The king’s representative was the justiciar, and there was an Irish parliament. Towns and cities were incorporated and much of the country was shired. Ring-forts died out, and people lived mainly in wooden or mud houses, in small settlements or in towns. Bishops’ links with Rome and the proliferation of monastic orders of continental origin built international connections, as did thriving trade with France, Spain, Britain and the Low Countries.

Gaelic-Irish leaders stood fast against Anglo-Normans in some areas and enlisted the aid of Scotland’s Edward Bruce to fight them in 1316–1318. But in general the two groups entwined politically, socially, economically and personally (through marriage) with each other. All professed the same religion, and spoke, or understood, the same language: English was the language of administration and of the king’s representatives, but Irish remained the lingua franca, and most of the towns established by Normans (mostly in Leinster and Munster) had Irish names. Many European texts were translated into Irish. But by 1490, Irish political interests were united enough to support the Yorkists in England’s civil wars. At this stage around Dublin was an area known as the Pale, considered the extent of English power. The Anglo-Norman Fitzgerald dynasty of Kildare emerged as leaders of Ireland by 1500, although in Ulster the O’Neills held sway.

Wartime controls ended in 1950, allowing New Zealanders to look forward to an era of postwar growth and change. The 1950s and 1960s are often recalled as a ‘golden age’. In many respects they were, for the baby boomers born from 1945 to 1961 who enjoyed a childhood unburdened by depression and war, and for the parents responsible for their upbringing. Broadly, however, the internal dynamics of the Pacific region were in flux. Playwright Bruce Mason captured the mood in The End of the Golden Weather (first performed in 1960), his dramatic solo performance about a summer in a boy’s childhood.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

Changes in social structure often lead to mobility and migration. Urbanisation is one important outcome of mobility and migration. Mobility, migration and urbanisation lead to dialect contact, that is, between speakers of mutually intelligible varieties. This chapter first introduces general concepts such as diffusion and supralocalisation, and then moves on to discuss sociolinguistic models developed for the analysis of dialect contact, including the theories of koineisation and new-dialect formation, based on principles such as accommodation and salience. Case studies are taken from medieval Spain, Early Modern New Mexico and twentieth-century Norway. The chapter also addresses the role of new speakers in contact situations, based on an example from sixteenth-century Tuscany, and ends with a short discussion of sociolinguistic typology.

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 explores the cities of Northern Europe as a plethora of difference and similarity, first by considering the possibility of a Northern European region as it might emerge from climate, politics or urbanisation. It traces, a double process of urban material planning, growth and building and, on the other hand, an overall notion of a (Northern) European urban and regional identity. This plays out over a broad process from the liberal cities of the later 1800s, through the inter-war crisis and post-war changes (very distinct between Nordic and Baltic cities), to the post-Cold War period (where some similarities reappear).The chapter also focuses on the welfare period, where state and municipality enter into new negotiations. The social programmes of Nordic statecraft mean large-scale public housing, regulation and institutions, causing new cleavages between city and country. The new role of the market in urbanisation from the 1970s onwards is also considered, intersecting from 1989 with the end of the Cold War, and a reconnection between Baltic and Nordic cities. The chapter evaluates the influence of globalisation and the role of modernised cities both economically and culturally, and thus the notion and identity of Nordic and Northern European cities are connected with regional urban development.

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.

This chapter surveys the evolution of urbanisation in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discussion follows the urban geography of the region, how and why it changed, and the relationship to industrialisation, capitalist production, market and transport networks. It considers the ways in which cities and towns along the Channel coast and North Sea, the coast of the Atlantic, and along the Mediterranean both substantiate and exhaust the vision of ‘Western Europe’ and evidence the richness of European patterns of urban life. Emphasis is on the density of the urban network as well as the multiplicity and distinctiveness of urban society in Western Europe as it evolved over time. Attention is given to the bourgeois and working-class experience, the rise of urban reform and planning, and the dissemination of Western European urban patterns as a model of modernity. The chapter recounts the fate of cities in the first and second world wars. It gives full attention to the late twentieth century and how Western European urban life changed under the influence of modernisation schemes, post-industrial society and globalisation.

The urban development of Britain and Ireland is not usually considered within a single frame of reference, a fact that reflects their conflicted histories. This chapter attempts to provide a comparative account to differences not only between Britain and what became the independent Republic of Ireland in 1921 but also between the ‘four nations’ of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The historical narrative is organised around four phases: 1850–1910, seen as witnessing the consolidation of the modern city in terms of demography and urban form; 1910–70 marked by the emergence of the twin forces of town planning and urban modernism; the 1970s and 1980s viewed as a period of urban crisis; and urban renaissance since 1990 in national and regional capitals, though not in other urban places such as seaside towns and de-industrialising urban regions. This chronological narrative is crosscut by the experience of race, colonialism and violence, which marked British urbanism not only overseas but also at home and on the island of Ireland. The result is an urban history that views urbanism in Britain and Ireland relationally: in connection to the simultaneous urbanisation of continental Europe and North America and to the matrix of colonial and post-colonial relations.

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 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.

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.

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.

Chapter 1 delves into global urbanisation dynamics, honing in on urban water challenges, notably in the context of China’s accelerating urbanisation. Urbanisation, a transformative global force, triggers societal, economic and environmental shifts, offering opportunities for progress if managed adeptly. However, the chapter underscores the escalating water challenges accompanying this phenomenon. Urban floods, propelled by expanding impervious areas, pose substantial global threats, inducing economic losses. The intensified urbanisation aggravates water scarcity, fuelling conflicts and impacting ecosystems. Urban development contributes to water pollution, upsetting natural balances and escalating pollutant concentrations, resulting in ecological degradation. The urban heat island effect exacerbates these challenges, affecting ecosystems and local weather patterns. This chapter provides a nuanced exploration of the intricate relationship between urbanisation and water challenges, emphasising the urgent need for sustainable urban development practices.