The urban spaces we inhabit today have been moulded by a combination of historical forces – by social and economic processes, by the specific designs of urban planners, and by the regulatory and ritual practices of earlier times. As arenas of cultural activity they are also imbued with legends, symbolic associations, and historical memories. This second volume of papers arising from the conference ‘Imagining the City’, held in Cambridge in 2004, examines the physical organization and the imaginative perception of cities from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, and over a geographical range that reaches from Ukraine to Mexico. It includes discussions of the ways in which cities have been envisaged in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in early modern times, as sites of religious, cultural and political rituals; of the uses to which urban spaces have been put by industrial societies and by the political cultures of the twentieth century; and of the implications for the populations of particular cities of the roles these have played in establishing the historical identity of particular communities (whether national, political or religious) and in the delineation of boundaries between cultures.

The Editors: Christian Emden is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Rice University. Educated at the Universities of Konstanz and Cambridge, he was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (2000-2003). Catherine Keen is Lecturer in Italian at University College London. After completing doctoral and post-doctoral studies at Cambridge, she lectured in Italian at the Universities of Leeds and Bristol before moving to University College London. David Midgley is Reader in German Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. He studied at Oxford (DPhil 1975) and was a Humboldt Scholar in 1979.

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