“The City in History” and Historical and Cultural Studies of the City: A Review of HistoriCity: Gorodskie issledovaniya i istoriya sovremennosti [HistoriCity: Urban Studies аnd the History of the Present], ed. by B. Stepanov, K. Levinson, O. Zaporozhets. Moscow: NLO, 2024, 456 pp.

Abstract

This review is devoted to an analysis of historical and cultural studies of the city and, in particular, an analysis of the book HistoriCity: Urban Studies and the History of the Present. According to the author of this critical text, HistoriCity belongs to the field of urban history. The first part of the review situates HistoriCity within the context of the “city in history” approach formed by Lewis Mumford, and also in the tradition of Russian studies of urban culture. The second part of the review includes an interpretation of the book’s immediate theses. According to the reviewer, the approach of the authors of the collection indicates that the sustainable production of urbanism was observed long before the mature modernity of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries. Another key idea of the book is related to a special emphasis on urban imagеology as perhaps the most defining feature of urbanism. It is not only the urban environment itself that matters, but also the ways in which it is represented. The authors of the collection also note that historical representations were not autonomous in urban projects: they often went hand in hand with technocratic narratives about the urban future and progress. In particular, this was characteristic of the existence of “history” in Soviet urban culture: history has always been closely linked to the discursive articulation of modernity. HistoriCity makes it clear that “history” in an urban environment is not limited to the past. Historicity regimes do not preserve historical buildings and architecture but rather push them towards reassembly and renovation.