During the negotiations with their Flemish subjects, the Burgundian dukes generally asked for taxes or military aid, while their subjects demanded the confirmation of privileges and the political and economic stability necessary for trade and industry to flourish. In this analysis of the institutionalized bargaining sessions between cities, rural districts and the dukes in Flanders, it will be shown that a specific political discourse developed among the Flemish delegates, that can be considered ‘corporatist’ or ‘communalist’.

Open to both aristocracy and middling rank, pleasure gardens fashioned a spectacle of order out of a heterogeneous crowd. They have been seen as uniquely British spaces, demonstrating how Britain juggled commerce, politeness and liberty. Yet these resorts had imitators abroad, especially in Paris. Far from being a case of Paris emulating London, they created a playful fantasy that shuttled visitors between the two cities – helping them imagine the ideal metropolis, polite yet policed.

This article examines the development of the Nottingham Arboretum (1852), the centrepiece of one of the most ambitious schemes of urban enclosure and improvement in mid-Victorian Britain. It contends that the provision for parks and green spaces in the town was inspired by local naturalists and sanitary reformers as well as cultural emulation and civic rivalry with other urban centres such as Derby and Manchester. Analysis of the design and management of the Arboretum and green spaces and local controversies about funding and access reveal major local disagreements concerning uses of such spaces reflecting continued divisions in Victorian urban society beneath the public rhetorical and celebratory façade.

The early nineteenth-century manufacturing town was a diverse and transient environment that inspired a varied canon of printed imagery. Alongside folio engravings and souvenir prints, one of the most prevalent genres of urban imagery was the commercial advertisement. This article demonstrates the value of early pictorial advertisements in accessing contemporary attitudes to urban manufacturing and to provincial urbanization in general. It argues that in a climate of urban rivalry, artists and publishers inherited and invented new visual formulae with which to promote manufactories and commercial premises to tradesmen, consumers and tourists. It concludes that the resulting imagery throws into question the prevalent historical caricature of the early nineteenth-century manufacturing town as a place of deprivation, disorder and decay.

Twentieth-century voluntary social work organizations became accustomed to altering the emphases of their work in response to changing legislation or shifts in funding priorities. The House of Charity for Distressed Persons in Soho, founded in 1846, provides a nineteenth-century example of a similar phenomenon. The history of its first 70 years suggests that the intention to serve ‘selected deserving persons’ was outweighed by the need to ensure the spiritual well-being of its benefactors through opportunities for Christian service. Its primary purpose was thereby subverted, and the energies of its workers were diverted from raising funds to support ‘selected deserving persons’ to casting round for ways to fill the space in the House and to continue to give the benefactors a role.

The formation of Manchuria in 1932 gave local cities along the Japan Sea coast new hope for development. However, their interpretation of imperialism was in terms of the city rather than the nation. The ways in which these discourses of nation and region played out in ideas of urban development are particularly clear in Kanazawa, the major city on the Japan Sea coast, in the rhetoric surrounding the presentation of empire and region in its exposition that spring.