Power and Identity: The Case of Islamabad

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-264
Author(s):  
Saboohi Sarshar
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Capital City ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Constructs ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The City

This article observes how the concept of power and national identity produced space in 1960’s Islamabad, the new capital city of Pakistan. In World War II’s aftermath, many capital cities emerged which were seen as their nation’s representation by negating or reinforcing ties with sovereign or imperial power. Pakistan is one such nation that gained independence from the British in 1947. Islamabad designed by Constantinos A. Doxiadis in 1959 aimed to construct its identity in a postcolonial paradigm. This article studies the urban layout and pattern of the city and emphasizes the relation of power and identity on its social constructs and making.

Breaking from and building on the past: Helsinki and Dublin after independence

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (160) ◽  
pp. 238-255
Author(s):  
Marjaana Niemi
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Capital City ◽  
World War ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Clean Break ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

AbstractCapital cities play a significant role in interpreting a country’s past and charting its future. In the aftermath of the First World War nine new European states, Finland and Ireland among them, were confronted with the question of how to create a capital city befitting their new status and national identity. Instead of designing and constructing an entirely new capital city which would have marked a clean break from the past, all these states chose an existing city as the capital. This article will examine processes through which two capitals, Helsinki and Dublin, were renewed physically and symbolically to make the political change ‘real’ to people, but also to reinterpret the past and create a ‘teleology for the present’. The aim is to discuss the ways in which the changes, planned and implemented, both reflected and reinforced new interpretations of the history of the city and the nation, and the continuities and discontinuities the changes created between the past and the present. Some elements and versions of the past were chosen over others, preserved and reinvented in the cityscape, while others were ignored, hidden or denied.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

scholarly journals ‘Between life and death’: On land, silence and liberation in the capital city

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan F. De Beer
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Mission Statement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
University Of Pretoria ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

This article reflects on the unfinished task of liberation – as expressed in issues of land – and drawing from the work of Franz Fanon and the Durban-based social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. It locates its reflections in four specific sites of struggle in the City of Tshwane, and against the backdrop of the mission statement of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, as well as the Capital Cities Research Project based in the same university. Reflecting on the ‘living death’ of millions of landless people on the one hand, and the privatisation of liberation on the other, it argues that a liberating praxis of engagement remains a necessity in order to break the violent silences that perpetuate exclusion.

Imperial Women of Rome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary T. Boatwright
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
The State ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Imperial Cult ◽  
Genealogical Trees ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Family Ideology

This book explores the constraints and opportunities of the women in the Roman emperor’s family from 35 BCE, when Octavia and Livia received unprecedented privileges from the state, to 235 CE, when Julia Mamaea was assassinated with her son Severus Alexander. Historical vignettes feature Agrippina the Younger, Domitia Longina, and some others as the book analyzes the history of Rome’s most eminent women in legal, religious, military, and other key settings of the principate. It also examines the women’s exemplarity through imaging as well as their presence in the city of Rome and in the empire. Evidence comes from coins, inscriptions, papyri, sculpture, and law codes as well as ancient authors. Numerous illustrations, maps, genealogical trees, and detailed tables and appendices complement the text. The whole reveals imperial women’s fluctuating but persistent marginalization and lack of agency despite their potential, even as it elucidates Rome’s imperial power, legal system, family ideology, religion and imperial cult, court, capital city, and military customs.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 268-280
Author(s):  
Kory Olson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Capital City ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Napoleon Iii ◽  
Housing Shortages ◽  
Paris Region ◽  
To Come ◽  
Work Done ◽  
The City

The tumultuous nineteenth century brought Parisian led regime change in 1830, 1848 and in many respects 1870. Although Napoleon III and Haussmann had hoped their Paris works would tame the capital city as they constructed uniform boulevards and transformed the crowded medieval centre into a bourgeois space. Throughout the twentieth century, the movement of people and goods throughout the Paris region remained a challenge and official maps showed how to address that issue. The German occupation during World War II effectively ended any hope of Prost’s 1934 plan to come to fruition. However, the damages afflicted on the city during combat allowed leaders to refocus their attention on the city. The pre-war work done by the Service géographique, Jaussely, and Prost allow future urban officials, such as Lopez and Bernard Lafay, to address problems such as increased traffic, parking, housing shortages, decentralization, and increased sprawl. The end of the war shifted national priorities away from the capital but by the 1950s, economic growth meant that urban planners needed to focus yet again on ameliorating development in greater Paris.

scholarly journals The signature of the city: abandonment and dreaming in colonial Williamsburg and Ottawa

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-251
Author(s):  
Mark Kristmanson
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Honorary Degree ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
The City

Exploring the themes of abandonment and dreaming in relation to two North American capital cities, this interdisciplinary narrative essay examines the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's influence on the planning and architecture of Ottawa in relation to his frequent visits to Colonial Williamsburg, the restored former capital of Virginia. At the invitation of John D. Rockefeller Jr., King became a regular guest in Williamsburg during the 1930s and 1940s culminating in the conferral of an honorary degree by the College of William and Mary in 1948. The records of these visits provide a diagnostic used to conceptualize the 'signature' of the capital city. In abandonment and in dreaming, capital cities are especially exposed to latent forces of nature and of 'museumification'. These two forces created a tension that complicated attempts by King and Rockefeller to leave permanent architectural legacies in the signatures of their respective capitals.

