European Cities In a Networked World During the Long Twentieth Century (original) (raw)
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Europe from the Bottom Up: Town Twinning in France during the Cold War
Contemporary European History, 2002
Town twinning can be seen as the first step taken by municipalities to define their interests on the international stage. Although a small elite of mayors and urban local government administrators had long since created a web of international relationships, 1 town twinning was the first activity to involve municipal institutions as such in wide-ranging and long-term international action by councillors. Some aspects of this activity have been studied, 2 but the full story of its development remains little known. Nonetheless it is a vitally important aspect of social history, the first step towards an understanding of how local public initiatives were transported to the international scale, and of the dynamics of this process. The purpose of this article is to show how, at a time when French mayors were re-defining their international relationships, a municipal tradition was created which led to a lasting social innovation. The dynamics of this international activity by the mayors can be broadly divided into three phases. The first was characterised by initiatives by small groups of reformers seeking to arouse international awareness of municipal activity and redefine the rules of local government. This movement continued after the war, but was swamped by a much wider-ranging involvement by mayors in initiatives expressive of their status as members of an international community. It was in this context that new relationships were established, not just between mayors as individuals, but based on municipal institutions.
Editorial: The European City as a Place of Coexistence
Joelho Revista de Cultura Arquitectonica
The European urban institutions have always negotiated a balance between collective control and individual initiative. However, over the last seven decades this balance has been challenged. In the aftermath of World War II, the utopia of the functional city was hijacked to serve the welfare policies of the states sponsored by the Marshall Plan. Both in urban extension as in urban renewal, technocratic planning approaches were encouraged to back up a political program of de-urbanization inspired by the nemesis of the European city, the American suburbia. Eventually, in the 1980s, the paradigm of the state as provider shifted to the paradigm of the state as enabler. The European city became nothing but a commodity where the state performs as facilitator for the consolidation of the hegemony of the markets. Against this background, the articles published in this issue of Joelho offer critical contributions to understand the production and reproduction of approaches to the (re-) definit...
Of Voids, Networks and Platforms: Post-War Visions for a European Transnational City: 1952-1958
2013
In 1952, the European Community of Steel and Coal (ECSC) invited applications from cities of member states to host the ECSC's institutions and its future organizations. A range of small and internationally unknown cities located in border areas submitted their candidacies. However, after a series of exasperating and endless debates, the ministers representing the ECSC's member states agreed to postpone the choice to a later date and to temporarily settle in the city of Luxembourg, while Strasbourg would host the European Parliament. Joined in 1957 by the European Economic Community and Euratom, the ECSC renewed its invitation in 1958, this time with the hope of establishing a permanent seat. Again several member state cities submitted applications ranging from elaborate packages including detailed urban schemes for the future European seat to tourist brochures published by the National Chamber of Commerce. From these applications, the image of a new urbanity emerged, in parallel to the existing city and inhabited by the newborn 'European citizen'. During the same period, several architecture competitions expressed a similar interest in developing new urban and architectural models for a unified Europe, such as the 1954-55 Architecture competition for a European district near Saarbrücken, the 1956-57 Competition for the Place des Nations, Geneva, the 1957-58 Prix de Rome for a European Pantheon and the 1957-58 Hauptstadt Berlin architecture competition for the center of Berlin. This dissertation studies a particular moment in postwar European history representing a crossroads in the relationship between urbanism and the nation-state. With the postwar crisis of the nation-state and at the same time a fast-changing European city, the discourse that developed around the question of a seat for the European Institutions raised a set of fundamental questions about the connection between cities and citizens at a European scale. A new notion of a ii transnational European city emerged and developed based on three essential political and spatial concepts: the void, the network and the platform. They will form the structure of a research project looking across a wide variety of materials from protocols of the European institutions to sketches by individual architects.
This article examines the changing relationship between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe, and outlines some of its implications for the geography of world capitalism in the late twentieth century. Most accounts of global cities are based upon a 'zero-sum' conception of spatial scale that leads to an emphasis on the declining power of the territorial state: as the global scale expands, the state scale is said to contract. By contrast, I view globalization as a highly contradictory recon guration of superimposed spatial scales, including those on which the territorial state is organized. The state scale is not being eroded, but rearticulated and reterritorialized in relation to both sub-and supra-state scales. The resultant, re-scaled con guration of state territorial organization is provisionally labeled a 'glocal' state. As nodes of accumulation, global cities are sites of post-Fordist forms of global industrialization; as coordinates of state territorial power, global cities are local-regional levels within a larger, reterritorialized matrix of increasingly 'glocalized' state institutions. State re-scaling is a major accumulation strategy through which these transformed 'glocal' territorial states attempt to promote the global competitive advantage of their major urban regions. Global city formation and state re-scaling are therefore dialectically intertwined moments of a single dynamic of global capitalist restructuring. These arguments are illustrated through a discussion of the interface between global cities and territorial states in contemporary Europe. A concluding section argues that new theories and representations of spatial scale and its social production are needed to grasp the rapidly changing political geography of late twentieth-century capitalism.
European Cities in the New Europe-To-Be
Antipode, 1993
was to look into the "New Order" and how it is shaped by and in turn influences uneven development in Europe, drawing on the experience of the past decade, during which major changes have reshaped the geography of European capitalism. The triumph of the market in both East and West and the (resulting?) deep crisis of the Left and of the theories and practices it had inspired formed a background for the debate. The project of European Integrationand the (then) approaching landmark date "1992"added yet another perspective to our search for possible directions for research and action.