Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
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Cities of Power
The Urban, the National,
the Popular, the Global
Göran Therborn
First published by Verso 2017
© Göran Therborn 2017
To the best of the publisher’s knowledge, the images reproduced here
are in the public domain. Should that be incorrect in any instance, Verso
will seek to rectify the mistake in future editions of this work.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-544-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-547-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-546-8 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays
The city … is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community.
—Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938)
Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms – now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ (1888)
Contents
Introduction:
The Urban, the National, the Popular and the Global
1.Cities, Power and Modernity
2.National Foundations: Europe – Transforming Princely Cities
3.National Foundations: Settler Secessions
4.National Foundations: Nationalizing Colonialism
5.National Foundations: Reactive Modernization
6.People Rising: Popular Moments in Modern Urban History
7.Apotheosis of Power: Fascism and Kindred Dictatorships
8.The Coming and Going of Communism
9.Global Moments in National Cities
10.Envoi: Global Capital, The Future of National Capitals and of Their People
Endnotes
Index
The Urban, the National, the Popular and the Global
This is a book about meetings and relationships between four social forces: the urban, the national, the popular and the global. We shall be watching how they meet and how they change the urban habitat during the lifetime of the national, up until now. The urban is old: cities have existed for thousands of years, but they have been transformed by the arrival of the national in the form of nation-states, just over two centuries ago. The national transformation of cities has focused on the urban centre of the nation-state, its capital, which is the object of this study. Mostly pre-national cities of different kinds were changed into national cities, but sometimes nation-states built new cities for themselves. Nation-states arrived at their chosen capitals along different historical pathways and after long or short, rough or smooth journeys. These historical experiences left enduring marks on each capital city.
Nationalism and nation-states were part of a much larger epochal change, the rise of modernity as a new historical era, rejecting authorities and institutions of the past (inner-worldly ones above all) and trying to create new societies, new cultures, a new world. The national and the global first met in this context, as global nationalism. Major meeting-places of this encounter were the national capitals, which now had to adapt to global models of a capital ‘worthy of the nation’, taking in the avenues of Second Empire Paris, the infrastructure of London, in some places the Mall and the Capitol Building of Washington.
Nations developed and changed and the constitutive elites of nation-states were faced with popular challenges from the ascendancy of originally subaltern classes, ethnicities/races and gender groups. Occasionally these challenges were strong and successful enough to create distinctive popular moments of power, manifested in urban history. National struggles for power could take extreme and violent forms, not only destructive and ephemeral, like wars and riots, but also, for a time, forms cemented in the capital city, which we shall also look at.
In recent times the global has taken centre stage, first of all in the form of global, transnational capitalism. To not a few contemporary authors, the national is on the verge of becoming an extinct species, particularly in big cities. We shall look into those claims, sceptically but seriously, trying to disentangle the intertwined dynamics of the global, the national and the local in the new style of globalist urbanism, of verticality, novelty and exclusivity. At the very end we shall venture a glance into the future of our four forces.
Underlying my interest in the choreography of the urban, the national, the popular and the global are old analytical interests in forms and relations of power and in meanings, ideology and symbolic forms. Cities affect us by their spatial structuring of social relations and by their provision of meanings of social life. This might be seen as urban power, but cities in the nation-state era are not actors of power of the same weight as the national, popular and global forces. Cities of our time had better be approached as manifestations and representations of power. Our main research question here is: What kind of power does the