This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

This article explores the relations between everyday life, materiality and urban modernity on two Danish mass housing estates, the Gellerup Plan and Vollsmose, in the 1970s. Specifically, the article examines a series of conflicts concerning the residents’ use and misuse of seemingly mundane material devices, including shopping trolleys, waste disposal and laundry facilities. In doing so, the article argues that the residents’ daily engagements with everyday materialities and technologies constitute a privileged, yet overlooked, point of entry into the shifting relations between modernity, materiality and agency in the Danish welfare city in the 1970s.

In 2011, when Jelle Haemers looked back on a decade's worth of Ph.D. theses on urban centres in the medieval Low Countries, he identified three main trends in scholarship: the emphasis on individuals, rather than institutions; the increasing use of new methodologies, such as social network analysis (SNA) and prosopography; and the deployment of inter-disciplinary perspectives. Haemers’ intuition proved prescient; recent doctoral contributions to the historiography of medieval English towns and cities tend, generally, to fall along similar lines. In many ways, this is natural, and a testament to the enduring legacy and successes of earlier works. But, as the following discussion will elaborate, important and divergent steps have also been made, pushing our perceptions of pre-modern urban societies in new directions. Medieval urban history remains a vibrant area for study, with Ph.D. students forming an important section of its vanguard.

Empty, abandoned or covered with vegetation – such areas were inherent to the medieval urban space, yet remain overlooked in research. Here, we describe three major types of ‘empty’ space of various origins and functions in Central European towns and suggest how these types can be investigated and interpreted through an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeological, written, pictorial and cartographical sources. We propose a simple interdisciplinary protocol to trace empty spaces in the urban context. This study will help to change our perception of medieval urban space into one that is more dynamic and heterogeneous than commonly believed.