How have cities emerged and how do they change over time? Within the field of urban history, a multitude of perspectives, themes and disciplines meet; cultural, economical, judicial, settlement historical, and spacial aspects of cities and city formations.

The Urban History Field exists in the transitions between the humanities and the social sciences - with the lived reality of cities being as important as settlement processes and economical change. This is the sentiment of economical historian H. J. Dyos' program statement for the very first professorship of urban history, in Leicester 1962. This statement is still valid and shows the range of the field. 

Urban history research is concerned with all periods of time. Archaeological results might be important to researchers within medieval urban history, along with questions of land use, legal and social relations. The modern urban history researcher might view cities as laboratories for the developed industrial or post-industrial society and its physical form.

The meaning of places and spacial processess have recently greatly influenced the historical scientific field. Questions of how societies organize space are central within urban history.

Urban history is also strongly connected to practices, from field studies to communicating research to activists, journalists, planners and desicion makers. In these collaborations, the urban historian searches for historical explanations to present conditions in cities - in the intersection between the humanities and the social sciences.