THE URBAN HISTORY GROUP Annual Conference BOUNDARIES AND JURISDICTIONS: DEFINING THE URBAN

S OF PAPERS Urban History Group Conference 2017 1 SESSION 2.1: THE PERMEABILITY OF URBAN BORDERS Petty crime, awareness spaces and informal edges in provincial shopping districts in 1830’s England Peter Collinge (Keele) Respectable citizens of Derby were used to navigating the informal boundaries of their town. Adverts for business and domestic addresses noted the desirable situations and commanding positions of superior districts where location alone was perceived to mark out the degree of respectability of those inhabiting such spaces. What happened though when those social constructs were breached by the activities of the petty criminal? How did authority respond, and with what consequences for both perpetrator and victim? Taking the case study of Glass-Blowing Billy’s and Yellow Ann’s theft of half a yard of ribbon in 1836, and placing their experience within the context of others brought to trial at the same assizes, this paper explores time, awareness spaces and opportunism in the art of shoplifting in provincial England. It argues that the restrictions imposed by imaginary boundaries were rarely enforced in practice and easy to transgress. In crossing the physical and theoretical thresholds that separated genteel retail establishments from the street, Glass-Blowing Billy and Yellow Ann were transgressing the ‘rules’ governing who could enter such premises. In the semi-privacy of shops, just as in the more public spaces of the street however, informal mechanisms shaped boundaries. How potential customers appeared to the owner or assistant often influenced the reception they received. Fully cognizant of this, petty criminals adapted their modes of dress, speech and deception strategies to the scale and standing of the establishment they targeted. In doing so artfully-constructed notions of genteel, respectable spaces were breached and ultimately reshaped. Putting Leith on the Map: Urban identities and the permeability of formal boundaries Anna Feintuck (University of Edinburgh) In 1920, Edinburgh and Leith were amalgamated. The decision to do so was taken despite the results of a plebiscite showing Leith residents and officials to have an overwhelming preference for remaining an independent burgh – as they had been throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the campaign against amalgamation – and afterwards – Leith representatives drew on social difference to make their appeal, writing in The Scotsman that Leith ‘had always been a distinct community’. Edinburgh-based respondents took a dim view of this argument, suggesting that ‘if sentimental concerns are to be the mainsprings of plebiscites, few extension schemes will ever have any chance of success. This paper takes the example of Edinburgh and Leith to examine the permeability of urban boundaries. There is ambiguity in how separate the two places ever really were. Prior to amalgamation, Urban History Group Conference 2017 2 municipal tramlines ran across the supposed boundary, and anecdotes abounded relating to houses that were half in Edinburgh and half in Leith. One formal consequence of the amalgamation was the re-drawing of maps: plans from 1918 and 1932 by the local mapmakers John Bartholomew & Son show how boundary lines changed. The latter plan also shows, however, that Leith was not the only area to be ‘absorbed’. Edinburgh’s formal boundaries expanded significantly at this time, but Leith put up a uniquely defiant fight. The discourse surrounding this episode therefore gives a valuable insight into perceptions of boundaries and their complexities in both their formal and informal guises. Cultural boundaries and conscious differentiation, it is suggested, have been especially important in the development and continuing representation of urban identity for both Edinburgh and Leith. A city in the city: The case-study of post-war Kallithea Paraksevi Kapoli (National Library of Greece) This presentation explores the reasons why Kallithea, a municipality of the Greater Athens area, gathered a great number of migrants from the Greek countryside during the first two post-war decades, namely from 1950 to 1970. Normally, many migrants tended to settle on the edges of cities, which therefore worked as entrances to the city. On the contrary, Kallithea seemed to be a bridge connecting the port city of Piraeus and the city centre of the Greek capital thanks to its geographical position. Within this framework, the research draws upon mostly archival material from the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives. Questionnaires about Kallitheans’ daily life, in particular, offer a closer look not only at their living conditions but also at their expectations from their place of residence. It was found, after a thorough observation of these questionnaires that, in the 1960s, migrants who lived in Kallithea had a great variety of options related to finding a job, to improving their educational level, to enjoying the city life. Moreover, the small distance from Piraeus and Athens and the area’s good transit systems reinforced the migrants’ easier access to the facilities offered by both. Thus, the wide range of options helped migrants’ upward mobility, since they could better adjust to the urban way of living. Through this case study, we can learn more about the way that cities are constituted by so many different urban environments. These small cities do not work independently from each other but they are mutually affected, while their inhabitants also leave their mark on them. Therefore, one could argue that facilities and other services have always played a decisive role in the city’s boundaries formation. Urban History Group Conference 2017 3 SESSION 2.2: RELIGION AND TOWN PLANNING IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE Writing in Urban History, Joks Janseen (2015) has commented that “the discourse on twentieth-century urban planning has hidden from view the way religion (re)shaped the urban landscape”. Historians have long recognized the conflict between ecclesiastical and civil divisions in the city, such as the overlapping boundaries provided by parish and ward. This panel seeks to put religion and the agendas of religious leaders back on the map, and to interrogate the disputes over governance, belonging, power and authority in the city during the critical years of the development of strong central government town planning in the mid-twentieth century. How did clerics understand their role in the formation of development plans, of new suburbs and neighbourhoods? How did town planning professionals