At the time of writing this periodical review, the gaming world was in turmoil over the leaking of a promotional video for the next instalment of the Grand Theft Auto series. The action-adventure game is renowned for its accurate depiction of Miami set in different time periods, most notably the 1980s. It lets players freely roam the coastal metropolis – dubbed Vice City by the game developers – from a third-person perspective donning Hawaiian shirts or Scarface-like suits. Players are encouraged to engage in various kinds of criminal activity such as the cocaine trade, dealing with competing crooks and – obviously – the stealing of expensive cars. The game’s fictional tourist guide describes Vice City as a place that cares little for its history, where inequality is rampant and cash rules everything: ‘Expensive suits, flashy cars and beautiful women are the accessories of millionaires that spend their afternoon in the shade, determining the face of Vice City’s less fortunate and waging war on rival drug barons.’ Urban historians will know that the representation of cities as sites of corruption and moral decay is as old as the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, but all clichés are partially true.
This year’s catch of articles dealing with the post-1800 period is a case in point. The city of Miami itself is the protagonist in Keith D. Revell’s ‘“Snet,” our man in Miami: urban tourism, illegal gambling, and the challenge of a sinful southern city, 1941–1944’, Journal of Urban History, 49 (2023), 353–87. Revell explores the development of South Florida as an urban gambling resort and the cultural and political conflicts it posed to traditional southern values, focusing on the relationship between Governor Spessard Holland and former Miami Beach Mayor Louis ‘Snet’ Snedigar. Snet became an informant during the 1940s crackdown on illegal gambling, revealing the tensions between a conservative southern state and a ‘liberal’ urban outpost. Sex work is another well-known metropolitan vice, which in post-war Hamburg became the subject of proactive policing. Annalisa Martin, in ‘“The chronicle must tell how it once was”: commercial sex and pimping in the chronicle of Hamburg’s postwar vice police’, German History, 41 (2023), 252–8, delves into the Sittenpolizei’s chronicles as a historical source, examining depictions of sex workers, transvestite prostitution and pimps, and exploring themes of violence documented by both police officers and the offenders themselves. By doing so, Martin exposes broader conflicts between vice police officers and Hamburg’s society at a time of perceived sexual liberalization.
Martin ends her historical narrative in the 1980s, a decade at the tail end of the so-called urban crisis. From the 1950s onwards, this term came to denote structural urban problems such as a dilapidated housing stock, deficient city services and the unprecedented suburbanization of middle-class families. Spiralling crime levels led several Western cities to adopt grassroots initiatives to counter petty crimes, which are examined for 1980s Amsterdam in Wim de Jong’s ‘Goon squad democracy? The rise of vigilant citizenship through victim support and neighborhood watches in Amsterdam 1980–1990’, Journal of Urban History, 49 (2023), 388–410. The article explores the interactions of vigilant citizens from victim support groups, conservative and women advocacy circles with police and municipal officials in promoting a communitarian ‘social safety’ agenda, which, as De Jong shows, gradually yielded results. Around the same time, in Amsterdam as elsewhere, including not so urban locations such as fields and abandoned army bases, a new party drug entered the emerging house scene. Focusing on the evolving attitudes toward young women’s drug use and new discourses of feminine pleasure during the 1990s, Peder Clark in the cheekily titled ‘Claire and Jose get off their cake: ecstasy, raving and women’s pleasure in 1990s Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 20 (2023), 117–32, innovatively utilizes leaflets from a harm-reduction charity in Manchester as a historical source. By reading the advice given to ecstasy-taking women navigating nightclubs, against the grain, Clark uncovers the obscured pleasures associated with MDMA and rave culture beyond the prevailing narratives of risk and harm presented by the media.
