This article traces the conservation history of the inner suburb of Parkville in Melbourne, Australia. It focuses on its 1972 designation as Melbourne’s first urban conservation area by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). It examines Parkville’s establishment in the setter-colonial city as an elite neighbourhood, its post-war transformation, the role of the resident amenity group, the Parkville Association, and the evolution of heritage planning policies by the City of Melbourne and the state government of Victoria. Using a range of archival sources, including the Victorian Heritage Database, the article analyses the expanding building, conservation area and heritage overlay protections for Parkville from the 1950s to the 2020s, with a particular focus on the years 1971–85. This article interlaces policy and planning, heritage and conservation, and cultural and social change. It argues that Parkville’s designation was demonstrative of urban conservation in Melbourne and reflected evolving international approaches to urban heritage.

This article investigates how the Ottoman–Habsburg rivalry was materialized in Istanbul’s urban fabric, c. 1530–1606. Tracing the itinerary Divanyolu → Elçi Hanı → Topkapı Palace, it reconstructs a ritual geography in which routes, lodgings and thresholds converted diplomacy into spatial governance. Drawing on protocol notes, narratives and images, it shows how orchestrated confinement, staged spectacle and reciprocal visibility structured ambassadorial experience: envoys were lodged under watch in the Elçi Hanı, processed along a ceremonial corridor and received in a palace that magnified authority by withholding it. Combining visual, textual and architectural analysis, the article demonstrates how power was materially and symbolically enacted and ambassadors became both spectators and exhibits. Rather than treating the city as backdrop, it reads Istanbul as an instrument that translated rivalry into movement, vantage and constraint, situating the Ottoman capital within a wider Mediterranean economy of representation, comparison and control.

This article examines the history of Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, in Central Europe between roughly 1870–1932 as a way to promote new perspectives on the relationship between music and the city during the height of European urbanization. Although Parsifal was conceived as an anti-urban opera, and until 1913 its performance was restricted to provincial Bayreuth, even during this period the work’s performance and reception were affected by urban-based cultural systems. With the end of copyright protection for Parsifal in 1913, the process of Parsifal ‘becoming urban’ began in earnest. While the flood of new productions in Europe’s cities during 1914 marked the work’s urban debut, it was only in the late 1910s and the 1920s that it became more fully integrated into the urban cultural environment. This development was marked by a growing distance from certain Bayreuth performance traditions and participation in early urban radio culture.

This article presents Bath as an urban crucible for global visitors, ideas and cultural brokers like Edmund Rack, a Quaker and former shopkeeper (1735/36–87). Rack seized opportunities to use his social networks to forge a scientific community in Bath. A study of members of Rack’s Bath Philosophical Society shows science was a pathway to social mobility for dissenters, physicians and men of marginal backgrounds. Scientific knowledge became the property of non-elites, whose interests over-rode socio-economic differences. The impact of knowledge brokers and Bath on eighteenth-century social and urban history is, thus, seen anew in its local, national and global contexts.

This article traces the origins and evolution of the Shanghai Bund within a comparative framework of transimperial urban forms. Existing scholarship has offered divergent interpretations – imperial metropolitan precedents, cross-colonial transfers and local antecedents – which this article argues are complementary rather than contradictory. It further moves beyond broad regional claims through specifying concrete cases supported by new archival evidence. Drawing on records mainly from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, The National Archives in the UK and contemporary newspapers, the article shows how Singapore’s Boat Quay, Calcutta’s Strand Road and London’s Thames Embankment were selectively appropriated to meet shifting sanitary, political and economic needs. Localized over successive decades, these borrowings crystallized into a Bund form – landscaped, monumental, with a financial core and technologically modern – that became a model for other treaty ports and was reproduced across the imperial world and beyond. The Bund’s history is thus a microcosm of the circulation and remaking of ideas within the wider networks of the British Empire.

This article addresses the expansion of urban public services in major Nordic cities, from 1850 to 1920. We argue that changes in political discourse were the driving force that prompted politicians to act on behalf of the urban public, significantly before the rise of the universal welfare state. The discursive changes are explored through three analytic concepts: publicness, urban citizenship and the welfare city. We start by presenting a short overview of the development of urban public services. Then we demonstrate how these concepts may be used in conjunction to explain the historical changes. Finally, the material effects are discussed in three case-studies, addressing freshwater pipes, public transport and municipal health care, respectively.

