The City as Power

This timely 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.

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 inclusion—and 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.

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

1 The City as Palimpsest: Narrating National Identity through

Urban Space and Place

Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

Part I: Remembering and Forgetting

Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

2 Creating a Place for the Nation in Dublin: The Republic of Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance

Kara E. Dempsey

3 Making a Wrong Turn in Tokyo: Yasukuni Shrine and the “Empty Center” of Contemporary Japanese Nationalism

Ronald Davidson

4 The City, Memory, and Ideology in Ulaanbaatar: Inscribing Memory and Ideology in Postsocialist Mongolia

Orhon Myadar

5 Ankara’s Forest Farm and the Turkish Nation: Modern Narratives of Agriculture, Identity, and Contestation

Kyle T. Evered and Emine Ö. Evered

6 A Usable Past in Tashkent: Public Culture, Eidolons, and “Uzbekness” in Independent Uzbekistan

Reuel R. Hanks

Part II: “Other” Identities and Counternarratives

Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

7 Remembering Rio: From the Imperial Palace to the African Heritage Circuit

Brian J. Godfrey

8 The Cityscapes of Lusaka and Mongu: Narrating National Symbolism in Zambia

Garth A. Myers and Angela G. Subulwa

9 Rewriting the National Past in Contemporary Budapest: Populism in Action

Emilia Palonen

10 Urban National Politics in the United States: #BlackLivesMatter and the Challenges to Normative National Identity

Joshua F. J. Inwood

11 From Precolonial to Postcolonial African Cities: Identity Formation, Social Change, and Conflict

Bill Freund

Part III: National Identity amid Globalization

Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

12 National Day Celebrations in Doha and Abu Dhabi: Cars and Semiotic Landscapes in the Gulf

Natalie Koch

13 With or without Chinese Characteristics in Beijing, Wuhan, and Shenzhen: Navigating Antiquity and Modernism in Socialist China’s Urban Space

James DeShaw Rae

14 From “Rural” to “Urban” India: Transforming a Nation’s Identity through Serial Urban Renewals

Diganta Das and Bikramaditya K. Choudhary

15 Ethno- and Religio-nationalism in Putrajaya, Taman Tamadun Islam, and Kota Iskandar: Malay(sian) National Identity in Contemporary Urban Megaprojects

Sarah Moser

16 The City as Crucible: Urban Space, Place, and National Identity into the Twenty-First Century

Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen

Bibliography

Index

About the Contributors