The essays collected in this volume unfold a panorama of urban phenomena of resistance that reach from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, thus revealing the essential vulnerability of urban space to all forms of subversion. Taking their readers to diverse places and moments in history, the contributions remind us of the struggles over the concrete as well as the imaginary space we call the city.
The collection maps the various challenges experienced by urban communities, ranging from the unmistakably hegemonic claim of civic festivities in early modern London to the perceived threat posed by newly created parks in the Restoration period and from the dangers of criminality and riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the transformation of the Berlin Wall into souvenirs scattered around the globe.

Contributors: Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland, Pascal Fischer, Blake Fitzpatrick, Kerstin Frank, Jens Martin Gurr, Bernd Hirsch, Marie Hologa, Mihaela Irimia, Stephan Kohl, Norbert Lennartz, Catharina Löffler, Margaret Olin, István Rácz, Gerd Stratmann.