Historical Urban Studies Series – serie

This is a coherent and integrated set of essays around the theme of governance addressing a wide range of questions on the organisation and legitimation of authority. At the heart of the book is a set of topics which have long attracted the attention of urbanists and urban historians all over the world: the growth and reform of urban local government, local-centre relationships, public health and pollution, local government finance, the nature of local social élites and of participation in local government. Approaching these topics through the concept of governance not only raises a series of new questions but also extends the scope of enquiry for the historian seeking to understand towns and cities all over the world in a period of rapid change. Questions of governance must be central to a variety of enquiries into the nature of the urban place. There are questions about the setting of agendas, about when a localised or neighbourhood issue becomes a big city or even national political issue, about what makes a ’problem’. Public health and related matters form a central part of the ’issues’ especially for the British; in North America fire and the development of urban real estate have dominated; in India the security of the colonial government had a prominent place. The historical dynamic of these essays follows the change from the chartered governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries towards the representative regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth. However, such historical change is not regarded as inevitable, and the effects of bureaucratic growth, regulatory regimes, the legitimating role of rational and scientific knowledge as well as the innovatory use of ritual and space are all dealt with at length.

Property is central to any historical analyses of production, reproduction and consumption. It lies at the heart of discussions of material culture, class relations and the household economy. Recent work has begun to look beyond the acquisition and possession of goods to examine what the disposal, transmission and giving of property might tell us about changing society and culture. This landmark collection of articles represents a wide range of approaches to and perspectives on the ownership, use and transmission of property in eighteenth and nineteenth-century towns. An introductory essay highlights the importance of property and inheritance in shaping social, cultural, economic and political structures and interactions within and between towns and cities. Writing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors then explore in detail the changing meaning of property to households and individuals; the social, economic and geographical contexts of inheritance practices; the geography of wealth; the role of gender in shaping property relations and, perhaps above all, the enduring link between property, the family and the household in urban contexts.

The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of museums in towns and cities across Britain. As well as providing a focus for collections of artifacts and a place of educational recreation, this work argues that municipal museums had a further, social role. In a situation of rapid urban growth, allied to social and cultural changes on a scale hitherto unknown, it was inevitable that traditional class and social hierarchies would come under enormous pressure. As a result, urban elites began to look to new methods of controlling and defining the urban environment. One such manifestation of this was the growth of the public museum. In earlier centuries museums were the preserve of learned and respectable minority, yet by the end of the nineteenth century one of the principal rationales of museums was the education, or 'improvement', of the working classes. In the control of museums too there was a corresponding shift away from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators. This work is in part a study of the creation of professional authority and autonomy by museum curators. More importantly though, it is about the stablization of middle-class identities by the end of the nineteenth century around new hierarchies of cultural capital. Public museums were an important factor in constructing the identity and authority of certain groups with access to, and control over, them. By examining urban identities through the cultural lens of the municipal museum, we are able to reconsider and better understand the subtleties of nineteenth-century urban society.

How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

The early modern period is often characterised as a time that witnessed the rise of a new and powerful merchant class across Europe. From Italy and Spain in the south, to the Low Countries and England in the north, men of business and trade came to play an increasingly pivotal role in the culture, politics and economies of western Europe. This book takes a comparative approach to the effect such merchants and traders had on the urban history of market places - streets, squares and civic buildings - in some of the great commercial European cities between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It looks at how this in period, the transformations of designated commercial areas were important enough to modify relationships throughout the entire urban context. Market places tend to be very ancient, continuing to function for centuries on the same location; but between the middle of the fourteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth, their structures began to change as new regulations and patterns of manufacture, distribution and consumption began to install a new uniformity and geometry on the market place. During the period covered by this study, most major European cities undertook the rebuilding of entire zones, constructing new buildings, demolishing existing structures and embellishing others. This book analyses the intentions of innovation, in parallel with sanitary and hygienic reasons, the juridical regulations of the architecture of certain building types and the urban strategies as efficient tools to better control the economic activities within the city.

Despite much recent interest in the area of urban governance, little work has been done on the changing ethical standards of urban leaderships, 'governing' institutions or the policing of public life. Yet the issue of ethical standards in public life has become a central concern in contemporary public discourse; with issues of public probity, moral order and personal standards re-emerging as central features of political debate. This volume places these debates into their historical perspective by examining the linkages between processes of 'modernisation', urbanisation and the ethical standards of governance and public life. It considers how ethical debates arise as a result of differential access to positions of authority and from competition for public resources. The contributions are drawn from a wide range of scholarly and disciplinary backgrounds and provide a broad analysis of the phenomenon of corruption, assessing how debates about corruption arose, the narratives used to criticise established modes of public conduct and their consequences for urban leadership.

