Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long shadow cast by mining and the urban metropoles, with their centripetal pull on labour and the state, making the company town an archetypal urban form on the rural periphery.

The article considers the impact of new arterial roads on the mobilities of the wealthier inter-war Londoner, and argues that they occasioned an emergent form of automobility that was modern, sensational and exciting for the metropolitan driver, but was also highly dangerous, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists living in suburban homes near these roads.

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

The adoption of non-traditional housing by local authorities is customarily explained in terms of economic factor shortages or a nationally determined policy discourse. This underestimates the significance of distinctly local understandings of civic responsibility. Based on Leicester and Nottingham, this article argues that those influences frequently used to predict outcomes – like party political allegiance – mattered less in decision-making than a city's intrinsic view of itself. Such perceptions were grounded in subtle constructions of civic community, perceived need and political reinterpretation. Particularly important was the role of the local press. Even cities with similar problems, therefore, could be represented, and subsequently see themselves, in very dissimilar terms and act accordingly.

Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Those living in naval sailortowns were geographically and culturally marginalized from the centres of economic and political power and their relationship with the civic and naval authorities was one which varied between compromise and resistance.

Although it is widely acknowledged that urban oligarchy pre-dominated across medieval England, oligarchy's foundations are only partly known. This article argues that part of oligarchy's success derived from close social interaction between oligarchs and the rest of the citizens. A case study of social networks and arbitration within the city of Wells demonstrates how the elite insinuated themselves into the town's social web, establishing and securing their influence and power. Moreover, such a social role brought the oligarchs together often and helped to define the elite. Such power encouraged a more benevolent form of oligarchy than later prevailed.

Historians have argued that American social welfare reformers looked to Europe for examples of successful programmes. This article provides a counter-case where a progressive American state, Massachusetts, developed public health reforms prior to their British counterparts. Social concerns about reducing cases of tuberculosis in Massachusetts' cotton manufacturing cities led to the transference of the public health discourse from the urban living environment to the workplace. This same relationship could have been applied within the Lancashire industry. Instead, the urban public health discourse focused on living conditions. In both countries, local and state political structures influenced health campaigners' actions.

When John Leland toured England in the 1540s, he observed water conduits in several towns, including a number of smaller urban centres. Subsequent historians and archaeologists, however, have seriously understated the number and importance of piped water systems in English towns. This article uses studies of individual towns, together with civic records and Leland's Itinerary, to examine the sources and technologies of urban water supplies, the origins of civic piped water systems, their relationships to other local systems, finance, management and oversight. It will argue that the growth in piped supplies by civic bodies in the later Middle Ages reflects the importance of charitable provision and the efforts of civic authorities to establish, maintain and regulate them. An appendix lists medieval English towns known to have provided public access to piped water supplies by c. 1550.

Urban icons were common in the Roman world, with monuments, cityscapes and personifications all used as metonyms. Yet an icon for the most important city of all is not easily identified. Rome was always sui generis, too large to be easily captured visually. Filled with innumerable wonders, no single structure or artwork stood for the whole. Representing the collective, as well as the great extent of the empire, the city could not be encapsulated in a single image.

This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.

This article explores how notions of African authenticity informed urban planning in post-colonial Africa. It examines an attempt by Tanzania's ruling party to build a new national capital in the sparsely populated region of Dodoma. Paradoxically, Dodoma's planners sought to build a modern African city based on the social principles of the traditional African village. This vision of African village authenticity legitimized Tanzania's ruling party by linking its authority to a purely African, rather than colonial, past. At the same time, it allowed politicians to criminalize urban poverty by attributing it to racial betrayal rather than broader structural failures.

The paper investigates the activities of the eight London Commissions of Sewers during the period 1800–47. It is argued that the criticisms of the Commissions made by Edwin Chadwick and later historians are undeserved. The Commissions were efficient, innovative and honest, and successfully kept pace with the ever-changing sanitary needs of the capital. Although they operated under severe statutory constraints, they constructed many miles of sewer and can be seen as the true instigators of the nineteenth-century sanitary revolution.

As an administrative tool of police reform, the introduction of house numbering in eighteenth-century Geneva was the result of a broad desire for urban transparency that resulted in the production of a new ‘regime of visibility’. This article examines how the logic of ‘number’ transformed the way in which urban space was conceived, organized and governed. As a political technology, the spatial practice of house numbering enabled governmental officials to divide, count, identify and classify urban populations in order to regulate the spaces of circulation in the modern city. Although the city's house-numbering system is taken for granted by most of the town-dwellers today, the current study illustrates how these police techniques encountered considerable resistance when they were initially imposed during the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Existing research in urban environmental history is often characterized by a narrow viewpoint or limited material reflecting the rationalist approach typical of white, middle-aged, middle-class and educated men. This orientation risks overlooking the viewpoint of the majority of urban dwellers: ordinary men, women, children, the elderly and different ethnic groups. The article focuses on the urban environmental history of children, because childhood forms the foundation for our relationship with nature. Environmental reminiscences offer fruitful material for the study of children's urban environmental history as well as children's contemporary relationships with the urban landscape. The article integrates aspects of urban history, environmental history and evolutionary psychology.

