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This article traces the centuries-long morphological development of Algiers’ port-city interface across four historically relevant time periods that together span from the dawn of the 16th century up until today. Through a diachronic and geo-historical approach, we identify and analyse the origins of Algiers’ persistent port-city divide. In doing so, the notion of the interface is interpreted as a spatial threshold between city and port, which nevertheless supports the material flows of both entities. As a multi-purpose area, the interface holds the potential to weave the disparate entities of a port city back together. To further complement this conceptual angle, we provide investigations of porosity that determine the differing degrees of connectivity between the city and port of Algiers. This is combined with a spatial-functional analysis of Algiers’ current port-city interface, which is ultimately characterised as a non-homogeneous entity composed of four distinct sequences. These results contribute to a better orientation of imminent plans for waterfront revitalisations in Algiers. Whereas the interface was long considered as some kind of no man’s land in the past, port and municipal authorities nowadays aim to turn the interface into a tool of reconciliation, and can do so by acting upon its potential porosity. Finally, this article’s critical examination of the previously neglected case of Algiers can and should also be considered as an applicable model for the continuing study of southern Mediterranean and African port metropolises in general, which share a particular evolution in the relations between city and port.

Contradictions and conflicts lie at the heart of port cities, with contemporary waterfront redevelopments offering the latest controversial associations to traditional maritime history. Tracing back classic urban renewal and modernization processes in maritime areas, this article develops a case study on a notorious pleasure neighborhood (the Zandstraatbuurt) in Rotterdam, eradicated when the Dutch port city entered a new stage of urban and industrial development in the decades around 1900. The case study is embedded within a conceptual framework on nostalgia and its connections to bygone sailor culture. Significant cultural imaginations of the historical pleasure district are discussed, and notable journalistic accounts help to assess how nostalgic sentiments attempted to shape the legacy of the neighborhood around the time of its dissolution. Finally, general newspaper coverage of the district after its turn-of-the-century life span is analyzed, thereby demonstrating the potential for further research on urban nostalgia in historical contexts.

In this article, we demonstrate and argue that one way to acquire a better sense of cinemagoing in the silent film era is to investigate the relations between cinema locations, the socio-economic and demographic profile of their surroundings, and film programming. Driven by the centrality of space as one of the defining traits of new cinema history, we operationalise this inquiry through a data-driven toolkit of interconnected scalable approaches, in order to establish a multilayered contextualisation of Amsterdam's early cinema landscape. We analyse Amsterdam's historical cinema market both on the meso level of the city's overall surroundings and on the micro level of two neighbouring film venues within a specific urban district. By switching between different levels of scale to analyse the cinemas' programming profiles, we highlight the venues' positioning within the socio-spatial structure of the city and their neighbourhood community in particular. In the future, the multifaceted analytical exploration enabled by our digital toolkit can be further enhanced by an increased availability of more fine-grained archival and contextual data.

Over the last two decades, a growing number of databases have been published online that record historical information on the production, distribution and reception of performing arts. The aim of this contribution is to present a starting inventory of European performing arts databases that are available online, since no such overview exists to date. This inventory stems from a project carried out in 2018 at the University of Amsterdam, in the context of the digital humanities research program CREATE. 1 One of the goals of the project was to examine the potential of transnational and cross-sectoral cooperation on historical research into performing arts: can we connect datasets in a meaningful way to facilitate comparative and interdisciplinary research? The first step in this project has been the creation of an inventory of online databases on theatre, music and film. 2 This contribution focuses only on performance-related databases in the field of theatre and related art forms such as opera and music theatre, as these comprised the majority of our initial inventory effort. We are aware that an overview of performing arts databases will never be complete or even up to date, but we nevertheless do believe that our compiled overview can be a practical tool for scholars interested in theatre studies and the history of performing arts to start exploring various existing theatre data projects, and to potentially further extend this inventory in the future.Several criteria were taken into account when selecting relevant data projects. The geographical focus was limited to Europe, 3 tying in with existing initiatives on a continental scale to make cultural heritage and data available for research and other uses, such as Europeana and the TMG 24 (1/2) 2021