Although the COVID-19 pandemic is far from history, its devastating effects have inspired copious scholarship among urban historians in 2022. The overwhelming majority of infections and deaths occur in towns and cities, which the UN's secretary general, Antonio Guterres, called the ‘ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic’.Footnote ² ‘Epidemics, planning and the city’ was a special issue of Planning Perspectives, whose editor, Juliet Davis, responded to current debates on how cities might adapt to mitigate the future spread of disease and their consequences. COVID-19, she writes, may be a new pandemic presenting new challenges, but ‘strategies such as social distancing and the promotion of fresh air are old’ (‘Epidemics, planning and the city: a special issue of planning perspectives’, Planning Perspectives, 37 (2022), 1–8). Acknowledging current tensions between concepts of pandemic-proof ‘open-air’ cities of the future and the need for sustainable urban development through high-density buildings and public transport networks, articles in this special issue presented historic examples of what has been done before, why and how they turned out.

Antonio Carbone's ‘Epidemics, the issue of control and the grid: a nineteenth-century perspective from Buenos Aires’ (Planning Perspectives, 37 (2022), 9–26), addressed the complex interactions of disease, rapid urban expansion and the inadequacies, in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, of partial reforms to a colonial-legacy, grid-based, city management system. Before the city's cholera and yellow fever epidemics between 1867 and 1871, its traditionalist and new liberal administrations had variously supported the old, closed-grid plan or partially opened the grid, producing a palimpsest of the two. By Carbone's account, this was an uneasy compromise which came into question in light of the epidemics, specifically regarding city elites’ ability to control lower-class dwellings and their assumed culpability for the disease outbreaks. Such concerns existed before but Carbone argues that disease fuelled them still further. They added urgency to discussions reimagining the city's future and its use of space, whose concepts aligned with different social and political groups. Drawing lessons from this for the present, Carbone concludes that ‘viewing urban space as an entity whose production is configured as an arena in which different conceptions, practices, and interests clash’ may encourage openness in current discussions and decisions on city futures in the shadow of COVID-19.

Other studies in this issue included Mrunmayee Satam on Spanish influenza in Bombay (1918–19), Nida Rehman on malaria in Mian Mir, a military cantonment in British colonial India (1849–1910), Julie Collins and Peter Lekkas on tuberculosis in South Australia (1890–1918), Samantha Martin's consideration of links between food and disease in the wholesale fruit and vegetable markets of late nineteenth-century Dublin and Giorgio Talocci, Donald Brown and Haim Yacobi's comparative study of the histories of urban planning and urban health initiatives in Jerusalem (1967 and 2002), Phnom Penh (1953 and 2001) and Toronto (1971 and 1990s). Acknowledging COVID-19's ability to cross territorial boundaries, Talocci et al. extended the existing concept of biopolitics to ‘The biogeopolitics of cities: a critical enquiry across Jerusalem, Phnom Penh, Toronto’ (Planning Perspectives, 37 (2022), 169–89). They consider how past crises have also transcended urban boundaries. Through the lens of their neologism, they ask how urban planning and health are affected by regional and trans-local forces.

Touching on a theme addressed in other journals, that of planners’ response to informal urban settlements in the context of city development and renewal schemes, Noel A. Manzano Gómez's ‘The cleanliness of otherness: epidemics, informal urbanization and urban degeneration in early twentieth-century Madrid’ addressed the clearance of such chozas in early twentieth-century Madrid (Planning Perspectives, 37 (2022), 127–47). Their dispossessed residents subsequently moved to the urban periphery where they built new shantytowns just as prone to disease as previously, but now less well regulated by authorities. Manzano Gómez linked Madrid's early twentieth-century slum clearances to racist and classist interpretations of decades-old medical science at a time of press reports of impending epidemics, associating chozas with pathological ‘otherness’. Today, in the context of COVID-19, he perceives re-emerging prejudices towards Madrid's urban poor and their deprived neighbourhoods, including towards immigrant populations. He thus calls on Madrid's urban planners ‘to adopt a robust public position’ against slum clearances to prevent history repeating itself.

