Overview

Always in the shadow of their more famous urban neighbors, small towns are consistently overlooked in historical research, especially in Europe. This book investigates the ramifications of that tendency for development initiatives. Paying particular attention to the marketability of towns’ cultural heritage and of the diverse ways local culture has been influenced by national and regional history, an international team of urban historians, sociologists, and historians of art and architecture present case studies of towns in England, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Russia to explore new methods for motivating development and renewal.

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9788024636450

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This edited volume . . . may help in filling the large gap . . . in the historical knowledge of urban Europe. There has been just one more project on European small towns carried out in the 1990s by Peter Clark and Bernard Lepetit, which dealt with the early modern period. Since then there have not been . . . other explorations that address small towns in Europe in any historical period. Hence my firm conviction that the . . . volume will definitely enforce . . . all-European knowledge about small towns and their role in preservation of the cultural heritage. --Dobrinka Parusheva, Institute of Balkan Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria From a greater distance it may become more explicit that individual cases testify to a certain marginalization of small towns in the modern period and, on the contrary, to their growing role in the period of globalization, when their wider networking through tourism, the media, and perhaps thanks to a certain saturation of interest in the metropolis, overcomes their historically given provincialism. This book is rich in content, inspiring, and certainly will be interesting for the professional public dealing with issues of history, anthropology, sociology, arts management, tourism, architecture, and urbanism. --Zdenek Uherek, director of the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences

Author Information

Luda Klusakova is professor of general and comparative history at Charles University in Prague, where she specializes in European towns, the modernization process, and urban history.

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