In 1960s Tokyo, late-night noise became a source of annoyance for urban-dwellers in residential areas. The problem was primarily due to young people who congregated around small food establishments eating and drinking. The situation led to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to attempt to remove such small businesses through the 1969 Environmental Pollution Prevention Ordinance. However, the section of the ordinance dealing with late-night noise hazards was diluted by the political parties, who supported the interests of such businesses, hence failing to satisfy local residents who were victims of the problem.

This article offers the first detailed history of the children's playground in Britain in the early twentieth century. Despite being a common feature of towns and cities, the playground has rarely been examined by historians. In response, the article charts how changing conceptions of childhood, alternative visions of the city, technological innovation and shifting ideas about health and exercise shaped both the imagined function and material form of the playground ideal. Making visible the historical assumptions hidden in playground swings and slides helps to contextualize both existing scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century adventure playground and present-day efforts to create more equitable urban environments.

Scholarship on architecture and urbanism in antiquity has focused on building activity and investment in the fabric of cities as positive processes, typically starting from the assumption that such developments were welcomed by inhabitants – but were they? This article examines objections to urban renewal and the construction of monumental public building in the Roman world. Specifically, it focuses on the city of Prusa and the controversy surrounding the renovation of its civic centre by the local politician Dio Chrysostom in the early 2nd century AD. Using speeches and letters written at the time, the article presents both a new interpretation of this specific episode and brings to the fore the rarely articulated and yet highly controversial nature of building projects that are traditionally thought of as being beneficial. In the conclusion, we also see how this example contributes to research on the issue of heritage as a pre-modern phenomenon.

Following indigenous thought, this article urges readers to understand that the past lies before us, more knowable than our ideologies ordinarily allow. The article specifically asserts that if, for England, imperialism was the last model of city-building, in the United States it was the first. A pattern of ‘improvement’ financed by negative externalities established from first contact remains visible, especially in US metropolitan areas. The article's example is one site in Ohio. Indicative of virtually all US metropolitan areas, it has nonetheless a specific history that includes an occasion, recorded in negotiator Hendrick Aupaumut's 1792 narrative, when a break from the pattern was possible.

Focusing on the largely unpublished ‘city accounts’ (‘Stadsrekeningen’) of Bruges, this article examines the city's giving of prestigious Baltic beeswax to their lords, the Valois and (later) Habsburg dukes of Burgundy. It sheds new light on urban government by analysing how civic leaders across north-western Europe used the apiary product to manage often fraught relationships with their rulers and reinforce their identities as trading centres or outposts of international repute. More broadly, the gifting of Baltic beeswax points to the political and diplomatic prestige associated with the trade and display of the commodity in the later medieval period and the desire of urban leaders and communities to extract symbolic and political capital from its exchange.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the all-powerful Johannesburg Council, comprising English-speaking middle-class white males, realized the importance of providing leisure spaces and sport facilities for its white residents and prioritized the building of swimming baths in their suburbs. It was regarded as the ideal facility, supporting the growing demand for outdoor activity. The upswing in the economy in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, expedited this endeavour, as it eased the financial expenditure. As a result, Johannesburg could boast 10 new swimming baths by the end of the 1930s. The council was adamant that the swimming baths should be on a par with international standards. This venture fitted comfortably into the larger project of transforming the economically vibrant Johannesburg into a modern city. In contrast, the first swimming bath for Johannesburg's black residents was only built in the mid-1930s, proving that racial considerations determined the council's provision of leisure facilities.

This article investigates the creation of a shelter for migrants in fifteenth-century Venice. As an ephemeral structure, the shelter raises questions regarding the scope, mutability and materiality of the city's early modern urban fabric. Further, due to its mission to shelter eastern refugees, the shelter is embedded in foreign policy matters stemming from and aiming to stabilize Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. This article positions the structure in the context of an early modern refugee crisis and Venice's multi-pronged urban and architectural responses in poor relief.

In recent years, the permeability of the Iron Curtain seems to have become a new paradigm in the field of post-war history – urban history included. It is clear, however, that significant differences existed among Eastern Bloc countries in terms of how open they were to Western influences, and to what extent their governments allowed those countries’ citizens – professionals among them – to gain experiences abroad. This article investigates the ways city planning and heritage policy in state socialist Hungary were influenced by international trends; it explores the roles Hungarian architects, urban planners and other experts played after 1956 in knowledge transfers, i.e. the transmission of novel ideas in the field of architecture and urban planning, with special regard to the renewal of inner-city areas and historic town centres. Besides reflecting critically on concepts of the strict East–West divide, the article also calls attention to the limits of freedom inherent even in a relatively liberal Eastern Bloc regime: various forms of state control – including state security surveillance – continued to characterize the system until its collapse in 1989, affecting the mobility of urbanists and architects as well as all other professional groups.

This article revisits the origins of small towns in medieval Hungary from the perspective of their owners and seigneurs. The fourteenth-century development of small towns on the estates of private landowners resulted from the coincidence of several factors. Among these, the article considers the intersection of royal and private interests. The aristocrats’ concern to endow their estate centres with privileges or attract new settlers to their lands was dependent on royal approval; likewise, the right to hold annual fairs had to be granted by the kings, and one had to be a loyal retainer to be worthy of these grants. The royal model of supporting the mendicant orders, which were gaining ground in Hungary from the thirteenth century onwards, added a further dimension to the overlords’ development strategies. This shows that royal influence, directly or indirectly, had a major impact on the development of towns on private lands in the Angevin period (1301–87).

