Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents:Living Apart Together: The City, Contested Identity, and Democratic Transitions Blair A. RublePART ONE THE ARCHEOLOGY OF THE LOCALIntroduction John J. Czaplicka1. Looking Behind the Marble Mask: Varied African American Responses to Difficult History in Washington, D.C. John Michael Vlach2. Dual History: The Politics of the Past in Kaliningrad, Former Konigsberg Olga Sezneva3. Filling Dwelling Place with History: Communal Apartments in St. Petersburg Ilya UtekhinPART TWO THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF HISTORICAL IMAGESIntroduction Blair A. Ruble4. Identity Contests: Local History and Electoral Politics in St. Petersburg Grigorii V. Golosov5. Constructing A National City: The Case of L'viv Yaroslav Hrytsak and Victor Susak6. The Battle For Public Space on Prague's Old Town Square Cynthia Paces7. Washington, D.C., in White and Black: The Social Construction of Race and Nationhood Howard Gillette, Jr.PART THREE HISTORICAL ALTERITYIntroduction John J. Czaplicka8. Black Washington and the New Negro James A. Miller9. Vienna Since World War II Siegfried Mattl10. Local Responses in Berlin to Urban Decay and the Demise of the German Democratic Brian LaddPART FOUR TRANSFORMATIONSIntroduction Blair A. Ruble11. Barcelona: Cultural Strategies and Urban Renewal, 1979-1997 Pep Subiros12. Growth and Stagnation in 20th-Century Prague Jiri Musil13. The Rebirth and Restoration of Administrative, Political, and Cultural Symbols in Riga's Town Hall Square Ojars SparitisConclusion: Urban History After a Return to Locaal Self-Determination-Local History and Civic Idenity John J. Czaplicka

About the Author :
John J. Czaplicka is an art and cultural historian currently affiliated with Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Blair A. Ruble is director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author, most recently, of Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka. Lauren Crabtree, until recently fiscal assistant at the Kennan Institute, is a graduate student in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

Review :
The complexity of these cases may not quite generate easily applied solutions, but the essays certainly merit attention as synthetic studies of urban place and history. Choice 2004 Well written and will appeal to readers across business and social science disciplines... Accessible and grounded in contemporary public affairs. -- James G. Mellon Political Studies Review 2005 It is rare for a volume comprising such a diverse range of articles to be as successful and as coherent as this book. It is also a timely call for scholarly engagement with some of the most urgent political, social and moral problems facing contemporary urban communities. Slavonic and East European Review 2005 Open[s] a floodgate for further investigation. -- Stephanie Ryberg Journal of Urban History 2008