It is somewhat surprising that music has only recently become a serious subject for urban historians. Musicologists and music historians, urban geographers, planners and all others who deal with diverse aspects of local development, cultural industry and the built environment have fared much better in tackling the fundamental social implications of music in a particular locality. It is not an accident that, for example, the recent volume of Built Environment, ‘Music and the city’, edited by an economic geographer, Robert C. Kloosterman, deals with urban spaces of creativity and the role of black music today, some of which have by now an ascribed ‘urban’ adjective in North America.1 It is also only natural, however, that Kloosterman's enquiry should concentrate on music in the city of the present and rarely venture into the time periods before World War II.

From the early 1960s until his sudden and unexpected death in August 1978, Jim Dyos was the chief inspiration, proselytizer and ambassador of urban history in Britain. Through many personal contacts and friendships in various parts of the world, he gave to all those connected with his chosen pursuit the sense of belonging to a great international family. It was entirely in keeping with his ambitions that he had been planning a major international conference to chart the progress made since the earlier agenda for urban history was set out at Leicester in 1966, and to highlight those methodological issues which should be confronted if urban historians are to sustain an innovative role into the 1980s. This conference will still take place with the help of a committee which had been working with him, the intention being to publish a volume based on the proceedings as the most fitting tribute to his memory. Nevertheless, it seemed right to begin this issue of the Yearbook with a short appreciation of the way Jim Dyos contributed to the study and enjoyment of urban history through his own teaching, research and writings.

Urban historians are much concerned with the need to study their towns from the perspective of social class and socio-spatial segregation, especially in periods of rapid industrialization. The models of such scholars as Engels, Sjöberg, Burgess, Hoyt and others are predicated on the possibility of identifying clearly the members of defined social classes. The manuscript census enumerators' books (CEBs) are one of the basic sources used for Victorian Britain (1841–81), but it is no simple matter to attribute the occupational descriptions found in them to a range of social classes. Problems occur at two levels: those associated with the conceptual validity of systems of class distinction, and those encountered in attributing occupations within such systems. As this article shows, there is also a degree of interaction between the two levels since it is useless to pursue concepts that cannot be systematically and straightforwardly related to the information available.

Based on a systematic analysis of local mainstream and activist media, this article reconstructs conflicts over the framing of British and Irish squatters in Leiden during the 1990s. During this decade, several hundreds of English-speaking youths travelled to Leiden and surrounding villages to work as seasonal labourers. Often lacking access to regular housing, many of them resorted to squatting houses and as a result got involved in local urban development conflicts. While proprietors, neighbours, aldermen and the police all tried to gain support via the media, squatters also contacted media outlets to counter bad press. This article reconstructs the ensuing struggle over the image of the foreign squatter in Leiden's local media during the 1990s, and analyses the dynamics between the various groups that attempted to influence the squatters’ framing.

Why 1500? Why 1800? Why does Urban History's review of periodical literature use this definition of the early modern? Does urban history have a periodization of its own? The reluctance of historians to stray before and after 1800 is a major theme of C.R. Friedrichs's review of early modern German urban history, ‘But are we any closer to home? Early modern German urban history since German Home Towns’, Central European History, 30 (1998), 163–86, and I wondered about these issues while reading some of the articles published this year which did not stop and surrender their historical passports at 1500.

Since the 1970s, policy-makers and the press have rendered young people, particularly those of black and minority ethnic backgrounds, synonymous with ‘inner-city crisis’. Focusing upon the high-density, multi-storey Hulme estate in Manchester, this article seeks to transcend stereotypical representations of these residents and illuminate their perspectives of the inner city. Conceptualizing the inner city as both a discursive and lived space, the article traces the intersections between its representation and residents’ testimonies to assess how far residents used prevalent understandings of Hulme as a space of crime and social breakdown respectively to shape their narratives of everyday life.

This article traces how the ‘wet’ market was integrated into the infrastructure of public housing estates in Hong Kong through modularization from 1969 to 1975. This includes how spatial modularization concepts extended into administration and management, incorporating responsibilities and categories of goods that ultimately reflected colonial ideas of health, food hygiene and social and spatial order. In doing so, this article theorizes how the modular market embodied the ways colonial government departments, architects and managers navigated notions of the materiality of ‘wetness’ in the market through its design in response to management and customer needs, but nevertheless how consumers found ways to re-narrate such spaces through maintaining ‘wet’ cultural exchanges and practices. Using government documents and photographs, this article combines a design historical approach to materiality with empirical evidence to expand on histories and practices of the ‘wet market’, bringing the everyday discourses of modernity in Hong Kong to the fore.

