Composing Urban History & the Constitution of Civic Identiti

This work 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, DC, Kaliningrad, St Petersburg, L'viv, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona and Riga. All have undergone greater or 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 50 years, the book 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.