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.

In the 1000 or so years after c. 700, Britain and Ireland’s urban sector developed from a hybrid European urbanism on the edge of the continent to an imperial urbanism forming the scaffolding of a complicated colonial and commercial empire. This contributed to the long-term shift in European economic power from its traditional epicentres in the Mediterranean and North Sea and Baltic worlds, with the Atlantic Archipelago on its margins, to the new riches of the Atlantic and Asians world, with the Archipelago at its heart. British and Irish urbanization involved conquest, colonisation, and social reordering as well as material improvement; and the cities, boroughs, and towns and ‘villages’ were more than a little implicated in the human and environmental trauma of Atlantic slavery and the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores fascist urban imaginary – the ways in which European fascists responded to, and sought to reorder, the modern city – and how these visions informed projects in Italy, Germany and Spain. Drawing on Social Darwinist and social hygienic discourses, fascists regarded cities antagonistically, as epicentres of cosmopolitanism, degenerate modernism, racial corruption and sterility. The city, like the nation as whole, was a space to be conquered, purged and regenerated. Yet at the same time, they also embraced the urban environment as a showcase for national greatness, a site of political ritual and a vehicle for the totalitarian transformation of society.

This tension shaped the policies of fascist regimes, especially as directed towards the capitals of Rome, Berlin and Madrid. Through demolition, excavation and construction, they used urban space to invoke past golden ages, attempted to leave an enduring imprint on the built environment, and formulated utopian plans for cities of the future. The chapter also considers the afterlives of fascist urban interventions and their significance for contemporary memory politics.

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.

This chapter critiques a non-reflexive use of the ‘post-industrial’ among urban historians. It investigates the genealogy of the term, tracing the notion back to period after the Second World War. The concept expressed a belief that the dynamo of science and industry would produce a planned society centred on wealth and leisure. In this utopian vision, the economy was to be transformed by computers and machines, while society was to change through a radical process of tertiarisation. However, during the economic crisis of the 1970s, many of these initial ideas were appropriated against a much gloomier background, retaining the idea that job losses in Western societies caused by industrial relocation could be solved by a growing demand for non-moveable human services. Moreover, investing in ICT, knowledge and creativity were to be the pillars on which future urban societies had to be built. The chapter questions how this post-industrial imaginary became the focus of political-ideological recuperation in Europe from the 1980s onwards. It questions the urban drivers and unequal outcomes of this process of urban transformation.

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.

How to foreground Africa and Africans in the processes and logics of European urbanisation and modernisation? Building on recent scholarship on (de)coloniality, the chapter explores how understanding Europe from Africa may transform dominant narratives of urban industrial modernity. The chapter discusses how racial capitalism and colonial dynamics shaped urban modernisation projects, thus seeing European ports from the perspective of the enslaved, Haussmann’s Paris from the perspective of Algiers, and Prussia’s rural planning from the settler colonial politics of Southern Africa. It further explores how the infrastructures of empire, from railways to dams and highways, shaped processes of Europeanisation and rearticulated colonial relations of power in Africa under the rubric of development. Finally, the chapter examines anti-colonial struggles in the imperial metropolises of Paris, London and Berlin since the 1930s and how they shaped changing projects of decolonisation, both in Africa and Europe.

This chapter provides keys to reading the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, later, the post-industrial and digital trends in Southern Europe, with some data on urbanisation and industrialisation, focusing on Iberia and Italy. This approach is explained with reference to the first emergence of industrialisation (the context of ‘delay’) and to the recent emergence of the ‘slow cities’. An overview of the development of three urban areas – Barcelona, Porto and Turin – creates a specific analytical framework and promotes a comparative perspective. The chapter proposes to rethink the approach to industrialisation as a generalised turning point in terms of change and all-round urban modernisation, consequently, considering aspects of ‘delay’ with respect to different dynamics. It identifies a ‘southernisation’ of Mediterranean Europe that created cultural as well as economic patterns as a form of marginalisation. The emergence of cultural heritage related to cities and towns redefines the role of Southern Europe in the new networks of European cities. The chapter looks for other rhythms and meanings of development connected to the awareness matured in the post-industrial world and the need for a paradigm shift in urban history. To this end, it offers entry points on breaks and continuities, aspects of change and historiographic interpretations.

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.

How does culture interact with cities – their growth, their beauties, their imaginaries – in recent times (mid-nineteenth century to the present)? How do writers represent cities in both narrative and poetic texts? How do visual artists depict them in paintings, drawings and photography? And what happens when cities are presented by both text and image at the same time?

Beyond representation, cities are also a playground for artists, a stage and a place to challenge the urban imaginary. The city is a dream topic and a dream place for illustrated books, magazines and hybrid works of art such as movies and performance, but also for street art. It is also a proper character of both visual and textual representations. What if it is considered as an intermedial object per se?

This chapter emphasises the imaginary dimension of the city, showing in particular how the city has been considered by writers and artists as the paragon of modernity since the mid-nineteenth century. Each of its five sections focuses on one issue of the urban experience in art and literature and on a particular genre of art.