Cities of Power. Göran Therborn

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      Monumentality may actually be a good indicator of the division of the country. By the outbreak of the protest rallies in Kyiv in the autumn of 2013, Lenin had been taken down in the country west of Kyiv, surviving in the capital with a battered nose, but stood tall east of the Dnipro River in the main square of every important city. After the successful regime change, Lenin is now confined to the Donbass region.^*

      Modern monumentality in the narrow sense of statues, triumphal arches, allegorical and other sculptural ensembles, pantheons and columns is of Greco-Roman European origin, and processional portraits are of Christian European origin. Monumentality has had its golden ages – imperial Rome and nineteenth-century Paris – but it is very much still with us, capable of arousing civic passion. This symbolic repertoire has been imported into other civilizations in modern times and its relative scarcity in, for example, East Asia, should be interpreted in the context of its alienness. Mausoleums and symbolically charged tombs, on the other hand, are part of the heritage of all Asian cultures.

       Toponymy

      Urban meanings are also constructed through naming streets, places, buildings, institutions – by toponomy. The official naming of streets was a European post-medieval practice. The original, vernacular naming referred to a street’s artisans and shops, some feature of its natural location or some colourful inhabitant of the neighbourhood. Concentrated national and city governments had more representative concerns.

      The first such street of any note was probably the Via Giulia in Rome, named after the great early-sixteenth-century Roman planner Pope Giulio II. In London, beginning with Henry VIII, several King Streets were laid out, none very grand. In 1765 a law was passed that all streets and squares should have a name and a name tablet.²⁶ In Paris official names started to appear in the seventeenth century, first drawn from royalty, but soon also from statesmen and high servants of the king: Colbert, Mazarin, Richelieu. By the eighteenth century, before the revolution, there were also streets named after guild heads and city leaders, and after 1728 there was a police ordinance that all Parisian streets should have a name plaque.²⁷ In the 1630s, the idea of official street naming reached the new (short-lived) big-power capital of Stockholm, whose Regency government began by commemorating itself, in Regeringsgatan (Government Street).

      The practice later radiated across the European imperial area and into Republican Beijing,²⁸ but it never stuck in Japan, which has kept a block-based address system. In contrast to Communist Europe, street (re)naming was not important in Communist China, although it did happen occasionally. In the 1990s, the World Bank put out a manual of street naming, mainly aimed at Africa.

      Washington, D.C., has its major avenues named after the states of the Union, with Pennsylvania Avenue outshining all others, followed by New York, in connecting Capitol Hill to the White House. The current American affection for toponymy of airports, hospitals, university buildings, etc., seems to be rather recent. US cities pioneered the utterly pragmatic manner of numbering streets, or, as in Washington, using the letters of the alphabet.

       Some methodological problems

      The meaning of the city text cannot be fully grasped from the existing cityscape, however sharp the urbanistic vision. Most cities are old, which means they consist of different time layers of spatial layout and of manifestations of meaning. At most given points in time, cities have to be read diachronically. You have to dive into city history and into the city’s plans, unrealized as well as realized. In general, contemporary cities have to be approached through a perspective of cultural geology. City texts have to be deciphered in archival contexts, making use of the historian’s privilege over the archaeologist.

      Oslo furnishes a nice illustration of the necessity of keeping historical layering in mind when interpreting a contemporary cityscape. The central, commanding building of modern Oslo is the Royal Castle, built in the nineteenth century for the lieutenant-governor of the Swedish king, but the current centre of power is the parliamentary Storting building on the main street below the Castle. The configuration of the two buildings tells us something interesting about the transition from royal Swedish to parliamentary Norwegian rule, but it would be misleading as a guide to power in contemporary Norway.

      We have already taken note of the polyvalence of architectural styles. But even politically analyzed built forms are not always understandable from general principles of construction. Transparency, for instance, is currently interpreted as a feature of democratic government and therefore of democratic architecture, underlined in the self-presentation of the EU parliamentary complex. However, a famous example of Italian Fascist modernism, the Casa del Fascio in Como by Giuseppe Terragni, is a light four-storey structure with large glass doors to the piazza and big windows, intended to convey the transparency of Fascism as a ‘glass house’ with ‘no obstacle between the political leaders and the people’.²⁹

      National Power and the Pathways to Modern Nation-States

      In a politico-cultural perspective on world history, the rise of national power and nation-states appears as a major historical divide, the key political dimension of modernity. By 1700, no single state in the world was claiming to be a state of the sovereign power of a nation. Britain, for which a bold sixteenth-century national claim has been made,³⁰ was after a short republican interlude again ruled as a dynastic monarchy, and its revolutionary settlement of 1688 was a compromise between two pre-national monarchical principles. The Tory one held that ‘the King is the source of all justice & authority’ and the Whig one, which became preponderant, ‘that King James the 2nd … by breaking the original compact between King & people … has thereby abdicated the government & left the throne vacant’.³¹ The Netherlands was a confederation of towns and local communities created from seven United Provinces.

      Today, all states – except Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates – present themselves as nation-states. What this planetary transformation of political power, which did not stop with the proclamation of nation-states, has meant for cities and urban representations of power is a central theme of this book.

      National power, nation-states and national capitals are distinctive phenomena, differing from the much more researched and hotly controversial topics of national identity and nationalism. National identities are part of a vast field of ‘Othering’ – distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘the others’ – and have, as such, ancient roots. Nationalism belongs to the secular ideological field of ‘isms’ emerging in Europe after the French Revolution.^*

      National power is a conception of legitimate power, breaking with previous conceptions of the ‘grace of God’, ‘Mandate of Heaven’, of descent – whether of princely dynasty or oligarchic regimentsfähigen Familien (‘families fit for rule’, as it was called in the Swiss city cantons) – or of age-cum-descent, as of tribal elders. National independence from empires started in the Americas about two centuries ago and became a major feature of twentieth-century history. It is in this sense that national power is the political core of the vast cultural transformation we call modernity. Basically, the nation was the population of a territory; national power, national sovereignty, was its claim to rule. For a long time this population was, at most, no more than its adult, non-servile males, setting the stage for subsequent struggles about who the nation is. A nation-state is the practical institutionalization of national power. In urban terms, the struggle for national power was focused on transforming the princely Residenz city, the oligarchic mercantile city, the religious centre (e.g., Rome), or centres of imperial/colonial power into national capitals. In the ‘White Dominions’ of the British empire, national capitals were built as political replacements of the colonial.

       Modernity, nation-states and their four main historical pathways

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