The use of the pesthouse in early modern England has received limited attention by scholars, in particular, how it was used in London. The study of the pesthouse tells us about the nature of parochial government in the capital, the early development of public health policies and the relationship between national and civic authorities and the suburban parishes, where plague was a long-term problem and intersected forcefully with poverty. This article explores how suburban parishes used the pesthouse in their repertoire of response to plague between c. 1600 and 1650, which is situated in the context of experiments with the pesthouse in England's provincial towns and cities. The article considers the development of the City of London's pesthouse in St Giles Cripplegate, its limited use by suburban parishes under the City's jurisdiction, and the establishment of a local pesthouse by some suburban parishes beyond the jurisdiction of the City.

This article examines the sounds and smells of late Renaissance Florence by analysing stone inscriptions posted in public streets and squares by the city's policing officials, the Otto di Guardia, during the Medici grand ducal period (1569–1737). The plaques contain sensory regulations prohibiting sounds, smells and sights considered socially and environmentally polluting. Unpublished archival records, printed materials and material artifacts reveal how sensory legislation developed as an increasingly public element of late Renaissance Florentine governance, while at the same time revealing how Florentines often resisted or ignored sensory regulation. Digitally mapping the sensory legislation plaques visualizes the intersections of sense, space and social history in new ways.

Despite a long settlement history, empirical investigations of the role of path dependency in the long-term evolution of human populations are scarce in Europe, and especially in the Mediterranean countries. Using spatially explicit econometric techniques, our study discusses the empirical evidence stemming from a quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution of population growth rates in 115 districts of metropolitan Athens (Greece) over one century, distinguishing path dependency from the impact of other socio-economic forces on long-term urban expansion. The empirical findings of this study clarify how path-dependent regulation of population growth was heterogeneous over time and space, and depends on the specific stage of the city life cycle. After an initial period when path-independent population expansion reflected the inherent impact of exogenous shocks, path-dependent growth was associated with compact urbanization governed by agglomeration and scale advantages. Path-dependent growth was less intense during suburbanization, when the population spread over larger areas.

This article suggests that the post-colonial viewpoint could be valuable in understanding Beijing during the colonial crisis between 1900 and 1928. Through the examination of urban space in the Legation Quarter, it pays attention to the emerging special types and forms, as well as the mechanisms behind them, and explains the transposition of a foreign modern cityscape to the local context. The Europeanized district in Beijing was a symbol of Western civilization and the uneven power dynamics in the city, and was regarded as both a spatial model and a competitor for the Chinese government's attempts to create a modern capital.

This case-study of Jewish activism in Strasbourg and Nice, interwar urban locales situated along the frontiers with National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy, respectively, examines critical facets of Jewish advocacy during the refugee crisis of the 1930s. It focuses on how urban spaces engendered dense thickets of community activism unlike that which took place in Paris. Whereas friction and ineffectiveness characterized aid efforts in Paris, these cities offer alternative views on the nature of the refugee crisis in France and the ways that Jews overcame obstacles to help asylum-seekers. It advances much-needed discourse on the complexity of French Jewish experiences during the interwar years and highlights the city as both location and a conduit for diverse activist strategies. Although circumstances varied in Strasbourg and Nice, Jews in these two borderland cities followed similar patterns of engaging urban civil society to build flexible networks that addressed the plight of refugees from multiple angles.

Zooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking.

In recent years, the idea that Britain and its northern American colonies were part of a single ‘British Atlantic world’ has provided historians of both the Old World and the New with a novel perspective from which to explore their subjects during the long eighteenth century. With a case study of Charleston, South Carolina, this essay extends British categories of analysis across the Atlantic to uncover the origins of an American middle class. Emphasis is placed on the simultaneous consideration of all arenas of identity formation, with a view to demonstrating that examining either the cultural sphere or the economic one cannot bring a genuine understanding of the coherence of this eighteenth-century middling sort. Investigating the emergence of this social group in the widest possible sense, I show how the economic experience of these middling people forged common values which then found their expression in the cultural and political sphere. Since this middle sort achieved such coherence before 1776 I suggest that we must move away from accounts that depict colonial society as a place of binary opposites and occupational groupings, for such models cannot convey the complexity of the British Atlantic urban society that took shape during this era.