The City as Power

Diener and Hagen have assembled a talented cast of scholars to investigate a wide range of urban landscapes, national ideologies, and political struggles from across the globe—from the everyday performance of car culture in the UAE to highly charged #BlackLivesMatter protests in the United States. In particular, The City as Power makes a major contribution to the recent ‘memory turn’ in the social sciences and humanities. The volume demonstrates the ways in which urban space is a vehicle for narrating and debating what histories and whose identities matter or belong in the contemporary nation. -- Derek Alderman, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen are to be congratulated for assembling such a far-reaching array of examples to reveal how the constructed and contested geographies of nationalism play out at multiple scales of the built environment. Taken together, these show how a sense of collective belonging is forged and re-forged through political landscapes. Drawing on incisive cases from across the globe, this astute book shows how a conjoined design-politics works to selectively edit, negotiate, and reappropriate the useable past to situate a powerful and politically useful future. -- Lawrence J. Vale, MIT, author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity
This exhilarating volume examines a range of topical issues across urban landscapes, spanning and extending diverse geographies at different scales and making productive connections across time, space, and culture. The essays model an integrative approach to urban studies that is satisfyingly site-specific and also thoughtfully shaped by broader comparative perspectives. Diener and Hagen convincingly demonstrate the critical relevance and potential of ‘nation,’ ‘narration,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘power’ as analytical concepts for cities in the twenty-first century. -- Julie Buckler, Harvard University