When the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, many commentators noted that in their short lives, the towers had come to represent many things: American-led global capitalism, the United States and, most of all, New York City. Their brief role as a shorthand way of saying ‘New York City’ provoked us to ask about ‘urban icons’ more generally. But we did not need such cataclysm to provoke us to consider the topic of icons and their functioning in contemporary global culture. To help illuminate the usefulness of the concept of ‘urban icons’ we held an international conference in order to determine whether the category can be used as a conceptual grid for studying the intersection of visual culture and urban history.

Urban icons were common in the Roman world, with monuments, cityscapes and personifications all used as metonyms. Yet an icon for the most important city of all is not easily identified. Rome was always sui generis, too large to be easily captured visually. Filled with innumerable wonders, no single structure or artwork stood for the whole. Representing the collective, as well as the great extent of the empire, the city could not be encapsulated in a single image.

Venetian printmakers in the sixteenth century were enthusiastic participants in what became a project of civic self-promotion as they looked beyond the local market to an international one. In response to the fascination of foreigners who marvelled at the city's singular topography and its reputation for liberty and licentiousness, the bird's-eye view and images of local social types – such as the doge and courtesan – became transmuted into icons of the city's urban identity. The medium and modes of representation used to reproduce the republic's social and physical organization on paper are crucial here, for it was the repetition and sedimentation of visual conventions that forged iconicity. Venice was redefined as a centre in which all the world could be seen. And the mechanisms for this redefinition, as this article argues, emerged, in part, out of print, for it was because the city could be seen from the eye of a bird, on paper as an image, by foreigners – that it could be re-envisioned from the outside in.

A huge clock, made at Whitechurch by Messrs. J. B. Joyce and Co … has been sent to Shanghai, for the new Chinese Maritime Customs House. The clock, weighing nearly 30 tons, will probably be the Big Ben of the Far East.

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.

What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.

Uwe Johnson

Architectural historian P. Reyner Banham (1922–88) is widely known for his numerous writings on the modern built environment, including the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). In the BBC television film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Julian Cooper, 1972), he concretized his earlier insights about the importance of mobility in the Southern California metropolis by employing the proclivity of the cinematic medium to represent movement. While traditional notions of the urban icon commonly understand it as a static monument or landmark, in these two works Banham challenges the suitability of this view to a city as inflected by automobility as Los Angeles and proposes the motorway and the experience of driving as its most characteristic iconic forms.

Just as nature fails to produce the ‘perfect harvest’ with predictable regularity, so does the quantity of medieval urban periodical publications vary. The crop of 2005 falls well behind the richer harvests of previous years, in quantity though not in quality of the published work. Two impressions of this work: first, there are fewer obvious ‘themes’ which seem to preoccupy the authors' minds; but, secondly, articles by German and Austrian scholars show a greater concern with the exposition and analysis of major urban themes than do those from the English-speaking world. One wonders why. Could it be that German-speaking urban historians are less hesitant to re-address the seemingly obvious? Two prime examples here are presented by the contributions of Ferdinand Opll and Benjamin Scheller.