturally and linguistically defined space where French nationals were presented with opportunities and even privileges. It sheds light on the social characteristics of foreign communities in a transcolonial city and on the spatial patterns they created in a non-western urban setting. Methodologically, we harness Geographical Information System tools to bridge demography and spatial history.

Between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed more than one in seven of the city's roads. Renaming was an important marker of revolutionary change in China's largest and most foreign-influenced city. Road renaming in socialist China has been commonly understood to have been extensive. This article argues, however, that the nature and extent of renaming in socialist Shanghai was less dramatic than has been assumed. It demonstrates that renaming was not simply an iconoclastic process, but rather involved the pragmatic weighing of symbolic change against potential disruption. Further, it contends that renaming was driven by a desire to order the city, in line with the CCP's modernist worldview.