Based on a wide variety of government and civic records, this book traces the evolution of the changing nature of city status, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with an explanation of how city status first became connected to cathedrals in the medieval period, the book explores how during the nineteenth century, links evolved between Anglican diocesan sub-divisions and city creation. It then shows how in a few years, between 1888 and 1907, the traditional interpretation of a city was overturned as the most major British industrial and commercial towns received city status and lord mayoralties. The second half of the book concentrates on city status during the twentieth century, and particularly the politicisation of the process and the linking of grants to royal occasions. The study concludes by looking at the city status competitions of 2000 and 2002 in relation to the previous two hundred years of city history.

The field of urban environmental history is a relatively new one, yet it is rapidly moving to the forefront of scholarly research and is the focus of much interdisciplinary work. Given the environmental problems facing the modern world it is perhaps unsurprising that historians, geographers, political, natural and social scientists should increasingly look at the environmental problems faced by previous generations, and how they were regarded and responded to. This volume reflects this growing concern, and reflects many of the key concerns and issues that are essential to our understanding of the problems faced by cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Addressing a variety of environmental issues, such as clean water supply, the provision/retention of green space, and noise pollution, that faced European and North American cities the essays in this volume highlight the common responses as well as the differences that characterised the reactions to these trans-national concerns.

The question of who actually ran cities in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries has been increasingly debated in recent years. As well as trying to understand the distribution of political power and the rise of broad political participation, urban historians have questioned how and whether elites retained influence in municipal government. The essays in this collection provide a detailed examination of the relationship between urban elites and the exercise of 'power', bringing together economic, social and cultural history with the political history of power resources and decision-making. The volume challenges common perceptions of a monolithic urban elite by looking at specific case studies. Collectively these essays provide a more sophisticated view of the exercise of urban power as the negotiation of various elite groups defined by their economic, social, political or cultural privilege. To contribute to this complex account of the history of cities, elites, and their influence, the collection applies a range of methodological approaches to studying European and American cities, as well as the wider world.

The late nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented levels of urban growth as migration swelled the population of European cities to new heights. The resulting problems of overcrowding and inadequate civic utilities prompted the governing elites to look for new planning solutions to address the needs of an increasingly urbanised society. At the same time young people were also increasingly recognised as being adversely affected, both politically and morally, by the on-going process of urbanization. Church groups, civic authorities, middle-class reformers and political movements all tried to steer youth toward their own concept of respectable behaviour, concepts that often tended to share many similarities in their paternalistic emphasis upon social discipline. This volume directly addresses the confluence of these issues, the point at which the city government, youth and public space meet and the resulting problems and tensions that were often created. Whether it be the corruption of the rural youth flooding into the cities at the beginning of the twentieth century, battles between Hitler Youth and working-class gangs in Nazi Germany, hooliganism in 1950s Hungary or the appropriation of, or withdrawal from, public spaces by youths in more recent times, all the chapters in this book explore ways in which authorities and adult groups have sought to control young people, both directly and indirectly. Drawing on a broad selection of methods and disciplines, a wide variety of case studies from across Europe are used to investigate the interactions between youth and authority, and show how these adapted and changed over time and in different countries. By taking a fresh look at these issues within a comparative framework, this volume furthers our understanding of modern European society during the twentieth century.

In recent years the concept of 'civil society' has become central to the historian's understanding of class, cultural and political power in the nineteenth-century town and city. Increasingly clubs and voluntary societies have been regarded as an important step in the formation of formal political parties, particularly for the working and middle classes. The result of this is the assertion that the more associations existing in a particular society, the deeper democracy becomes entrenched. In order to test this hypothesis, this volume brings together essays by an international group of urban historians who examine the construction of civil society from associational activity in the urban place. From their studies, it soon becomes clear that such simple propositions do not adequately reflect the dynamics of nineteenth-century urban society and politics. Urban associations were ideological in purpose and deliberately discriminatory and as such set the boundaries of civil society. Thus competing and segmented associations were not only an indication of pluralism and strength, but also highlighted a fundamental weakness when faced down by the interests of the state. Through a wide array of urban associations in a broad range of settings, comprising Austria and Bratislava, France and Italy, the Netherlands, Austro-Hungary, England, Scotland and the US, this volume reflects on the construction of class, nation and culture in the associations of the nineteenth-century urban place. In so doing it shows that a deep and interlocking civil society does not automatically lead to a rise in democratic activity. Expansion of the networks of urban association could equally result in greater subdivision and to the fragmentation and isolation of certain groups. Partition as much as coherence is our understanding of civil society and associations in the nineteenth-century urban place.

