Yet Michael Cotey Morgan cautions that it was not a seamless alignment. The three ideological agendas orienting the Cold War international politics of human rights were those promoted by state representatives of liberal democracies, communists, and postcolonial nationalists. Alliances between these three approaches to rights were malleable, especially in the non-aligned “Third World.” While socialist and postcolonial states emphasized socioeconomic over individual political and civil rights, many developing states shared the American view that international human rights must not task the state with economic responsibilities toward its citizens. In the Cold War context, the principle on which all states could agree was the protection of state sovereignty, although, beyond the principle of non-interference so problematic to rights protections, no consensus existed on how to measure sovereignty.

Northern Europe is often undervalued in surveys of the historical development of cities. The reasons have been the relatively small size of most urban settlements; the peripheral location of Scandinavian and most Hanseatic cities, when viewed from Western Europe; and the complexity underlying the concept of the Hanse, which connected many of the settlements. The importance of the towns and cities in the area lay in their multiple functions – be they economic, commercial, political, religious, cultural or military – and in the fact that they were nodes in larger networks. These connections meant that the Scandinavian towns and towns in the Hanse were fully integrated into urban Europe. The Hanse, a unique premodern urban organisation, illustrates how rich this urban history was.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

This chapter highlights changes in the relationship between humans and the urban environment by revealing the negotiations and tensions regarding the sealing and unsealing of urban soils and surfaces; organic waste removal and recycling; the use of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ soils; spontaneous plant growth and plant cultivation; as well as urbanisation, biodiversity and nature conservation. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrialisation both reinforced and blurred the separation and distinction between urban and rural, city and landscape, centre and periphery. It also produced novel hybrid ecologies which might be called nature-cultures; ecologies in which cities were naturalised and nature was urbanised.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

How did ideologies of war and peace become visible in modern European cities and how did the effects of war manifest themselves in the daily lives of people during times of war? This chapter addresses the role of war (and peace) in the context of European urbanisation from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Starting with the revolutionary wars of the early nineteenth century to the wars of colonial expansion and national unification all the way to the era of the world wars and the subsequent Cold War into the present, the chapter traces the changing engagement between political/military institutions and urban populations/environments. The complex interrelationship between war and European cities was marked by strategic changes in the practice of warfare itself – from battles fought by opposing military forces to practices of total war that increasingly included warfare against civilians (in cities).

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

For a long time, the cities of northern and central Italy were understood as belonging to a ‘communal’ sphere whose economic, social and political trajectory pointed towards modernity; southern Italian cities were part of a ‘monarchical’ sphere whose backwardness was said to continue to the present day. This chapter, however, approaches the history of the cities of medieval Italy from within the political spaces to which they belonged, especially those of the great monarchies that dominated the peninsula. If we avoid two preconceptions – that communes were a manifestation of statehood and that monarchies necessarily limited the autonomy of cities – the two spheres of the Italian cities appear much closer to urban experiences in the rest of Europe than has often been recognised.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.

Volume II charts European urbanism between 700 and 1850, the millennium during which Europe became the world’s most urbanised region. Featuring thirty-six chapters from leading scholars working on all the major linguistic areas of Europe, the volume offers a state-of-the-art survey that explores and explains this transformation, how similar or different such processes were across Europe, and how far it is possible to discern traits that characterise European urbanism in this period. The first half of the volume offers overviews on the urban history of Mediterranean Europe, Atlantic and North Sea Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and European urbanisms around the world. The second half explores major themes, from the conceptualisation of cities and their material fabric to continuities and changes in the social, political, economic, religious and cultural histories of cities and towns.