Preface

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of manipulation of the natural landscape and its transformation into culturally constructed and ideologically defined political landscapes, as a result of the urban design of capital cities, understood as principal seats of governmental authority. In this sense, capitals turn into political landscapes that, in Adam T. Smith’s (The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities, 2003) definition of the term, encompass the material elements of buildings and infrastructure, the cultural constructs of their urban functions, and their spatial transformations. Political landscapes are accessible by means of experience, perception, and imagination, generating multivalent relations among space, time, and human agents. They can be experienced through bodily movement, which ferments perceptions that depend upon the social status and the cultural perspective of the agent. Perceptions set up time- and culture-specific relations between subject and object: the agent and the natural and human-made landscapes. Political landscapes of capital cities also mirror power structures that exist between polity agents who designed capitals, or those who lived within them, or those who were otherwise associated with them. Such structures of authority further direct the aesthetic representation of the capital, which provokes calculated responses in the imagination of the subjects. In this context, imagination serves ideology, especially when examined from the viewpoint of those in power.

This collection of essays takes a global approach in terms of chronology, geography, and scholarship to amplify the intimate associations that exist between the natural landscape, human-made environments, and the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. The multiple but occasionally strongly converging paths of inquiry we offer provide further ways to conceive how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, or unification affected capitals differently worldwide without losing grasp of their distinctive architectural and spatial features. These essays articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming Smith’s claim that “the creation and preservation of political authority is a profoundly spatial problem.”

Jessica Joyce Christie, Jelena Bogdanović, and Eulogio Guzmán