Urban Space and Identity in the European City 1890-1930s [antikvár]

ForewordThe engagement with urban modernism has become, at the end of the twentieth century, probably more popular than ever before. While the urban culture of the great European cities at the beginning of the twentieth century continues to be the object of identification and projection of a multitude of cultural desires, cities are also seen as places for the realisation of old and new conceptions of civil society. From yet another point of view, the cities of Central Europe were each particular 'melting pots' in the irruption of the modern. Finally, the global city of today appears as a symbol for unprecedented societal change. Urbanism has, it seems, something for everyone.At the beginning of the 1970s, in the headydays when social history came to predominate the study of history, Eric Hobsbawm described urban history as, "a large container with ill-defined, heterogeneous, and sometimes indiscriminate contents. It includes anything about cities". In retrospect, it is possible to see that Hobsbawm's rather negative encapsulation marked, at the same time, a change in urban historiographical research. Basically, at this point in the German-speaking world, the discipline was able to free itself and the genre from its purely traditional 'heimatge-schichtlich approach, which had previously been applied to urban history. Hungarian historiography also experienced a certain upswing in the fields of urbanisation research and a new orientation in art and architectural history. In the United States, urban history engaged in high-flying quantifying investigation, primarily into social mobility, whose borders however were soon to come into view. In England, urban history-writing had benefited already early on from the strengths of English economic history, and by the middle-to-end of the 1970s, it became a part of the dynamic social history.The History Department Working Papers Series presents, as its third volume, a collection of articles on the social and cultural history ofCentral European University Budapest, 1995