Modern Irish history is urban history. It is a story of the transferral of a populace from rural settlements to small towns and cities; of the discipline and regulation of society through new urban spaces; of the creation of capital through the construction of buildings and the sale of property. The history of Ireland has been overwhelmingly the history of land, but too often the emphasis has been on the field rather than the street, and on the small farmer instead of the urban shopkeeper. But the same questions of property run throughout Irish urban history from the early modern period to the contemporary, as speculators, businesses and government have attempted to convert land into profit, creating new buildings, streets and spaces, and coming into conflict with each other and other vested interests. Indeed, as recent work on Irish cities has shown, a turn to the urban history of Ireland provides a framework and a methodology for writing a textured and complex history of Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity.

A remarkable cluster of Irish town histories appeared in the early nineteenth century, coming after several generations of unprecedented urban growth. But that growth stalled and most Irish towns entered a long period of stagnation. Meanwhile, academic interest in the urban past became dormant. Urbanization in Ireland resumed in the twentieth century, but the study of urban history was late to develop and slow to move beyond the documentation of built heritage. However, public interest in medieval origins, official interest in urban heritage and the vision of a handful of medieval historians and historical geographers have helped transform the prospects for Irish urban history.

This article addresses efforts to reform market activity in pre-Famine Ireland, exploring Karl Polanyi's assertion that the ‘free market’ required ‘the intervention of the state in order to establish it’. It begins by rooting Ireland's alleged ‘social ills’ – over-population and subsistence agriculture – in terms of integration into international markets from the mid-eighteenth century. From the crisis of the 1820s, state actors came to see the extension of the cash economy as central to remedying these ‘ills’. Altering the physical fabric of exchange to encourage ‘rational’ market behaviour, I argue reformers aimed to ‘enclose’ commercial spaces economically and physically from non-market forces. Utilizing novel technologies of vision and precision, market space could thus operate according to a logic and ethics of its own, inculcating voluntary compliance through new standards of ‘trust’ and ‘fairness’. I conclude by asking, if indeed the state had come to operate as much through ‘freedom’ as force by 1845, how we might begin to reassess the course and context of the Irish Famine.

The infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. This article examines the foundation stone ceremonies that marked the beginning of several large-scale building Roman Catholic church building projects between 1850 and 1900, and in particular considers the extent to which these highly visible and ceremonial events prefigured the more permanent occupation of public space by the new buildings. These foundation stone ceremonies were complex events that reflected contemporary political issues such as land rights as much as they engaged with the spiritual concerns of the Roman Catholic congregations in Ireland during this period.

At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.

Taking the office of the coninc der ribauden in Ghent as a case-study, this article reconstructs the enforcement of urban sanitation and preventative health practices during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The coninc managed a wide range of issues perceived as potentially polluting, damaging or threatening to health. Banning waste and chasing pigs as well as prostitutes off the streets, the office implemented a governmental vision on communal well-being. Health interests, as part of a broader pursuit of the common good, therefore played an important yet hitherto largely overlooked role in medieval urban governance.

Paris is renowned for artistic neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for earlier periods, the art-historical picture is much vaguer. Where did artists live and work in the eighteenth century? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the early modern art world? Drawing on data from a large-scale digital mapping project locating the addresses of hundreds of eighteenth-century artists, this article answers these crucial questions of urban art history. Following an overview of the digital project, the article explores three different mappings of the city's art worlds: a century long survey of the neighbourhoods inhabited by the Academy's artists; a comparison of where the Guild's artists were living in a single year and a wider world view of Parisian artists abroad. Through its new cartographic models of Paris's art worlds, this article brings the city to the foreground of eighteenth-century French art.

The story of Hebron during the 1948 Palestine War remains largely untold, obscured by the larger historical forces of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and refugee crisis that resulted from Israel's declaration of independence. This article examines the history and historiography of Hebron from mid-May 1948 until the departure of Egyptian troops from the country on 30 April 1949, a period referred to as the ‘Dual Era’, an unusual configuration between Jordan and Egypt in which both countries temporarily ruled over the city. It analyses the Dual Era against an emerging Egyptian and Jordanian proto-pan-Arab nationalism as each country's locally based leaders vied for support for their rule from the Palestinian population in Hebron.

The European Historic Towns Atlas project, probably the largest one in European urban history, is conceptually rooted in national histories. Methodologically it is focused on the production and interpretation of large-scale maps primarily for the understanding of urban morphogenesis and the role of morphological agents but also of issues connected with the economic and cultural aspects of urban life. The atlas project now involves 19 countries and with over 520 towns produced across Europe, pioneer comparative urban studies have been published. Comparative work based on theoretical underpinning is the aim of the project and though it holds great potential, it also faces challenges: access to published towns, language barriers and consistency between national productions. It is argued that the digital production of the atlases may provide a chance for a more unified approach in the future.

The IPHS conference in Yokohama demonstrates that the history of planning is in rude health. The discipline now includes the histories of planning around the world, and scholars from many different countries are reflecting deeply on their own and each other's experiences. Planners, the institutes they work in, the evolution and transmission of their ideas and of course their application and success or failure are now considered from a multitude of regional and disciplinary perspectives. The vitality of these debates in the twenty-first-century global urban world holds much promise that historical study can contribute to understanding some of the challenges facing contemporary cities.