Journal of Urban History

This article reflects on the ways in which cities—from the ancient world to the present and in four continents—have expressed and transmitted imperial ideas. Different types of empires are considered: territorial, commercial, nomadic, dispositional, and reactive. The cities themselves might be central sites of rule, often incorporating symbols of power imported from earlier empires; outposts of commerce or rule; military encampments; or some mixture of these. Strategies of imperial rule and the forms of the cities themselves are often shaped by the traditions of the ruling group or by reference to the political and cosmological systems of other empires deemed worthy of emulation. At the same time, the city forms and governmental structures of lands taken into an empire often are absorbed and used by the empire itself, sometimes even after the empire has been dissolved.

This article considers the topography of two neighboring Scottish burghs—Edinburgh and Canongate. Sited alongside each other, they sat on a tail-like ridge running down from the volcanic rock that housed Edinburgh’s castle. From the castle, a single street stretched about a mile down to Holyrood Abbey at the east end of the burgh of Canongate. Both the castle and abbey were temporary homes to kings and queens of Scotland throughout the Middle Ages; by the sixteenth century, Holyrood was established as a palace and Edinburgh was the sole capital of Scotland. This royal palace with an urban court was the home of Scots kings, whereas Edinburgh housed the tools of a capital—parliament, law courts, and university. The two burghs became the stage for ceremony—royal entries, processions, and “riding the parliament” followed the processional route, the Royal Mile. Topography determined that route and does so to this day.

Early modern Amsterdam attracted large numbers of female immigrants. Their presence can be inferred from marriage registers and the city’s substantial surplus of women. Knowledge of their exact numbers, of why they migrated, and of how they lived is, however, hard to come by. This article approaches their motives and perspectives through two case studies. The first concerns the migrating poor from Husum, a small town in northern Germany. The second probes the migration patterns and stories of the thousands of immigrant women convicted of prostitution as told before the Amsterdam courts. Female migration had many facets. Women migrated in all stages of their lives and for many reasons. Probably, most came looking for work, even if it was informal or illegal. Others were attracted by the relatively generous poor relief and free medical care Amsterdam offered, especially to pregnant women, a fact that seems to have been widely known.

The article deals with the educational intentions of and the discourses on popularization of museums by the new media. The use of radio by museums as a means of attracting more people will be reconstructed from the turn of the century to the Nationalist Socialist period. Looking at the Hamburg, the article demonstrates how the city Heimatmuseum, the Museum of Hamburg History, and its director, Professor Otto Lauffer, cooperated with the Hamburg radio station Norag and one of its program directors, Dr. Kurt Stapelfeldt. The cooperation of the two men was based on similar ideas of Volk, Stamm, and Heimatand demonstrates the use of the most modern media at the time for the popularization of a conservative, attractively prepared concept. Although there was a bias for the rural past, their Heimatconcept was not anti-urban per se. Instead, they wanted the cities to search their identities in the peculiarities of the old rural culture of their region. Lauffer and Stapelfeldt considered their work apolitical; in fact, their concept was directed against the modern republican and democratic political culture of the Weimer Republic, and therefore it belonged to the pre-story of the Third Reich.

Based on the concept of cognitive mapping, the article addresses the issues of the production, representation, and conceptualization of space. Focusing on emerging concepts of urban space in turn-of-the-century and Weimar Berlin as developed by the sociologist Georg Simmel, the architectural historian Adolf Behne, and the urban designer Martin Wagner, it is shown to what extent these concepts are bound to technological modes of representation like photography and film. Based on these concepts, it is proposed to extend the concept of cognitive mapping, emphasizing that it not just examines but also produces images of the urban. Thus, cognitive mapping is not just analytical but also constructive.

This article argues that socialist cities were fundamentally shaped by both “modern” and “traditional” concepts of urbanism, showing major shifts throughout time and remarkable differences from one city to another. After an examination of the planners’ debates in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the three East German cities of Eisenhuttenstadt, Schwedt, and Berlin Marzahn are analyzed to show common features as well as the different pathways of urban development. Special attention is given to the relationship between inner-urban transformation and “extensive urbanism,” and to the question of socialist environmental problems and lifestyles. It is claimed that the socialist pathway of urban development differed considerably from the process of suburbanization in the Western countries and can be interpreted as an attempt to realize “socialist utopias” by forming socialist men, socialist families, and socialist neighborhoods with the help of urbanism.

Is architectural modernism necessarily hostile to civic life? Or can it be said to produce civic life in new terms? This article explores the experience of the civic realm of the modernist city with regard to Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil and by far the largest city built on modernist lines. Designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s, and inaugurated to international acclaim in 1960, it subsequently came to represent an authoritarian and inflexible urbanism that for residents was profoundly alienating or worse. Yet for all the city’s evident problems, it is productive of complex spatial experiences that are qualitatively different from those of older cities. Civic space here is by no means absent, it is argued: it merely takes different forms.