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.

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.

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.

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.