Studies of office-holding in Renaissance Italy have largely ignored magistrates of communal origin. The focus has been on offices and officials in the developing regional states, with an emphasis on princely regimes and on Lombardy. The present article examines the citizen magistrates despatched by the city of Lucca to govern its significant but depleted and fragmented territories. It addresses the question of the professionality (or lack of professionality) of the short-term office-holders of urban-centred republican regimes, and briefly explores what a study of office-holding can reveal about relations between a city and its dependent countryside. Though fifteenth-century Lucca was atypical in its historical setting, comparisons have been drawn throughout between Lucca and neighbouring (albeit very different) political formations.

Urban conflict in medieval England often took one of two forms: public confrontation involving ritualistic acts of transgression on the one hand and legal challenges involving litigation on the other. This article explores an urban dispute in the latter category fought at Bishop's Lynn between 1346 and 1350. The rich series of records surviving from this dispute provides a rare opportunity to reconstruct in detail the legal strategies adopted throughout the conflict. The case is significant for the innovative legal challenge adopted by the burgesses, and for the subsequent campaign of misinformation propagated in parliament by the bishop of Norwich.

The guest editors for this special issue of Urban History are both Canadian, and for many Canadians the hottest conflict of the Cold War might have been the 1972 ‘Summit Series’, eight hockey games played between the Russian Red Army team and an all-star cast of Canadian professionals. Without delving into the sporting glories of the series (Canada won it, four games to three, with one tie), we can aver that the event was as much about diplomacy, national identity and political-economic rivalry in the context of the Cold War as it was about skating and scoring.

It is widely claimed that there was a clear spatial continuity in the evolution of the traditional Middle Eastern city, with every new development the result of an intelligent, albeit unplanned, evolution of pre-existing doctrines of construction. However, as far as the new Safavid urban development of seventeenth-century Isfahan (in Iran) is concerned, it is possible to distinguish a spatial fragmentation, in terms of urban pattern and urban structure, between the old texture and new extensions.

Between 1950 and 1964, as a result of slight federal policy shifts, Cold War civil defence went from a pro-urban policy dedicated to the preservation of communities to an anti-urban policy focused on social control in the wake of an attack. Civil defence volunteers in Baltimore along with some of the city's civil defence paid staff, who had bought the federal message that they could protect themselves and their communities for nuclear war, allied with anti-nuclear activists against an increasingly militarized programme – one that by 1961 prioritized post-attack policing and de-emphasized the imperative to preserve urban neighbourhoods.

This article uses the Decrees issued by the London Fire Court to explore two aspects of property law and practice in the 1660s. The first is the use of trusts and settlements. The Decrees suggest that at least for property owners these were more widespread than previously thought. The second theme concerns women. Fathers and husbands used their property carefully to make provision for their daughters and wives. More than that, women were clearly active participants in the property ‘market’, despite the legal restrictions imposed on them. The conclusions emphasize the importance of looking beyond legal rules.

The London Bridge Waterworks (LBWW) was founded in 1581 and lasted until the removal of the bridge in 1822. The waterworks was one of the largest water companies in London during this time. In contrast to the other water companies, its history was closely tied to both the bridge itself, as well as the City of London. Its initial growth was linked to the City's expansion, but was more limited in the eighteenth century because its pipes could not reach the expanding suburbs. This article describes the LBWW mostly at its height around 1745, when its surveyor produced a detailed engineering report of its technology.

This article offers a reconsideration of planning and development in English towns and cities after the Black Death (1348). Conventional historical accounts have stressed the occurrence of urban ‘decay’ in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here, instead, a case is made that after 1350 urban planning continued to influence towns and cities in England through the transformation of their townscapes. Using the conceptual approaches of urban morphologists in particular, the article demonstrates that not only did the foundation of new towns and creation of new suburbs characterize the period 1350–1530, but so too did the redevelopment of existing urban landscapes through civic improvements and public works. These reveal evidence for the particular ‘agents of change’ involved in the planning and development process, such as surveyors, officials, patrons and architects, and also the role played by maps and drawn surveys. In this reappraisal, England's urban experiences can be seen to have been closely connected with those instances of urban planning after the Black Death occurring elsewhere in contemporary continental Europe.

