Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City.

Poling refers in the book's conclusion to the "ghosts of walls past" and warns against oversimplifying the significance of the town walls and their removal (p. 174). Every few years, I take students to Vienna and let them marvel at its famous Ringstraße, the design of which so clearly evokes the old city wall it replaced as the city outgrew its centuries-old boundary and needed room to blossom in the 1850s. The urban frontier, Poling argues, is 'the boundary between what has been done in the past and what might be done in the future', and urban planners, city and national officials and regular folks alike spent considerable time hashing out what it should look like and what, more conceptually, it meant to be a modern city putting its past behind it (p. 14). [Extracted from the article]

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