Late medieval kings varied in their level of personal interest in the visual arts and architecture. Henry III sent his workmen detailed and impatient personal directives for the commissioning of vestments, liturgical furnishings and the decoration of palaces and chapels. In 1447–8, Henry VI ordered his new college of Eton to be built in the fashionable Perpendicular architectural style. Yet for all late medieval kings, images, buildings and material objects played an important role in projecting, representing and inviting wider reflection on their power and authority.

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 delineates Eastern, East Central, and Southeastern Europe, highlights its shifting geographies for the study of cities, and argues for the need to see the region ‘between the Baltic and the Adriatic’ as one whole. Whereas the imperial capitals Vienna, St Petersburg and Istanbul tend to be considered either not representative or beyond the delineated borders of the region, the chapter pays closer attention to other cities, especially ‘second capitals’, regional and provincial centres, ports and border towns. In the imperial context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, major urban planning and improvement projects are analysed as the responses to the perceived backwardness of the region as compared to their counterparts in Western and German-speaking Central Europe, where the latter served as useful models. When addressing various attempts at ‘modernisation’, cities emerge as a group that displayed similar urbanisation patterns and chronology, as well as persistent ethnic and religious diversity. Their twentieth-century experiences were also shaped by the ‘long’ First World War and the accompanying revolts and revolutions. Many became sites of nation-building in the inter-war period, they also shared similar pathways during and after the Second World War, when they became sites of urban programmes of state socialism and post-socialist transformation

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.

Twenty-first-century readers perhaps associate the word ‘citizen’ with nations and states. The inhabitants of England in the later Middle Ages, however, were subjects of the king, not citizens of a nation. The word ‘citizen’ did exist in late medieval England, but it referred to cities and towns rather than nations, realms or states. A citizen was someone who swore an oath to be a member of an urban political community: a person who paid taxes to the local urban government, took up municipal office when called upon and contributed towards the defence of the city. In return, the citizen received the right to practise a trade within the city and to be tried by the city’s own law courts.

Scholarly writing on modern European urban history has broadly endorsed modernisation theory’s contention that European modernity was both urban and secular, most notably by ignoring religion altogether as a meaningful factor in European cities, especially after 1900. This chapter suggests that instead of excluding religion from our analyses, it needs to be integrated into our histories of urban Europe. Urbanisation not only expanded the number and size of cities, but also made for larger and more diverse urban religious environments. In both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, religious culture flourished in Europe’s cities, even if the nature of that culture and those who participated in it shifted considerably over time. Finally, religious actors made important contributions to many of the developments that are associated with urban modernity, from associational life and political mobilisation to social assistance and the development of mass communication. Finally, at the same time that integrating religion into urban history enriches our understandings of urban social, cultural and political life, it sheds light on how faith communities and their members profited from urban modernity.

This chapter explores the relationship of social class and the nature of the urban place with its elements of size, density and variety. Social class and status groups shared common values and experience. European towns demonstrated hierarchies of dominance and conflict. Despite the importance of the market, regulations enforced by bureaucracy were essential to manage the externalities generated by the complexity of the town. Towns provided places where citizens learnt the nature of class. The factory and the department store are presented as examples.

The town was a place where change was driven by ethnic and nationalist contest as well as class conflict dominated by labour and capital. Among the multiple directions of social contest, varied degrees of stability were created by the great land empires of Europe.

Towns provided the mass and variety which generated associations, clubs, societies and lodges which mediated between the individual and the State and the contests of class, ethnicity and nationalities. Associations were also a source of instability as they became a source of ethnic, language and national identity. The unstable triangle of empire, class and ethnicity failed, leaving the towns of the twentieth century in the shadow of the old multi-ethnic empires.

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.

European urbanism in the Americas cannot be extricated from the diverse processes of conquest and colonisation that agents of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English and French imperial expansion executed over land, water, peoples and natural and mineral resources. European urbanisms in the New World were neither manifested uniformly across the entire continent nor a product of a social consensus among Europeans of what a city was and what it was supposed to look like. Desire and ability to direct urban settlement were also unequally distributed; best endowed with both were the Spanish monarchs. Among both Hispanics and Indians, they deployed the municipality as an ‘instrument of colonisation’. Sometimes subsuming indigenous urban centers, new towns and cities were laid out with straight streets arranged in orthogonal patterns around preferably symmetrical main squares where secular, ecclesiastical and commercial functions were housed and exercised. Urban geometry and hierarchy assisted in the systematisation of rule.

