Urban Planning and Cultural Identity

Urban Planning and Cultural Identity
ISBN-10
1134512856
ISBN-13
9781134512850
Category
Architecture
Pages
272
Language
English
Published
2003-10-23
Publisher
Routledge
Author
William Neill

Description

Urban Planning and Cultural Identity reviews the intense spatiality of conflict over identity construction in three cities where culture and place identity are not just post-modernist playthings but touch on the raw sensibilities of who people define themselves to be. Berlin as the reborn German capital has put 'coming to terms with' the Holocaust and the memory of the GDR full square at the centre of urban planning. Detroit raises questions about the impotence and complicity of planners in the face of the most extreme metropolitan spatial apartheid in the United States and where African-American identity now seems set on a separatist course. In Belfast, in the clash of Irish nationalist and Ulster unionist traditions, place can take on intense emotional meanings in relation to which planners as 'mediators of space' can seem ill equipped. The book, drawing on extensive interview sources in the case study cities, poses a question of broad relevance. Can planners fashion a role in using environmental concerns such as Local Agenda 21 as a vehicle of building a sense of common citizenship in which cultural difference can embed itself?

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