Urban History

"This paper examines Ildefons Cerdà’s 1860 Plan for the Urban Expansion of Barcelona; specifically, how and why it was conceived in a unique way, in which the provision of services to the population was an important part. Cerdà based his expansion proposal on an in‑depth socio‑statistical study of old Barcelona’s population conditions. The high mortality rates of the working‑class population and poor health and education conditions pushed Cerdà to design a new type of urban planning, which he defined as “urbanism”. In his proposal for the new city, he planned the location of services such as marketplaces, schools and hospitals. The first part of this paper introduces the urban and political preconditions of Barcelona and the statistics on which Cerdà based his contribution. The second part uses location theory and a geographic information system (GIS) to analyse the pattern of location and the population served by markets and hospitals. In addition, topographic maps from 1926 and 1975 are used to study the development of the expansion up to when it was fully developed. The evolution of the city differed from Cerdà’s proposal, partly due to unexpected increases in population density, the built environment, and higher amounts of building occupation. Nevertheless, Cerdà’s layout of streets and avenues has prevailed.
Keywords: urban planning, location theory, optimisation, wellbeing, GIS, spatial decision support system"

The work is divided into two parts : the first one considers the singular city as a socio-spatial entity, identified through the intervention of the archaeologists' work. Beyond the recent conceptual arguments, it is a question of considering the practice of urban archaeology in its multifaceted aspects, institutional and methodological, before opening a reflection on its current developments in four specific scopes (archaeomorphology, chorematic, buildings archaeology and ancient environment) ; wherein lies a potential widening of the fields, of the approaches and the exploration of new paradigms. The second part considers the city in terms of networks and systems, from a theoretical viewpoint at first and then through three case studies, illustrating the idea that the city does not define itself only by its own characteristics but also, and no doubt chiefly, in the interactive spatial relationships that it entertains with other towns and with the territory.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

The historic centre of Walsall has been occupied and reoccupied over the post-medieval period with major shifts in the use of the early urban area, including quarrying and industrial activity to the construction of affluent housing. By the mid to late 19th century the area was largely given over to slum housing. The paper synthesizes earlier archaeological excavations and investigates the urban development within the town centre.

"Throughout the postwar period, Harlem’s public schools became increasingly troubled. Racial segregation intensified and dropout rates rose. Classrooms were more overcrowded than ever before, while facilities crumbled. Parents, students and community activists fought long battles against inferior black schools in Harlem, especially after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Though these people tried nearly every means at their disposal, they were unable to stop public education in Central Harlem from declining in the years following the war. They faced a complex set of issues, including housing, employment, districting policies and government intransigence. Harlem residents and activists credited these interconnected exigencies with bringing about the explosive July 1964 uprisings in the community.

In the postwar period, Central Harlem was the most crowded, run-down, segregated and economically depressed black neighborhood in Manhattan, and conditions only worsened with time. As the city’s black population and residential segregation increased throughout the postwar period, educational segregation spread and with it, inferior black schools. School board officials and local politicians professed deep concern for the city’s educational segregation, with the board of education citing the Brown decision as an affirmation of what the city’s educational system already held to be true. After years of fruitless picketing and conferences with city officials, parents in Central Harlem began withdrawing their children from inferior segregated schools in 1958, instead preferring to educate them through tutoring.

In attempts to call attention to the many problems black New York City public school students faced, two one-day student boycotts in February and March of 1964 kept 45 percent and 25 percent of the city’s public school children out of school on those respective days. With the cry of “Boycott Jim Crow Schools,” the Harlem Parents Committee enjoined every mother and father of a school-age child to refuse to send their children to inferior schools. The committee also led a struggle for an educational concept that discarded Euro- and Anglocentric models of history in favor of one that taught black and Puerto Rican history in a proportional way. Examining these demands helps us to see the emergence of Black Power in the city as a logical outgrowth of frustration, as opposed to a nihilistic, irrational force. Despite school integration proponents’ best efforts, including multiple boycotts, sit-ins, conferences, pickets, legal intervention and more, schools were more segregated by the mid-1960s and children of color were worse off than they were in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision that invalidated separate but equal educational facilities.

This paper shows the ways in which Harlem’s public schools became increasingly segregated in the twenty years following the Second World War, leading up to the explosive July 1964 rebellions in Central Harlem and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Residential segregation was a crucial factor in producing and maintaining Harlem’s segregated schools. Unlike today, parents in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s had no choice but to send their children to local schools. The city had a strict policy of neighborhood schools, which meant students learned where they lived, unless they went to private schools, which were not an option for most black students. Segregated neighborhoods produced segregated schools, and by the mid-1960s, there were more segregated schools than ever before. While this was a time of progress for the national civil rights movement, New York’s civil rights movement was unable to prevent social, political and economic conditions from worsening in Manhattan’s largest black neighborhood. Many of the students’ parents had recently escaped the physical and emotional violence of the Jim Crow South to seek better opportunities in New York, with its reputation for racial liberalism and economic opportunity. Instead, they found the quiet misery and slow violence of the city, with its combination of residential and educational segregation, which combined to produce poor employment prospects.