We describe and analyse how Newcastle was transformed from a relatively stagnant British city at the dawn of the nineteenth century to one of the most vibrant cities in the world by the early twentieth century. We use two frameworks to chart and explain this momentous change: Wallerstein's model of hegemonic cycles to locate Newcastle's late development in a world-historical context, and Jacobs’ theory of city economic growth to understand the processes of change within the city and its region. These lead to an empirical focus on three investigations: first, how Newcastle grew geographically to become a multi-nodal city region (Tyneside plus Wearside); second, how the Newcastle city economy grew and developed into a very complex division of labour; and third, how this generated a new modern metropolitan cultural world.

It has recently been revealed that English common law played a certain role in dealing with the pollution problems that accompanied industrialization. This article explores the role of legal actions in solving environmental problems, not within a legal theory but in a larger framework of environmental politics. By focusing on legal actions, it is shown that the Act on Smoke Abatement of 1821 triggered smoke and noise nuisance lawsuits in London, especially against printers. The introduction of the steam press not only contributed to the production of cheap prints but also transformed the printing business into a polluting industry. Legal actions could sometimes remove a polluting business from a plaintiff's neighbourhood, though it also raised the problem of environmental inequality.

Port-cities provide excellent examples of the socio-economic transformations that occurred during the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hermoupolis on the island of Syros was a major economic centre in Greece and a hub of international trade during the nineteenth century. However, economic transformations that commenced in the 1860s affected long-established port-based activities such as wooden shipbuilding and its related industries due to the decline of sailing ships and the expansion of factories. This factor led to an increase in tension and antagonism between manufacturers and shipbuilders over the use of land and altered the physical and the socio-economic landscape of the port-city. However, new types of economic activities flourished, like the tramp steamship business and factories, which enabled Hermoupolis to maintain its economic importance until World War II.

Focusing on the example of municipal interventions in defence, this article proposes to evaluate the role of cities and towns in Cold War policies. It discusses how, in the early 1980s, residents in Great Britain, New Zealand, West Germany and the USA claimed responsibility for defence and (dis)armament policies in the name of their respective city or home town. To justify this claim, protagonists not only portrayed urban settlements as probable targets of nuclear war. They also highlighted cities and towns as concrete places and drew attention to locality as a scale that might bear specific potentials for participation and empowerment. Yet a closer analysis of such initiatives in the four countries reveals that municipal activities for peace and disarmament developed in far more complex spatial relations than references to the ‘local’ as a scale of involvement might imply.

This article examines the political and social tensions of late Ottoman Haifa through the history of the Hejaz Railway and a particular monument, the ‘Exalted Column’ (Sütūn-u ʿĀlī), a monument erected in 1903 to commemorate the beginning of Ottoman construction on the Haifa railway branch. By first establishing the use of railways and railway architecture as a means of exerting state power in a comparative and local perspective, the railway structures in Haifa are analysed in the context of that city's other monumental buildings. This then leads to a discussion of the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī as a celebration of Ottoman authority and modernity, and of the developing Ottoman–German alliance. The symbolism of the column's iconography is shown to reflect a variety of problems that the Ottoman state faced in Haifa at the turn of the twentieth century.

Although little explored, regulations – in the form of laws and byelaws – formed an important technique of nineteenth-century government. This article explores the implementation and enforcement of two sets of regulations regarding the keeping and disposal of dirt imposed by Scottish local authorities: one on behaviours around the disposal of domestic refuse, the other on the keeping of dung – a form of property. While behaviours around refuse were more stringently policed than those affecting property, in both cases regulations were not the basis of a strict disciplinary regime, but a means of informing, educating and persuading residents into cleanly habits.

This article examines the role played by workmen's trains in allowing working-class families to move out into London's suburbs between 1860 and 1914. While previous scholarship has argued that these trains effectively only benefited skilled artisans or a working-class elite, it is argued here that from the 1880s onwards they were increasingly used by unskilled workers in irregular employment. Furthermore, they were also used by women and children earning low wages in subsidiary employment. Ultimately, it is demonstrated that a much broader spectrum of the working class were living in the suburbs and commuting than has been previously supposed.

Focusing on Liverpool in the early 1980s, this article argues that localized approaches to Cold War cities can help us understand the impact of national nuclear policy on cultures of local government and everyday life. After an articulation of cultural politics in the early 1980s, this article suggests that nuclear cultures that existed in Liverpool were shaped by ideas and assumptions discursively reinforced at both a national and local level.