The question ‘what is the city’ raised by Martindale in his edition of Max Weber's The City is an omnipresent one in urban history. This analysis of urban historiography since 1840 explores two definitional strands, each with many theoretical dimensions. The first is a somewhat self-contained conception of the city and relies on rural-urban contrasts; the second is a more open conceptualization of the city. The article tries to unravel the different approaches rather than preferring one approach to the other

This paper analyses in their political context the festival decorations created by Paolo Amato, architect to the Senate of Palermo, in 1686 for the festival of the patron saint of that city. One of these decorations, that of the main altar in the cathedral, is of particular interest in that it represents a map of the city itself. An analysis of this map in relation to other seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maps of Palermo reveals its political and social aim and biases, but also shows that it was unusually up to date and accurate as a representation of the city at that date. Such a representation not only marks a striking cul-de-sac in the history of the development of cartography, but sheds light on the relationship between forging politically acceptable identities for a city and their representation in the early modern period. The map in particular, but all the decorations, or apparati, in general are interpreted in the context of the weakened Spanish empire (to which Sicily belonged) and of the internal politics of the island and of Palermo.

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.

The briefest inspection of the English urban hierarchy during the long eighteenth century reveals this as a period of immense change. However, regional analysis of the temporal and spatial patterns of these pre-census developments relies on using a variety of non-demographic sources to produce a series of urban demographic ‘snap-shots’ of the urban population. Employing this ‘demographic photography’ in early modern northwest England allows detailed investigation of the dynamics of the entire urban system. This reveals the deep roots of urban development in the region and points to an eighteenth-century urban revolution. Towns grew faster than the overall population, but this growth was unevenly distributed; both large and small towns exhibited strong and weak growth, making changes in the urban hierarchy inevitable and far-reaching. The most notable trend was the changing geography of the system: Cheshire towns grew far less rapidly than their increasingly industrial neighbours in Lancashire and the urban locus underwent a definite shift northwards. The fact that the urban patterns of growth appear to have preceded the period of maximum industrial growth by some forty to fifty years forces us to rethink the relationship between industrial and urban development.

Much of our knowledge concerning the ‘urban renaissance’ in eighteenth-century provincial towns comes from a reading of contemporary urban histories. Too often they are referred to purely for their factual information, and insufficient consideration is given to their relationship to the society for which they were written. This article examines in detail the series of histories written in Newcastle over the long eighteenth century. Although the content of these histories can appear formulaic, with considerable borrowings of material, there are significant differences. These reflect the different agenda which the respective authors were addressing and the changing composition of the readership. Urban histories can provide an invaluable insight into the dynamics of urban society and the way in which contemporaries perceived and presented it.

The history of cities in the Low Countries at the end of Middle Ages is commonly presented as one of discontinuity in which old textile centres collapsed, and were replaced by new centres such as Antwerp, Leiden, Lille and Amsterdam which were in fundamental respects entirely unlike their medieval predecessors. This conventional interpretation is challenged with reference to Ghent and Douai. Neither suffered devastating economic decline, social trauma or political upheaval in the period, and both enjoyed a degree of relative economic success. Contradictions are also identified, especially the way that economic flexibility was associated with an intensification of social conservatism. This process not only helped produce a characteristically ‘early modern’ social order but also decisively linked the ‘medieval’ with the ‘early modern’ in these two cities.

The automobile is often misconstrued as being exclusively responsible for the decline of traditional street culture. This paper argues that the marginalisation of street vendors may also be related to developing definitions of the street as the locus of respectability, unobstructed circulation, nationalism and civic pride. Street entrepreneurs of the 1850s became urban nuisances by the 1900s, associated more with obstruction and underservedness as with convenience and enterprise. Licensing records of bootblacks and coffee-stall keepers as objects of municipal benevolence reveal their economic and social roles in the micro-geography of the city. While nostalgia can distort the realities of historical and contemporary public spaces, the street evacuated of social density and diversity is one of the great losses of modern urban life.

Early modern Londoners had access to weekly reports on the numbers of deaths. These weekly ‘books of death’ that the Parish Clerks' Company compiled provided the base for a city-wide system whereby the number of deaths in every parish was reported to the Lord Mayor and the monarch. Under James and Charles royal interest led to the extension of the parishes listed in the Bills of Mortality to cover the wider metropolis while readers developed strategies for interpreting these weekly figures. In 1662 statistics derived from the annual summaries of the London Bills provided the base for John Graunt's path-breaking actuarial calculations. However, despite Graunt's demonstration of the importance of supplementary data that the Bills had incorporated, a system geared to report the weekly ebb and flow of epidemics was unable to provide the statistics that statisticians wanted. Rather than blaming the Bills, disappointed scholars claimed that the female parish searchers were incompetent.

In analysing the practicability of Victorian proposals to dispose of urban wastes, valuable insights may be gained from the commentaries of agriculturalists and their scientific advisers. The paper reconstructs the debate as to how the sewage of towns and cities might be transferred to farmland, the developing concepts of sewage farming and the ‘sewage farm’, the increasing disillusionment of farmers with sewage irrigation and, finally, the acknowledgement by the turn of the century that the recycling of such wastes was irrelevant to the needs of town and country alike.

Sources of information abound for the study of German urban demography in the ‘late’ early modern era – the period from about 1600 to 1800. Yet we are still a long way from a comprehensive grasp of urbanpopulation trends. Frequently-cited figures for the total population of German cities are often based on the uncritical replication of casual estimates. Intensive case studies which exploit the full range of available sources are more reliable, yet only the smallest towns can be subjected to the process of ‘total reconstitution’. A true understanding of German urban demography in the early modern era may come less from the endless accumulation of data than from a thoughtful comparison of findings from different cities.

While the scholarly literature largely ignores issues of suburban population size, density and heterogeneity, during the 1920s a number of large, densely-settled, heterogeneous suburbs emerged on the fringe of the largest US cities. The article identifies forty-one of these potential ‘city suburbs’ which are defined as communities having minimum thresholds of 25,000 population and residential densities of 6,000 per square mile. City suburbs may have claimed nearly 25 per cent of the suburban populations of the nation's ten largest metropolitan districts. Drawing largely on data for midwestern cities, city suburbs are further identified through their diverse populations by class, ethnicity and race; varied housing stocks and economic activities including retailing, professional services and manufacturing; and political independence from their central city. Nearly equally divided between residential and industrial suburbs, the former, including Oak Park, Illinois, ‘fit’ traditional middle-class suburban descriptions while neighbouring Cicero represented workingclass, industrial communities.

The tenement is the traditional form of urban housing in Scotland and most tenements were built for rent. From the early nineteenth century onwards, private landlords in Scotland employed ‘factors’ to manage the houses on their behalf, responsible for houseletting, rent collection and the organization of repairs and maintenance. This paper examines the nature of the house factoring profession in terms of its organization and uses case studies to illustrate the way individual firms operated. The representation of the profession through factors’ associations is also examined and there is a consideration of the negative image which factors have acquired. The paper explores the changing nature of factoring as tenement flats have been sold off and factors have become agents not for individual landlords but for a multiplicity of owner-occupiers.