Recent research has significantly refined the idea of an urban economy of the (late) Middle Ages and early modern period. Beyond social and economic-historical narratives of modernisation, the focus has shifted to economic practices, socially heterogeneous actors and moral norms that appear to underpin modern economic practices, but in their ensemble follow an independent, epoch-specific logic that cannot be reduced to a proto- or embryonic form (of modernity, capitalism, etc.). This has also revived older approaches and evaluations, generating and promising new combinations of insights.

By incorporating digital methods, it has become possible to create large amounts of data and utilize them effectively for analysis in a specific way. However, these methods also shed new light on source- and algorithm-critical debates. Combining cultural, social, financial, economic-historical, and digital approaches – be they quantitative or qualitative in nature – thus renews our understanding of property, household management, and economic networking in medieval cities.

In this context, urban space does not function as a fixed, built entity, but is considered multimodally, including financial valuations of buildings or a literary conceptualization of space that can be symbolically and economically charged.

To critically discuss diverse research traditions, explore possibilities for comparison and combination, and apply various methodological approaches according to their contexts, we are organizing a series of panels at IMC 2025 in Leeds and are calling for abstract submissions.

We invite scholars to submit proposals for fifteen-minute papers that study

- Diverse economies of the property markets
- (Non-)institutional actors in the urban property market
- Forms of economic behaviour in the urban property market
- The relations between property market and other economic forms
- Social embeddedness of economic activity with urban property
- Diverse practices of transactions

For submissions, please send an abstract of ~250 words with a title and a short CV to a.vonwiller@unibas.ch until the 10th of September 2024. Depending on the circumstances, there is the possibility for the coverage of some travel expenses for submitters.

The sessions will be organized as part of the “Economies of Space” project by the Universities of Basel and Bern, which analyses the urban space of medieval and early modern Basel through data aggregation and evaluation of historical sources.