This book combines contributions by numerous Flemish and Dutch authors to produce a history of the city as a physical structure. The development of the city in both the Northern and Southern Netherlands is explored chronologically: the mercantile city of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the more or less systematic expansion and beautification of the city by the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the city shaped by industrial activity in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth; and finally the modern twentieth-century city. In each part, the essays on the various elements – urbanisation, relationship with the landscape, infrastructure, spatial planning and urban topography/urban properties – focus on two large cities in the Low Countries, Amsterdam and Antwerp.