ABSTRACT
This chapter first explores the production of localities in nationalist modernity, distinguishing between rural and urban localities as differentiated cultural, societal and locational attributes of nationalist spatiality. Localities are the places in which people spend most of their lives, enact their daily routines and with which they are most familiar. Localities in the Marchlands in the 1920 and 1930s were usually associated with communes, the smallest scale of local government, but counties also conveyed the sense of the local for some societies. In this chapter particular attention is given to Central Europe as defined by Rónai in the Atlas of Central Europe 1945 (for which the 1993 digital facsimile edition has been used). In this atlas communes generally form the framework for analysis, and I have adopted them as localities. Through the example of Budapest, the most rapidly growing city of the region, I look at the ambivalent status of capitals, as symbols of national identity and as places of conflict between traditionalist, nationalist and modernist ideas. The urban—industrial conurbation was a relatively new settlement form. The Upper Silesian coalfield was the most developed urban—industrial, multi-centred, conurbation and is presented as a case example of resource-based urban—industrial development in the particular conditions of nationalist modernity.
