Living in the City Urban Institutions in the Low Countries,
1200–2010 Edited by L.A.C.J. (Leo) Lucassen, W.H. (Wim) Willems
Published December 22nd 2011 by Routledge – 266 pages The city
is a place to find shelter, a market place, and an elevator for
social mobility and success. But the city is also a place that
frightens people and that can marginalize newcomers. Living in
the City tries to understand what pulls people to the city since
the High Middle Ages, focusing on one of the earliest urbanized
regions in the world, the Low Countries. The book is a quest for
new insights that leads the reader from Medieval Ghent and
Bruges, through the Dutch Golden Age and the mass urbanization
in the age of Industrialization to the present Eurodelta. A
region that emerged in the last century with Antwerp, Rotterdam
and Amsterdam as nodal points in a global urban network. To
understand the motivations of so many to settle in cities this
book focuses on a wide variety of urban institutions. What was
the role of churches,