Twentieth-century urban nightlife was immersed in sound and vision. This was also the case in Japan, where the shopping districts of inter-war Nagoya were transformed into bright visual spectacles due to a thriving urban economy and architect Ishikawa Hideaki’s ‘City planning for the night’ methodology. By artistically (re)designing shop windows and installing electric billboards, Hideaki aimed to modernize retailing and redefine shopping districts as modern entertainment areas, as Shuntaro Nozawa demonstrates in ‘Designing the night: Ishikawa Hideaki and shopping districts in Nagoya, Japan, 1920–1933’, Architectural Histories, 11 (2023), 1–37. Night-time spectacle could also be an annoyance for urban dwellers, as Junichi Hasegawa demonstrates by examining nocturnal noises in 1960s Tokyo in ‘Late-night noise hazards and the Tokyo metropolitan government’s countermeasures in the 1960s’, Urban History, 50 (2023), 152–68. Residents filed complaints about the chatter of young people gathering near small food establishments, but government attempts to close such businesses were unsuccessful due to a coalition between local political parties and business interests.
Moving to and living in the modern metropolis can be a liberating experience, as evidenced by Dominic Janes’ ‘Naked civil servant: queer sex, Catholicism and conformism in the post-war London diaries of George Lucas’, History Workshop Journal, 96 (2023), 25–45. George Lucas, not to be confused with the film-maker, was an otherwise anonymous office clerk who kept extensive diaries that offer a unique insight into the queer quotidian of post-war London. The diaries demonstrate the tensions between a respectable work life, a sincere belief in Roman Catholicism and sexual admiration of young men, pointing to a potential re-evaluation of the post-war period, particularly concerning queer coping strategies, religiosity and the experience of aging. For the gay spies of Cold War West Berlin, metropolitan life was anything but liberating. As part of a special section on social histories of the security state, Samuel Clowes Huneke, in ‘The surveillance of subcultures: gay spies, everyday life, and Cold War intelligence in divided Berlin’, Journal of Social History, 56 (2023), 559–82, investigates historical evidence that intelligence agencies in divided Berlin actively recruited gay men due to their perceived suitability for intelligence work within the queer subculture. Drawing on files from the East German secret police, the article reveals how surveillance could play a permissive role in queer lives while at the same time reinforcing state paranoia over the pernicious effects of urban subcultures.
Another article situated in Cold War Berlin is Lauren Stokes’ ‘Racial profiling on the U-Bahn: policing the Berlin Gap in the Schönefeld airport refugee crisis’, Central European History, 56 (2023), 236–54. To address pressures from other Western countries to close the city’s open border, the West German government adopted two strategies: internalizing the border through racial profiling in West Berlin and externalizing it by asking the East German government to enforce strict visa and passport requirements. This ‘urban’ perspective on international relations makes us reconsider how and when the end of the Cold War came into sight during the 1980s. The Cold War also features as a backdrop in Samuel J. Hirst and Aydin Khajei’s ‘A Turkish mayor goes to Moscow: Vedat Dalokay and development politics in the 1970s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 58 (2023), 739–58. In 1975, Ankara’s mayor sought Soviet assistance in providing his residents with public transportation and affordable housing, a move which reflects the leftist sentiments of many urban dwellers in 1970s Turkey. However, Moscow dismissed the mayor’s appeal to introduce progressive planning methods, instead opting for investments in traditional industrial sectors, which made the Ankara municipality eventually turn to Western Europe for planning solutions. Cold War partnerships in urban planning also failed when the United States were involved, as demonstrated by Tracy Neumann in ‘Overpromising technocracy’s potential: the American–Yugoslav project, urban planning, and Cold War cultural diplomacy’, Journal of Planning History, 22 (2023), 3–25. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Ford Foundation futilely funded knowledge exchange between American academics and Yugoslav planners, which contributed to the Foundation’s decision to retreat from international urban development and abandon technocratic one-size-fits-all solutions for the socialist world.
