ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on why municipal employees and services is a relevant and revealing theme in urban history, and then goes on to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of existing scholarship. The modern city referred to in the title of the present volume is one which took shape towards the middle of the nineteenth century in a period marked by the dual processes of urbanization and industrialization, characteristic of great European and American cities. The nature of such transformation becomes more transparent if municipal employees are given a central role in the formulation and implementation of public policy. On both sides of the Atlantic, interventionism was stimulated by urban development and population growth as well as by a consciously political dynamic. An examination of the history of municipal employees and services inescapably raises the question of the degree to which city administrations had the power and capability to shape cities at both the physical and the social level.