Social inequalities linked with spatial segregation in cities lead to unequal health and other outcomes. Geeta Thatra's history of caste-based residential segregation in Greater Bombay demonstrated, through archival and oral records, how such inequalities were reinforced over time by layer upon layer of conurbation-wide planning initiatives. Her ‘Dalit Chembur: spatializing the caste question in Bombay, c. 1920s–1970s’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 63–97), filled two gaps in the historiography: that of Mumbai's neglected mid-twentieth-century planning history and the perspective of its poorest citizens at the urban periphery, specifically the Dalit settlers in Chembur (an area of Trombay island, to the north of Bombay City). By 2009, against a Greater Bombay-wide average human development measure of 0.56, with its wealthiest wards ranking 0.96, Chembur and the city's other poorest wards north of Bombay City ranked just 0.05. In part, Thatra traces this to the vicissitudes of pre- and post-colonial urban planning.

Informal settlements vary enormously, and their place in urban history can be misunderstood. Egemen Yılgür's revisionist study of the Teneke Mahalles (literally ‘tin-can’) neighbourhoods of Istanbul highlights the uniqueness of their built form and demography. In his ‘Formation of informal settlements and the development of the idiom Teneke Mahalle’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 608–37), Yılgür established their origins in the late nineteenth-century settlements of refugees from the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Modern planners confuse these peri-urban settlements with a more diverse form, Turkey's gecekondus, which are typically larger squatter settlements on agricultural lands populated by rural peasants. In contrast, the earliest residents of Teneke Mahalles were more suited to urban life, building makeshift homes on pieces of unused land on or around the city's decaying ramparts. Egemen Yılgür's study is striking for focusing our gaze onto the dwellings and settlements of Istanbul's very poorest residents and their rich history.

Historians of Britain's nineteenth-century working class may struggle to know much about their everyday lives. Why was it, for example, that they moved so frequently between similar dwellings in the same neighbourhood? Richard Rodger's monumental ‘Property and inequality: housing dynamics in a nineteenth-century city’ (Economic History Review, 75 (2022), 1151–81) is a rich resource of insights into the habitation habits of all classes of tenant residing in the nearly 34,000 individual dwellings of Edinburgh between 1860 and 1861. His data come from a valuation roll for that year, compiled by the burgh assessor, listing the types of property, their owner(s), tenant(s) and occupier(s), together with their yearly rental or value. From this, Rodger has revealed ‘the residential, occupational, and socio-spatial dynamics of the city’ for a single year, finding ‘subtle and graduated inequalities within the housing sector and its component parts at this time’. While his study rests on the facts of Edinburgh's mid-nineteenth-century housing, the author expects his findings to apply up to a generation before and after 1860–61, and in other urban settings too, though the particulars will vary.

Students of England's nineteenth-century local government may have an embarrassment of riches to choose from concerning its various forms, what they did and why. But details of the sources of their financing and the repayment terms of loans supporting their spending are easier to obtain for city corporations than for smaller bodies like improvement commissions, turnpike trusts, dock trustees, local boards and urban and rural district councils. But Ian Webster's ‘Making the municipal capital market in nineteenth-century England’ (Economic History Review, 75 (2022), 56–79) reveals the size of the capital market which provided local authority funding for road building, sewers, gasworks, schools, hospitals and the like. This is another mammoth piece of work, and in it Webster has compiled two large datasets: of published local authority accounts, local taxation returns and borrowing approvals, with pre-1884 data published here for the first time; and details of the six sources of 54,000 loan transactions of 3,000 local bodies (amounting to 38 per cent of the total borrowed). He finds that the business of lending money to local government had much in common with the wider capital market, and that most of the money came from private individuals and institutions, with central government having only a modest role. Webster's findings should be seized upon not only by financial historians, or even those concerned with nineteenth-century local government, but also by historians of local politics. The affordability or otherwise of local government spending, and its effect on local rates, could make or break the fortunes of councillors. In that regard, Michael Barke and Peter J. Taylor's ‘Narrative heroes and civic builders in Newcastle city region during the nineteenth century’ (Urban History, 49 (2022), 88–107) highlights the unsung heroes of that northern English town's nineteenth-century transformation into a city renowned for its industrial development and technological and economic prowess. Local histories are peppered with names of the great and the good, but on the authors’ closer examination, the names of forgotten local heroes have been uncovered.

Barke and Taylor's innovation was to recognize a significant discrepancy between historic acclaim as ‘narrative heroes’ and those demonstrably involved in the ‘political conflicts, cultural activities, social problems and responses…[contributing to] the city's complicated development’ who they dubbed ‘civic builders’. The authors found this through a quantitative ‘scavenger method’, listing and ranking individuals’ involvement in useful societies or clubs, based on archival records of 1,320 lists of organizers in 343 local institutions, then drawing up a list of the 1,621 most significant active members. Among the types of people Barke and Taylor found had been under-rated in Newcastle's nineteenth-century urban historiography were lawyers, medics and gentry.

