ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the similar ways in which the contributors imagine the politics of modernity, understand the historicity of urban social and spatial change, narrate human agency, and underline the state-civil society interplay in the social construction of urban space. These similarities stand out despite the contributors' different disciplinary starting points in history, sociology, architecture, literary criticism, and cultural studies. The chapter considers the relationship between city, nation, place, and identity. Modernity is thus best understood not as an inexorable driving force of historical development, but as a socially constructed and highly localized and contingent enactment of particular spatial and social practices that vary from place to place and time to time. The new social spaces of identity formation are important and at least potentially democratic. It would be going too far to associate the internal contradictions and elisions in the discourse and practices of the state and modernity directly or inevitably with democratization.