scholarly journals Nekateri vidiki razvoja Ljubljane med marčno revolucijo in prvo svetovno vojno

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2018) (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Bele
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
English Summary ◽  
Capital City ◽  
World War ◽  
Time Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Revolution Of 1848 ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

Category: 1.02 Review Language: Original in Slovenian (Abstract in Slovenian and English, Summary in English) Key words: Ljubljana, the Ljubljana earthquake, Cukrarna, March Revolution, the southern railway, First World War Abstract: The following text deals with the many-sided development of today’s Slovenian capital city between the so called March Revolution of 1848 and the end of the First World War. In the described time period Ljubljana made significant progress in many aspects. The municipality of Ljubljana grew in size; the city got its statute; also it was reached by the newly built railway. The city population more than doubled. Many of the brand new factories opened its doors; some of the city’s most representative buildings were also built. The Ljubljana earthquake in 1895 presents the biggest turning point in the building history of the city. Ljubljana began receiving help from all sides of the country and became a lively construction site. In the decades in question ten mayors stood at the head of the Ljubljana administration. Some of those mayors were (more or less) pro-Slovenian, others more pro-German.

scholarly journals Identidades relacionadas ao espaço geográfico: a nação brasileira e a cidade de Novo Hamburgo/RS (1927-1945)

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Alessander Kerber ◽  
Cleber Cristiano Prodanov
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Media ◽  
The City ◽  
Geographical Space ◽  
Second World

O texto analisa as lutas de representações em torno da construção de identidades ligadas ao espaço geográfico da nação brasileira e da cidade de Novo Hamburgo (RS) através do seu principal jornal, O 5 de Abril, no período de 1927, momento de sua emancipação, até 1945, final da Segunda Guerra Mundial e da ditadura do Estado Novo. Este período foi marcado pela construção de versões acerca destas duas identidades e de sua disseminação através da imprensa. As duas versões apresentavam conflitos especialmente focados no fato de a cidade ser representada por signos que remetiam ao processo de imigração alemã, e à nação, por signos que remetiam à mestiçagem. Tais conflitos acirraram-se no momento em que o Brasil entrou na Segunda Guerra Mundial contra a Alemanha. Palavras-chave: cidade; identidade nacional; imprensa. Abstract: This is an analysis of the struggle over representations involving the construction of identities rooted in the geographical space of the nation of Brazil and the city of Novo Hamburgo using the city’s main newspaper, “O 5 de Abril”, which was published from 1927, when the city was officially recognized, until 1945, which marked the end of the Second World War and of the Estado Novo dictatorship in Brazil. This period was marked by the construction of different versions of these two identities and their massification by the media. These versions were in conflict, specifically focused on the fact that the city was represented through signs that refer to the process of German immigration, while there presentation of the nation was through signs referring the intermixing of races. These conflicts intensified when Brazil entered the Second World War against Germany. Keywords: city, national identity, the press.

A Minor Apocalypse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Blobaum
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Fertility Rates ◽  
World War ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Disease Mortality ◽  
The First World War ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

This concluding chapter begins with an attempt to capture Warsaw in November 1918 in imagery that is in stark contrast with the standard narrative of the city as the scene of recovered Polish statehood. This imagery will be drawn from scenes set in cold and unlit streets that featured ubiquitous begging, long lines for foul-tasting “bread,” riots and the looting of public stores, everyday theft and banditry, widespread prostitution, and mounting incidents of personal, intercommunal, and political violence. The chapter then evaluates the “minor apocalypse” that occurred in Warsaw during the First World War by looking more precisely at the prevalence of certain kinds of disease, mortality and fertility rates, and the war's larger demographic consequences, and by comparing these data with those obtained for other European cities. Ultimately, this evaluation provides a better understanding of the problems confronting the establishment and consolidation of a functioning parliamentary democracy in Poland's “old-new” capital city.

scholarly journals A Comparative Study of Urban Spatial Characteristics of the Capitals of Tang and Song Dynasties Based on Space Syntax

Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Liran Yin ◽  
Tao Wang ◽  
Kemi Adeyeye
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Tang And Song Dynasties ◽  
The Ancient Chinese ◽  
The Comparative Study ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Space syntax has been widely used in studies with historical components to developing a common analytical language for the comparative study of urban morphology across time and space by visual diagrams. This paper uses space syntax to analyse the inner and outer city parts of the daily life of residents in the capital cities of two dynasties, Tang and Song, to reveal the impact of changes in urban planning on the overall spatial structure of the city, the structure of commercial space, and the role of urban squares in the two dynasties under centralised rule. Based on the quantitative analysis, the results show significant differences between the Tang and Song dynasties in all three aspects of comparison. The changes in the Tang and Song dynasties’ capital cities result from the interaction between the materiality of the ancient Chinese capital city form and the spatial function of the city, and the analysis of space syntax is useful for interpreting their relevance.

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