This article argues that the extent and longevity of dry conservancy systems in urban England between the 1870s and 1920s is underappreciated for its impact on health and disease. Using Birmingham as a case-study, it advances knowledge on the systemized development of municipal pail systems and offers a deeper understanding of living with conservancy. It draws out the importance of looking at the fly problem and the transmission relationship, largely ignored until the second decade of the twentieth century. It also explores and challenges existing ideas in the debates surrounding investment in sanitation infrastructure and mortality decline.

Urban tourism has expanded dramatically in recent decades, reshaping European cities economically, socially and culturally. Yet its roots run much deeper, as (early) modern urban centres – especially in the Low Countries – developed distinctive traditions of tourism and place promotion. This special issue highlights how civic boosterism, marketing innovations and inter-urban competition shaped these early practices. Bringing together new research on Belgium and the Netherlands, the special issue uncovers the actors, tools and narratives that fashioned urban tourism long before the late twentieth-century boom. Collectively, the contributions rethink the genealogy of urban tourism by analysing its ‘orgware’, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ from the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

This article employs a gendered analysis to explore work and workplaces in Naples during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Using a work-task approach with judicial sources, it offers a novel investigation into the economic activity of women in southern Italy. The results demonstrate that women played an active role in all sectors of the economy, beyond domestic and care work. Spatial analysis unveils an intricate labour system characterized by dynamic and flexible boundaries and thus challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private spheres. The findings call into question traditional schemas by offering a more nuanced interpretation of the division of labour in early modern Mediterranean urban contexts.

During the inter-war years, the Musées royaux du Cinquantenaire in Brussels launched a publicity campaign aimed at attracting foreign tourists, Belgian day-trippers and local visitors. Using traditional methods (posters, postcards) alongside innovative techniques (radio interviews, department store exhibitions), the museum tapped into emerging urban tourism marketing trends. Inspired by American practices, director Jean Capart collaborated with travel publishers, railway companies and tourism associations to brand the museum as a must-see destination. While official tourist offices played a minor role, private stakeholders were crucial. These efforts reflected broader societal shifts: a push for more democratic access to culture, economic challenges post-World War I and a growing belief in the power of advertising. Marketing was seen as a solution to financial pressures on the museum, aiming to boost attendance and public support. Although the campaign raised the museum’s visibility and enhanced Brussels’ appeal, visitor numbers remained low, limiting its overall success.

The first international expositions appeal to the imagination and have an almost mythical status, but for most participating countries, they were just a form of good marketing. The prevailing idea in literature is that the expositions were platforms for nation-building undertaken by national governments. What is still lacking, however, is research into the intersection of urban, regional and national identities at these events, and the role of the city in this process. This article, which is part of the special issue Urban Tourism Promotion in Belgium and the Netherlands, addresses this gap by examining the presence of Belgian city pavilions at the expositions in Belgium between 1885 and 1958 through the lens of urban tourism promotion. By analysing the different groups involved in tourism promotion at these events, the article reveals that cities were not merely venues for large events, but also served as platforms for identity promotion through urban tourism promotion.

This article examines media discourse about commuting travel time in Australia’s two largest metropolitan areas – Sydney and Melbourne – between 1970 and 2000. In major newspapers from each of the cities, reportage and commentary conveyed expanding commuting geographies oriented towards the mass pursuit of home ownership enabled by public policy and reflective of pluralism around households’ time use preferences. In a period when time use was widely understood as increasingly pressured, the choices available to households were frequently portrayed as responding to a wide range of opportunities but co-existed with discourses of market-driven compromise and consequences.

This article discusses the changing tourist gaze on Amsterdam between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century. Based on travel guidebooks, the article analyses the increasing appreciation of buildings through time as a result of the growth and spread of architectural knowledge. Two different types of architecture are analysed: historic buildings, such as seventeenth-century canal houses and former harbour districts (in this period framed as ‘heritage’), as well as new architecture: the social housing projects and public buildings that were built between the 1920s and 1940s. By examining how architectural narratives were conveyed by guidebook writers, as well as following the path of knowledge transfer from the architectural profession towards the guidebook industry, this article offers an overview of the mechanisms behind architectural storytelling which enriches the understanding of sightseeing processes.

