This paper aims to provide a transferable methodology suitable for mapping the spatial development of medieval urban landscapes. Using the technique of ‘plan analysis’ the paper discusses some new evidence relating to the origins and development of Coventry, one of medieval England's more important provincial centres which rose to prominence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The case study provides an opportunity to show how the plan analysis technique works and how it is of benefit to urban historians, as well as archaeologists and geographers.

Based on notarial and municipal sources in Madrid from the late sixteenth century to 1808, this article challenges current views of Castilian urban elites as mere reflections of noble hegemony. It assesses the implications of widespread venality of offices, as well as the real meaning of the estatuto of 1603, which formally excluded non-nobles from the city council. Ultimately, it argues that the system of preferment contributed in part to the long-term backwardness of seventeenth-century Castile.

Conflict between the town and county of Bristol and the liberty of St Augustine's Abbey was largely the consequence of the failure of the county's founding charter of 1373 to recognize the separate existence of the liberty. In 1496 a confrontation between the abbey and the town resulted in an appeal to Council, and the production of The Great White Book, to record the evidence collected for the hearing. This allows both a reconstruction of the 1496 conflict and its precursors, and an interpretation of the Bristol political elite's rhetorical exploitation both of the conflict itself and of its representation.

Seventeenth-century Edo was a city built by and for the shogun. The immense concentration of power in the shogun imposed stability in the city, and this made it unnecessary for the authorities to interfere directly in the city's general administration and economic affairs. Even given the overwhelming power of the shogun, however, the city did not develop a distinct culture at that stage.

This article looks at ways of relating together two concepts of early modern urban life: the urban renaissance and the consumer revolution. Nottingham passed through a process of urban renewal between c. 1688 and c. 1750, and it is argued that in the absence of any public funding this must have been privately pioneered by the town's ‘middling sort’. Using probate inventory material the members of this social group are identified, and their habits as consumers examined. We speculate that it was this consumer-conscious middling sort which promoted urban change.

This paper analyses connections between culture and architecture, and between political ideology and capital planning in a region of China. It poses two crucial questions: first, what were the contrasting architectural expressions between imperial palaces in Shenyang? Second, what were the underlying planning concepts of Shenyang, and what urban design models were used to realize that concept? This study shows that the development of Manchurian architecture and planning had been a result of cultural confluence and political governance.

The adoption of non-traditional housing by local authorities is customarily explained in terms of economic factor shortages or a nationally determined policy discourse. This underestimates the significance of distinctly local understandings of civic responsibility. Based on Leicester and Nottingham, this article argues that those influences frequently used to predict outcomes – like party political allegiance – mattered less in decision-making than a city's intrinsic view of itself. Such perceptions were grounded in subtle constructions of civic community, perceived need and political reinterpretation. Particularly important was the role of the local press. Even cities with similar problems, therefore, could be represented, and subsequently see themselves, in very dissimilar terms and act accordingly.

Apart from a few obvious exceptions, the definition of a ‘leisure town’ in eighteenth-century England remains problematic. Using a list of the employers of manservants registered for taxation in 1780 this paper isolates the fifty-three ‘residential leisure towns’ outside Middlesex and Surrey where there were thirty or more such employers. It is suggested that the employment of manservants is, within limits, a useful indicator of a certain type of gentility and that the spread of such towns outside the Home Counties was very limited at this time.

The paper explores the links between changing transport technology, individual mobility and urban form in the British cities of Manchester and Glasgow in the mid-twentieth century. The variability of individual commuting preferences is stressed, and it is argued that decisions about the provision of public transport rarely took into account the views of individual commuters. It is also suggested that factors governing modal choice have remained quite stable from the 1930s to the 1960s.

