Introduction: unlikely metropolis -- Cracow around 1900 : people, place, and prospects -- The interurban matrix : local news and international sensations in Cracow's popular press -- "We'll make ourselves into Europe" : the "Greater Cracow" survey series, 1903-1904 -- Municipal, national, and European aspirations : the creation of "Wielki Kraków," 1904-1915 -- Planes, trams, and automobiles : the dangers and allure of modern technology -- "Big-city muck" : images of the "great city" in the "gutter press" -- Becoming metropolitan -- Epilogue
ABSTRACT:This article explores the tendency of citizens to liken their city to other cities in an effort to promote particular visions of their hometown. It examines three mythic visions offin-de-siècleCracow – the Polish Mecca, the Little Vienna on the Vistula and modern Big-City Cracow – as reflected in contemporary accounts and historical scholarship, demonstrating how they functioned to promote national, imperial and interurban identification. Most critical of the national vision, the article advocates a broader perspective.
AbstractAbstract: This article explores the development of urban and interurban identities in fln-de-siècle East Central Europe as alternative sources of identity that do not fit simply within standard national-historical narratives. The author focuses on Cracow as an example of this trend. Analyzing three popular illustrated newspapers from the city, he argues that thanks to popular press representations of the big city at home and abroad, as well as the experience of urban life itself, Cracovians began to develop distinct urban and interurban identities. The mass circulation press was a major vehicle in fostering and developing a shared sense of modem, urban identity among its readers. How were modem metropolitan identities created in East Central Europe in the decades before the Great War, and how were such identifications informed by tropes already in use elsewhere? In general, scholarship about East Central Europe for this period has focused on the question of nationalism and its relation to politics. Even in studies of urban centers, like Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, nationality issues have often had precedence.' This is not unwarranted, as national identification defined many of the terms of urban interaction in the ethnically diverse cities of the region. But what if strong urban and interurban identities also arose during this period, identities that overlapped with, and at times even supplanted, national ones? "Islands in a sea of rural, peasant settlements," the large cities of East Central Europe were qualitatively different from the landscape that surrounded them, as Ivan Berend has observed.2 It should come as no surprise that as their citizens became accustomed to life in the city, they recognized these differences. In their introduction to The City in Central Europe, Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, and Jill Steward
This short essay introduces three articles about Socialist prefabricated apartment buildings in the Czech Republic and Poland. The essay begins by noting the impossibility of replacing the apartment blocks of the Communist bloc after 1989, despite their clear connotation with the undesirable gray uniformity of the old regime, and asks what their legacy has been for their inhabitants in the twenty years since. Based on summaries of the three articles by My Svensson, Adrienne Harris, and Kimberly Zarecor that follow, it draws some conclusions about the prefab neighborhoods. While the first two authors, who consider filmic and literary depiction of life in the blocks, tend to focus on the despair and entrapment people feel there, Zarecor, who notes the pre-socialist origins of prefabricated apartment buildings, uses contemporary surveys and other sources to demonstrate ways that they have proven adaptable to post-socialist life. All three articles suggest that the blocks of the former Communist bloc may be more similar to the "projects" of the West than formerly thought. It seems that the buildings' gray uniformity has meant that they can serve both as the backdrop for slums and degradation, or, if refurbished and repainted, as an adequate post-socialist living space.
