9781787354128
9781787354135
Distributed for UCL Press
Re-Centring the City
Urban Mutations, Socialist Afterlives and the Global East
Re-Centring the City rethinks the concept of the center in studies of the urban across the social sciences and humanities. Through cases ranging from Moscow and Berlin to Mexico City, Cairo, and Chennai, the contributions explore the tension between forces of decentering and recentering as they reshape the political, economic, and social fabric of the urban and force us to reconsider the genealogy of the contemporary global city.
By drawing our attention back to the center as an object of analytical and empirical study, this book counters a long-term trend in both planning and urban scholarship that emphasizes decentralization as the hallmark of the twenty-first-century city. It argues that such a “centrifugal” turn in urban studies is neither empirically accurate nor normatively incontestable, especially when one looks beyond the West. Rather, as the contributions to this volume show, decentering obscures the ways in which the center continues to exert a powerful influence on cities of today. The concise chapters, situated at the intersection of urban studies, social anthropology, architecture, and art theory, provide new perspectives on the role of the center in defining the city’s terrain. Together, they constitute a collection of sharp, provocative interventions into debates about the transformation of global urban forms in the twenty-first century.
By drawing our attention back to the center as an object of analytical and empirical study, this book counters a long-term trend in both planning and urban scholarship that emphasizes decentralization as the hallmark of the twenty-first-century city. It argues that such a “centrifugal” turn in urban studies is neither empirically accurate nor normatively incontestable, especially when one looks beyond the West. Rather, as the contributions to this volume show, decentering obscures the ways in which the center continues to exert a powerful influence on cities of today. The concise chapters, situated at the intersection of urban studies, social anthropology, architecture, and art theory, provide new perspectives on the role of the center in defining the city’s terrain. Together, they constitute a collection of sharp, provocative interventions into debates about the transformation of global urban forms in the twenty-first century.
264 pages | 140 color plates | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2019
Free digital open access editions are available to download from UCL Press.
Political Science: Political and Social Theory
Table of Contents
"Preface
Alena Ledeneva and Peter Zusi
Introduction: Notes towards a political morphology of undead urban forms
Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski
Part I. Moscow, point of departure
1. Centre and periphery: a personal journey
Vladimir Paperny
2. Fortress city: the hegemony of the Moscow Kremlin and the consequences and challenges of developing a modern city around a medieval walled fortress
Clementine Cecil
3. Appropriating Stalinist heritage: state rhetoric and urban transformation in the repurposing of VDNKh
Andreas Schönle
4. The city without a centre: disurbanism and communism revisited
Owen Hatherley
5. Mutant centralities: Moscow architecture in the post-Soviet era
Dasha Paramonova
II. Off centre: palatial peripheries
6. Berlin’s empty centre: a double take
Jonathan Bach
7. Phantom palaces: Prussian centralities, and Humboldtian spectres
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Jonas Tinius
8. Palatial socialism, or (still-)socialist centrality in Warsaw
Michal Murawski
Part III. Looking inward: re-centring the sacred
9. The Architecture of the Seventh Day: building the sacred in socialist Poland
Kuba Snopek with Izabela Cichonska and Karolina Popera
10. Post-shtetl: spectral transformations and architectural challenges in the periphery’s bloodstream
Natalia Romik
11. Eat, pray, shop! The mosque as centrum in the Swedish suburbs
Jennifer Mack
Part IV. Looking upward: power verticals
12. Verticality and centrality: the politics of contemporary skyscrapers
Steve Graham
13. Partitioning earth and sky: vertical urbanism in post-socialist Mumbai
Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao
14. Vertical horizons: the shadow of The Shard
Thomas Wolseley
Part V. Looking outward: hinterlands, diffusions, explosions
15. New geographies of hinterland
Pushpa Arabindoo
16. De-escalating the centre: urban futures and special economic zones beyond poststructuralism’s neoliberal imaginations
Patrick Neveling
17. Explosion, response, aftermath
Joy Gerrard
Part VI. Things fall: (after)lives of monumentality
18. Domestic monumentality: scales of relationship in the modern city
Adam Kaasa
19. On an alleged thought of inflicting harm on a Lenin statue
Oleksiy Radynski
20. We’re losing him! On monuments to Lenin, and the cult of demolition in present-day Ukraine
Yevgenia Belorusets
Index"
Alena Ledeneva and Peter Zusi
Introduction: Notes towards a political morphology of undead urban forms
Jonathan Bach and Michal Murawski
Part I. Moscow, point of departure
1. Centre and periphery: a personal journey
Vladimir Paperny
2. Fortress city: the hegemony of the Moscow Kremlin and the consequences and challenges of developing a modern city around a medieval walled fortress
Clementine Cecil
3. Appropriating Stalinist heritage: state rhetoric and urban transformation in the repurposing of VDNKh
Andreas Schönle
4. The city without a centre: disurbanism and communism revisited
Owen Hatherley
5. Mutant centralities: Moscow architecture in the post-Soviet era
Dasha Paramonova
II. Off centre: palatial peripheries
6. Berlin’s empty centre: a double take
Jonathan Bach
7. Phantom palaces: Prussian centralities, and Humboldtian spectres
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Jonas Tinius
8. Palatial socialism, or (still-)socialist centrality in Warsaw
Michal Murawski
Part III. Looking inward: re-centring the sacred
9. The Architecture of the Seventh Day: building the sacred in socialist Poland
Kuba Snopek with Izabela Cichonska and Karolina Popera
10. Post-shtetl: spectral transformations and architectural challenges in the periphery’s bloodstream
Natalia Romik
11. Eat, pray, shop! The mosque as centrum in the Swedish suburbs
Jennifer Mack
Part IV. Looking upward: power verticals
12. Verticality and centrality: the politics of contemporary skyscrapers
Steve Graham
13. Partitioning earth and sky: vertical urbanism in post-socialist Mumbai
Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao
14. Vertical horizons: the shadow of The Shard
Thomas Wolseley
Part V. Looking outward: hinterlands, diffusions, explosions
15. New geographies of hinterland
Pushpa Arabindoo
16. De-escalating the centre: urban futures and special economic zones beyond poststructuralism’s neoliberal imaginations
Patrick Neveling
17. Explosion, response, aftermath
Joy Gerrard
Part VI. Things fall: (after)lives of monumentality
18. Domestic monumentality: scales of relationship in the modern city
Adam Kaasa
19. On an alleged thought of inflicting harm on a Lenin statue
Oleksiy Radynski
20. We’re losing him! On monuments to Lenin, and the cult of demolition in present-day Ukraine
Yevgenia Belorusets
Index"