conceive of urban boundaries and jurisdictions, and how were disputes concerning the perception of these boundaries resolved? Furthermore, what exactly was ‘urban’ about these disputes and how was the urban angle deployed by different sides? This panel will use case-studies in Belgium, Ireland and the U.K. to show how boundaries and jurisdictions were fundamental to understanding the role of religion in the evolution of town planning. Planning for Manchester’s post-1945 places of worship Angela Connelly (University of Manchester) The City of Manchester Plan 1945 outlined a vision for the reconstruction of the world’s first industrial city. Unusually, City Surveyor Rowland Nicholas gave special consideration to places of worship in the proposed plan. He noted that the pre-1945 housing estates in Manchester did not account for places of worship, leading to them being relegated to awkward sites. Nicholas argued that places of worship should act as ‘spiritual and architectural focal points’, and that ‘sites in keeping with their significance should be reserved in new development’. Major faith organizations in the city supported the 1945 plan, and, indeed, people of faith occupying key positions in the city’s political class were prominent in the realization of his proposals. Governing the relationship between planners and faith organizations was, however, a far from straightforward process. The pre-1945 experience of unregulated development, combined with declining attendances, had led to an over-supply of places of worship. Therefore, a more nuanced approach was needed in order to prevent accusations of favouritism for certain religious organizations. Key to this was the Manchester branch of the Churches Main Committee, which was originally established to negotiate war damage claims. Complex negotiations between the Committee, religious organizations, and city planners reveal much about the material politics in constructing Manchester’s places of worship. Through an analysis of the response by religious organizations to the City of Manchester Plan 1945 and the subsequent placement of places of worship in Manchester between 1945 and 1975, I argue that the Urban History Group Conference 2017 4 boundary between sacred and secular was more porous than historians have accounted for to date. Rethinking the Urban Parish: François Houtart and the Centre de Recherches Socio-Religieuses de Bruxelles, 1956-64 Sven Sterken & Eva Weyns (University of Leuven) In earlier times, most settlements in Western Europe developed around the local parish church, the community’s spatial and social nucleus. The processes of industrialization, urbanization and secularization have reversed this mechanism; towards the midtwentieth century, the place of the church (both as a religious institution and as a building) was no longer self-evident. The established religions devised various strategies to preserve the once-evident unity of ideology, territory and society. Many Catholic dioceses, for example, established consulting bodies for the strategic planning and financing of religious infrastructure in the suburbanizing areas. As a case in point, this paper studies the interaction between religion, urban planning and demographic change at a pivotal moment in recent Belgian history, namely the period leading to the 1958 World Fair in Brussels. In particular, it addresses the ideas developed by the canon François Houtart (b. 1925), a key figure in the development of urban expertise within the Belgian Catholic milieu who has nonetheless been overlooked so far. Originally trained as a priest, Houtart obtained a Masters in sociology and read urbanism under Gaston Bardet in Brussels before spending a year in the USA, familiarizing himself with the Chicago School principles. In 1956, he founded the Centre de Recherches Socio-Religieuses de Bruxelles. Financed by the Belgian episcopate and inspired by similar institutions abroad, it advised on the planning of Catholic infrastructure such as new parishes, churches, hospitals and schools. As this paper will show, Houtart developed an increasingly critical attitude towards the territorial politics of the Roman Catholic Church during the post-war era in Belgium. For example, he openly contested the concept of the territorially defined parish – the fundamental cornerstone of the Catholic edifice – since ever increasing mobility made the very notion of spatial boundaries obsolete. By focusing on the international conference ‘The Church in the City’ organized by Houtart at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, this paper will discuss his criticism as part of a broader contestation of Catholic authority within modern society, and assess the alternatives that were put forward in order to regulate a religious presence in the newly urbanized areas. ‘The Galway School Site Controversy’: City-centre redevelopment and urban governance in Ireland, 1944-49 Richard Butler (University of Leicester) The first town plan for Galway, drawn up in 1944, faltered under sustained opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. The plan would have involved large-scale demolition in the medieval city centre and the building of a ring road and a surface car park on a site Urban History Group Conference 2017 5 owned by the church and earmarked for a primary school under its patronage. This paper will use the resulting controversy, played out between 1944 and 1949, and known at the time as ‘the Galway school site controversy’, as the basis for a broader analysis of governance, property rights and the provision of social services in Irish cities in the immediate post-war period. The dispute involved the county council, a professional Dublin-based town planner, central government and the Catholic Church, each vying for control of the city’s future. The proposed ‘thinning out’ of the city centre, and the development of satellite communities clashed with the church’s desire to maintain its old urban constituency and threatened a dilution of its influence. The interventions of the local bishop, Michael Browne, led to a broader debate in Ireland, and especially Northern Ireland, on the ‘excessive’ influence of the church in town-planning issues. This paper will analyse the tactics used by Browne to defeat the proposed ring road from his long-standing distrust of ‘managerial systems’ (which he equated with Communism) to his secretive pamphleteering in the city on the eve of the final debate on the matter. I will suggest that the controversy represents a key episode in church-state relations in Irish urban history. Urban History Group Conference 2017 6 SESSION 2.3: BOUNDARIES, SPACE AND TRAVERSING THE