The City as Power: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity

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This 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 inclusionand 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.

Reviews

Diener 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 globefrom 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

Author Bio

Alexander C. Diener is associate professor of geography at the University of Kansas. Joshua Hagen is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern State University.