Debt imprisonment was one of the tools a creditor had to enforce a debt. When creditors believed that their debtors were defaulting, they could imprison debtors to ensure they would not disappear and debts would be settled. As a practice, debt imprisonment was never fundamentally challenged in the Middle Ages though the way it was executed did come under scrutiny. In the city of Bruges, the city magistrate regulated the practice. As debt imprisonment was an essential part of the commercial framework in Bruges, the city tried to avoid princely interference. However, merchants could also complain to princely courts about their imprisonment. If the city hesitated to address unjust practices in the existing framework, it risked losing these cases to princely courts. As princely institutions increased their control over debt imprisonment, the city government kept the mechanism of debt imprisonment while, for example, Antwerp sought alternative tools for creditors. The adaptations that did happen in Bruges were not the result of the requests of merchants, but a means of rather safeguarding its own jurisdictions from princely courts.

While town twinning has played a crucial role in reconciliation and reconstruction processes in Europe after World War II, urban historians have not yet paid sufficient attention to it. This special issue thus addresses this historiographical neglect through a set of case-studies that examine the role of twinned cities in post-war reconciliation and reconstruction between former enemy nations and across the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. The framework that underpins all contributions rests on the use of ‘twinned cities’ as an umbrella term to denote various forms of inter-municipal links and builds on similarly broad definitions of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘reconstruction’.

In early modern violence, location mattered, and where something took place communicated much to early modern urban residents about the people involved, the significance of the act and the likely judicial repercussions for their communities. This article uses GIS to trace the locations of homicides in early modern Bologna, Italy, with a ‘prepositional cartography’ that translates early modern Italian spatial mentalities into modern GIS analyses. Mapping homicides reveals much about their meaning and significance. From private buildings, streets and churches, early modern killers spoke a language of space to their audience.

Medieval Bruges was an important international economic hub in the late Middle Ages. Similar to other luxury goods, manuscripts produced in Bruges were intended for both local and international audiences. This article scrutinizes the specific urban context of Bruges as a multilingual contact zone focusing on quantitative data of extant manuscripts and case-studies of professional and non-professional book production. The dominance of francophone manuscripts in a Dutch-speaking town is noteworthy and called for an actively bilingual community of book professionals. Furthermore, the social competition of locally embedded social groups (court, merchants, craft guilds) influenced language choice as well. Both ‘official’ production of books for trade by professional writers and librarians, and the ‘private’ multilingual literary accomplishments of Bruges city-dwellers, illustrate the multilingual dynamics of urban contacts in Bruges.

This article focuses on house-destruction as a legal punishment, as prescribed and practised in Rome over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It argues that the reintroduction of the punishment by Pope Paul II (r. 1464–71), and its application by Pope Sixtus IV (r. 1471–84), should be read against contemporary papal attempts to increase their political and legal authority in the city, to the detriment of the authority wielded by municipal officials. By setting the Roman case against a wider chronological and geographical background, it also shows how it was representative of a broader European evolution, in which house-destruction was progressively abolished by municipal authorities, but continued to be practised by individuals holding more centralized power as a means to assert and display authority. Finally, it shows how house-destruction as a legal punishment was used as a political tool by Pope Sixtus IV alongside other practices of demolition as part of his urban renewal programme.

Urban histories of modern South Asia have centred on British Indian cities and the reign of colonial urbanism, with dependence on metropolitan imperatives and models regarded as givens. Focusing on Hyderabad, one of the subcontinent's five largest cities and capital of an autonomous princely state throughout the colonial era, this article establishes the analytical utility of princely urbanism as a framework for writing the history of South Asian cities. Characterized by state-directed planning, transnational urbanist networks and multiple overlapping property regimes, this mode of city development and its resonance points to hidden genealogies of modern urbanism.

This article addresses the beginnings of the twinning relationship between Coventry and Kiel to introduce and exemplify the idea of ‘urban internationalism’ as a new lens onto urban histories of town twinning initiatives and a contribution to the historiography of British town twinning. Focusing on paradiplomatic initiatives by municipal officials, religious dignitaries and other citizens in Coventry and Kiel, the article examines the role that cities played in British–German reconstruction and reconciliation in the period from the end of World War II until the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.

This article examines the relationship between public services and the urban middling sort in provincial England from 1550 to 1640 through comparative case-studies of the finance and management of waterworks, the creation of new skilled roles and the cultural import of water systems in Bristol, Chester and Ipswich. It argues that the middling sort were vital in establishing public services and that water provision centred not only on its value as a material and financial resource, but also as an expanding source of patronage and social capital that shaped and entrenched the emergence of middling groups in society.

Formalized in the 1970s through the Middlesbrough–Oberhausen Town Twinning partnership (Partnerschaft Oberhausen–Middlesbrough), the connection between the two post-industrial towns dates back further to informal connections in the early 1950s and an age of reconciliation between the two nations. This article explores the origins, mechanisms, benefits and challenges of town twinning by drawing upon a rich body of empirical evidence from local authority records, press coverage, interviews and community reminiscence. The study provides the first academic analysis of the changes, challenges, continuities and continued relevance of town twinning in one of Britain’s leading pro-Brexit areas.

