Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary book considers national identity through the lens of urban spaces. By bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, The City as Power provides broad comparative perspectives about the critical importance of urban landscapes as forums for creating, maintaining, and contesting identity and belonging. Rather than serving as passive backdrops, urban spaces and places are active mediums for defining categories of inclusion—and exclusion. With an international scope and ready appeal to visual learners, the book offers a compelling survey of historical and contemporary efforts to enact state ideals, express counter-narratives, and negotiate global trends in cities. The contributors show how successive regimes reshape cityscapes to mirror their respective socio-political agendas, perspectives on history, and assumptions of power. Yet they must do so within the legal, ethnic, religious, social, economic, and cultural geographies inherited from previous regimes. Exploring the rich diversity of urban space, place, and national identity, the book compares core elements of identity projects in a range of political, cultural, and socioeconomic settings. By focusing on the built form and urban settings for social movements, protest, and even organized violence, this timely book demonstrates that cities are not simply lived in but also lived through.
Trade ReviewDiener and Hagen have assembled a talented cast of scholars to investigate a wide range of urban landscapes, national ideologies, and political struggles from across the globe—from the everyday performance of car culture in the UAE to highly charged #BlackLivesMatter protests in the United States. In particular, The City as Power makes a major contribution to the recent ‘memory turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. The volume demonstrates the ways in which urban space is a vehicle for narrating and debating what histories and whose identities matter or belong in the contemporary nation. -- Derek Alderman, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen are to be congratulated for assembling such a far-reaching array of examples to reveal how the constructed and contested geographies of nationalism play out at multiple scales of the built environment. Taken together, these show how a sense of collective belonging is forged and re-forged through political landscapes. Drawing on incisive cases from across the globe, this astute book shows how a conjoined design-politics works to selectively edit, negotiate, and reappropriate the useable past to situate a powerful and politically useful future. -- Lawrence J. Vale, MIT, author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity
This exhilarating volume examines a range of topical issues across urban landscapes, spanning and extending diverse geographies at different scales and making productive connections across time, space, and culture. The essays model an integrative approach to urban studies that is satisfyingly site-specific and also thoughtfully shaped by broader comparative perspectives. Diener and Hagen convincingly demonstrate the critical relevance and potential of ‘nation,’ ‘narration,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘power’ as analytical concepts for cities in the twenty-first century. -- Julie Buckler, Harvard University
Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1 The City as Palimpsest: Narrating National Identity through Urban Space and Place Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen Part I: Remembering and Forgetting Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen 2 Creating a Place for the Nation in Dublin: The Republic of Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance Kara E. Dempsey 3 Making a Wrong Turn in Tokyo: Yasukuni Shrine and the “Empty Center” of Contemporary Japanese Nationalism Ronald Davidson 4 The City, Memory, and Ideology in Ulaanbaatar: Inscribing Memory and Ideology in Postsocialist Mongolia Orhon Myadar 5 Ankara’s Forest Farm and the Turkish Nation: Modern Narratives of Agriculture, Identity, and Contestation Kyle T. Evered and Emine Ö. Evered 6 A Usable Past in Tashkent: Public Culture, Eidolons, and “Uzbekness” in Independent Uzbekistan Reuel R. Hanks Part II: “Other” Identities and Counternarratives Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen 7 Remembering Rio: From the Imperial Palace to the African Heritage Circuit Brian J. Godfrey 8 The Cityscapes of Lusaka and Mongu: Narrating National Symbolism in Zambia Garth A. Myers and Angela G. Subulwa 9 Rewriting the National Past in Contemporary Budapest: Populism in Action Emilia Palonen 10 Urban National Politics in the United States: #BlackLivesMatter and the Challenges to Normative National Identity Joshua F. J. Inwood 11 From Precolonial to Postcolonial African Cities: Identity Formation, Social Change, and Conflict Bill Freund Part III: National Identity amid Globalization Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen 12 National Day Celebrations in Doha and Abu Dhabi: Cars and Semiotic Landscapes in the Gulf Natalie Koch 13 With or without Chinese Characteristics in Beijing, Wuhan, and Shenzhen: Navigating Antiquity and Modernism in Socialist China’s Urban Space James DeShaw Rae 14 From “Rural” to “Urban” India: Transforming a Nation’s Identity through Serial Urban Renewals Diganta Das and Bikramaditya K. Choudhary 15 Ethno- and Religio-nationalism in Putrajaya, Taman Tamadun Islam, and Kota Iskandar: Malay(sian) National Identity in Contemporary Urban Megaprojects Sarah Moser 16 The City as Crucible: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity into the Twenty-First Century Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen Bibliography Index About the Contributors
