In the Middle Ages, Islamic Iberia was home to one of the largest urban networks in Europe, while Sicily saw the exponential growth of cities like Palermo and Syracuse after the Arab conquest in the ninth century. Islamic cities in Iberia and Sicily were not only landmarks of an unprecedented and early economic expansion, they also bear witness to a number of institutional characteristics and forms of urban planning that need to be considered by new and more inclusive historical approaches. In the tenth century, Umayyad Córdoba was by far the most populated city in western Europe, while the Fāṭimid rulers of Sicily embarked on a conscious policy of urbanising the island. During the Naṣrid period (1238-1492), Granada was booming. In many Castilian cities, such as Burgos, Avila, Segovia and Valladolid, flourishing Muslim communities were established during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

This chapter tests the claims made by proponents of replacement and superdiversity in Europe in the last 170 years. During this period, not only migrations changed, but also the opportunity structure of cities, which find themselves tossed between the nation state ideal of cultural homogeneity and globalisation. Three approaches are applied: 1) comparative (both in time and space); 2) a distinction between central place and network cities; and 3) a much broader (cross-cultural) definition of ‘migration’, including internal, return and circular moves. An overview of the major shifts in migration and mobility patterns to and from European cities leads to a reconsideration of the idea of mobility transition. Although the composition of urban populations changed drastically, cities have managed to adapt to this transition. Migrations and mobilities created a fertile soil for changes and innovations that produced new forms of liveability and resilience. There are also dark sides, including segregation and discrimination, underclass formation, criminality and gentrification that pushes out less wealthy citizens. The ‘superdiversity’ frame should be handled with care, as it tends to underestimate the homogenising force of integration through urban institutions. Accordingly, what social scientists termed the high ‘liquid’ mobility had characterised cities since the Middle Ages.

Planning as a discipline developed in response to some of the challenges that occurred following the Industrial Revolution: health, hygiene or housing. A key field of intervention for the new discipline was infrastructure development for transport and communication in line with evolving technologies. Globalisation and the exchange of commodities around the world led to ever more extensive projects. The shared needs of infrastructural planning went hand in hand with the sharing of ideas and concepts of planning and their exchange around the world. This article explores four examples of European planning and their key actors in four distinct periods through the lens of the global infrastructural turn: the age of rail (1850s to 1910s), the age of motorisation (1910s to 1950s), the age of flight (1950s to 1980s), and the age of increasing digital communication (1980s to 2000s). Understanding the embedded role of infrastructure in planning practice can help promote a system approach much needed to address contemporary challenges in the design of urban spaces.

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.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.

This chapter has several major themes. It begins by documenting how historians are rethinking the origins of the United States, emphasizing its contingent nature as a union of sovereign states rather than a nation, and the roots of that novel confederation in the complexities of the British imperial system. In that context, it then traces the fluidity and contingency of rights available to the citizens of the United States after the Revolution. Finally, it examines how, following the victory of the Jeffersonian coalition in 1800, those rights became structured and limited along racial lines, creating a “patchwork nation” of distinct racial orders.

This chapter explores the ways in which British imperial reforms were part of broader imperial rivalries and interconnections; the racial, gender, and political limits of Enlightenment reforms; the perceptions and bargaining that shaped reforms; and the relationship between reform and Revolution. It questions teleological approaches that cast British imperial reforms in the 1760s and 1770s as having led to Revolution in the thirteen colonies. In a global and Enlightenment context, British reformers did not pursue particularly radical reforms until the Intolerable Acts of 1774. These Acts were reactionary punishments intended to reform colonial thinking and behavior. They foreclosed the previously vital bargaining process between the imperial government and the colonists, and the colonists saw dire parallels with the monopolistic and tyrannical East India Company. The government’s attempt to use non-negotiable punishment to reform colonial thinking and behavior, rather than reforms to imperial tax and trade policies, most directly stimulated Revolution.

Between June 1774 and June 1775, radical factions in the thirteen colonies launched an armed uprising that arguably did more than the Declaration of Independence to wrest the colonies from Great Britain. Ordinary people pushed their leaders to take bold new steps, and the rebels developed tools of popular mobilization that turned resistance into armed insurgency. They formed new political bodies such as the Continental Congress and hundreds of local committees, while drawing on longstanding community institutions. There were plenty of uncertain or hostile people in America who were unready to consider independence, and so local crowds menaced Loyalists and sometimes perpetrated shocking acts of violence. These crucial months of insurgency were peppered by tense “alarms” that mobilized the population. These incidents culminated in the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, releasing the violence that characterized the Revolutionary era.

The numerous multilingual texts from medieval to modern times have only recently received the recognition as serious linguistic data that they deserve. They provide important testimony of medieval and early modern multilingualism and have increasingly been seen as written records of early code-switching and language mixing, which can be analysed on the basis of modern code-switching theories. This chapter discusses this assumption with historical data from England, addressing questions like syntactic, functional and visual approaches to the data, the distinctiveness of languages in multiligual texts. A related, but special type of multilingualism is attested in medieval mixed-language administrative texts which show a principled but variable use of Latin, French and English. Other issues are the increasing use of manuscripts and electronic corpora as data for linguistic analysis. The chapter finishes with a small selection of multilingual historical texts from England with brief comments to illustrate some of the issues discussed.