Neighbourhood Social Change in West European Cities: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

SummaryIt is argued that both the tenacity of the neighbourhood and its adaptability were much greater than historians have tended to think, and that this was true not only during theancien régimebut also during the nineteenth century when the rate of mobility between towns and within towns reached enormous proportions. Demographic, social and cultural changes did not result in the destruction of the local community, but in its transformation, a transformation in which the growing need for reciprocity among working-class neighbours played a crucial role. The decline of more or less institutionalized forms of self-regulation went hand in hand with the construction by the lower classes of informal channels of social interaction based on local ties, which stimulated an active and participatory street life. Moreover, the tendency towards geographical segregation contributed to the development of a different collective sense of identity in working-class neighbourhoods, which added a new dimension to the concept of solidarity.

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The History of ‘the Reading Public’

10.1093/oso/9780198800170.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Stefan Collini

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Social Change ◽

Working Class ◽

Literary History ◽

Reading Public ◽

Reading Matter ◽

History Of ◽

Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

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Bandstands and Modernity: Constructing Spanish Cities Musically

Journal of Urban History ◽

10.1177/0096144220976125 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 009614422097612

Author(s):

Gloria Araceli Rodriguez-Lorenzo

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Social Interaction ◽

Case Studies ◽

Social Groups ◽

Urban Spaces ◽

Cultural Changes ◽

Urban Modernity ◽

Sonic Environment

This article analyses the interplay between sound and urban spaces in Spain, from the end of nineteenth century until 1936. Free outdoor concerts performed by bands in public urban spaces offered a new aural experience audience from across an increasing range of very diverse social groups, almost ritualizing both the practice of listening to music and the spaces in which that music was heard—all at a time when those very spaces were changing, in a way which mirrored the wider reconfiguration and modernization of Spanish cities. Case studies focusing on political, social, and cultural changes in urban spaces are analyzed, in order to understand how cities developed new spaces for social interaction, the modern sonic environment, and the ways in which those cities have appropriated culture for their citizens, as a symbol of urban modernity.

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