Verdurization (lühua), a term coined in Japan and adopted into the Chinese vocabulary in the early twentieth century, was an emotive concept and relentless practice in Mao's China. The Chinese state used various verdurization campaigns as part of its project of building a socialist state and as a way of exercising ideological control, particularly in cities. At the same time, ordinary citizens had their own ideas about the role of vegetation in their daily lives – ideas that were often different from, and sometimes counter to, those of the state. The article takes Shanghai as a case-study to examine the politics of urban greening along the spectrum of state, society and everyday life in the early years of the People's Republic.

In the history of crime and criminal justice, the city of Goerlitz represents a rather special case. The city magistracy did not feel politically responsible towards the burghers and therefore did not strive to legitimize its rule by administering efficient social control. As a consequence, the formal and inefficient procedures of archaic Saxon law were largely kept intact. Due to this, the level of violence seems to have been higher than in other cities.

This article, based on western primary sources, seeks to investigate the relationship between western imperialism in China and the making of modern Chinese statecraft in urban form, focusing on the French perspective and on historical institutionalism. Both internal rebellions and western empires shaped modern Chinese cities. The Chinese response to western intervention is a more complicated story. Pace Paul Cohen, we do need to know about foreign activities in modern China – not as ‘impact-response’ and ‘tradition-modernity’ paradigms – but rather as part of local history, both in terms of local administration and urban landscape. Euro-American expansion and exploitation are not part of a unitary or totalizing enterprise, and warfare and Franco-British conflicts facilitated the making of modern municipal administration in the French Concession of Shanghai; on the other hand, Chinese forces indirectly shaped the structure of the institutions of imperialism, as well as pointing to divergent national approaches to imperialism.

This article presents the tale of a serial flirt, punished for making a noisy, lewd nuisance of himself outside a widows' residence in Florence in 1553. Close study of this vivid episode uncovers some of the sonic strategies of ritual insult and abuse available to early modern city-dwellers, and is also an opportunity to explore the connections between aurality and spatiality in late Renaissance Florence.

The poll books produced before the Ballot Act of 1872 are a major source for political and social history. Those which have an occupational title for most or all entries have been increasingly used since Vincent's pioneering work. Others have been linked to other sources so that voting can be related to occupation. This is either time-consuming or expensive and often both. The alternative is a very selective sampling tactic guided by the directories. The use of occupational titles has been criticized because of the lack of social homogeneity within the groups designated by such titles. This is slightly unfair but a relevant warning against using such titles to do more analytical work than the meaning of the titles justifies. Those who want a more precise measure of status must link with the rate books and the census manuscripts.

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’.

Historians came late to the study of the American city. They lagged far behind scholars in other disciplines who, by the turn of the twentieth century, had begun to apply the tools of the social sciences to the examination of urban America and its problems. American urban history as a distinctive field of scholarly inquiry does not date much earlier than 1940, when Arthur M. Schlesinger, sr, published his landmark article on ‘The City in American History.’ Interest in the field grew rather slowly, however, and by the mid-1950s only a half-dozen or so universities offered courses in the subject. Progress in urban history research was also somewhat less than dynamic, the chief accomplishments being several fine urban biographies and a handful of monographs, notably the works of Carl Bridenbaugh on the colonial seaport towns, Oscar Handlin's study of Boston's immigrants, and Richard C. Wade's book, The Urban Frontier (1959).

In this article, I rethink the genre of urban biographies and argue that it can be given new potency when remodelled to become a means of reinvigorating the critical public. In the first part, I reflect upon some of the recent biographies of cities in the Czech Republic. In the second part, I discuss promising strategies, drawn from a sample of innovative urban biographies. In the final part, I outline the guiding principles of an adapted model for urban biographies. I propose that the cities must be repoliticized and recentred in the biographies, which entails adopting a political concept of the city, a deconstructive approach, utilization of the urban presence and a more urban-sensitive treatment of time.

The first half of the 1990s was a pivotal period in the development and growth of urban history in Europe. In Britain the Urban History Group began to convene again after a decade in abeyance, work commenced on the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain, the Urban History Yearbook became Urban History whilst the European Association of Urban Historians organized their first conference. It was in this climate that Ashgate Publishing commissioned a new monograph series, Historical Urban Studies, under the editorship of Richard Rodger, editor of Urban History, and Jean-Luc Pinol, the leading French urban historian and a key figure in the European Association of Urban Historians (EAUH). The aim of the series was and is to be comparative over both time and space, drawing on multiple locations to explore what is common and what distinctive about the urban experience of diverse towns and nations. The broad agenda for the series was shaped by an overarching concern with the administration and governance of the city which underpinned attempts to manage the social, economic and political challenges wrought by 300 years of urban change. In particular, the editors stress the importance of the comparative element which should allow historians to distinguish ‘which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature’. The editors set themselves an ambitious agenda and this essay aims to explore how the series has developed over the ten or so years since it commenced publication; the degree to which it has provided a platform for advancing the sub-discipline of urban history; and to consider some future directions which urban history might take.

The Portuguese discovered the uninhabited Azores archipelago in 1427 and started to settle it during the fifteenth century. Angra, located on Terceira Island, soon became the most important Azorean city, leading to rapid urban development. This article investigates the overlooked role of streams in the rise of Angra as a pivotal Atlantic urban centre. Through the intersection of historical and flood modelling methods, it makes a unique contribution to our understanding of Angra's urban morphologic development, highlighting the potential of applying urban flood modelling to analysis of the rise of coastal urban settlement.

A part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, the city of Ioannina integrated into the Greek state following the Balkan wars of 1912–13. This article provides a first in-depth historical account of the city's water supply system from the early 1910s to the eve of World War II, and traces the path leading from a traditional system relying on private wells and public fountains to a modern water network entering inhabitants’ homes. In doing so, it also offers material and insights contributing to a larger research project on the technological modernization of urban Greece in the inter-war period, during which the Greek state itself was driven by a particularly strong urge to modernize the country.

Federally funded ‘urban rehabilitation’ began with the Housing Act of 1954 in the United States. Baltimore's Harlem Park was selected to pilot this experimental programme; a logical choice seeing how the pilot largely built on a programme dating from the prehistory of legislated urban rehabilitation that originated in Baltimore. This article lays bare the history of this programme, known as the ‘Baltimore Plan’, which offered empirical evidence that substantiated the potential of participatory urban planning. Beyond transferring upon minority communities a level of control over housing that black communities had seldom possessed before, the Baltimore Plan also constituted in an alternative to public housing.