The medieval period is often regarded as part of the statistical ‘Dark Ages’ in English history before the nineteenth century. The figures which are available were mostly collected for immediate administrative or fiscal purposes far removed from the future needs of historians and by a state lacking the comprehensive administrative organization of a census-taking modern government. Medieval man in particular is usually thought to have had little concept of the meaning of high numbers. In 1371, for instance, the English parliament believed that there were 40,000 parishes in the country when in fact there were less than 9,000. Again, ‘when the pope was assured by his advisers that the Black Death had cost the lives of 42, 836, 486 throughout the world, or the losses in Germany were estimated at 1, 244, 434, what was meant was that an awful lot of people had died’. Estimates of total populations have of course been a famous source of controversy. ‘Medieval man like classical man before him was little interested in figures. Neither showed any desire to formulate a precise estimate of population, and when figures were called for they hazarded only the wildest guesses.’ Even for England, where more promising evidence survives than for any other country, Professor Postan concluded that it was not possible to measure the total size of the population at any given point of time. For 1086 for example, estimates of total population could have a ‘heroic’ margin of error of up to 150 per cent. Historians, he decided, should rather be concerned with the dynamics of medieval population than with global numbers.

This essay examines the nature and role of mythical histories in English medieval towns. Myths concerning the origins and special destinies of particular cities were widespread and long-lasting. For contemporaries they acquired meaning through their interaction with changing historical circumstances. Evidence for their circulation in both elite and popular domains is reviewed. Their significance was not unambiguous; they were, rather, contested territory, a means through which townspeople articulated their particular views about the nature and purpose of urban society. Their effect, therefore, could be to assist both in the formation and in the transformation of that society. Issue is taken with the argument that the early modern period saw a weakening of the potential force of such myths.

Drawing on life stories, this article considers the relationship between urban working-class men and domesticity. Focusing on the spaces, objects and rites of men's homecoming, it questions perceptions of working-class men as peripheral to the inter-personal dynamics of family life and assesses how men's occupation of domestic space and time could be invested with emotive meaning by adult children. The article suggests that fathers were not simply figures of authority or masculine privilege but, rather, that the domestic interior was a space where men and their children navigated family roles and filial obligations to enjoy nurturing and intimate relationships more commonly associated with mothers. In doing so, the article stakes a claim to reconsider the idea that working-class homes were ‘a woman's place’ and view them more dynamically as inter-personal domains.

This essay explores the concept of collective memory as a component of political culture in pre- and especially post-Reformation provincial towns. Pre-Reformation political culture depended heavily on a collective memory shaped by traditional religious experience and institutions. When so many of these were destroyed by the Reformation, it became necessary for the ruling elites of provincial towns to create alternative cultural forms, and thus to refashion a usefully legitimizing political culture. Three forms of this refashioned and legitimizing collective memory – civic regalia, civic portraiture and historical writing – are examined as they applied to the provincial urban milieu in the years c. 1540–1640.

Street and house numbers are part of the modern state's geo-locational regime, by which people and places are made legible to distant governments and bureaucrats. Some writers have suggested that they were important in colonial cities, where urban regulation and political control was often insecure, but we know little about their extent and significance in such settings. Bombay and Calcutta c.1901 are significant test cases, being two of the largest colonial cities in the world, as well as being recent sites of major disease outbreaks. City directories in Bombay, together with property assessment and census evidence for Calcutta, show that house numbers were rare for all types of property and people. Local residents used other methods to navigate the city, while British administrators did not believe house numbers to be an important aspect of colonial rule. Fragmentary evidence for other colonial cities suggests that the experience of these Indian cities was broadly typical.

Swift's poetic jibe was aimed at the ever-friendless literary critic; but there were many others who shared in the polymorphic business of ‘giving directions’ to the unwieldy town. Some very literally so: the makers of the early directories provided names, addresses, and occupations of leading urban residents, plus staple information about transport services, posts, banks and miscellaneous local offices. Itemizing and classifying a complex urbanity took a certain confidence. ‘I have taken upon me the arduous Task of compiling a Complete Guide, for the easy finding out of every inhabitant of the least Consequence…’, asserted Elizabeth Raffald, publishing the Manchester Directory in 1772, while confessing the difficulties of the task. Not everyone may have been convinced by her computation that the significant citizens numbered only 1,500 men and women, in a growing conurbation of over 30,000 residents. But that was not the point. A directory offered immediacy rather than complete accuracy or comprehension. Indeed, most compilers were careful not to claim too much. ‘Errors and Deficien- cies must unavoidably appear in every Work of this Kind, from the extreme Difficulty of procuring Information in some Things, and the fluctuating Variety of others’, as A Directory of Sheffield explained firmly in 1787. Many compilations made a caveat of this sort, and indicated a willingness to accept corrections and additions for future editions.