Recent years have seen sustained public debate and controversy over the 'greening' of European cities, associated with the environmental movement, pressures of urban redevelopment, and the promotional strategies of cities competing in a global market. But the European debate over urban green space has a long history dating back to Victorian concerns for the 'green lungs' of the city to combat the health and social problems caused by rapid population and industrial growth. This book explores the multiplicity of green space developments in the modern city - ranging over parks and commons, garden suburbs and the cities in the park, allotment gardens, green belts and national urban parks. It is concerned not only with the different types of green space but the many influences shaping their evolution, from international planning ideas, to the rise of modern-day sport and leisure, and the effects of the transport revolution. No less vital in this story is the interaction of the many actors involved in the often fractious political process of creating green spaces - architects and planners, politicians, developers and other businessmen, NGOs and local residents. This volume is particularly concerned with contexts: how international planning ideas are transmitted and adapted in different European cities; how the construction of green space is affected by local power structures and relationships; and how ordinary people perceive and use green spaces, quite often at variance with official designs. The European City and Green Space looks at these and other issues through the prism of four metropoles - London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg. All represent different types of North European city, yet each has experienced distinctive economic, political and cultural trajectories, whilst also facing powerful challenges and problems of similar kinds with regard to green space. This volume examines how each has responded to them and what patterns emerge.

This book explores the social history of colonial Bombay in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a pivotal time in its emergence as a modern metropolis. Drawing together strands that hitherto have been treated in a piecemeal fashion and based on a variety of archival sources, the book offers a systematic analytical account of historical change in a premier colonial city. In particular, it considers the ways in which the turbulent changes unleashed by European modernity were negotiated, appropriated or resisted by the colonised in one of the major cities of the Indian Ocean region. A series of crises in the 1890s triggered far-reaching changes in the relationship between state and society in Bombay. The city’s colonial rulers responded to the upheavals of this decade by adopting a more interventionist approach to urban governance. The book shows how these new strategies and mechanisms of rule ensnared colonial authorities in contradictions that they were unable to resolve easily and rendered their relationship with local society increasingly fractious. The study also explores important developments within an emergent Indian civil society. It charts the density and diversity of the city’s expanding associational culture and shows how educated Indians embraced a new ethic of ’social service’ that sought to ’improve’ and ’uplift’ the urban poor. In conclusion, the book reflects on the historical legacy of these developments for urban society and politics in postcolonial Bombay. This wide-ranging work will be essential reading for specialists in British imperial history, postcolonial studies and urban social history. It will also be of interest to all those concerned with the comparative history of governance and public culture in the modern city.

Cities have always had a key role in warfare, as strategic centres which periodically suffered the horrors of siege and sack. With industrialisation, however, they were drawn ever closer to the front line and to direct and continuous experience of fighting and destruction. 'Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War' explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises world wide in the era of the First and Second World Wars. It brings together cultural and urban historians and scholars of related disciplines including anthropology, education, and geography. The volume examines how the emergence of 'total' warfare blurred the boundaries between home and front and transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of total mobilisation turned the social and cultural fabric of urban life upside down. Arranged so as to bring out the evolution of experience over time, the essays explore Eastern and Central Europe, Britain and Western Europe, and Japan and address several key themes. The first strand - scenarios - explores the apocalyptic imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and writers anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban event - a commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On a different plane, civil servants and engineers materialised visions of urban chaos and devised countermeasures in case of emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a repertoire of cultural forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience of war. The second strand deals with metropolitan experiences, notably mobilisation, deprivation, and destruction in wartime. Ruins and the repercussions of war is the central theme of the third strand - commemorations - which investigates post-war efforts to remember and forget. The quest for meaningful forms of commemoration was hard enough after the First World War; the Second World War, which saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility that the limits of representation had been reached. The central contention of this volume - that total war in the twentieth century has a significant but often overlooked metropolitan dimension - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.