This article examines the role of illustrated lantern lectures in promoting Belgian cities and towns during the early twentieth century. Drawing on two original databases of lantern slides and a database of lantern lectures, it demonstrates how these lectures served not only tourism, but also broader social, political and cultural agendas. The projection lantern functioned as a powerful medium within an emerging circuit of education and entertainment, offering audiences an immersive experience. While previous scholarship has largely focused on colonial or exotic representations, this article highlights how familiar, domestic places in Belgium were also visually constructed and promoted. Through an analysis of content, context and the actors involved, the article reveals how lantern lectures contributed to shaping urban imagery, fostering civic pride and constructing local, regional and national identities. In doing so, it repositions the lantern as a key medium in the history of place representation and visual communication.

During World War II, German occupation obstructed foreign tourism to Amsterdam. The local tourist association VVV did not, however, cease its promotional activities. On the contrary; as a public–private association largely financed by the Amsterdam municipality and the local Chamber of Commerce, the VVV functioned as an institutional nexus between the German-controlled municipal authorities, local entrepreneurs in the city’s tourist industry, tourists and local citizens. This article argues that the VVV played a significant role in promoting the return to ‘normalcy’ and an acceptance of aspects of a new normal in the Dutch capital. In a wide variety of initiatives, it encouraged domestic tourists and local inhabitants – largely ignoring the gradual exclusion of Jews – to continue a public life of amusement, cultural enrichment and identification with local and national heritage.

The naming of cityscapes has never been a disinterested or straightforward affair. This article, which introduces the special issue on multifunctional urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire, opens by providing an overview of recent developments in critical place-name studies and bringing this field into dialogue with the historiography of the empire. It then delineates the main waves of toponymic changes in the empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and proposes a typology of the main categories of imperial toponyms used for (re)naming. Our main argument is that place names performed a wider array of functions, beyond just orientational and ideological, and were also used to gain socio-economic capital and enhance the social desirability and economic value of urban areas. Having introduced the contributions to the special issue, the article then outlines several avenues for future research.

In recent years, the emergence of both the spatial and spectral turns has meant a more intense focus on the importance of space in supernatural narratives, especially within modern, industrialized cities. Less has been said, however, about the importance of understanding the affective resonances of space in early modern tales. This article examines tales of ghost sightings in London and Southwark that appeared in print. It argues that these hauntings created affective topographies that had both individual and communal resonances. In turn, the article explores how these emotional responses contributed to conceptions of space, community and neighbourhood in early modern London. As such, it demonstrates how paying attention to supernatural narratives can reveal a hidden geography of the city, one that is shaped by supernatural storytelling, emotions and close conceptions of community.

In this article, I explore the history of Bokaro Steel City – a planned industrial settlement conceived in the 1960s in the Indian state of Jharkhand as part of India’s post-Independence modernization programme. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival materials, I demonstrate the unique socially inclusive approach of tackling social inequalities, focusing specifically on how planners approached social reproduction. By foregrounding the distinctiveness of Bokaro’s urban design, I argue for a re-evaluation of modernist urbanities, delinking them from the exclusively Eastern European monotowns or Western superblocks and demonstrating how Indian planners adapted modernist ideas to meet their local objectives.

This article considers a curious document – Baker’s Australian County Atlas – which contains carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales in the mid-1840s. The analysis seeks to bridge the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We argue that the Atlas reveals the mechanics of territorial accumulation and Aboriginal dispossession in nineteenth-century New South Wales in their historical and material specificity, locating instances of ‘improvement’ – clearing, fencing and the construction of temporary and permanent buildings – at the centre of settler colonial land administration and sovereignty. The article demonstrates that the legal obligation to improve ultimately regulated colonial urbanization, enacting a process in which buildings and other structures functioned less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession.

Orenburg, a Russian border fortress on the Kazakh steppe founded in 1743, was the first city of the Tsarist Empire that was provided with a full set of official street names. While toponymic designations in empires have often been investigated in the context of the struggle of competing national groups for visibility, the case of Orenburg provides an example of how toponymic designations served to claim a newly conquered region as an integral part of the empire. As Orenburg’s street names were rarely in use in everyday life, this article argues moreover that both their orientation and representation functions were of little importance, and that their main purpose was to demonstrate the progressive governing techniques the administration had at its disposal.