Nationalism, self, and the city

Juval Portugali

Chapter 8 in The Second Urban Revolution, 2025, pp 202-224 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter links the entity “city” to the personal identity of each individual and connects it to the collective identity of modern nationalism. Its basic thesis is that while nationalism originated in cities, once it was born, a process of self-organization and spatial diffusion began, in which nationalism “enslaved” the city and became the grand defining identity of people in the 19th and 20th centuries. The chapter then presents the core doctrine of nationalism, its origin out of a Dual Legitimacy identity crisis that transformed nationalism into the generative order of modern society, with the nation state as its material content and the ideology of nationalism as its information content. This is firstly related to the role of cities and urban dynamics in the process and then to notions of place and placelessness. This theoretical analysis is then illustrated by reference to the “Jewish problem” and the emergence of Zionism – Jewish nationalism – and its role in the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. The chapter closes by relating the above to the current emergence of trans-national consciousness.

Keywords: Nationalism; Place; Placelessness; Self; Trans-nationalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035350117
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