Abstract This article examines the cultural figure of the Modern Chinese Woman as produced by the colonial educational scene and the women’s club of the Hong Kong Young Women’s Christian Association (HKYWCA) in inter-war Hong Kong. In the broader context, where city-wide sanitary reform rested on changing daily hygiene practices and everyday routines in middle- and working-class Chinese households, equipping Chinese women with knowledge of domestic hygiene became a matter of state and public concern. The figure of the Modern Chinese Woman, this article shows, proliferated in inter-war Hong Kong in the context of modernizing domestic and urban spaces by Western-trained medical and sanitary experts. This in turn captured the specific sites and spaces where modern practices of health and hygiene took shape, and the modern femininity that drove and emerged through them.
Abstract This article examines domestic windows as sites where nineteenth-century London was observed, interpreted and made socially meaningful. Though ostensibly private, windows staged selective signs toward the street. Focusing on the practice of window gardening, the article argues that vegetal displays on sills functioned as semiotic interfaces, through which the city could be read. Drawing on periodical literature, philanthropic writing, gardening manuals and social investigations, it situates domestic windows within the visual culture of the modern city, showing how façades became legible surfaces. By analysing window gardening as part of urban spectatorship, the article highlights how Victorians negotiated privacy, respectability and self-presentation in everyday life.
The elderly are an overlooked cohort in early modern urban spaces. Where studies of old age have tended to focus on the spaces of the home or the hospital, studies of street space and urban mobility have often not considered age, or have focused on youth groups. This article examines the relationship between urban space and mobility, and old age in early modern Venice. It shows how elderly people used urban spaces and were a visible presence in the early modern city. In so doing, it demonstrates that attending to how and where elderly people moved can shed light on strategies for self-sufficiency and on histories of disability and care, as well as shedding new light on how urban populations used city spaces.
At the turn of the sixteenth century, the city of Bruges, a considerable trading centre in the County of Flanders, witnessed a noticeable increase in rape prosecutions. Drawing on final judgments by the city magistrates, many of whom imposed the death penalty, this article examines how these prosecutions were shaped by broader concerns for social order and urban prosperity. It argues that deep-rooted anxieties about disorder and deviance among both civic authorities and the wider community fostered a more standardized policy towards sexual violence. This, in turn, enables the reconstruction of the late medieval 'criminal-rapist': an outsider associated with brutal and dishonourable violence, deemed particularly intolerable in 'a city of high repute'.
The number of people living alone in northwestern European cities has grown rapidly since the 1960s. Why did this happen, and to what effect? This article explores the causes and social, political and spatial consequences of this demographic transition, hypothesizing that it has fundamentally reshaped social life, housing politics and the design and use of buildings and spaces in modern urban societies. The article underscores the need for urban historians to address the rise of one-person households during the second half of the twentieth century. It urges them to move beyond the urban crisis paradigm that still dominates this period to understand the profound and lasting effects of changing household structures. The article proposes a broad temporal and geographic scope for further research, using Amsterdam as a pilot study.
This article investigates how the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry was materialized in Istanbul's urban fabric, c. 1530-1606. Tracing the itinerary Divanyolu -> El & ccedil;i Han & imath; -> Topkap & imath; Palace, it reconstructs a ritual geography in which routes, lodgings and thresholds converted diplomacy into spatial governance. Drawing on protocol notes, narratives and images, it shows how orchestrated confinement, staged spectacle and reciprocal visibility structured ambassadorial experience: envoys were lodged under watch in the El & ccedil;i Han & imath;, processed along a ceremonial corridor and received in a palace that magnified authority by withholding it. Combining visual, textual and architectural analysis, the article demonstrates how power was materially and symbolically enacted and ambassadors became both spectators and exhibits. Rather than treating the city as backdrop, it reads Istanbul as an instrument that translated rivalry into movement, vantage and constraint, situating the Ottoman capital within a wider Mediterranean economy of representation, comparison and control.
This article traces the conservation history of the inner suburb of Parkville in Melbourne, Australia. It focuses on its 1972 designation as Melbourne's first urban conservation area by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). It examines Parkville's establishment in the setter-colonial city as an elite neighbourhood, its post-war transformation, the role of the resident amenity group, the Parkville Association, and the evolution of heritage planning policies by the City of Melbourne and the state government of Victoria. Using a range of archival sources, including the Victorian Heritage Database, the article analyses the expanding building, conservation area and heritage overlay protections for Parkville from the 1950s to the 2020s, with a particular focus on the years 1971-85. This article interlaces policy and planning, heritage and conservation, and cultural and social change. It argues that Parkville's designation was demonstrative of urban conservation in Melbourne and reflected evolving international approaches to urban heritage.
