Imagining the City, Volume 2

The urban spaces we inhabit today have been moulded by a combination of historical forces - by social and economic processes, by the specific designs of urban planners, and by the regulatory and ritual practices of earlier times. As arenas of cultural activity they are also imbued with legends, symbolic associations, and historical memories. This second volume of papers arising from the conference -Imagining the City-, held in Cambridge in 2004, examines the physical organization and the imaginative perception of cities from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, and over a geographical range that reaches from Ukraine to Mexico. It includes discussions of the ways in which cities have been envisaged in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in early modern times, as sites of religious, cultural and political rituals; of the uses to which urban spaces have been put by industrial societies and by the political cultures of the twentieth century; and of the implications for the populations of particular cities of the roles these have played in establishing the historical identity of particular communities (whether national, political or religious) and in the delineation of boundaries between cultures.

The Editors: Christian Emden is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Rice University. Educated at the Universities of Konstanz and Cambridge, he was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (2000-2003). Catherine Keen is Lecturer in Italian at University College London. After completing doctoral and post-doctoral studies at Cambridge, she lectured in Italian at the Universities of Leeds and Bristol before moving to University College London. David Midgley is Reader in German Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John-s College, Cambridge. He studied at Oxford (DPhil 1975) and was a Humboldt Scholar in 1979.

Contents: Christian Emden/Catherine Keen/David Midgley: Introduction - Gil P. Klein: Oral Towns: Rabbinic Discourse and the Understanding of the Late Antique Jewish City - Jenny Rahel Oesterle: Topography of Sacral Space in the Middle Ages: Ottonian Bishop Towns and the Fatimid Capital Cairo - Catherine Keen: Boundaries and Belonging: Imagining Urban Identity in Medieval Italy - Ruth Schilling: Asserting the Boundaries: Defining the City and its Territory by Political Ritual - Alex Dougherty: Theatre, City, and the Baroque Imagination - Claire Daméry/Sylvie Miaux: The Panorama in the City: 'Itinerary' of a Patrimonial Place - Carolyn Steel: Feeding the Great Wen: An Alimental Portrait of Eighteenth-Century London - Alexander Kossert: 'Promised Land'? Urban Myth and the Shaping of Modernity in Industrial Cities: Manchester and Lodz - Janet Stewart: Exhibiting and Communicating the City: Imagining Berlin around 1900 - Hsiu-Ling Kuo: Weltstadt of National Socialist Germany: The Greater Berlin Project - Simon Ward: Sites of Memory, Sites of the Imagination: Monumental and Urban Space - Stephanie Warnke: The Cold War of City Landmarks: Architecture and the Media in Berlin, 1950-70 - Toni Lorenzen: Marzahn in the Mind: An Analysis of the Imaginary Potential of a Housing District in the North-East of Berlin - Oscar J. Martinez: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico: Images of a Legendary Border City - Heidi Hein: The Idea of Lviv as a Bulwark against the East - Mireille Senn: Venice: Subject or Object of Memory? - Jenny Burns: Provisional Constructions of the Eternal City: Figurations of Rome in Recent Italophone Writing.