Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)

Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities 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, D.C., Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, L'viv, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, and Riga. All have undergone greater and 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 the past half-century, Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities 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.Contributors are John Czaplicka, Howard Gillette, Jr., Grigorii V. Golosov, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Brian Ladd, Siegfried Mattl, James A. Miller, Jiri Musil, Cynthia Paces, Blair A. Ruble, Olga Sezneva, Ojars Sparitis, Pep Subiros, Victor Susak, Ilya Utekhin, and John Michael Vlach.