With the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and other parts of the world, war was probably on the mind of many urban historians in 2023. Over the year, urban settlements have often been targets themselves, as exemplified by the wilful destruction of civilian infrastructure by Russian missiles and drones in Ukraine and the indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli cities by Hamas and the Israeli airstrikes that followed. A special issue in Urban Studies, ‘Comparative urbanism for hope and healing: urbicide and the dilemmas of reconstruction in post-war Syria and Poland’, 60 (2023), 2901–18, offers some reassurance by proposing a method of ‘hopeful comparison’ in examining how war-torn cities can be rebuilt. Historians are often wary of such asynchronous comparisons and generally cynical with regard to learning lessons from the past. Not so the geographers in this special issue, who aim to establish connections between (formerly) war-damaged cities in Poland and Syria, shift the perspective from a traumatic past to an open future and offer practical tools for ethical and political considerations in ongoing conflicts. A similar approach is taken by Sofia Dyak, ‘From war into the future: historical legacies and questions for postwar reconstruction in Ukraine’, Architectural Histories, 11 (2023), 1–11, who states that current debates about rebuilding Ukrainian cities invite a comparison with historical discourses about post-war reconstruction. This might offer valuable insights into citizen participation, the challenge of navigating local and international expert knowledge in rebuilding communities and localities and the potential of architecture for coping with trauma. Dyak is hopeful, even idealistic, about the potential of such historical comparisons: ‘Architecture and urban planning…can bring change not only to the physical materiality of place, social relations and communities, but also to the ways architecture and planning are imagined and practiced.’
A less programmatic article on the legacies of urban warfare and changing political tides is Dasha Kuletskaya and Alicja Willam’s ‘Warsaw and its land: property rights on urban land in transition’, Architectural Histories, 10 (2023), 1–33. By tracing the history of urban land reforms in Warsaw from the end of World War I until the present day, Kuletskaya and Willam contribute a historical perspective to ongoing debates about the reprivatization of properties confiscated by the communist regime between 1947 and 1989. Rather than denouncing this policy, the authors recognize the post-war communalization of urban land in Warsaw as a distinctive accomplishment, despite the fact that many of its innovative proposals were not fully implemented. Another article dealing with issues of landownership is Shira Wilkof’s ‘The Sharon Plan reconsidered: how Elitzer Brutzkus’ pre-1948 separatism shaped Israel’s new towns’, Planning Perspectives, 38 (2023), 281–304. Wilkof demonstrates that Israel’s celebrated new town programme was actually based on the mass urbanization of land emptied of its Arab population, highlighting the programme’s roots in Zionist colonization and dispossession. Zionism also stands at the core of Anat Kidron’s ‘Local communities and separate space: the Zionist stance on Jewish settlements in Arab cities – the case of Acre’, Journal of Urban History, 49 (2023), 1243–62. Zionists largely avoided endorsing Jewish settlement in Arab towns with environmental obstacles such as swampy land and seasonal flooding. Only when economic or political incentives existed did colonization take place, shaping both the scope of Jewish settlement and its portrayal in the Zionist narrative.
Israeli nation-building, environmental and urban history come together once more in Galia Limor-Sagiv and Nurit Lissovsky’s ‘Place and displacement: historical geographies of Israel’s largest landfill’, Journal of Historical Geography, 80 (2023), 32–43. In the aftermath of the 1948 war, Tel Aviv began disposing of waste near an Arab village whose residents had been displaced. The article utilizes diverse archival sources to highlight the environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards associated with the landfill, emphasizing the merits of landscape analysis as a method for understanding environmental tragedies. In the same journal, Katherine Leah Pace, ‘Shifting terrains of risk: a history of natural hazards and displacement in three historic Black communities of central Austin, Texas’, 79 (2023), 39–51, similarly urges us to take into account the social consequences of environmental change. Taking Black communities in Austin as a case-study, she emphasizes the interplay between natural hazards and the hazard of displacement by analysing the changing environmental and socio-economic conditions that affected the communities’ vulnerability to both. By doing so, the article contributes to the literature on double exposure, environmental gentrification and the impact of human interventions on the social fabric of US cities. Also focusing on Austin’s environmental history is Andrew M. Busch, in ‘Dams and the age of abundance: hydraulic boosterism, regional growth, and the reemergence of water scarcity in central Texas’, Journal of Urban History, 49 (2023), 309–34. During the second half of the twentieth century, the city’s growth was fostered by an artificial abundance of water resulting from dams and reservoirs, incentivizing real estate development, providing power and creating a positive city image. However, as argued by Busch, this artificial abundance concealed and conceals environmental risks and may compromise Austin’s resilience in the face of increasing climate events such as droughts.
