All too often, urban studies scholars have approached transnationalism as a zero-sum game in which localities, regionalities, and nationalities are suppressed in favor of a globalized set of identities. At least in the German case, however, globalization has if anything reinvigorated localism, with local and regional identities exhibiting far more continuity than the multiply disrupted national space. As this marvelously varied collection demonstrates, the urban environment has become a site of "translocal" re-territorialization in which actors do not entrench themselves in opposition to globalization, but practice a dialectical adaptation. Bringing together scholars from anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, history, and urban planning, this volume offers empirically and theoretically rich essays to help deflate myths about the presumed dissolution of the urban environment's multiple particularities. Together they conceptually reconfigure the German city to reveal a transnational set of processes intermingled within the local, regional, and national spheres.

Jeffry M. Diefendorf is the Pamela Shulman Professor of European and Holocaust Studies and Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, USA.
 
Janet Ward is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, USA and an interdisciplinary scholar of urban studies, European cultural history, and visual culture. Her recent books include Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (2011) and Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (2012).

PART I: CONTESTED GERMAN URBAN PUBLICS

1. Enlightenment in the European City: Rethinking German Urbanism and the Public Sphere; Daniel Purdy

2. Posen or Poznan, Rathaus or Ratusz: Nationalizing the Cityscape in the German-Polish Borderland; Elizabeth Drummond

3. Inclusion and Segregation in Berlin, the "Social City"; Stephan Lanz

4. Wild Barbecuing: Urban Citizenship and the Politics of (Trans-)Nationality in Berlin's Tiergarten; Bettina Stoetzer

PART II: CROSSING BOUNDARIES IN MODERN GERMAN PLANNING

5. Transnational Dimensions of German Anti-Modern Modernism: Ernst May in Breslau; Deborah Ascher Barnstone

6. Was There an Ideal Socialist City? Socialist New Towns as Modern Dreamscape; Rosemary Wakeman

7. Housing as Transnational Provocation in Cold War Berlin; Greg Castillo

8. Transatlantic Crossings of Planning Ideas: The Neighborhood Unit in the USA, UK, and Germany; Dirk Schubert

PART III: CITY CULTURES AND THE GERMAN (TRANS)NATIONAL IMAGINARY

9. Princes and Fools, Parades and Wild Women: Creating, Performing, and Preserving Urban Identity through Carnival in Cologne and Basel; Jeffry M. Diefendorf

10. The Local, the National–and the Transnational? Spatial Dimensions in Hamburg's Memory of World War I during the Weimar Republic; Janina Fuge

11. From the American West to West Berlin: Wim Wenders, Border Crossings, and the Transnational Imaginary; Nicole Huber and Ralph Stern

PART IV: GERMAN URBAN HERITAGE FOR A (TRANS)NATIONAL ERA

12. Post-Post-War Re-Construction of a Destroyed Heimat: Perspectives on German Discourse and Practice; Grischa Bertram and Friedhelm Fischer

13. Berlin's Museum Island: Marketing National Heritage in the Age of Globalization; Tracy Graves

14. The Historic Preservation Fallacy? Transnational Culture, Urban Identity, and Monumental Architecture in Berlin and Dresden; John V. Maciuika