Rio de Janeiro's Carioca aqueduct, bringing fresh water from its mountain Tijuca Forest to the burgeoning population of the city's swampy and marshy coastal trading centre, was a marvel of late eighteenth-century improvement and colonial engineering. But by the late nineteenth century, it was falling into disuse. Today, only a monumental double-arched portion of its structure, the Arcos de Carioca, remains to recall its important role in the city's urban development. Alida C. Metcalf, Sean Morey Smith and S. Wright Kennedy's two-pronged investigation, ‘“A mere gutter!” The Carioca Aqueduct and water delivery in mid-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro’ (Urban History, 49 (2022), 61–87) addresses not only the aqueduct's engineering, water-carrying capacity, and its now-forgotten route down the mountain, but also the human distribution network of enslaved people it relied upon; those forced to carry its fresh waters to the tables of free Rio residents. The distribution of clean drinking water is a common theme in nineteenth-century urban history, and we feel the authors’ footwork as they trudge through Rio's backstreets armed with historic maps, finding in names like Rua do Aqueducto (Aqueduct Street) clues pointing to the trajectory of its lost channels. These are combined with aerial surveys using GIS mapping to produce a likely route map. To these, the authors add nineteenth-century travellers’ testimony of slaves collecting and carrying heavy jugs of water, reminding us of their unwilling contribution to Rio's urban culture. ‘Good water in Rio came paired with slavery’, they note, and even after the transatlantic slave trade's mid-nineteenth-century abolition, enslaved people continued to distribute water in the city. Though new aqueducts and piped water systems were built there, fountains and spouts remained the only sources of water for many residents as late as 1888.

Few histories of major urban improvements, for example the building of new roads or other major infrastructural projects, explain in detail how private lands were secured for them. Nor do they usually tackle the fairness or otherwise of financial compensation to such landholders or the pressures applied to force the unwilling to sell their property. Carmen C.M. Tsui's ‘From public interest to public obligation: compulsory land expropriation for capital reconstruction in nationalist China’ (Urban History, 49 (2022), 383–400) addressed the seizure of private land to create a modern European-style capital in Nanjing (1927–37). Her sources were field investigative reports produced in the 1930s for Nanjing's Central School of Governance, alongside official publications including City Administration Weekly, which proved a useful source of contemporary government propaganda selling city-wide improvements as a ‘public obligation’. Tsui found that reluctant landholders were stigmatized by being called ‘short-sighted’ and ‘selfish’ for trying to ‘frustrate the capital's reconstruction and modernization’. Random land acquisitions and unjust compensation were common, she finds, and additionally landowners living beside a new road were forced to pay dearly towards the costs of its construction. Tsui highlights the lack of similar studies of land seizures connected with modern European Haussmanization. Such studies may present similarities in the ambitions of capitalist city developers, though the extent of their realization may differ.

Capitalism and the politics of race forced the mid-nineteenth-century middle-class African American community of New York's Seneca Village from their privately owned homes, to make way for Central Park. From Alexander Manevitz's ‘“A great injustice”: urban capitalism and the limits of freedom in nineteenth-century New York City’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 1365–82), we learn that Seneca Village was established in the 1820s as an experimental settlement in an area of upper Manhattan. Its founders sought a location that was distant enough from other black communities to be independent but close enough to maintain a connection with them, and to the city's broader economy. Seneca Village offered residents protection from slave kidnappers and race rioters and was a stable place from which they might develop institutions, offer educational opportunities and achieve voting rights. Founding members of the Village belonged to prominent black social and anti-slavery organizations. In the consultation preceding Central Park's development, Seneca villagers opposed their eviction from the land due to its community benefits but were unsuccessful. They were defeated, writes Manevitz, by the same real estate capitalism that made their original purchase of the lands possible. The author makes a convincing argument that the destruction of Seneca Village was particularly harmful to its African American community, and in the propaganda campaign against them, we see pre-echoes of some of the tactics seen in early twentieth-century Nanjing.

Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and city dwellers’ greater appreciation for open spaces, several articles this year addressed urban greening. Ranja Hautamaki's ‘From sparse to compact city – shifting notions of nature in post-war residential landscapes in the Helsinki region’ (Planning Perspectives, 37 (2022), 1179–203) asked how changing approaches to landscape architecture (apparent through planning documents, texts and drawings) reveal shifting conceptions and narratives of urban nature and their contribution to discussions on healthy environments. Hautamaki identifies changing planning paradigms of urban nature associated with different Nordic city types: the garden city; the forest city; the compact city; the ecological city; and the new compact city. Her analysis of the meaning of urban landscape architecture, through case-studies of such cities since the 1950s, included characterizations of nature as relief, boundary and greening. From this, she has highlighted the value of urban nature as heritage, noting that in response to new challenges (residential densification) and changing land uses, nature's contribution to the culturally layered urban landscape, and its meaning to urban history, is often forgotten.

Johanna Conterio's ‘Controlling land, controlling people: urban greening and the territorial turn in theories of urban planning in the Soviet Union’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 479–503) presented a surprising use of urban greening, here as a component of Stalinist policing and social control in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1932. This was a period of particularly acute urban disorder following collectivization when police established order in towns and cities by the expulsion of ‘socially harmful elements’. State-sponsored urban planning was geared to social engineering, for example by reducing urban density and limiting urban growth. Green areas in cities promoted public health and reduced urban density. However, Conterio also finds that they were used as ‘emptiable places…[and part of] the urban geography of mass operations’ by Soviet police who swept up people from them and fed them into the coercive population distribution system of the gulag. The author concludes by suggesting a rethink of Soviet planners’ reputation as radical, humanist visionaries who became victims of Stalinism. Rather, she finds that some urban planners of this period were actively complicit in proposing new methods of surveillance and control.

The production of urban heritage has been a strong theme this year, mainly covering types of building or district thought worthy of conservation, and the shifting power of experts in times of political, paradigmatic or other upheavals to ensure that favoured heritage sites are safeguarded in future city planning schemes. But we were also reminded that humans were not the only animals to shape modern cities.

Camels, while indispensable to the history of Beijing, have rarely received as much attention in its historiography. But from Lei Zhang's ‘Urbanizing camels: camels in Beijing, 1900–1937’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 913–27), we learn that Bactrian camels (the two-humped variety) had been a prominent feature of Beijing since the thirteenth century. Once used for military and diplomatic purposes, they increasingly replaced equines as transporters of coal into the city from rural storehouses. In the post-1900, post-Boxer Rebellion, period of increasing urbanization, camel trains were replaced by cheaper and faster railways to carry coal to and from Beijing, with the animals relegated to its distribution between urban depots and homes. When, in 1928, the Nationalist government relocated China's capital to Nanjing, Beijing's municipal authority began to present the city as a Chinese cultural capital and tourist attraction, highlighting its imperial past and establishing camels as part of that heritage. ‘For westerners’, writes Zhang, ‘the camel reawakened the imagination of Kubla Khan's capital and urban life in ancient China’. Unlike resident urban animals like horses, dogs and pigs, he notes, Beijing's camels were unique in living outside the city while working within it. For Zhang, their story broadens our understanding of animals in urban history, transforming them from mere beasts of burden into cultural icons.

The politically precarious power of experts to decide which historic features merit conservation was exemplified in Mesut Dinier's ‘A political framework for understanding heritage dynamics in Turkey (1950–1980)’ (Urban History, 49 (2022), 364–82). His study focused on Turkey's High Council for Immovable Historic Works and Monuments (HC), ‘which functioned as the sole decision making mechanism for historic preservation in Turkey from 1951–1983’. Its powers to sanction or reject construction projects were ‘frightening’ according to one of its former members. Failure to comply with the HC could lead to fines, termination of construction or even imprisonment. Yet, during the 1950s, it was reluctant to use those powers, faced with an increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party government, whose Redevelopment Plan for Istanbul subsequently destroyed some of the city's historic quarters. In the bureaucratic chaos following Turkey's 1960 coup d’état, Dinier writes that the HC reasserted itself, but over time acquired an elitist reputation and proved a growing source of inconvenience and irritation for local authorities. After a second coup in 1980, the existing HC was terminated and replaced with an alternative model, where heritage decision-making was partly delegated to regional bodies. Ultimately, the author found that although, over three decades, the HC defined and imposed high standards for historic preservation, its policies proved mostly unworkable in practice.

