Broken Cities

The prose is very elegant and lucid, well suited for upper-level undergraduate classes pertinent to matters of pre modern urbanism and thus worth assigning.

There is a large and diverse genre of works centered on ruins. Much of it is written in the Romantic tradition and focuses on classical and medieval ruins from the Renaissance to the Romantic era. Broken Cities takes the study of ruins in more creative conceptual directions across a greater geographical range.

Martin Devecka offers a rich, illuminating, and well-researched study of the complex sociological processes leading to the production of ruins.

A serious political critique that is also highly readable; Martin Devecka travels ruined cities down the millennia. Provocative, erudite, moving; a reminder to look around us at the ruins of the future as they are formed in the long present.

This engaging account of ruins and their uses amounts to a provocative and illuminating exposé of flawed assumptions at the heart of antiquarian studies. Broken Cities should prove to be as important for understanding present attitudes to the past as Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities has been for the history of nationalism.