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Introduction: an atlas of the urban icons project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

PHILIP J. ETHINGTON
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
VANESSA R. SCHWARTZ
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Extract

When the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, many commentators noted that in their short lives, the towers had come to represent many things: American-led global capitalism, the United States and, most of all, New York City. Their brief role as a shorthand way of saying ‘New York City’ provoked us to ask about ‘urban icons’ more generally. But we did not need such cataclysm to provoke us to consider the topic of icons and their functioning in contemporary global culture. To help illuminate the usefulness of the concept of ‘urban icons’ we held an international conference in order to determine whether the category can be used as a conceptual grid for studying the intersection of visual culture and urban history.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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