Environmental history is usually concerned with the consequences of long-term processes. This is often also the case for economic urban histories, such as Joseph Gibbons’ ‘Examining the long-term influence of New Deal era redlining on contemporary gentrification’, Urban Studies, 60 (2023), 2816–34. His study of data from 58 US cities suggests that The New Deal’s Home Owners Loan Corporation’s redlining policies, known for denying financial investment to Black communities, may have a direct or indirect connection to gentrification. This emphasizes the need to consider the role of discriminatory government policies in shaping the timing of gentrification processes. Michael Raftakis employs a similar long-term perspective, but for a completely different time period and different part of the world in ‘Urban mortality in Greece: Hermoupolis 1859–1940’, Economic History Review, 76 (2023), 728–58. The article is the first comprehensive study of urban mortality in Greece, utilizing an extensive individual-level time series derived from civil registration and census data. Raftakis reveals that Hermoupolis – situated on the Cyclades island of Syros – experienced higher mortality levels than the national average but also demonstrates how these began to decline from the late nineteenth century onwards. While an ‘urban penalty’ persisted even in the early twentieth century, factors including the improved access to water contributed greatly to declining mortality rates later in the century.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban health and child mortality also features in two articles in the same journal, Social Science History, Sanne Muurling, Tim Riswick and Katalin Buzasi, ‘The last nationwide smallpox epidemic in the Netherlands: infectious disease and social inequalities in Amsterdam, 1870–1872’, 47 (2023), 189–216, and Michael Oris, Stanislao Mazzoni and Diego Ramiro-Fariñas, ‘Immigration, poverty, and infant and child mortality in the city of Madrid, 1916–1926’, 47 (2023), 453–89. Muurling et al. explore the historical relationship between infectious diseases and social inequalities by focusing on the last nationwide upsurge of smallpox in the Netherlands from 1870 to 1872 through an analysis of Amsterdam’s 50 neighbourhoods. Using a mixed methods approach, including qualitative spatial analysis and OLS regression, the study investigates the epidemic’s impact on different age and sex groups, geographic distribution and underlying socio-demographic neighbourhood characteristics. Their findings reveal significant spatial patterns of smallpox mortality linked to existing social environments, underscoring the epidemic’s lack of social neutrality and exposing deep-seated social and health inequalities within the city. By contrast, by using birth and death records, Oris et al. lay bare significant spatial heterogeneity in infant and child mortality in early twentieth-century Madrid, a city that was meticulously planned from the 1860s onwards but became overwhelmed by the continuous arrival of new inhabitants. Precisely because of major public health investments, from which the affluent parts of the city benefited more, inequalities deepened – particularly during waves of the influenza pandemic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the authors identify poverty as a key factor influencing infant survival linked to the quality of nutrition, hygiene and housing. However, mortality differentials between offspring of native and migrant mothers were relatively small, suggesting the importance of behavioural adaptation to the challenges of urban living.
As it happens, Spanish urban history loomed large in our selection of journals this year, in particular the period when Franco was in power (1939–75). Except for the early years of the dictator’s regime, this was a period of rapid economic growth, similar to the German Wirtschaftwunder or France’s Les Trente Glorieuses. The relationship between this era of prosperity and the configuration of modern Spain’s urban planning system is at the core of Juan Luis De las Rivaz Sanz and Miguel Fernández-Maroto’s ‘Planning for growth: contradictions in the framework of economic and urban development from the “Spanish Miracle” (1959–1973)’, Journal of Urban History, 49 (2023), 41–59. More social approaches to Francoist urban Spain are adopted in articles by Roseanna Webster, ‘Women and the fight for urban change in late Francoist Spain’, Past & Present, 260 (2023), 158–99, and Manel Guàrdia et al., ‘Working-class suburban housing, homeownership, and urban social movements during Francoism in Barcelona, 1939–1975’, Planning Perspectives, 38 (2023), 671–93. Webster contends that despite the constraints of Francoism a significant number of women organized themselves into social movements on the outskirts of Madrid and in Asturian mining towns from the late 1950s onwards. Contrary to current historiography, neither the presence of democracy and secularism nor high literacy rates and formal education were necessary preconditions for such social action. Internal migration, Catholic internationalism and industrial unrest contributed to the emergence and proliferation of urban women’s movements, which is studied through a theoretical lens introduced by the author as ‘the moral economy of motherwork’. Manel Guàrdia et al. focus on a different kind of social movement in Franco’s Spain, one that was centred around the issue of homeownership, which the authors examine with respect to suburban Barcelona in relation to its ideological roots, growth patterns and the broader Western European context.
