The importance of legal institutions as mediators of social relations in early modern towns has long been recognized. However, opinion differs over the extent to which early modern courts generated social conflict or resolved it through promoting consensus. This article brings to light a neglected jurisdiction and argues that while the university courts inevitably generated conflict when pursuing their regulative agenda, they nonetheless offered Cambridge inhabitants a considerable resource which was used extensively in both the speedy resolution and the vexatious prolongation of a wide range of disputes which tended to cut across rather than deepen town–gown hostilities.

In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish thinkers Miguel Giginta and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera proposed a model for welfare reform based on the design of institutions in which the organization of space made possible new ways of imposing discipline. In these institutions, known as Casas de Misericordia, the relation between the disposition of space and the possibility to control and influence the will of individuals was studied. This new consideration of space had a profound influence on areas as diverse as urban development and penitentiary systems.

The industrial towns of northern England have been largely overlooked during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article examines newspaper advertising, directories, public building and improvement in Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield and identifies a middling, consumerist society, where urban culture was firmly rooted in the localities in which it developed. The nature of this culture challenges simplistic understandings of metropolitan dominance and questions the utility of national models of consumerism and ‘politeness’ that ignore the importance of regional variation and provincialism.

This article examines the relationship between gender, occupation, illiteracy and economic development in Leicester from 1760 to 1890. Although Leicester's economy was at a proto-industrial stage of development, heavily dependent on domestic and workshop-based industries, interesting comparisons may be made with industrializing factory towns. There was similar reliance on child and female labour, and the industries appeared to develop in a climate of illiteracy. This new local case study is especially important for previous research concerning gender, occupation, illiteracy and economic development has tended to focus on urban market towns or newly developing factory towns.

The city of Ferrol was designed ‘ex-novo’ by military engineers to serve the Spanish monarchy and to house its naval base and dockyards. The principles of stratification on which society was based, and the need to defend the city from enemy attacks and to discipline workers led to a spatial plan that segregated the Navy officers and the working classes. In the nineteenth century, the naval base and the enclave economy of Ferrol became obsolete. Furthermore, the new political culture of the nation state and liberal democracy complicated further the task of controlling the working class. The Spanish Civil War allowed for the updating of Ferrol's spatial plan thanks to the identification of a single enemy both inside and outside: the political repression of the working-class became a major issue in the victory against the II República. The Franco regime meant the return of a segregated and militarized Ferrol, whereas in the 1980s, European integration and the transition to democracy made this model obsolete.

It was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor. Augustinus, De Civitate Dei

The article considers the relationship between the middle class and urban place in England. Using the concept of identity, it examines changes in the meaning of the term ‘middle class’ between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth century and how these changes were related to the configuration of urbanity. In the earlier twentieth century, it is argued, state and nation replaced the urban as the principal referent for middle-class identity.

This article explores the relationship between colonial ideologies and urban planning in the context of the pre-war Japanese empire. It does so by examining the second largest city in what was Japan's first formal overseas colony of Taiwan. By exploring some of the key texts through which the city of Takao (Kaohsiung) was depicted and its future debated in the colonial era, the ways in which imperial ideologies, such as the ‘southern advance’ of the Japanese empire, influenced and were reflected in urban space will be considered.

This article explores the ways in which a young woman who migrated from Londonderry to London in the 1930s acquired and used spatial knowledge of the city. Using detailed diary evidence the article maps everyday action spaces, and examines themes such as the use of visual cues in the accumulation of spatial knowledge, the use of maps and signs, the influence of previous travel experiences and the organization of search and exploration strategies in the city.

This article focuses on aspects of the economic evolution of La Coruña during the 1940s and 1950s by analysing the entrepreneurial activities in a stage characterized by an urban demographic take-off. The tertiary sector, based mainly on port traffic, fishing, commerce and other traditional urban functions, contributed significantly to the diversification of the economic structure of this town.

