The concept of civil society provides a useful means of evaluating the social and political relationships of British towns. Civil society refers to the non-prescriptive relationships that lie between the state and kin. Such relationships are associated with the existence of the free market, the rule of law and a strong voluntary associational culture. Both theoretical analysis and historical evidence link civil society with the nature of urban places, their complexity, their function as a central place and their operation as a focus for flows of information. Between 1780 and 1820 the agencies of civil society in Britain provided an arena for making choices, for reasoned informed debate and for the collective provision and consumption of services in an open and pluralist manner.

This article addresses a range of conceptual issues relating to the history of European port cities in order to construct a framework for comparative research. Port cities played a key role in European urban development and their growth was often determined by common factors. Particular attention is paid to the demography of port cities, their specific labour markets and the dominant ideology of merchant capital. The article establishes a basis for analysing case studies of individual port cities and for exploring their location within the overall process of European urbanization.

The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of ‘leisure towns’ as the chief resorts of wealthy consumers of a new range of goods and services. Their prosperity related closely to the growth of consumerism, but little attention has been given to the ways in which shopping and shops linked into the changing social, economic and physical structure of such towns. This paper explores these processes in the context of Chester – a classic, but largely neglected leisure town – and concludes that shopping streets became central to the economy of the city and amongst the most important of its social spaces.

This paper analyses the notion of neighbourhood in Haarlem, a Dutch town in the province of Holland, in the seventeenth century. During the first decades of the century the city magistrates were challenged by huge immigration, religious and cultural pluralism, and, due to the Dutch Revolt, a lack of a strong central power. In spite of these ingredients for social unrest, peace was preserved without too many difficulties. One of the mechanisms that kept society from falling apart was neighbourhood. Several levels of neighbourhood will be studied here and an answer is given for the growing interference of city magistrates with neighbourhood life.

Recent work on ‘civil society’ has made claims for the past capacity of mutual aid associations to generate ‘social capital’: self-help, trust, solidarity. Friendly societies in nineteenth-century Bristol are examined to test these claims. Their origins and growth are explored, as well as their membership and social, convivial and medical roles. Solidarities of class and neighbourhood are set against evidence of exclusion and division. Trust and close personal ties proved insufficient to avert the actuarial risks that threatened financial security.

Urban growth revealed problems associated with the administration of mid-sixteenth-century cities. In the Mediterranean area, and especially in Spain and France, a discrete discourse emerged in the late seventeenth century as to how towns and cities should be organized and administered. Contained in numerous tracts and manuals were ‘policy science’ recommendations to deal with environmental health and related matters. This article examines the evolution of ‘policy science’ in Spain which achieved its greatest prominence during Carlos III's reign (1759–88). It is a field of study which offers insights into urban customs, behaviour and beliefs, and had important implications for the subsequent morphology of the Spanish city.

From the mid-nineteenth century Glasgow's civic leaders recognized the effect that the rapidly deteriorating urban fabric was having on perceptions of the city, and began to construct a more positive identity, intended to inspire faith in municipal government. The landscape played a crucial part in selling this ideal. Parks were used as visible evidence of civic beneficence, and (deriving much influence from evangelical Presbyterianism) also served as a potent symbol of regeneration. However, while this paper considers the success of public parks in boosting Glasgow's image between 1850 and 1914, it also examines the complex material motivations originally underlying civic involvement, the impact of the environment in determining parks' policy and the influence of other British and European cities in shaping ideas.

Set in the context of the nineteenth-century expansion of Madrid, the Parque del Oeste not only reflected the plans for urban expansion of the city, but it also encapsulated the core values and ideals of the conservative reformist agenda of Spain's Restoration government. The relationships between park and city are explored in the context of the late nineteenth-century expansion of Madrid.

This article attempts a detailed social portrait of Cape Town on the eve of apartheid. In the process it provides a rare cross-racial study of a twentieth-century South African city. The first section reveals a complex place already distinguished by considerable segregation and predictable social inequalities, both between and within racial and ethnic categories. Yet such findings are at odds with popular memories of a golden age – marked by tolerance, greater cohesion and security. So the second section explores and explains the differences. It finds that memories cannot simply be dismissed as myths.

This paper studies the evolution of urban form in both physical and social manifestations through an examination of the transformation of the Chinese capital from a planned imperial city into a modern metropolis in the early twentieth century. The newly created municipal government sought to modernize Beijing through public works to improve the old urban infrastructure. Consequently, city walls and gates were reconfigured; streets were paved, widened and expanded; and new rules of urban planning and zoning were introduced. Reflecting changes in political power relations, the modernist transformation in the urban built environment was evidently brought about by a combined force of Western influences and Chinese indigenous developments, especially by a shift in ideological allegiance from imperial authority to people's rights, by the state's increasing intervention in urban affairs, and by new technologies transmitted from the West.

The article was conceived as a guided tour through the Balkan Peninsula including descriptions of two selected towns from Hungary, Croatia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It gives a summary of Western perceptions of the Balkan towns as noted by Western Europeans who visited the area in different periods from the seventeenth century onwards. The civilization they found and described there was a part of an entity encompassing the material and spiritual culture of urban life in the Near East. During the nineteenth century the Balkans underwent major political changes and contemporary travellers' reports were rich with observations about the process of ‘Europeanization’ of the Balkan towns. During the process which meant nationalism and fragmentation in what had been a fairly uniform culture area, paradoxically, ‘Balkanization’ was the final result.

Civil society remains the most challenging and all-pervading of concepts, yet too rarely is it examined empirically. The potential of civil society is that it better allows understanding of local political structures as well as cross-class associational activity. Its alternatives, while many, are principally ‘public life’ and ‘influence’, both of which have their own highly respected traditions. It is argued here that civil society offers a powerful analysis of structure and action in the urban world, and that it is one mediated by municipal government. To operationalize this definition, this article will introduce three further concepts: ‘enshrinement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘legitimacy’. Each of these is linked to the relationship of the municipal state with that at Westminster, the formal mechanism through which the stability of civil society in nineteenth-century Britain was negotiated.