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An ancient and industrious place: visual geographies and urban identity in a Danish provincial town, c. 1780–1915

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2019

Camilla Schjerning
Camilla Schjerning*
Affiliation:
Odense Bys Museer, Overgade 48, DK-5000 Odense C, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Through the example of Danish provincial town, Odense, the article explores the role of visual culture in the construction and transformation of nineteenth-century provincial identities and placemaking in an industrial town. It demonstrates that while representations may follow certain aesthetic conventions of urban imagery and ideas of urban prestige, they both reflect and contribute to the construction and reproduction of a specific local, imagined geography; an imagined geography where initially history and nature and as time progresses signs of industriousness and in particular an infrastructure of civic culture merges into a narrative of an ancient and industrious place.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 63 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

†

The author would like to acknowledge the Research Board of the Danish Ministry of Culture, which funded the research project ‘Imagined geographies, social identities and urban transformation, Odense 1536–1915’ of which this article is part. The author wishes to thank Per Seesko for his invaluable input on the older materials. Moreover, I thank the peer reviewers for their valuable input.

References

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