Cities are not a mere backdrop to historical events; rather, they stimulate a range of felt experiences, defined as the way we feel in and about places and the felt relationships we have to and within them. Cities provoke emotional responses, foster emotional attachments, shape emotional communities and the norms that govern them, and influence how and why decisions about the urban are made. This chapter examines the role of felt experiences in urban history scholarship and calls for more engagement with the emotional dimensions inherent in people–place relations. To achieve this, the chapter examines three foundational themes within urban history: experiencing, planning and remembering through the lens of the felt and the emotional.

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.

Urban historians have become increasingly attentive to the various flows of peoples, resources and ideas that connected and at times disconnected urban spaces worldwide. This chapter on the history of urban revolutions, rebellions and riots draws on these debates. It aims to make sense of the way in which local occurrences of violence and discontent turned into events of national or transnational significance in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. As globally entangled sites of capitalist accumulation, knowledge production and migration, European cities played a pre-eminent role in the diffusion of protests and the emergence of new forms of insurgent citizenship. In order to explore this role, the chapter highlights four ‘transnational circuits’ that impacted on urban repertoires of contention: 1) activist networks, 2) mass media, 3) the circulation of expert knowledge, and 4) (post-)colonial migration. Attending to the way that different political conflicts were or were not embedded in such transnational circuits, it points to similarities and simultaneities, as well as differences and disconnections between urban agencies in Europe and beyond.

This chapter presents eleven buildings that are connected to important aspects of urban life between 1850 and the present, a period that is characterised by enormous energy wealth based on fossil fuels. These include icons of urban culture, such as the Crystal Palace in London, the Paris Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim as well as structures for housing, transport and industrial production, including a Glasgow tenement, a Moscow panel block, London’s St Pancras railway station and the Turbine Factory in Berlin. The chapter will discuss the impact of these buildings: as models for architectural design; as catalysers for urban plans and the politics behind them; and as symbols for radically different forms of modern urban life during nineteenth-century industrialisation, mid-twentieth-century modernisation, and late twentieth-century urban regeneration.

Food has been central to many critical public health issues in European cities. Although the steady increase in the quantity and variety of food in the late nineteenth century had a positive impact on urban health, many old food-related health concerns persisted and new ones emerged. Market forces alone seemed unable to bring about the necessary changes, and therefore cities were gradually vested with new powers to ensure that enough nutritious and safe food would be available. This chapter looks at the emergence and development of municipal infrastructure for urban food security, as well as its subsequent partial dismantling. It first focuses on municipal actions to inspect and monitor the quality and safety of food sold in cities. Then it explores the changing role of municipalities in the retail and processing of foodstuffs by looking at municipal market halls and slaughterhouses. A key theme pervading the whole chapter is the movement of reform ideas across Europe and the ways in which these transnational ideas intersected with national and local politics.

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.

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 III uncovers the radical transformations of European cities from 1850 to the twenty-first century. The volume explores how modern developments in urban environments, socio-cultural dynamics, the relation between work and leisure, and governance have transformed urban life. It highlights these complex processes across different regions, showcasing the latest scholarship and current challenges in the field. The first half provides an overview on the urban development of European regions in the West, North, Centre, East-Southeast and South, and the interconnectedness of European urbanism with the Americas and Africa. The second half explores major themes in European urban history, from the conceptualisation of cities, their built fabric and environment, to the continuities, rhythms and changes in their social, political, economic and cultural histories. Using transborder, transregional and transdisciplinary approaches to discern traits that characterise modern and contemporary European urbanism, the volume invites readers to reconsider major paradigms of European urban history.

This chapter traces the development of modern urban history scholarship across the twentieth century, its roots being found in several interdisciplinary fields interested in the shape and growth of urban areas and the changing experience of urban life over time. Urban history’s institutionalisation and internationalisation is then examined, which started in the 1960s and 1970s before gathering momentum in the following decades with the spread of teaching and exchange programmes at European level and the end of the Cold War. At its core, the objective of these programmes and initiatives was to map the history of urbanisation and the growth of towns and cities using a comparative methodology, both within nation states and, increasingly, using a transnational approach to compare across borders. Finally, the chapter considers several recent ‘turns’ within modern and contemporary urban history since the 1990s – cultural, spatial and environmental to name a few – to illustrate emerging and emergent themes prevalent across the subfield. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that these ‘turns’ reflect the changeable nature of wider historical scholarship, urban historians remain fundamentally interested in the people, places and processes that constitute our frame of reference.

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.

Infrastructure planning and engineering more specifically are often considered as external influences that either independently or unintentionally influence the process of urbanisation. This chapter advances an alternative perspective on relations between infrastructure planning and urbanisation. Instead of interpreting technological systems as objective, monolithic, standardised engineered structures hovering above the urban landscape, it follows the interdependencies between infrastructure planning and urbanisation. Infrastructure is approached as a spatial planning instrument intentionally steering spatial development to accommodate socio-economic and political agendas. In doing so, infrastructure is considered as a driving force of urbanisation and it is posited that a history of infrastructure planning sheds light on fundamental socio-spatial developments in urban history.

First, the turn to infrastructure in Urban History and Urban Studies is discussed, proposing infrastructure planning as a key entry into understanding nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanisation processes. In the second part, the history of urbanisation in Europe is portrayed through an infrastructural lens and there is a discussion of urban development in relation to network planning, its expansions and implosions. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the promise of infrastructure networks for research and how the liaison of Urban History with other fields, and Urban Studies more specifically, could open up novel research paths.

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.

The boundaries between humans and animals have been redrawn in modern Europe. This is especially true for the development of human–animal relations in cities since the onset of urbanisation around the middle of the nineteenth century. Although cities in the wide spectrum of European urban spaces differed significantly with respect to animal inhabitants and to the formation of so-called co-habitations of humans and animals, nevertheless the changes in human–animal relations took place under common overarching tendencies, which this contribution will pursue from the perspective of an Animate History. The central elements of a new order of human–animal relations developed not in the countryside, but in cities. Cities have always been multispecies spaces, both historically and in the present. The working assumption for this chapter is that the interaction of people, animals and the built environment creates new living worlds.