Nazism and Cities

Lyric Hughes Hale has an interesting piece in the Huffington Post titled “The Global Politics of Cities” which uses the German Propaganda Archive to discuss the role of cities.  She notes that Mao Zedong and Hitler both saw cities as places of depravity. She uses an educational poster from the GPA showing the deleterious effects of a growing urban population.

She concludes:

“My bottom line: urbanization is a political process. Most of us are urbanites, and for most of us, urbanization has meant modernization and economic progress. But have we reached a new plateau, a place where we have reached the limits of the economic benefits of urban growth? How will the politics of cities evolve?”