There is a widespread concern today with the role and experiences of ethnic and religious minorities, and their potential for conflict and harmony with 'host communities' and with each other, especially in towns. Interest in historical aspects of these phenomena is growing rapidly, not least in studies of the long and complex history of the towns of Central and Eastern Europe. Most such studies focus on particular places or on particular groups, but this volume offers a broader view covering the period from the tenth to the sixteenth century and regions from Germany to Dalmatia and from Epirus to Livonia, with an emphasis on the territory of medieval Hungary. The focus is on the changing nature of identity, perception and legal status of groups, on relations within and between them, and on the ways in which these elements were affected by the external political regimes and ideologies to which the towns were subjected. Many of the places examined were notable for the complexity of their ethnic and religious composition, and for their exposure to a wide range of external influences, including long-distance trade and tensions between settled and semi-nomadic ways of life. Overall the volume illustrates the variety of ways in which minorities found a place in towns - as citizens, outsiders, or in some other role - and how that could vary according to local circumstances and over time. Dealing with the formative period for modern European towns, this volume not only reveals much about medieval society and urban history, but poses questions still relevant today.

This book explores the social history of colonial Bombay in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a pivotal time in its emergence as a modern metropolis. Drawing together strands that hitherto have been treated in a piecemeal fashion and based on a variety of archival sources, the book offers a systematic analytical account of historical change in a premier colonial city. In particular, it considers the ways in which the turbulent changes unleashed by European modernity were negotiated, appropriated or resisted by the colonised in one of the major cities of the Indian Ocean region. A series of crises in the 1890s triggered far-reaching changes in the relationship between state and society in Bombay. The city’s colonial rulers responded to the upheavals of this decade by adopting a more interventionist approach to urban governance. The book shows how these new strategies and mechanisms of rule ensnared colonial authorities in contradictions that they were unable to resolve easily and rendered their relationship with local society increasingly fractious. The study also explores important developments within an emergent Indian civil society. It charts the density and diversity of the city’s expanding associational culture and shows how educated Indians embraced a new ethic of ’social service’ that sought to ’improve’ and ’uplift’ the urban poor. In conclusion, the book reflects on the historical legacy of these developments for urban society and politics in postcolonial Bombay. This wide-ranging work will be essential reading for specialists in British imperial history, postcolonial studies and urban social history. It will also be of interest to all those concerned with the comparative history of governance and public culture in the modern city.

The field of urban environmental history is a relatively new one, yet it is rapidly moving to the forefront of scholarly research and is the focus of much interdisciplinary work. Given the environmental problems facing the modern world it is perhaps unsurprising that historians, geographers, political, natural and social scientists should increasingly look at the environmental problems faced by previous generations, and how they were regarded and responded to. This volume reflects this growing concern, and reflects many of the key concerns and issues that are essential to our understanding of the problems faced by cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Addressing a variety of environmental issues, such as clean water supply, the provision/retention of green space, and noise pollution, that faced European and North American cities the essays in this volume highlight the common responses as well as the differences that characterised the reactions to these trans-national concerns.

The early modern period is often characterised as a time that witnessed the rise of a new and powerful merchant class across Europe. From Italy and Spain in the south, to the Low Countries and England in the north, men of business and trade came to play an increasingly pivotal role in the culture, politics and economies of western Europe. This book takes a comparative approach to the effect such merchants and traders had on the urban history of market places - streets, squares and civic buildings - in some of the great commercial European cities between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It looks at how this in period, the transformations of designated commercial areas were important enough to modify relationships throughout the entire urban context. Market places tend to be very ancient, continuing to function for centuries on the same location; but between the middle of the fourteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth, their structures began to change as new regulations and patterns of manufacture, distribution and consumption began to install a new uniformity and geometry on the market place. During the period covered by this study, most major European cities undertook the rebuilding of entire zones, constructing new buildings, demolishing existing structures and embellishing others. This book analyses the intentions of innovation, in parallel with sanitary and hygienic reasons, the juridical regulations of the architecture of certain building types and the urban strategies as efficient tools to better control the economic activities within the city.

