Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850(Historical Urban Studies Series)

Reflecting the growing interest of historians in space and location as objects of analysis, this book is about the historical relationship between urban space and social identity. In urban history there has long been concern with space and place, but recent interest has also been stimulated by specific aspects of postmodern thought deriving from the work of theorists such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, as well as more generally from the burgeoning field of cultural geography. The essays in this book demonstrate the ways in which urban spaces have been shaped historically by conflicts over access and use, and how the identities of particular social groups have themselves been forged in those conflicts in western cities - such as London, Los Angeles, Marseilles, Liverpool, Nicosia and San Sebastian. The contributors include art, architectural and social historians, bringing a wide range of settings, contexts and approaches to the study of space and the city.

Table of Contents:
The spatial turn - changing histories of space and place, Simon Gunn. Part 1 Authority, urban development and the representation of the past: classified urban spaces - who owns the history of Helsinki South Harbour? Anja Nevanlinna; deciding where to draw the line - urban strategies and the Vieux-Port of Marseille during Second World War, Sheila Crane; one Cyprus or many? Turkish Cypriot history in Nicosia, Nergis Canefe. Part 2 "Race", ethnicity and urban place: racial boundaries in a frontier town - St. Louis on the eve of the American Civil War, Barbara Burlison Mooney; space, race and identity in the Pueblo of Los Angeles, Diane Y. Ghirardo; the zone of the other - imposing and resisting alien identities in Chapeltown, Leeds, during the twentieth century, Max Farrar. Part 3 Contesting public space - gender, sexuality and class: boundaries and identities in the 19th-century English port - sailortown narratives and urban space, Valerie Burton; the battle of the boulevards - class, gender and the purpose of public space in later Victorian Liverpool, Krista Cowman; for whose convenience? gay guides, cognitive maps and the construction of homosexual London, 1917-1967, Matt Houlbrook. Part 4 Spaces for leisure: "roughs of both sexes" - the working class in Victorian museums and galleries, Kate Hill; bourgeois strategies of distinction. Leisure culture and transformations of urban space - the Hague, 1850-1890, Jan-Hein Furnee; policing the Alameda - shared and contested leisure in San Sebastian, c. 1863-1920, John K. Walton.