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I'd like to propose that, in its current form, this article has some problems. Although there are lots of towns by castles, in English (as far as I know) "castle towns" is not a subject that's studied or defined in its own right. I'm wondering if we'd be better retitling this article jōkamachi, and focusing down on the Japanese theme, where it is a specialist term and (I think) a theme studied by academics? Hchc2009 (talk) 07:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps the solution is to move the article to the title of urban castle. The Council for British Archaeology's report Urban Archaeology in Britain (1987) has a chapter on urban castles, and Liddiard mentions the role of urban castles in his book Castles in Context (2005). Liddiard even gives numbers for the number of castles established by William the Conqueror and breaks them down into urban and rural. The term "castle-town" is sometimes used, for example Creighton in Castles and Landscapes seems to use it as an alternative to "urban castle" which he uses more frequently and it seems to be a more technical term. Archaeology isn't always rich in statistics, but Drage does give some interesting snippets such as "over 80% of all new towns in Wales and 75% of those established in England before 1150 lay beside a castle" and his chapter is well worth a read, and that was before the growth of landscape studies in relation to castles. Nev1 (talk) 20:12, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Urban castle I'd be happy with - I could imagine an article covering that theme quite well. Hchc2009 (talk) 20:38, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The term 'castle town' does get used a lot though to describe the towns which developed around castles. It's often applied to places like Himeji, Hyōgo which grew up (or developed from scratch) largely as the result of the castle. Is there a difference between the popular name for these towns and that used by specialists in this field? (eg, 'castle town' being the layman's term and 'urban castle' being the term used by academics and the like). Nick-D (talk) 10:30, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't seen this article before. It's regrettably short, considering the importance of castle towns to urban history... lots of potential to write good content.
In some cases the castle will have been built before the town, and vice versa; I think that "urban castles" would imply that it only covers a subset, and it also takes the focus away from the towns. We already have pretty good coverage of castles. Platt's "The English medieval town" has some good coverage of this area, will try to find my copy (although it doesn't help our systematic bias towards the anglosphere). Also, I think the distinction between castle and cathedral is drawn too sharply - lots of towns would have had both (or at least a substantial church). In nonchristian places it's different, of course. And don't forget Palmanova! bobrayner (talk) 13:20, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Nick, I think that urban castle is the term used for castles in urban areas (I've only seen literature on this in respect to England, where they're mostly founded in the years after the Conquest, but there may be more elsewhere). I think that castle town is a near literal translation of jōkamachi. What I propose doing is creating an "urban castle" article in the next week or so, then linking to there from a hatnote in this article. I'll create a redirect for jōkamachi linking to this article. Please shout if anyone disagrees... Hchc2009 (talk) 22:49, 30 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
