As public spaces, such as plazas and parks, were increasingly aestheticized and commercialized in late nineteenth-century Mexico, these visual and accessible shared spaces became subject to the competing visions of different urban groups. This article argues that these transformed public spaces enabled a wide range of city residents, not just the elite class, to assert their own claims to the city. Street vendors and petty entrepreneurs, in particular, found the opportunity to demonstrate their contributions to public aesthetics, the local economy and consumer needs, while simultaneously claiming their rights as political actors and their identity as civic-minded residents. Through a close analysis of letters written by working residents, the article suggests how enterprising men and women performed their ‘public civility’, ‘honest occupation’ and ‘morality’ in the ‘Lettered City’ through their written dialogues with municipal and state officials. These exchanges also reveal how the slippage between the categories of vecino (literally, neighbour) and cuidadano (literally, citizen) functioned in the everyday politics of the provincial Mexican city, highlighting how citizenship in Mexico was not just an outgrowth of nineteenth-century liberalism, but also rooted in local customs and much earlier historical notions of community membership.

In keeping with past experiences, 2005 produced a rich range of 70 theses that address urban history topics. Equally, as in past years, the topics the theses address are marked by diversity that itself is reflective of the nature of the urban experience. As usual the theses reviewed here are drawn from the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, which now also features Irish theses, and Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/dissertations. This year's crop of theses has proved somewhat easier to categorize than has been the case in previous years and has seen the emergence of some new topics. In particular there is a noticeable interest in what might be called the urban environment and its functioning, which leads to interest in the infrastructural aspects of the city. This is not a new agenda for urban historians but it does also reflect the growth of environmental history and seems to represent an intersection of the two areas. It is also a consequence of the dominance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in urban history, which of itself tends to bring infrastructure to the historian's notice. Another interesting area of study that is emerging as the result of the opening of Soviet era archives is that of city planning, reconstruction and history in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries. Theses from American universities continued to predominate with 68 per cent being drawn from their institutions. The proportion from Great Britain dropped to 21 per cent but the percentage from other countries, predominantly Canadian universities, increased to 11 per cent. The earlier production of this article may be the reason for the reduction in the British proportion rather than a real decline in numbers. There were noticeable clusters of theses coming from Stanford University (7.6 per cent of the total), with the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University each producing 6.1 per cent of the theses produced. In Britain there was a small cluster that emerged from the Open University and among the ‘other’ group, Toronto University was the only institution to produce more than one thesis.

This article searches for the historic centre of Los Angeles, California, the archetype of urban sprawl. Taking maps and photographs as its principal sources it finds an enduring urban centre in a plaza designed by the Spanish in 1781 and occupied by Mexicans until the US army conquered the city in 1847. The Plaza anchored the dispersed ranch land of the Pueblo of Los Angeles and was the magnet for commercial development during the first decades of American settlement. Between 1850 and 1880, Anglo immigrants built up the south-western side of the Plaza with shops and civic buildings creating a hybrid and bicultural centre, a compression of Main Street and the Plaza. After 1880 a process of spatial mitosis occurred as commerce and municipal functions moved down Main Street and melded into a modern downtown. Since then the skyscrapers downtown have overshadowed but not displaced the old Plaza, which still serves as social, symbolic and ceremonial space for Angelenos, especially immigrants from Latin America. The durability of the Plaza and its direct successors, Main Street and Downtown, not only designate a centre for Los Angeles, but articulate a distinctive urban morphology, that of a centrifugal metropolis rather than fragmented city or sprawl of suburbs.

Just as nature fails to produce the ‘perfect harvest’ with predictable regularity, so does the quantity of medieval urban periodical publications vary. The crop of 2005 falls well behind the richer harvests of previous years, in quantity though not in quality of the published work. Two impressions of this work: first, there are fewer obvious ‘themes’ which seem to preoccupy the authors' minds; but, secondly, articles by German and Austrian scholars show a greater concern with the exposition and analysis of major urban themes than do those from the English-speaking world. One wonders why. Could it be that German-speaking urban historians are less hesitant to re-address the seemingly obvious? Two prime examples here are presented by the contributions of Ferdinand Opll and Benjamin Scheller.

In Denmark, the first actual towns can be dated to the eighth and ninth centuries. The establishment of towns became more significant in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in connection with the state-building process, and these towns were distinctly consumer towns serving as administrative, religious and military centres. From 1200 to 1350 Denmark, similar to the German area, underwent considerable urbanization; a large number of market towns were created, and in contrast to the older ones they were mercantile towns. Denmark thus clearly became the most urbanized country in Scandinavia. As Copenhagen grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the urban system decisively changed its character in the direction of a primate system. The characteristics of the primate system are particularly distinct within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Denmark, but less pronounced if the entire monarchy is included in the period in which Denmark was a conglomerate state. The institutional conditions must in general be attributed considerable importance in explaining Danish urban development. Thus, Denmark is one of the countries where town privileges were of great significance until the middle of the nineteenth century.