This exciting collection of essays explores new ways of understanding politics and governance in Europe’s cities over the last 500 years. Reflecting state of the art scholarship, it will be essential reading for any student of power and rule in the urban past.

Introduction: Unravelling Urban Governance Part I: Elites, Institutions, and Civil Society 1. Reassessing Power and Governance in Late Medieval Cities: Institutions and the Cursus Honorum 2. Urban Governance and Prison Building in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1820–1845 3. Governing Taste: Fin-de-SieÌcle Cracow, Its Museums and the Urban Elite in the Shaping of the Modern Metropolis Part II: Behaviour and the Governing of Morality 4. Governing Sexuality: Regulating Prostitution in Early Modern Europe 5. Negotiating Urban Governance: Norm Entrepreneurs in Dutch Cities, 1850–1900 Part III: Urban Rituals and the Performance of Power 6. The St Francis Housing Project: Rituals, Symbols and Discourses in Housing Policies in Rome After the Second World War 7. Post-War Urban Pageants in Finland: Performance, Participation and Power Part IV: Governmentality and the State 8. The Foundation of St Petersburg as a Variation upon Foucault’s Governmentality: The Russian Service City, 1703–1740 9. Urban Materialities: Citizenship, Public Housing and Governance in Modern Britain 10. "A Community Not Our Own": Urban Enclosure and Spatial Governmentality Under Fascism Part V: Beyond Foucault: New Narratives for Urban Governance 11. Urban Individuality and Urban Governance in Twentieth-Century Europe 12. Heterodoxies: New Approaches to Power and Agency in the Modern City