Scholars and architects have long admired the urban structure of the five towns of the Oued M'zab Valley. Originally built by the Hybadites, a schismatic sect of Muslims, the towns con­ sist of stratified masses of houses on rocky peaks, each dominated by a mosque and minaret, elevated on the skyline like a divine finger. Many common points may be discerned between the tendencies of contemporar...

Under the background of rural revitalization, important goal is to help sustainable development villages and towns. While implementing concept green development, needs promote inheritance continuous activation culture. In this paper, ancient architectural wisdom design contained in traditional houses south Yangtze River were studied, how extract low-carbon ideas combine them with modern technol...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain, but not in France. As urbanization recovered, medieval towns were more often found in Roman-era town lo...

Historians face many difficulties when plumbing the depths of the very dynamic and heterogenic population structures of pre-modern towns, especially because very few sources encompass the various layers of the urban population. In this paper I argue that it is necessary to collect and unlock larger amounts of data in databases, which in turn allow to compose multi-facetted biographies of townsp...

According to their self-representations, western European guilds in the early modern period (1500–1800) were archetypal patriarchal institutions. In cities and towns where they existed, the vast majority of guilds restricted their membership to men. Corporate statutes not only prohibited women from becoming mistresses, they also prevented them from entering apprenticeship or even taking employm...