Using the Harlem Neighborhoods Association archives at the Schomburg Center, I am able to trace the ceaseless activities of Central Harlem activists and residents to combat segregated housing and schools. I will also use newspapers, NAACP branch files and social science research, such as that from Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU).

This paper makes substantial historiographical contributions to the histories of education, civil rights, and New York City. While some scholars, such as Adina Back and Clarence Taylor have written on parents’ and activists’ efforts to desegregate New York City’s schools, all have looked at the city in its entirety. In doing so, though these scholars have given us vital information on citywide school desegregation, they have not given Harlem the attention it deserves. Harlem has a long history as a site of black political organizing dating back into the 19th century, making it the urban center of the black diaspora. Also, none of these scholars places appropriate emphasis on the vital connections between housing, education and employment, linkages which activists and parents made evident at the time. While we may not think of financial institutions as having a role in creating educational segregation, it was in fact banks and mortgage brokers who decided who would be allowed to live where in New York City through granting or not granting loans, the results of which in turn fed students into the city’s neighborhood schools.

Harlem’s segregated schools are as timely a topic as they have ever been. Though nearly fifty years have passed since the end of the time period I cover, predominantly black public schools in New York City are still staffed by a much larger number of short-term teachers than are predominantly white schools, with teachers in majority black schools also earning significantly less money. Black students in the city’s public schools face a disproportionate discipline rate when compared to white students for committing the same offenses, helping to feed the school to prison pipeline. My research helps us to understand how the problems of the past continue into today, what remedies have already been attempted and how we might address segregated schools in the future."

""Development of the Trogir’s fraternity of the Holy Spirit depended on several elements: a common emergence of such fraternities in Europe, social and political position of commoners in Trogir during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as the maintenance of city’s hospital which probably was under the influence of hospitaler’s order of Santo Spirito. It is important to stress that the period of the fraternity
emergence (together with the city’s hospital) conveys with the urban growth of Trogir. Members of the fraternity came from various social groups but leadership
was always under the influence of the rich citizens. The importance of this fraternity was such that during the rule of Louis the Great this was the only fraternity in Trogir
that was not abolished in 1365. During the fifteenth century this fraternity was leading, so called, commoners council, which was a kind of opponent to the city’s council
of noblemen. Investigation of the fraternity’s statute (matrikula) revealed that fraternity of the Holy Spirit owned a significant amount of mobile and immobile
property. The chief income was coming from the gifts, mostly from testaments. Because
of this wealth the fraternity was economically independent and often communal turbulences did not affect it. In 1442 all the property of the fraternity was evaluated
and listed: the fraternity possessed 60 possessions in the city’s district, several houses within the city walls among which some were rented. With these incomes
fraternity financed maintenance of the hospital. All the possessions of the fraternity were supervised by fraternity’s župan (headmaster). The extent documents reveal
dynamics of the fraternity’s business, rents and loans. The fraternity’s statue contains approximately 470 names of fraternity members over the period of 160 years
(1429-1589). Some of the fraternity members were prominent citizens, holding a significant property in the city and performing various important offices. Therefore,
the fraternity of the Holy Spirit in Trogir represented an important political, social and economic institution that significantly influenced culture of medieval and early
modern Trogir.""

ICREFH’s mission is to organize symposia and publications – this book is the ninth in the series – aimed at understanding European food in all of its aspects (cultural, social, economic, political), as it has changed over the last 250 years. Our approach is avowedly international and inter-disciplinary and we regard this as a strength, since it gives our deliberations ‘hybrid vigour’. The coordination of scholarship is essential in any such enterprise and we hope that the reader will have found a harmony of voices rather than a cacophony.

This study concerns the urban periphery of Rome in the period 200 to 500 AD. Our thesis is that the periphery in this period obtained a new meaning and gradually began to surpass the centre in importance, and that this displacement of activity-nodes and movement created decisive prerequisites for the polycentric structure which was to dominate the urban development of Rome up to the nineteenth century. The main focus of thisinvestigation will be on areas and situations contextually related to the Via Tiburtina, mainly from the Clivus Suburanus inside the Porta Esquilina to and somewhat beyond the Aurelian Wall. The defined period begins with the Severan dynasty’s monumentalization of the area between Porta Esquilina and Porta Maggiore around 200. The following three centuries present a flourishing periphery all around Rome. However, after 500 this flourishing is concentrated in only two areas: the Lateran and Vatican, probably due to the huge loss in city population at that time. This marks the end of the period under investigation in this article. The years 200–500 comprise major shifts in the power structure of the Roman Empire and the rise of new driving forces which transform Rome’s spatial configuration and the physical and mental limits between centre and periphery.