Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities
Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xiv, [2], 430. [2] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Tables. Figures. Index. Minor edge soiling. A few corners creased. The dust jacket has slight wear and soiling. The index has entries for Architectural Space, Architecture, City Center, Collective Identity, Communal, Heritage and Tradition, Historical Topographies, Housing Policy, Pierre L'Enfant. Marian Column, Modernism, Monuments, Tourism, Urban Development, and Working Class. Czaplicka has taught in Hamburg, Germany, at Harvard, and Humboldt University in Berlin. His publications have dealt with the pictorial imagery of Berlin, Americanism in Germany, Austrian exile artists, and commemorative practices and urban history in East-Central Europe. Recently he edited a collection on rewriting urban history and European immigration. Together with Felix Lutz, he is engaged in a study of German-American cultural-political relations that concentrates on the period 1900–1933. Blair Aldridge Ruble (born December 18, 1949) is a non-fiction writer and academic administrator whose work has focused on comparative urban studies as well as Russian and Ukrainian affairs. Ruble was affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for several decades, beginning in the late 1970s. He served in various capacities at the Wilson Center between 1977 and 2017, including a long-standing association with the Kennan Institute from 1989 to 2012. Following this, he was named a Distinguished Fellow, a title he held until the Wilson Center ceased operations in April 2025. Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities tells the story of how fractured urban communities sometimes succeed and sometimes fail at creating a way of life embracing the many varieties of people and institutions that make cities both urban and urbane. The volume studies nine cities long divided by race, nationality, class, and religion: Washington, D.C., Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, L'viv, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, and Riga. All have undergone greater and lesser transitions from authoritarian to democratic forms of government, creating new needs and opportunities to shape a civic identity. The contributors study these cities' presentations of their own history as embodied in everything from museum exhibits to architecture to street names. Do a city's efforts at material renewal and reform reflect and promote an inclusive, pluralistic self-image that supports nascent democratic institutions, or an exclusionary one that claims all the city for some particular group? Drawing on the experiences of the past half-century, Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities shows how the emergence of pluralistic images of the past, present, and future can open the way for more pluralistic understandings of power and social relations. Contributors are John Czaplicka, Howard Gillette, Jr., Grigorii V. Golosov, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Brian Ladd, Siegfried Mattl, James A. Miller, Jiri Musil, Cynthia Paces, Blair A. Ruble, Olga Sezneva, Ojars Sparitis, Pep Subiros, Victor Susak, Ilya Utekhin, and John Michael Vlach. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Pluralism, Community Development, Urban Renewal, Kaliningrad, Konigsberg, Communal Apartments, St. Petersburg, L'viv, Public Space, Racism, Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, Prague, Riga, Self-Determination, Civic Identity, Cities, Urban History
ISBN: 0801873851
[Book #90217]
Price: $75.00