Forum: Ideas and the City Introduction

What is the relationship of ideas to the city, and how should we rethink the “urban model” of intellectual history? Are we experiencing a resurgence of a model of European intellectual history focused on cities? Is there in fact an “urban model” for cultural and intellectual history? Meike G. Werner, Mary Gluck, and Emily J. Levine, approach the question of the links between cities and ideas. In particular, they focus, respectively, on Jena, Budapest, and Hamburg, cities that, if not all exactly “peripheral,” did not enjoy the status of the leading capital cities that were the focus of the first wave of city-based intellectual histories.