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European Urbanities since 1945: A Commentary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2015

SIMON GUNN
SIMON GUNN*
Affiliation:
Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, United Kingdom; [email protected]
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Extract

Europe's history since 1945 has most commonly been seen through the prism of international politics and economic change, from post-war reconstruction to late twentieth-century deindustrialisation. Urban history has been tangential to these accounts. Hence Leif Jerram's call to arms in his book Streetlife, published in 2011: ‘it is time to put the where into the what and why of history’. The history of Europe's twentieth century, Jerram declared, happened ‘in the streets and factories, cinemas and nightclubs, housing estates and suburbs, offices and living rooms, shops and swimming baths of Europe's booming cities’.

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 24 , Special Issue 4: Urban Societies in Europe , November 2015 , pp. 617 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Jerram, Leif, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4Google Scholar.

2 Amongst a large and controversial literature see Arnold, Jörg, The Allied War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Mumford, Eric, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

4 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 5Google Scholar.

5 Mandler, Peter, ‘New Towns for Old’ in Conekin, Beckie, Mort, Frank and Waters, Chris, eds., Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–64 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), 213–4Google Scholar.

6 Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3, 4Google Scholar. See also Saunier, Pierre-Yves and Ewen, Shane, eds., Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For examples of contemporary debate see Gunn, Simon, ‘The Buchanan Report, Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 521–42CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Schmucki, Barbara, ‘Cities as Traffic Machines: Urban Transport Planning in East and West Germany’ in Divall, Colin and Bond, Winston eds., Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban development in Historical Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 149–70Google Scholar.

8 In some cases those involved could encompass all three dimensions. The housing charity Shelter was founded in London in 1966 by Bruce Kenrick, a minister of the United Reform Church who was also a supporter of the Cuban revolution and Latin American liberation theology. On the crisis in London's housing in the 1960s see White, Jerry, London in the Twentieth Century (London: Vintage, 2008), 46–51Google Scholar.

9 Goldthorpe, John H.et al., The Affluent Worker, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, La Distinction. Critique Sociale du Jugement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979)Google Scholar.

10 The historiography of alternative lifestyles in the 1960s and 1970s is expanding rapidly. See for example Davis, John and Warring, Anette, ‘Living Utopia: Communal Living in Britain and Denmark’, Cultural and Social History, 8, 4 (2011), 513–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pugh, Emily, Architecture, Politics and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), especially ch. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Clark, Peter, European Cities and Towns 400–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 282Google Scholar.

12 Ginsborg, Paul, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 219Google Scholar.

13 The work of Elizabeth Buettner is important here. See her ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 80, 4 (2008), 865–901 and forthcoming monograph Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

14 Bailkin, Jordanna, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

15 Castells, Manuel, La Question Urbaine (Paris: François Maspero, 1972)Google Scholar.

16 Lyotard, Jean-François, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport Sur Le Savoir (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979)Google Scholar.