The aim of this article is to offer a new conceptual framework for the study of various spaces in Istanbul during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. I contend that rather than the sharp distinction manifested with the public–private dichotomy, we need to focus on gradations of privacy. I offer qāpū and bāb as two new concepts borrowed from the period's own repertoire for representing the macro and micro ends of the spatial gradation. Theoretically, I draw on George Simmel's definition of doors as the interfaces of spatial formation.

The ability to capture, store and distribute water safely is fundamental to the health of urban and rural settlements alike. This is true for Hyderabad city, located in India's semi-arid Deccan region. I argue that an exegesis of the nineteenth-century conservation plans for Hyderabad's large, built water reservoir, Hussain Sagar, reveal multiple hydrosocial processes at work: class structures related to proximity and use of the lake's water; health concerns triggered by the water's ebb and flow; and enforcement challenges related to issues of shared governance. This article shows how conservation of a scarce resource brought together princely and colonial officials (often parsed along historiographical lines) to address a shared concern within an urban context. Such urban environmental co-operation offers a new princely urban perspective on the binaries of princely–colonial and/or ruler–ruled.

This article presents a comparative study of the industrial energy consumption in Ghent and Leiden, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It asks whether or not industrial development depended on the availability of coal. Whereas the Southern Low Countries had recourse to cheap coal from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards, the Northern Low Countries remained trapped in its ‘proto-fossil’ trajectory based on peat, lacking a full fossil-fuel transition. By using production data to estimate the fuel consumption by industry, it is argued that energy divergences did not matter for industrialization. Both in Ghent and in Leiden, industries such as brewing, sugar refining, glass making and textile production had already largely switched to coal by the end of the seventeenth century. Explanations for these early coal-burning trajectories should be found, not in the ‘lucky’ location of coal supplies, but in the demand and organization of coal-specific industry itself.

This article demonstrates how the introduction of a police office in mid-eighteenth-century Altona, a free town in the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Danish monarchy, catalysed practices and arguments in favour of privacy. By examination of police logs and correspondence from Altona to Copenhagen between 1759 and 1766, which included reports of conflicts over the implementation of the police instruction issued in 1754, we show how the process of establishing police regulation resulted in a greater emphasis on the outer door as a demarcation between street and house. Drawing specifically on a key conflict between a young merchant with his intended wife, their landlord and the chief of police, in which the supreme president also intervened, we demonstrate how arguments for and against the protection of the outer door helped to create room for privacy in the shifting landscape of bureaucratic opportunities offered by town and state.

The experience of the urban in nineteenth-century Hyderabad was interwoven with the experience of modern technologies like film. Cinema participated in constituting a modern public; practices of film viewing were practices of enacting the modern. Through a study of conflicts in the space of cinema, this article examines the politics of constituting and controlling the urban in the princely city of Hyderabad and the cantonment town of Secunderabad. It suggests that the princely modern adapted new technologies but was rooted in patrimonial traditions. The article also argues that the cantonment had a dependency relationship with the princely city, and urban space as constituted through cinema was the site of power negotiations between the princely ruler and the British.

This article provides a fresh perspective on the history of East German town twinning in the early era of détente. While previous studies have analysed East German town twinning solely as an instrument of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) to establish paradiplomatic relations in Western Europe, I explore the dynamic inter-relation between global, national and local actors and the ambiguities of urban détente. I reveal the importance of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities (Deutsche Städte- und Gemeindetag, DStuG), the East German association of municipalities, which crucially shaped the East German concept of urban détente through practising trans-local exchange. The role played by the DStuG was backed by the United Towns Organization (UTO), a non-governmental organization founded in 1957 whose aim was to form a global network of cities beyond the East–West divide. In 1960, the DStuG joined the UTO as a member and consciously used its new position to expand its scope and improve its national status through actively working on the conceptualization of urban détente. However, the conflicts between the East German foreign ministry and the UTO grew bigger, resulting in the marginalization of the DStuG and town twinning in the SED’s concept of détente. These conflicts encouraged the UTO to redefine its global approach.

This article explores the spatial dimensions of Athens' carnival and their change in the course of a century. It is based on two polarities: first, that of the old city and the new city, which was related to the contrast between traditional and modern culture in the celebration of carnival. Both the old city and traditional culture were increasingly undervalued and denounced until the inter-war years, when nostalgia for old places and practices developed. The second major contrast is that between the centre of Athens and its periphery. There was a strong tendency towards the concentration of carnival events and crowds in the centre of Athens until the 1900s. This development is correlated with the reinforcement of the middle class and its cultural hegemony. A new autonomy of the neighbourhoods of the popular classes in the inter-war period did not result in the revival of popular carnival culture.