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...

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...

New towns built in North Africa and the Middle East incorporate modern elements into their built environments unprecedented in the traditional city of the region. This thesis addresses the questions: Do these new built environments respond to the prevalent culture? What modern and traditional design qualities enable new towns to maintain cultural integrity? The new towns Sadat City, Egypt and Y...

During the 1940s a series of remarkable and radical planning documents were produced for many British cities, generally now collectively referred to as ‘reconstruction plans’. Universally these sought to introduce a highly interventionist, comprehensive planning, often with strong elements of ‘clean sweep’ reconstruction. This article considers two such plans, for the historic cities of Durham ...

The January 2001 earthquake that struck the state of Gujarat in India damaged or destroyed some 8,000 villages and 490 towns. In the months and years after the earthquake, many organizations undertook widespread reconstruction programmes. One such collaboration between the NGO CARE India and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) built 5,554 permanent houses as well ...