ABSTRACT
In recent times some urban historians have argued that a particular feature of modernization was the nationalization of local life, as cities became integrated into the larger constellation of the nation (Ribhegge 1973: 3–4; Harvey 1985: 32–3, 57; Buse 1993: 521). The sources we have been confronting in the earlier chapters of this book, however, suggest that the process was more the reverse as artefacts and practices for organizing the urban experience ‘thickened’, initiating a new paradigm of modernity that encompassed the nation. In other words, the national whole became the sum of its urban parts (Frisby 1992: 8ff.).