Hungarian historiography needs to review its negative representation of towns and burghers typical of the first half of nineteenth-century Hungary, as Vera Bácskai, a major figure of Hungarian urban history suggested in a paradigmatic paper. Starting from her statements, this article examines the historical narratives of secondary school textbooks and wider historical syntheses of Hungarian history published in the age of Austria-Hungary (1867–1918). The author shows that the burghers’ negative image was rooted in the political fights prior to the 1848 Revolution and the emergence of modern nationalism.

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’.

Between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed more than one in seven of the city's roads. Renaming was an important marker of revolutionary change in China's largest and most foreign-influenced city. Road renaming in socialist China has been commonly understood to have been extensive. This article argues, however, that the nature and extent of renaming in socialist Shanghai was less dramatic than has been assumed. It demonstrates that renaming was not simply an iconoclastic process, but rather involved the pragmatic weighing of symbolic change against potential disruption. Further, it contends that renaming was driven by a desire to order the city, in line with the CCP's modernist worldview.

Post-catastrophic damage cartography constitutes a serious research gap in the field of urban history. While fire and war damage maps have been made for centuries, qualitative analyses of these documents, especially from a comparative and transnational perspective, have appeared only recently. In response, this article tracks the coeval emergence of urban archaeology, heritage zoning and war damage mapping across Europe. Based on detailed studies of early post-war Munich and Warsaw, it demonstrates that damage mapping was as much about recording loss as it was about reshaping and reimagining Europe's historic city centres.

This article analyses a case of female patronage in Edwardian Leicester, a drinking fountain surmounted by a statuette dedicated to a female Anglo-Saxon ruler. The bequest, by Edith Gittins (1845–1910), is contextualized within the nineteenth-century perspectives on the past that identified the roots of the English people in the Anglo-Saxon period. The article explores the cultural, social and gender implications of Gittins’ intentions behind the bequest both for women's rights and for the use of the past in the construction of civic identity. These have not hitherto received sufficient attention. In order to address these questions the article exploits the potential of a 3D visualization of the urban setting where the fountain was intended to be erected to help frame the historical inquiry.

This article investigates a devout society centring on the household of Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509) at Collyweston in Northamptonshire and St Katherine's guild in the neighbouring market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire. The discussion unveils Margaret Beaufort's place at the heart of a vibrant devotional community, whose members, among them a core group of lay and religious townswomen, were united by their geography and shared devotional interests. Ultimately, this article sheds new light on the overlapping spiritual networks of an important market town and the household of a highly influential noblewoman, whilst also demonstrating how Margaret's sponsorship of the society informed her self-fashioning as a pious matriarch of the house of Tudor.

This article explores how the publisher Cornelis vander Plasse managed to promote the literary career of the Dutch playwright Gerbrand Bredero (1585–1618) by using Amsterdam as a place. It is concerned with the way in which this Amsterdam-based publisher took decisions both to comply with Bredero's work and to derive maximum benefit from its publication. One of his strategies was to deploy the city as a recognizable trademark to Bredero's work. By using the advantages that the ‘place’ of Amsterdam offered him, he proved himself an expert in marketing and advertising, laying the foundation of Bredero's reputation as both an Amsterdam-based and national author in the centuries to follow.

The literature on nineteenth-century Newcastle city region is a narrative of industrial progress premised upon technological prowess. But there is another story to be told about the transformation of a relatively small northern town into a conurbation with the attributes of a modern city. This second process of ‘rounding out’ the city with social, cultural and political institutions to accompany the economic prowess is relatively under-reported. In this study, we follow 1,621 individuals and compare their record of being mentioned in the literature to their participation in 343 local institutions. The focus is directed towards those who are much more visible in the literature compared to institutional membership – ‘narrative heroes’ – and those with the reverse pattern, much more to be found in institutions than in the literature – civic builders. The two sets of individuals are discussed and reasons for their contrasting positions are suggested.

This article will argue that the history of East India Company Bombay – like that of many foreign British enterprises, and like many other ‘global’ cities and indeed colonies generally – is best understood as the product of contradictions and contingencies. Bombay was never easy to define geographically and its identity as an ‘English’ settlement was precarious. It could not insulate itself militarily from the powerful polities nearby; nor could it always rely on the loyalty of its subjects, whether English or of other ethnicities. It was a city constructed out of crisis and tragedy, trial and error, a history that the story about a European dynastic ‘dowry’ obscures, and which Company representatives worked hard to conceal.

This article brings together three aspects of early modern urban life: the later stages of the urban renaissance, the consumer revolution and horse racing. Those towns identified as having an effectively commercialized ‘race week’ between 1750 and 1805 challenge notions of any trickle-down effect from London. Successful organization and funding came largely from co-operation rather than division between the county aristocracy and gentry and the urban middling sort. Both groups attended, while race weeks were sufficiently popular for many rural and urban workers to sacrifice production time for the allure of their leisure experiences. Racecourse consumer space, with its booths, tents and stands, allowed spectators to enjoy either cross-class mixing or increased social differentiation, the latter most especially on the permanent stone grandstands, an innovation of the period.