Who owned the woods, pastures and public spaces in the city? The IStG Spring Conference on ‘Städtische Gemeingüter’, to be held on 27–28 March 2028, will examine communally used spaces and rights in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period from a comparative European perspective. Proposals for papers are welcome until 30 November 2026.
The bibliography provides access to a continuously updated database of literature on urban history, with links to openly accessible digital publications and reviews.
The next workshops in the Friday Colloquium series will take place on 20 November 2026 (“Stadtbilder [...] im Hanseraum”) and 8 January 2027 (“Junge Städteforschung”), both from 10.00 am to 1.00 pm in the IStG meeting room.
In 2024, the seventh volume of the Deutscher Historischer Städteatlas (Historical Atlas of German Towns), dedicated to Magdeburg, was published. Since October 2025, a large interdisciplinary team has been working on the next atlas, focusing on Lübeck.
In 2025, the 20th volume of the Historischer Atlas westfälischer Städte (Historical Atlas of Westphalian Towns), covering Bödefeld, was published. Now, the project staff is working on a town atlas for Bad Oeynhausen in collaboration with Hartmut Klein.
Since the 1970s, edited collections and monographs on current topics in urban history have been published as part of the series Städteforschung (Urban Research). In spring 2026, the 108th volume of the series was published, featuring key contributions to urban history by Gerd Schwerhoff.
This project systematically documents the phenomenon of imperial cities in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period and makes this information accessible via a digital information system.
The project develops a digital approach to the study of urbanity, based on a scalable catalogue of urban characteristics of settlements in Westphalia and Mecklenburg (800–1800).
Since 2025, this project has been systematically collecting and studying the contents of private correspondence from the Westphalia region dating from the period of the Thirty Years’ War.