Through the concept of ‘character’ or ‘urban racial type’, traversing literature, science and metropolitan life, Bertellini reconsiders early American cinema's colour-based biracialism epitomized by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the New York-based film industry race also emerged from the city's dense intermingling of ‘white ethnics’ and broader shifts in epistemological emphasis – from inheritance to the environment. If Italian immigrants were racialized as innately violent in early gangster films, after 1915 heartbreaking melodramas of destitution and misfortunes adopted instead a combination of still othering and universal characterizations.

Half the people in ‘the Bend’ are christened Pasquale…When the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits.Jacob Riis, 1890

I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person.Actor and director George Beban, 1921

The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and the landscape of regulated prostitution that resulted, are read as part of a mid-nineteenth-century crisis of government. Ultimately, the political and discursive construction of Chinese racial/cultural difference reveals the limits of ‘imperial governmentality’ as much as the ambition of colonial sexual discipline.

Pressures for cleanliness in inter-war Tel-Aviv stemmed from the British government, the autonomous Jewish Municipality, local residents and visiting Zionists. This article reconstructs Tel-Aviv's sanitation during the 1920s and 1930s, describes and analyses attempts to clean the urban public space and their limited success. It is argued that the sanitary reality and the issue of cleanliness and squalor in Tel-Aviv, ‘The First Hebrew City’, reflected British colonial policies, Zionist national ideologies, ethnic and social stereotypes.

In September 1896, a virulent plague epidemic broke out in the colonial port city of Bombay. Central to existing interpretations of the epidemic has been the pervasive assumption that colonial policies aimed at suppressing the disease were principally informed by ‘contagionist’ etiological doctrine. However, this article argues that long-standing ‘localist’ etiological theories continued to exercise a critical influence over colonial policies. It thereby highlights the explicit ‘class’ bias that informed the colonial state's anti-plague offensive, which was largely directed at the urban poor.

The rise and decline of Changchun is examined focusing on its urban character in terms of symbolic identity and built form. Based on an analysis of physical characteristics of the urban fabric and architectural forms of the state buildings, the study explores and identifies the ideological underpinnings of city planning and the methodological sources of architectural design to understand how the city was shaped and why.

The Hobrecht Plan of 1862 is the framework for Berlin's urban development. The changing assessments of this plan over the past 150 years can be followed using contemporary evaluations of street and park layout and the Mietskaserne (tenement). Following early suggestions that it was authoritarian, and persistent criticism that it was responsible for bad housing, it later came to be seen more positively, as renewal and conservation took over from clearance and when reunification highlighted its significance as a common factor in the new capital city.

The article tries to identify the factors that led to urban growth in India in the period we style ‘early medieval India’, viz the centuries between the decline of the Gupta empire and the rise of the Islamic sultanates in northern India. In doing so, the author obviously responds to the seminal work of R.S. Sharma, without, however, even mentioning it. Sharma is one of the most influential advocates of the school of ‘Indian feudalism’, and he linked the decline of cities in India during the period under review to the decline of long-distance trade (caused especially by the decline of Roman trade with India) on the one hand and the feudal transformation of agrarian relations on the other. The economic crisis (the emphasis on which easily identifies Sharma as a staunch Marxist) went along with a socio-religious crisis, during which people expected the fourth age of Hinduism, the age of Kali, to draw to a close. Thakur does not deny the importance of economic factors completely, but tries to weigh them against other factors, which he styles ‘technological and ecological’ and ‘institutional and political’. His conclusion in this respect is somewhat inconclusive as ‘no single factor initiated urban growth’, though in a surprising move, he adds that three phases can be made out which are characterized by agrarian expansion (AD 600–750), emergence of empires (750–1000 – this phase is obviously related to the institutional and political factors) and finally the predominance of trade (1000–1200). In what sense this development is based on ‘mechanisms’ (as alluded to in the title), remains completely open.

Modernization and westernization in the urban morphology of Istanbul during the late Ottoman period has frequently been presented by Turkish scholars in a linear process, linking urban development plans and later changes to the influence of historic figures, such as Helmuth von Moltke, a Prussian military adviser of the 1830s. A more holistic reading of this phenomenon based on primary sources, including letters in German by von Moltke, reveals a complex array of forces, responses and reactions, and simultaneously, a more modest and less seminal role for von Moltke in the development of the historic city.