Transnationalism and the German City (Hardcover)

All too often, urban studies scholars have approached transnationalism as a zero-sum game in which localities, regionalities, and nationalities are suppressed in favor of a globalized set of identities. At least in the German case, however, globalization has if anything reinvigorated localism, with local and regional identities exhibiting far more continuity than the multiply disrupted national space. As this marvelously varied collection demonstrates, the urban environment has become a site of "translocal" re-territorialization in which actors do not entrench themselves in opposition to globalization, but practice a dialectical adaptation. Bringing together scholars from anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, history, and urban planning, this volume offers empirically and theoretically rich essays to help deflate myths about the presumed dissolution of the urban environment's multiple particularities. Together they conceptually reconfigure the German city to reveal a transnational set of processes intermingled within the local, regional, and national spheres.