There has been a tremendous explosion of interest in European urban history in the last decades. Across Europe we see a spate of new research projects and publications examining the economic, demographic, social and cultural devel opments of the many thousands of urban centres -metropolitan cities, regional cities and small towns. This is hardly surprising because urban development has been one of the principal forces shaping the transformation of Europe from the Renaissance to the contemporary era. One striking feature of the new work is its strongly interdisciplinary character with economists, archaeologists, geographers, art historians and sociologists, as well as historians, collaborating in research. Another feature of current approaches is the stress on comparative urban history -using the variable pat terns of development in different countries to shed light not only on structural variations but on the process of urban change itself. Testifying to this enthusiasm for comparative history since 1990 the European Association of Urban Historians (instituted by the European Union) has organ ised large -scale comparative conferences on the European city at Amsterdam, Strasbourg and Budapest. Since the 1980s there has also been a network of Eu ropean institutions (including the universities of Leicester, New University of Lisbon, Leiden, Cantabria, Humboldt University, Berlin, and Strasbourg, Gent and Leuven) actively involved in student teaching programmes in the fiel- with support from the European Union ERASMUS programme.

Since the Middle Ages Europe has been one of the most urbanized continents on the planet and Europe's cities have firmly stamped their imprint on the continent's economic, social, political, and cultural life. This study of European cities and towns from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present day looks both at regional trends from across Europe and also at the widely differing fortunes of individual communities on the roller coaster of European urbanization. Taking a wide-angled view of the continent that embraces northern and eastern Europe as well as the city systems of the Mediterranean and western Europe, it addresses important debates ranging from the nature of urban survival in the post-Roman era to the position of the European city in a globalizing world. The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the middle ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - with each part containing chapters on urban trends, the urban economy, social developments, cultural life and landscape, and governance. Throughout, the book addresses key questions such as the role of migration, including that of women and ethnic minorities; the functioning of competition and emulation between cities, as well as issues of inter-urban cooperation; the different ways civic leaders have sought to promote urban identity and visibility; the significance of urban autonomy in enabling cities to protect their interests against the state; and not least why European cities and towns over the period have been such pressure cookers for new ideas and creativity, whether economic, political, or cultural.

A vivid reading of globalization through centuries of Iberian peoples, places and encounters.

This interdisciplinary book brings together eleven original contributions by scholars in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, America and Japan which represent innovative and important research on the relationship between cities and their hinterlands. They discuss the factors which determined the changing nature of port-hinterland relations in particular, and highlight the ways in which port-cities have interacted and intersected with their different hinterlands as a result of both in- and out-migration, cultural exchange and the wider flow of goods, services and information. Historically, maritime commerce was a powerful driving force behind urbanisation and by 1850 seaports accounted for a significant proportion of the world’s great cities. Ports acted as nodal points for the flow of population and the dissemination of goods and services, but their role as growth poles also affected the economic transformation of both their hinterlands and forelands. In fact, most ports, irrespective of their size, had a series of overlapping hinterlands whose shifting importance reflected changes in trading relations (political frameworks), migration patterns, family networks and cultural exchange. Urban historians have been criticised for being concerned primarily with self-contained processes which operate within the boundaries of individual towns and cities and as a result, the key relationships between cities and their hinterlands have often been neglected. The chapters in this work focus primarily on the determinants of port-hinterland linkages and analyse these as distinct, but interrelated, fields of interaction. Marking a significant contribution to the literature in this field, Port-Cities and their Hinterlands provides essential reading for students and scholars of the history of economics.

This volume examines theoretical and comparative perspectives on civil society activism under authoritarian constraints to offer a better understanding of its relationship with regime change. Rejecting a normative approach, the authors focus on the whole range of civic activism under authoritarianism.

This book analyses the origin and evolution of the water supply service in Andalusia (southern Spain) between 1800 and 2020 from several perspectives. It does so from a historical perspective, to understand the evolution of the service over the years; from an economic perspective, as it is very useful to obtain an overview of the level of efficiency of the service; from a legislative perspective, as the regulatory framework of each era determines the models of management and provision of the service; and, finally, from an ecological and environmental perspective, of great importance in the New Water Culture and the protection of this resource. The volume's main objective is to contribute to the extension of knowledge and analysis of the processes of municipalisation and/or privatisation of this service in Andalusia, with the aim of providing those responsible for local governments and administrations, both political and technical, with useful reflection and illustrative information on the use of municipalisation and/or privatisation as instruments for the reform of the local public sector. Contributors are: María Ana Bernardo, Ana Cardoso de Matos, José Escalante Jiménez, Antonio Rafael Fernández-Paradas, Mercedes Fernández-Paradas, Leticia Gallego Valero, Víctor Manuel Heredia-Flores, Carlos Larrinaga, Nuria Magaldi, Alberte Martínez-López, Juan Manuel Matés-Barco, Jesús Mirás Araujo, Encarnación Moral Pajares, Jesús Raúl Navarro García, Nuria Rodríguez Martín, and María Vázquez-Fariñas.

One of the most notable features of literature about "new economic geography" is a close association between theoretical and empirical work. In contrast to earlier research, theoretical studies are often much more strongly focused on real-world phenomena. At the same time, empirical work is often more closely tied to theoretical models. Instead of purely detecting possible stylized facts, considerable efforts have been made to test for the relevance of theoretical results.A major shortcoming of recent empirical work in urban economics is, however, the startling concentration on basically only two estimation strategies. Probably driven by limited data availability, most analyses are either cross-country studies which usually seek to explore a data set as rich as possible, or the studies examine single country data and then often focus on U.S. experiences.This book aims to provide a new - European - perspective. The basic idea is that a focus on European cities, apart from being interesting for itself, allows to combine both previous approaches. In particular, there is considerable cross-country variation while, in addition, also reliable historical data is available. Therefore, it is one of the contributions to compile a new data set of European cities which covers 13 countries and ranges from 1870 to 1990.This set of data is then applied to explore several hypotheses which have been recently proposed in literature. In particular, three sets of issues are discussed: the growth pattern of cities and their implications for Zipf's law, the relationship between trade openness and urban concentration, and the role of history for city growth. The results are often striking. In contrast to some previous findings, for instance, there is only weak evidence for random growth across cities. Also, the empirical evidence for an association between external trade and internal geography turns out to be shaky. Finally, it is argued that the urban dominance of Vienna after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 is evidence in favor of path dependence in city growth.Taken together, the book shows that the European experience provides a rich laboratory of real-world data which still waits to be explored.