New publication - Small Towns in Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Heritage and Development Strategies
Largely unknown small towns, always in the shadow of famous cities, are mostly overlooked by historical research. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Czech and Russian towns are staged in this volume as examples of a typical European phenomenon. They appear in diverse shapes, influenced by their countries and regions history. One of possible strategies to overcome difficulties and motivate new development uses cultural heritage as a marketable value. International teams of urban historians, sociologists and historians of arts and architects joined at the European Association for Urban History conference in Lisbon in 2014 and decided to present the issue in this volume - composed of five chapters - using a variety of methods and perspectives.
Prof. Dobrinka Parusheva, Institute of Balkan Studies in Sofia, wrote in her review: “This edited volume may serve as a piece of knowledge that may help in filling the large gap existing 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, at least to my knowledge, other explorations that address small towns in Europe in any historical period. Hence my firm conviction that the proposed volume will definitely enforce both the publication record of the Charles University Press and the all-European knowledge about the small towns and their role in preservation of the cultural heritage.”
