Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires
Capital cities seem to be a natural phenomenon: a state, especially a nation state, needs a central city from which it is governed and administered. However, in history this has not always been the case, and how much capital cities are cultural constructions driven by specific political agendas is impressively demonstrated in Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires, which deals with the planning of capital cities for the new states which emerged gradually from the declining Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires in Central and Southeastern Europe between c. 1830 and 1940. Bringing those cases of ambitious urban planning together for the first time, this book, which has been compiled by the two architectural historians Emily Gunzburger Makaš and Tanja Damljanović Conley, not only closes an important gap in European planning history – usually overlooked by a more Western European center historiography – but also offers a special European facet of postcolonial studies.
Wolfgang Sonne, Technical University in Dortmund
This book explores the planning and architectural histories of the cities across Central and Southeastern Europe transformed into the cultural and political capitals of the new nation-states created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their introduction, editors Makaš and Conley discuss the interrelated processes of nationalization, modernization, and Europeanization in the region at that time, with special attention paid to the way architectural and urban models from Western and Central Europe were adapted to fit the varying local physical and political contexts.
Individual studies provide summaries of proposed and realized projects in fourteen cities. Each addresses the political and ideological aspects of the city’s urban history, including the idea of becoming a cultural and/or political capital as well as the relationship between national and urban development. The concluding chapter builds on the introductory argument about how the search for national identity combined with the pursuit of modernization and desire to be more European drove the development of these cities in the aftermath of empires.
Emily Gunzburger Makaš is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Tanja Damljanović Conley teaches architectural history at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Contents
- The Contributors
- Introduction
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1 Shaping Central and Southeastern European Capital Cities in the Age of Nationalism
Emily Gunzburger Makaš and Tanja Damljanović Conley - Part I South-Eastern European Capitals after the Ottoman Empire
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2 Athens
Eleni Bastéa -
3 Belgrade
Tanja Damljanović Conley -
4 Bucharest
Maria Raluca Popa -
5 Cetinje
Maja Dragičević & Rachel Rossner -
6 Sofia
Elitza Stanoeva -
7 Tirana
Gentiana Kera -
8 Ankara
Zeynep Kezer - Part II Central European Capitals within and after the Hapsburg Empire
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9 Budapest
Robert Nemes -
10 Prague
Cathleen Giustino
11 Bratislava -
Henrieta Moravcíková
12 Cracow and Warsaw -
Patrice Dabrowski
13 Zagreb -
Sarah A. Kent
14 Ljubljana -
Jörg Stabenow
15 Sarajevo - Emily Gunzburger Makaš
- Conclusion
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16 Not Just the National: Modernity and the Myth of Europe in the Capital Cities of Central and Southeastern Europe
Nathaniel D. Wood
