In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany’s many growing cities. Germany’s Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.
In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.
Tracing multiple mobilities, entangled borderlands, microhistory and space, and human and nonhuman actors, Jan Musekamp demonstrates how an inner-Prussian railroad line turned into a transnational force, overcoming borders and connecting Europeans in a time of rising nationalism. Shifting Lines, Entangled Borderlands investigates the dichotomy between a globalizing world and tighter border control in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the Royal Prussian Eastern Railroad (Ostbahn) between the 1830s and 1930s. The line was initially planned as a major internal modernizing project to connect Prussia's capital of Berlin to East Prussia's provincial capital of Königsberg (today's Kaliningrad). Soon, the Ostbahn connected to the growing Imperial Russian railroad network, thus becoming a backbone of European East–West transportation in trade, tourism, technological exchange, and migration. The First World War temporarily disrupted and reconfigured existing networks, adapting them to new political regimes and borders. However, World War II and its aftermath altered mobility patterns more permanently, dividing not only the Ostbahn tracks but the whole continent for decades to come. From border towns and major cities to unique structures, such as stations or bridges, this volume analyzes the obvious and not-so-obvious nodes of the Central and Eastern European rail network—and the spaces in between.
We tend to accept that German cities and states run their own cultural institutions (concert halls, theatres, museums). This book shows how this now “self-evident” fact became a reality in the course of the long nineteenth century.
'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' explores different ways of understanding the city. The social city approach proceeds from the ground-up, it focuses on human interactions shaped by economic and environmental processes. The built city method looks through a top-down lens, examining policy and planning for buildings and infrastructure, including utilities and energy networks. This volume is different from other city anthologies in that it explores them through their differences, by presenting each chapter in one of the two categories. While there is invariably an overlap between the two areas, they are distinct positions. In doing so the book identifies how, despite their often adversarial approaches, they both belong to the same city. As essential components of the city they should not necessarily be resolved, as it is in this friction where creativity and innovation happens. 'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' is concerned about the ideas and solutions that they both offer. The book’s originality stems from this duality, and from its recognition that cities are living, organic, protean places of opportunity, crisis, conflict and challenge. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of cities as a set of ideas concerning what they engender, how they function and why they continue to act as a catalyst for different kinds of human activity. They explore issues of socio-political import and questions of the city as a physically constructed space. The themes are diverse and include the inception of the city as a place of competition to centres of regeneration and urban withdrawal. They cover a range of city and urban regions from Athens to Wellington from site specific singular perspectives to comparative assessments. The questions they raise include how do we inhabit urban areas, how do we make plans for them, and how do we, at times, ignore them entirely.
In this exhilarating look at cities, past and future, Ben Wilson proposes that, in our world of rising seas and threatening weather, the natural world may prove the city's savior "Illuminating...Wilson leaves readers with hope about the future of efforts to preserve the ecosystems that surround us, as well as a new perspective that looks beyond the concrete and asphalt when walking along a city’s streets."—Associated Press Since the beginning of civilization, humans have built cities to wall nature out, then glorified it in beloved but quite artificial parks. In Urban Jungle Ben Wilson—the author of Metropolis, a seven-thousand-year history of cities that the Wall Street Journal called “a towering achievement”—looks to the fraught relationship between nature and the city for clues to how the planet can survive in an age of climate crisis. Whether it was the market farmers of Paris, Germans in medieval forest cities, or the Aztecs in the floating city of Tenochtitlan, pre-modern humans had an essential bond with nature. But when the day came that water was piped in and food flown from distant fields, that relationship was lost. Today, urban areas are the fastest-growing habitat on Earth and in Urban Jungle Ben Wilson finds that we are at last acknowledging that human engineering is not enough to protect us from extremes of weather. He takes us to places where efforts to rewild the city are under way: to Los Angeles, where the city’s concrete river will run blue again, to New York City, where a bleak landfill will be a vast grassland preserve. The pinnacle of this strategy will be Amsterdam: a city that is its own ecosystem, that makes no waste and produces its own energy. In many cities, Wilson finds, nature is already thriving. Koalas are settling in Brisbane, wild boar may raid your picnic in Berlin. Green canopies, wildflowers, wildlife: the things that will help cities survive, he notes, also make people happy. Urban Jungle offers the pleasures of history—how backyard gardens spread exotic species all over the world, how war produces biodiversity—alongside a fantastic vision of the lush green cities of our future. Climate change, Ben Wilson believes, is only the latest chapter in the dramatic human story of nature and the city.
Explores changes in city density by comparing Melbourne, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Auckland and other new frontier cities. Includes a new interpretation of the effect of development on problems faced by frontier cities, and a detailed bibliography. The author lectures on economics and economic history at La Trobe University.
This book offers the first full-length comparative analysis of urban development trajectories in Eastern Africa and the political dynamics that underpin them. It offers a multi-scalar, historically-grounded, and interdisciplinary analysis of the urban transformations unfolding in the world's most dynamic crucible of urban change.
In a globalizing world, frontiers may be in flux but they remain as significant as ever. New borders are established even as old borders are erased. Beyond lines on maps, however, borders are spatial zones in which distinctive architectural, graphic, and other design elements are deployed to signal the nature of the space and to guide, if not actually control, behaviour and social relations within it. This volume unpacks how manipulations of space and design in frontier zones, historically as well as today, set the stage for specific kinds of interactions and convey meanings about these sites and the experiences they embody. Frontier zones organize an array of functions to facilitate the passage of goods, information, and people, and to define and control access. Bringing together studies from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, this collection of essays casts a wide net to consider borders of diverse sorts. Investigations of contemporary political frontiers are set within the context of examinations of historical borders, borders that have existed within cities, and virtual borders. This range allows for reflection on shifts in how frontier zones are articulated and the impermanence of border emplacements, as well as on likely scenarios for future frontiers. This text is unique in bringing together a number of scholarly perspectives in the arts and humanities to examine how spatial and architectural design decisions convey meaning, shape or abet specific social practices, and stage memories of frontier zones that no longer function as such. It joins and expands discussions in social science disciplines, in which considerations of border practices tend to overlook the role of built form and material culture more broadly in representing social practices and meanings.
