After years of concentration on the working class,social historians of nineteenth-century urbanBritain have recently rediscovered the upper andmiddle classes. Various writers have recognizedthese groups, and elites within them, as significantsubjects in themselves and as major influences inurban society generally.

Johannesburg, in certain respects the Republic'sleading urban centre, celebrates her centenary in1986. Acquisitive citizens and indifferent officialshave, however, long driven much of her past from thestreets. Today carnival history is beingmanufactured hurriedly beyond remote tarmac parkinggrounds and behind ticketing turnstiles. Althoughits popularization is also overdue, scholarlyinterest in South African urban history fortunatelyhas not attracted only whimsical attention. In thebrief review which follows an attempt is made tosketch the outlines of the South African urban past,to capture the flavour of substantive research intoSouth African urban history and to contour theintellectual climate in which this has beenconducted and shaped. Emphasis is placed on researchreported in scholarly outlets. Not unexpectedlythere is a wide range of other publications whichcontain elements of urban historical interest, theseranging from newspapers and magazines to generalhistorical texts and finely liveried, lavishlyillustrated Africana. For the purposes of thispresentation, the ‘modern period’ of South Africanurban history is closed during the 1950s.

Whilst the historian of the nineteenth-century town isable to turn to the censuses for information aboutthe demographic and occupational character of aparticular community, nothing comparable survivesfor the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Listsof the entire population are extremely rare andrecords enumerating sections of the community only,such as tax lists, are difficult to use without firmevidence of the proportions exempted and the levelsof evasion. An impression of the social andoccupational structure of the early modern town canbe obtained only by deriving material from a rangeof local as well as national sources.

The small medieval town has recently captured theattention of historians, geographers andarchaeologists. Documentary work is, for example,not only disentangling the fluctuating history oflocal markets, but also demonstrating that, despitetheir small size, seignorial boroughs of the laterthirteenth century had a diverse occupationalstructure that entitles them to be regarded asgenuinely urban. Indeed, Hilton has recently arguedthat as much as half the urban population lived inthese small towns. This research has also emphasizedthe economic vitality of the smaller towns in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and has raisedthe possibility that they were prospering at theexpense of the provincial capitals, a trend to beseen in the context of the movement of industry fromthe towns to the countryside.

The inter-war years represented a turning point inGreek urban history as a capitalist mode ofproduction rose to dominance. Yet despite itsEuropean location, Greece should be seen as formingpart of a capitalist periphery: for a long period ofits history, from the late nineteenth century to themid-1960s, structural features of its economy andsocial development differed in important respectsfrom those of most other European countries, and inregard to urban development, the history of Athens –the capital city of Greece – provided a pattern thatwas the reverse of the European experience. Thebasis of this article, in fact, is the claim thatdevelopments affecting inter-war Athens had featuresin common with a Latin American pattern of‘peripheral’ urbanization. Amongst the features thatwill be illustrated in this review of Greekurbanization – based on a study of the history ofAthens – will be economic ‘dualism’, thepolarization of social classes, and at greaterlength, the nature of ‘popular’ land allocation.