Recent years have seen sustained public debate and controversy over the 'greening' of European cities, associated with the environmental movement, pressures of urban redevelopment, and the promotional strategies of cities competing in a global market. But the European debate over urban green space has a long history dating back to Victorian concerns for the 'green lungs' of the city to combat the health and social problems caused by rapid population and industrial growth. This book explores the multiplicity of green space developments in the modern city - ranging over parks and commons, garden suburbs and the cities in the park, allotment gardens, green belts and national urban parks. It is concerned not only with the different types of green space but the many influences shaping their evolution, from international planning ideas, to the rise of modern-day sport and leisure, and the effects of the transport revolution. No less vital in this story is the interaction of the many actors involved in the often fractious political process of creating green spaces - architects and planners, politicians, developers and other businessmen, NGOs and local residents. This volume is particularly concerned with contexts: how international planning ideas are transmitted and adapted in different European cities; how the construction of green space is affected by local power structures and relationships; and how ordinary people perceive and use green spaces, quite often at variance with official designs. The European City and Green Space looks at these and other issues through the prism of four metropoles - London, Stockholm, Helsinki and St Petersburg. All represent different types of North European city, yet each has experienced distinctive economic, political and cultural trajectories, whilst also facing powerful challenges and problems of similar kinds with regard to green space. This volume examines how each has responded to them and what patterns emerge.

Despite much recent interest in the area of urban governance, little work has been done on the changing ethical standards of urban leaderships, 'governing' institutions or the policing of public life. Yet the issue of ethical standards in public life has become a central concern in contemporary public discourse; with issues of public probity, moral order and personal standards re-emerging as central features of political debate. This volume places these debates into their historical perspective by examining the linkages between processes of 'modernisation', urbanisation and the ethical standards of governance and public life. It considers how ethical debates arise as a result of differential access to positions of authority and from competition for public resources. The contributions are drawn from a wide range of scholarly and disciplinary backgrounds and provide a broad analysis of the phenomenon of corruption, assessing how debates about corruption arose, the narratives used to criticise established modes of public conduct and their consequences for urban leadership.

Based on a wide variety of government and civic records, this book traces the evolution of the changing nature of city status, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with an explanation of how city status first became connected to cathedrals in the medieval period, the book explores how during the nineteenth century, links evolved between Anglican diocesan sub-divisions and city creation. It then shows how in a few years, between 1888 and 1907, the traditional interpretation of a city was overturned as the most major British industrial and commercial towns received city status and lord mayoralties. The second half of the book concentrates on city status during the twentieth century, and particularly the politicisation of the process and the linking of grants to royal occasions. The study concludes by looking at the city status competitions of 2000 and 2002 in relation to the previous two hundred years of city history.

The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of museums in towns and cities across Britain. As well as providing a focus for collections of artifacts and a place of educational recreation, this work argues that municipal museums had a further, social role. In a situation of rapid urban growth, allied to social and cultural changes on a scale hitherto unknown, it was inevitable that traditional class and social hierarchies would come under enormous pressure. As a result, urban elites began to look to new methods of controlling and defining the urban environment. One such manifestation of this was the growth of the public museum. In earlier centuries museums were the preserve of learned and respectable minority, yet by the end of the nineteenth century one of the principal rationales of museums was the education, or 'improvement', of the working classes. In the control of museums too there was a corresponding shift away from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators. This work is in part a study of the creation of professional authority and autonomy by museum curators. More importantly though, it is about the stablization of middle-class identities by the end of the nineteenth century around new hierarchies of cultural capital. Public museums were an important factor in constructing the identity and authority of certain groups with access to, and control over, them. By examining urban identities through the cultural lens of the municipal museum, we are able to reconsider and better understand the subtleties of nineteenth-century urban society.

This is a coherent and integrated set of essays around the theme of governance addressing a wide range of questions on the organisation and legitimation of authority. At the heart of the book is a set of topics which have long attracted the attention of urbanists and urban historians all over the world: the growth and reform of urban local government, local-centre relationships, public health and pollution, local government finance, the nature of local social élites and of participation in local government. Approaching these topics through the concept of governance not only raises a series of new questions but also extends the scope of enquiry for the historian seeking to understand towns and cities all over the world in a period of rapid change. Questions of governance must be central to a variety of enquiries into the nature of the urban place. There are questions about the setting of agendas, about when a localised or neighbourhood issue becomes a big city or even national political issue, about what makes a ’problem’. Public health and related matters form a central part of the ’issues’ especially for the British; in North America fire and the development of urban real estate have dominated; in India the security of the colonial government had a prominent place. The historical dynamic of these essays follows the change from the chartered governments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries towards the representative regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth. However, such historical change is not regarded as inevitable, and the effects of bureaucratic growth, regulatory regimes, the legitimating role of rational and scientific knowledge as well as the innovatory use of ritual and space are all dealt with at length.

