Foreword to the first issue of the english edition of "Urban People", a journal of anthropology of urban worlds ****************************************************************************************** * Blanka Soukupová ****************************************************************************************** The city represents a sort of sieve of history. Its temporal layers, at fi rst glance clea architecture, interiors, indoor and outdoor sculptures and paintings, appropriation of ent are a document of the continuity of development of its territory and appearance and of imp turning points that society and its residences pass through. Inappropriate vacant lots in areas in a historic center or insensitively placed constructions and structural elements, rst glance also bear witness to the importance people attributed and attribute to the citi willy nilly blend with the spirit of the time and that spirit often not only demanded reco buildings and their surroundings and therefore helped maintain material for what we can ca a city, but it also determined what to demolish, reconstruct, or change. Modern and postmo a city were then affected by a confl ict between socalled traditionalists and socalled mod scholarly interest in monuments actually began only in modern national societies. The original "old" town and its further temporal layers have disappeared forever. They hav often remained captured only on maps and plans of the time, in pictures, in literary works periodicals, later in photographs and postcards and, in the 20th century, in fi lm strips. records of how people looked after the memories of a city and what they actually found imp and document, there also exists a fl ow of memories of inhabitants and visitors to their c codifi ed memories, memories transmitted within the family and interest groups (national, social, local), and also, of course, dreams of the city, virtual images that homesick emig "build". However in any case there is no city without a memory that is the basis of every therefore there is no city without an identity. Naturally in the course of historical deve developed symbolic importance through certain historical experience (possibly regional, na etc. symbols), and also places with minimal historical moorings. The future of the latter, continually remains open; it is never possible to exclude an event that will transform a n something unique. The identity of a city, that is, its character, its self perception and its selfpresentati its perception and presentation from the exterior, expressed by the polarity of city and s and villages, city and rival city (this polarity meanwhile can be negative or positive), i nished work of many generations. From the viewpoint of its development, the key is the ent in European society and from it the emerging interest of communal institutions. The urban however, must pose another question: what is the importance of the historical character of the character and contentment of the people who live in it? How do they live in quarters w history (in housing estates), how do they live in zones with monuments, today crowded with how do they live in cities and in quarters with a past that tears at the emotions (e.g., i during the Second World War, there were ghettos overloaded with human suffering)? And is i to live in areas of former concentration camps without suppressing the past of those place issue of this journal concerning anthropology of world cities is primarily dedicated to Pr and its rival Krakow, which shares with Prague a reputation as the most beautiful city in Prague anthropologist Blanka Soukupová deals with the importance of the relationships of C from the turn of the 20th century to the socalled Velvet Revolution (1989) to memorials as materialization of the past. Warsaw ethnologist Andrzej Stawarz tries to show in his essay to visualize the memory of the totalitarian regime and its victims. In this case he unders with some sort of additional construction of the picture of the time distorted by the regi and hearts of the people in the town which, from the end of the Second World War, laboriou and is constructing a new identity whose axis is the Warsaw Uprising. The myth of cityhero however, also continued in postwar times (during the years 1949-1956 and 1980-1988 and mai years 1981-1983), when the capital of Poland became the symbol of resistance against total And in the case of Warsaw, the past should thus be of service to the new present. Krakow e GodulaWęcławowicz proceeds from the theme of identifi cation of Krakow with old Krakow, wh is, to a great extent, a copy of the medieval city. In the mental map of its inhabi tants, bound to several transparent polyfuntional places in the Old Town. This enhances its value important festivals, prome nades, etc. Besides, Durkheim already drew attention to the imp rhrythmization of activities for the creation of social time. Krakow functions in the ment connected at the same time with the personality and cult of John Paul II. GodulaWęcławowic a certain extent, paired with the article by Krakow art historian Tomasz Węcławowicz, who, the main anthropological thesis that a city is created by people, writes about the beginni and the expansion of its borders in the light of the newest socialscientific research. The medieval Krakow is tied to Christianization with the mentality of medieval man. However, K like the main square, later lost many of their original functions and were transformed int In the closing study, Slovak ethnologist Alexan dra Bitušíková deals with the thesis of me an essential, but also, in the course time, a fl exible component of the identity of a cit presents two transparent approaches to the revitalization of cities: Americanization and E She then illustrates with the example of Bánská Bystrica how European institutions can inf politics, which retroactively strengthen individual components of the identity of a town. report on a sociological survey of how the users of Loreta Square in Prague perceive its s from the methods of Schafer's acoustic ecology research team and from the research of the Project which was carried out in a traditional quarter of Tokyo in the 1980s. What is most anthropology is that he stresses the importance of sounds in the memory and identity of a course, could perhaps be the case of typical smells. Social psychologists believe that forgetting ones roots does not pay. The journal's fi rst endorses this theory while, at the same time, it points out the possibilities of pulling o natural decomposition, and their new growth. The story of a town - at least for the presen end... Besides, in the outskirts of globalized (or generalized) metropolises, internationa chains and multientertainment centers are springing up like mushrooms. Will they some day by our memory? How do the city and its people handle the present? How much group and indiv whether or not refl ected on, will be contained in the answer to the question, "Where are Blanka Soukupová [ URL "LM-364.html "]