It was not a political shift but a paradigmatic one, between 1867 and 1971, which tilted the balance in favour of conservation for an allegedly ‘obsolete’ Melbourne food market, set for clearance in favour of a new, modernist high-rise multi-purpose commercial and public complex. At this time, the City of Melbourne and the Victorian Government had decided to expand the city's Central Business District northwards, removing the market to facilitate a re-planned North Melbourne. But what James Lesh and Kali Myers call the tail of modernism's mid-twentieth-century ‘flux’ in ‘“Beyond repair”: modernism, renewal and the conservation of Melbourne's Queen Victorian Market, 1967–76’ (Planning Perspectives, 37 (2022), 217–42) created fertile conditions for opposition to the scheme by a diverse coalition of community groups, bolstered by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), forcing a rethink. The authors’ acknowledgment of the differing ideological motivations of the various interest groups who, despite this, worked together offers refreshing nuance to Lesh and Myers’ tale of the triumph of local over central planning. So, too, is their consideration of the battle amid the emergence of post-modernism and contextualism in design. The clash of cultures they consider was partly due to ‘the overall scarcity of future-oriented visions suited to the coming post-modern age’.

We are not told why the government of the Dominican Republic has been reluctant to approve an archaeological dig to find evidence of a building representing one of the darkest aspects of its colonial history: a now lost warehouse called La Negreta, which once housed slaves newly transported across the Atlantic. But in their ‘Stones and slaves: labour, race and spatial exclusion in colonial Santo Domingo’ (Urban History, 49 (2022) 746–70), José R. Núñez Collado and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury make a compelling argument for why the government should. The island nation's capital, Santo Domingo, once housed slaves and facilitated their distribution throughout the New World. Today, memories persist in folklore of how its reputation as a ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’ was earned. But little more remains of La Negreta than a street name and persistent references to it in folklore. To fully understand how hierarchies of power supported the slave industry, the authors argue that its quotidian logistics must be understood. For this, and to support and encourage new narratives about the Dominican Republic's national identity, they call for emblematic lost features of its built environment, like La Negreta, to be restored.

While this review has reflected this year's prominent themes of urban planning and improvement (with particular attention to informal settlements) on urban greening, and heritage, there were several other articles of particular interest which did not fit into those categories. They included: Prerna Agarwal's ‘The war at the workplace: Calcutta's dockworkers and changing labour regime, 1939–1945’ (International Review of Social History, 67 (2022), 407–34). This is a study of dramatic improvements to dockworkers’ compensation which were forced upon the port's wartime military administration due to Calcutta's increased strategic significance after the fall of Singapore and Rangoon. Recognizing the role that colonial universities played in urbanization, Do Young Oh's ‘The university and East Asian cities: the variegated origins of urban universities in colonial Seoul and Singapore’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 336–60) compared their different impacts in a Japanese and a British former colony, alongside those of other interest groups involved in the universities’ creation. Understanding how various colonial interests shaped these environments, writes the author, will help to unravel the complex development trajectory of East Asian urbanization; Jordan Sand's ‘Building Tokyo: social and political histories’ (Journal of Urban History, 48 (2022), 959–1193) was a special section of the journal introducing non-Japanese-language readers to research by leading scholars of Tokyo's urban history who are working today. Their several articles addressed the city's urban politics and development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, municipal responses to environmental hazards, gender and working-class culture, and informal economies; finally, a word of caution from our science desk to those historians and planners thinking of using intelligent Cellular Automata (CA) systems to model urban futures based on historic GIS data. Yongjiu Feng, Peiqi Wu, Xiaohua Tong, Pengshuo Li, Rong Wang, Yilun Zhou et al. note, in ‘The effects of factor generalization scales on the reproduction of dynamic urban growth’ (Geo-spatial Information Science, 25 (2022) 457–75), that the ‘driving factors’ of urban growth relied upon by CA systems are many and various. They include socio-economic factors, as well as physical, proximity, neighbourhood and urban planning factors, which can all interact in complex ways. Feng et al. show that the scale of such factors (for example the size of a railway station) is important to the reliability of CA predictions about urban growth around it. But CA systems typically use data from GIS maps, and the size of their features (e.g. railway stations which are typically represented by points) can be unclear. Is that a small stop on a local branch line or the Eurostar terminal? Because the future of urban growth near each station would be very different. The authors propose a new way of dealing with this issue. Meanwhile, behind the technicality of this paper is a reminder that in the field of geo-informatics, where information science is harnessed to address urban challenges, knowledge gaps remain. They may affect predictions for the future, based on knowledge from the past, in unpredictable ways.