Since the early 1990s, Spain has been connecting its main cities and suburbs to a high-speed railway network. This so-called transit-oriented development (TOD) maximizes urban functions within walking distance of public transport. One of the global cities that has successfully embraced the TOD model is Tokyo, which is considered today as an exemplary transit metropolis. However, as demonstrated by Yudi Liu et al. in ‘Institutionalization of transit-oriented development in Tokyo 1868–1945’, Planning Perspectives, 38 (2023), 1185–212, this model has long historical roots. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, former feudal elites in Japan established a private railway industry through joint-stock companies. Throughout the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, these companies were able to resist nationalization attempts and even wartime regulation and automobilization, in particular because of vested political and economic interests. Thus, although Tokyo’s TOD was initially inspired by railway suburbs and garden cities in the Anglosphere, the institutional context makes the Japanese case unique in the world. Whether state-run or privately owned, public transport has a tremendous influence on the spatial organization of cities. In the planning and construction of Leningrad’s metro network around the mid-twentieth century, urban planners aimed to unite disparate parts of the city and create a cohesive urban space. While the perception of city spaces is often tied to surface features, the significance of subterranean structures is highlighted by Philip Schroeder in ‘The second line of the Leningrad/Saint Petersburg metro between old and new structures’, Journal of Urban History, 49 (2023), 271–89.
Mobility and transport feature prominently as well in contributions to British urban history this year. Lena Ferriday, in ‘“An indispensable aid”: urban mobility, networks and the guidebook in Bristol, 1900–1930’, Journal of Historical Geography, 79 (2023), 99–110, examines the ‘collaborative relationship’ between guidebooks and transport networks to shed light on the dynamic, multivalent characteristic of human movements through cities, taking early twentieth-century Bristol as a case-study. In the same journal, John Michael Roberts, ‘Traffic logic, state strategies and free speech in an urban park: the Park Lane road improvement scheme, London, 1955–1962’, 81 (2023), 179–89, delves into disputes between state departments about nascent traffic logic schemes to reveal how social movements strategically leverage such disputes to advocate for civil liberties in public space, taking a road improvement scheme in post-war London as a case-study. Post-war London is also the setting of two articles in Twentieth Century British History, Michael Romyn, ‘The uses and abuses of “community art” on an inner-city pestate’, 34 (2023), 98–128, and Holly Smith, ‘The Ronan Point scandal: architecture, crisis, and possibility in British social democracy, 1968–93’, 34 (2023), 805–34. While Romyn provides an in-depth analysis of the evolving aims, outputs and engagements of a community arts trust with tenants on the Aylesbury Estate from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s, Smith puts the partial collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in 1968 into a much broader analytical framework, suggesting the disaster was a moment of possibility for both the British welfare state and social democracy.
We also observed a number of fresh architectural perspectives on nineteenth-century urban history this year. Caryatids – sculpted female figures serving as an architectural support – were a central element in neoclassicism, which is the focus of Daniel Jütte’s ‘Contested caryatids: architecture, modernity, and race around 1900’, Central European History, 56 (2023), 18–45. Jütte zooms in on Berlin, Frankfurt am Main and Vienna to examine how caryatids came to symbolize social aspirations and societal divisions during the bourgeois age, exploring the statues’ material and metaphorical significance with a particular emphasis on the real and imagined nexus between caryatids and Jews. Thus, the article illuminates the intricate interplay of architecture, religion and race in the long nineteenth century, offering insights into a complex and underexplored subject. Another contribution with an architectural perspective on race and cities is offered by David Sadighian, ‘The business of beaux-arts: architecture, racial capitalism, and Branqueamento in belle époque Brazil’, Architectural Histories, 11 (2023), 1–40, who reveals how ‘whiteness’ was a crucial instrument for uneven and racialized capitalist growth in urban Brazil by analysing archival sources and contemporary public discourse on a landmark project in Rio de Janeiro. Sadighian’s contribution demonstrates the merits of combining the fields of architectural and urban history, and hopefully points to a future with even more articles focused on cities in the Global South.