European and North American cities and city-dwellers maintained intense connections over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often linkages reveal themselves biographically or architecturally, and occasionally through congruent developments in urban policy. Even the most hackneyed contrasts between the archetypal ‘European’ versus ‘North American’ city belie a strong set of mutual influences born of the many enduring, influential transatlantic conversations. This chapter will explore three major clusters of common concern and agitation: class, gender and race. An aestheticised approach to the imposition of order on the volatile industrial cityscape was picked up from Second Empire Paris and transposed to North American cities, above all the US capital in Washington DC, by the turn of the twentieth century. Activist urban women formed networks and borrowed strategies between the great port cities of the United States and the United Kingdom, with particular intensity from the 1880s to the 1930s. Finally, as patterns of segregation proliferated in cities across the Atlantic world in the twentieth century, Germany and the United States provide comparisons of mutual influence: rooted in discrimination at the bottom of often brutal economic systems, rationalised by Darwinian social ‘scientific’ thinkers, and reinforced by policies from the top of evolving political orders.

This chapter offers a survey of cities in Asia formed by European-based state or company rule, that is, subjected to power structures originating, more or less directly, from Europe, during the period from 1500 to 1800. Some cities that hosted European trading posts while remaining under Asian sovereignty, or cities with merchant communities only loosely attached to European-based power structures, are included tangentially. The combined surveying of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, Danish and French power bases in the region runs counter to a long-established tradition of studying them within separate ‘national’ traditions. In this sense, the epithet ‘European’ stakes a claim for methodological renewal. At the same time, however, doubts persist about the pertinence of designating composite gateway conurbations as ‘European’ in the face of their profound intertwinements with Asian societies.

Capital cities comprised the most expansive, creative, fast-moving, globally powerful and politically explosive of all European urban communities cities during 1850–2000. This chapter examines the forces shaping their development including the role of the State, their growing economic and demographic primacy, and their multifaceted imperial and global connections. It argues that that not only did many individual cities have their own specific trajectories but also regional variations across Europe were equally significant. Furthermore, while capital city development owed much to the impact of the modern state, their powerful predominance in many spheres generated major opportunities to thrive and innovate, as well as facing them with difficult social, political, governmental and other challenges.

The lands of East Central Europe experienced three major transformations: Christianisation and the formation of a new political framework in the tenth-eleventh centuries; the profound social and structural changes of the thirteenth century; and the emergence of early modern states in the seventeenth century. Each of these engendered distinct steps in urbanisation. Many steps of these developments followed similar (although usually earlier) processes in Western and North-Western Europe, but with certain limitations. The constitutional status of cities and towns in diets was more precarious. Certain forms of communal governance were lacking, such as the institutionalised participation of guilds in municipal government or the role of neighbourhoods as local units of social solidarity and self-defence. Quantitative estimates show a low-density urban network and small sizes of towns.

The German home front was a vital part of the war Nazi-Germany waged. Skilfully deploying the country’s workers, its women, and its youth organizations, the regime would come to subject most of its economy to the war effort. The Wehrmacht’s campaign into the Soviet Union would permanently alter the way Germany structured its economy. The home front benefitted tremendously from the Nazi conquest of the East, and before long hundreds of thousands of slave labourers were forcibly drafted into its factories and its agriculture. As the war went on, the regime also increasingly deployed concentration camp inmates in the war effort and also used the threat of violence or imprisonment to coerce it own population. Determined to prevent a repeat of the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, the home front was treated with increasing suspicion, while Allied bombing raids and the introduction of ever stricter rations put further strain on Germany’s citizens. Notwithstanding, resistance was rare, and the home front remained largely intact until the very end of the war: the vast majority of Germans only laid down their tools once Allied forces arrived.