The article begins by showing the differential impact of slum clearance on regions, conurbations and major cities through the three decades of the slum clearance campaign which began in 1955. It discusses the main methods of clearance procedure, the nature of compensation and the relation of clearance to ‘unfit’ housing. House condition surveys revealed an increasing mismatch between patterns of unfit housing and those of slum clearance and this began, it is argued, in the 1960s. Factors such as the development of property markets, and the rise of owner occupation, had differential economic and political effects which in turn reacted on the incidence of clearance.

This article calls for greater attention within urban history to the ‘civic economy of the book’. By means of a case study of the Manchester Free Public Library and its context, examining the internal workings of the library system and its impact on the broader cultural life of the city, it is argued that the nineteenth-century public library, if not an especially successful disciplinary institution, may yet have been a significant mechanism of cultural disempowerment.

Over the past thirty years, one of the fastest growing fields of urban history has been the history of planning. In some respects, this is surprising, as urban planning had existed on an institutional basis only since the early twentieth century. In other ways, though, it was a very logical development. Planning reached its high point during the 1960s, and by the 1970s was being condemned in many quarters, being blamed, for example, for disasters like high-rise tower blocks and sacrificing old cities to crude commercial and transport developments. Historical research was necessary to understand how a movement which promised so much at the start of the century had degenerated so badly in sixty years. Criticism became so severe that, in the words of one historian, ‘many planners have certainly thought in more pessimistic moments . . . that the past may be the only thing they have to look forward to’. For whatever reason, the Planning History Group was set up in 1974 and a massive body of historical research on planning has been produced. This paper reviews four recent books on planning, two from North America and two European. They represent different aspects of planning and different time periods and will be treated in chronological order.

The intention of this paper is to review the ways in which the role of urban elites has been examined and interpreted, and to show how the traditional concepts of social control and hegemony have required modification. The paper identifies two phases of study. The first phase was descriptive, concerned primarily with the identification and categorization of elites. The second phase, which began in the 1980s, was interactional and explored the influence of elites in inter-class relationships. The interactional role of elites is discussed in detail in relation to the exemplar of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester. The paper continues by considering the changes which elites began to undergo in the transitional conditions of the late nineteenth century. The significance of recent work is assessed and the paper concludes with some comments regarding the future direction of study on urban elites.

London's cultural and social life is the focus of four recent books which, with the exception of a few forays by Manley, concentrate mostly on the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century.

It is over thirty years since E.P. Thompson's The Making of the Working Class (1963) pushed culture – seen as an active process of coping with and shaping collective experience – higher up the historians' agenda. The waves made by the late twentieth-century ‘turns’ towards culture and language are still being felt. This highly diverse movement has also been shaped by theorists such as Foucault and Bourdieu, whom Thompson would undoubtedly have regarded as being suspiciously ‘continental’ but whose work has made an exciting contribution to the historian's repertoire.

It seems bizarre and inappropriate that so many books dealing with African-American lives in both Southern and Northern cities pay scant attention to the music that provided their only clear political as well as cultural voice. This seems even more anomalous now that historians of slavery appreciate that the music is a vital conduit for black responses to oppression and discrimination. In the five books under review, cultural consciousness is frequently relegated to a marginal position in the attempt to define the parameters of racism in cities as diverse as Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Charlotte.

One of the attractions of medieval urban history is the fact that major conceptual problems in the field continue to be debated. In a stimulating review article by J.H. Mundy, ’Philip Jones and the medieval Italian city-state‘, J. of European Economic History, 28 (1999), 185–200, one distinguished scholar is taxed for holding views now dismissed by some, but of which he is by no means a unique surviving representative. One of these views assumes a clear distinction between the antique city, supposedly a bureaucratic centre with limited economic functions, and the medieval city, as the home of industrious artisans and nascent capitalism. The image of the non-profit-making ancient town may be overly indebted to the nature of the literary sources and to the prevalent interests of classicists; but, although many would now agree that both the elements in the above equation need qualifying, a more focused comparison is presently lacking, and a fine book is still waiting to be written on the transition from the ancient world to the middle ages in urban history.