There is a widespread concern today with the role and experiences of ethnic and religious minorities, and their potential for conflict and harmony with 'host communities' and with each other, especially in towns. Interest in historical aspects of these phenomena is growing rapidly, not least in studies of the long and complex history of the towns of Central and Eastern Europe. Most such studies focus on particular places or on particular groups, but this volume offers a broader view covering the period from the tenth to the sixteenth century and regions from Germany to Dalmatia and from Epirus to Livonia, with an emphasis on the territory of medieval Hungary. The focus is on the changing nature of identity, perception and legal status of groups, on relations within and between them, and on the ways in which these elements were affected by the external political regimes and ideologies to which the towns were subjected. Many of the places examined were notable for the complexity of their ethnic and religious composition, and for their exposure to a wide range of external influences, including long-distance trade and tensions between settled and semi-nomadic ways of life. Overall the volume illustrates the variety of ways in which minorities found a place in towns - as citizens, outsiders, or in some other role - and how that could vary according to local circumstances and over time. Dealing with the formative period for modern European towns, this volume not only reveals much about medieval society and urban history, but poses questions still relevant today.

How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

A provocative survey of new research in the history of urban public health, Body and City links the approaches of demographic and medical history with the methodologies of urban history and historical geography. It challenges older methodologies, offering new insights into the significance of cultural history, which has largely been overlooked by previous histories of public health. This book explores important issues and experiences in the public health arena in diverse European settings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

Property is central to any historical analyses of production, reproduction and consumption. It lies at the heart of discussions of material culture, class relations and the household economy. Recent work has begun to look beyond the acquisition and possession of goods to examine what the disposal, transmission and giving of property might tell us about changing society and culture. This landmark collection of articles represents a wide range of approaches to and perspectives on the ownership, use and transmission of property in eighteenth and nineteenth-century towns. An introductory essay highlights the importance of property and inheritance in shaping social, cultural, economic and political structures and interactions within and between towns and cities. Writing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors then explore in detail the changing meaning of property to households and individuals; the social, economic and geographical contexts of inheritance practices; the geography of wealth; the role of gender in shaping property relations and, perhaps above all, the enduring link between property, the family and the household in urban contexts.

Cities have always had a key role in warfare, as strategic centres which periodically suffered the horrors of siege and sack. With industrialisation, however, they were drawn ever closer to the front line and to direct and continuous experience of fighting and destruction. 'Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War' explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises world wide in the era of the First and Second World Wars. It brings together cultural and urban historians and scholars of related disciplines including anthropology, education, and geography. The volume examines how the emergence of 'total' warfare blurred the boundaries between home and front and transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of total mobilisation turned the social and cultural fabric of urban life upside down. Arranged so as to bring out the evolution of experience over time, the essays explore Eastern and Central Europe, Britain and Western Europe, and Japan and address several key themes. The first strand - scenarios - explores the apocalyptic imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and writers anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban event - a commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On a different plane, civil servants and engineers materialised visions of urban chaos and devised countermeasures in case of emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a repertoire of cultural forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience of war. The second strand deals with metropolitan experiences, notably mobilisation, deprivation, and destruction in wartime. Ruins and the repercussions of war is the central theme of the third strand - commemorations - which investigates post-war efforts to remember and forget. The quest for meaningful forms of commemoration was hard enough after the First World War; the Second World War, which saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility that the limits of representation had been reached. The central contention of this volume - that total war in the twentieth century has a significant but often overlooked metropolitan dimension - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.

The question of who actually ran cities in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries has been increasingly debated in recent years. As well as trying to understand the distribution of political power and the rise of broad political participation, urban historians have questioned how and whether elites retained influence in municipal government. The essays in this collection provide a detailed examination of the relationship between urban elites and the exercise of 'power', bringing together economic, social and cultural history with the political history of power resources and decision-making. The volume challenges common perceptions of a monolithic urban elite by looking at specific case studies. Collectively these essays provide a more sophisticated view of the exercise of urban power as the negotiation of various elite groups defined by their economic, social, political or cultural privilege. To contribute to this complex account of the history of cities, elites, and their influence, the collection applies a range of methodological approaches to studying European and American cities, as well as the wider world.