Routledge Imaginary Athens: Urban Space Memory Berlin Tokyo Seoul

This comprehensive study explores how three modern cities - Berlin, Tokyo, and Seoul - transformed into national capitals through an entangled transnational process rooted in imaginative interpretations of classical Athens. The book examines Schinkel's classicist architecture in Berlin, particularly its core principle of tectonics, and traces how this architectural philosophy was adopted and adapted in East Asian cities. It investigates how Imperial Japan reinvented Tokyo by merging classical Athenian architectural principles with national identity, and explores how these influences reflected evolving notions of modern civilisation across vastly different cultural contexts. This work in the Routledge Studies in Cultural History series offers critical insights into the relationship between architecture, urban planning, and collective memory in shaping metropolitan spaces and civic perception across continents.