Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Space

摘要

This book presents an intriguing account of identity conflicts to issues of scale and urban citizenship. The collection combines matters not frequently discussed simultaneously, including government and architecture, sovereignty struggles and global restructuring, Western and non-Western cities, present and past times. Davis and Libertun de Duren question the ability of traditional national institutions to answer the evidently escalating urban partisan violence, and strive to portray the potentials and dangers of various sovereignty arrangements. Urgency is vital, they state, as many growing conflicts are aligned with the scaling-down of identity issues from the nation states towards 'more territorially circumscribed subnational levels, where race, ethnicity, or religion are often the principal basis for making representational claims' (p. 2). Conflicts are especially evident in postcolonial countries 'still struggling with non-democratic forms of government', but the matter is global, since current violent struggles occur 'on a variety of scales and in a range of forms' (p. 2).