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of contemporary cities. Apart from the vast monographic literature, which will be referred to repeatedly below, there are a number of distinguished comparative contributions. As this is not an academic thesis requiring a literature review, I shall confine my collegial respect to a short list only.

      The portal work in the modern field is Lawrence Vale’s Architecture, Power and National Identity, a masterly study of architecture and capital city design in a wide range of national contexts, focusing on ‘capitol complexes’ of governmental buildings, with a critical political sense and the professional eyes of a city planner.¹¹ Contemporary and intercontinental in scope are also Wolfgang Sonne’s deep-digging Swiss dissertation (Habilitation) Representing the State¹² on the early-twentieth-century design of some capital cities, from Washington to New Delhi, and the collective overview edited by David Gordon, Planning Twentieth-Century Capital Cities. An impressive global study on the relocation of capitals is Vadim Rossmann’s Capital Cities: Their Development and Relocation, similar to this book.¹³

      Incisive, non-parochial analyses of power in contemporary cities have also come significantly from outside the academia of urban history and social science, from architecture and architectural criticism. Two works have blazed the trail: Deyan Sudic’s The Edifice Complex¹⁴ and Rowan Moore’s Why We Build,¹⁵ both focusing on architects and their patrons. From a similar milieu also comes Owen Hatherley’s remarkable Landscapes of Communism.¹⁶

      All built environments in human settlements are manifestations of the power relations among the inhabitants. Two sources and several kinds of power are highlighted in this book, which is not meant to be a general treatise on power. With its focus on the capital cities of nation-states, political power is naturally central. But political power in itself means no more than power by coercion and/or persuasion through institutions and processes of government. We are here explicitly interested in the character and the operation of political power in capital cities of the world.

      Modern processes of urban power form a quadrangle of competing actors and types of influence. In one corner is political authority – national and/or urban – identifying the character of which is a major aim of this study, with variable powers and resources of design and regulation; in a second corner is capital, global as well as national, with economic power and resources of design and ‘development’; third, there are the classes of privilege, with their desires, fears and resources; and finally, there are the popular classes, with their grievances and their capacities of resistance and of change.

      We begin with the national elites’ political power, emerging from the welter of nation-state formation. In this macroscopic global analysis, the national elites will be approached through the specific contexts of nation-state construction and the latter’s relationship to prevailing capitalism.

      Then we shall look into two types and two eras of challenges to the historical national elites. One is a popular challenge, coming out of the rise of social and political forces once excluded from the nation-making process. The other is a global challenge of non-national forces and issues. The former is clearly a different kind of political power; the latter may posit a supremacy of economic power.

      Political power can, of course, take many different forms, from the same or similar social roots. Here we shall look into the apotheosis of national elite power under perceived popular threat, i.e., at fascism and kindred military dictatorships. Furthermore, we shall analyse urbanistic Communism as an enduring radical popular challenge to historical elite rule, and into post-Communism as a new kind of political power.

      After World War II there was concern with democratic versus non-democratic architecture and urban design, especially in West Germany.¹⁷ This is here taken into account, but it would not work as a master distinction, given the fact that most of the nation-states of the world for most of the 225 years covered in this book were non-democracies.

      Popular political power has asserted itself in different ways: in access to institutional power, as in ‘municipal socialism’, welfare-state cities or, recently outside Europe, in city governments by middle-class coalitions with the urban poor, but also in successful protest moments: stopping the ravages of the ‘Car City’ in the North Atlantic of the late 1950s to 1970s and, even more recently, in a spate of urban revolutions – or better called, given their basically ambiguous (but always non-working-class) social character, extra-constitutional regime changes. It may also make up bargaining power in cities where public participation in urban planning and development is recognized.

      Capital cities are by definition sites of political power. But popular challenges mean that they are often also sites of resistance, of political counter-power, of protest rallies and headquarters of opposition movements, parties and trade unions.

      Most of the constitutive national elites were capitalist or pro-capitalist, and their imprint on their nation and its capital is duly taken into account. But there is also the raw economic power of capital and wealth outside political channels. This – economic – is the second source of power we have to pay attention to. It operates in two major ways in our story. One is its imprint on the spatial layout and on the patterning of buildings, and most specifically through skyscrapers. The other refers to the urban exclusivity of wealth and economic prosperity, as manifested in gating and private cities of the privileged.

      At some level, all systems of political power need representation, in the sense of public display. Power needs public representation to be recognized, respected, awed or admired, in order to be obeyed and followed. A new reign of power is publicly and ceremoniously inaugurated. Secondly, modern nation-state power (in particular) needs representation in order to give direction to the self-identity, thoughts, beliefs, memories, hopes and aspirations of its citizens. This is the second function of monumentality, as well as of flags, cocardes, symbolic pins, public banner slogans and rhetorical addresses to the nation.

      Economic power as such needs no representation; money is force enough in itself. Many times it is wiser to let it operate in the dark rather than in broad daylight.* Corporations and capitalists often want to display their wealth, though, and to bask in admiration of their buildings.

      ‘Representation’ has a connotation of intent, which would be much too narrow a perspective for what we are trying to do here. Basically, our interest is in manifestations of power. Representations make up an important part of the latter, but there are also power manifestations through ignorance, neglect or rejection of certain areas or parts of the population, and there are power manifestations of order and disorder, of competence and incompetence.

      Reading the Urban Text

      Cities are shaped by power in two different ways. First, urban social relations are structured through the constitution of city space, in terms of division/connection, of centre/periphery, of hierarchy/equality and of comfort/discomfort/misery. Second, power constructs the meaning of life in the city: the opportunities and the limitations, the sense and the priorities of urban living, identities in the city, the meanings of the city’s and the nation’s past, present and aspired future. The urban text of power can be read along these two lines. The key variables we are then going to look at are often simultaneously socially structuring and meaning-conveying.

       The spatial layout

      The urban layout is a production of social space, in Henri Lefebvre’s felicitous phrase.¹⁸ In the ancient grand civilizations, such as the Indic and the Sinic, it was designed as a cosmological representation of the city’s connection to the cosmic order. Later, for instance in European and modern history generally, the space produced is usually that of terrestrial power relations. The basic elements of the spatial design are its paths or system of streets; its allocation of the size of building lots; its ‘edges’ or boundaries within the city as well as its boundaries to the non-/other city (currently often blurred); its open places; its nodes of circulation; its delimited areas, districts or neighbourhoods; and what we may call their mode of orientation, i.e., their conception of centre–periphery and their use of the given topography, for example, a landscape of alternating altitudes.^*

      We are not dealing with metric variables of power or with clear-cut universal

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