Obraz miasta epoki przedprzemysłowej we współczesnych badaniach historycznych

The aim of the article is to present the material scope and methodological assumptions of the research on the image of cities undertaken since the late 1970s. The author points out that the image of the city is a very broad term in which various research directions are included. The subject matter had been addressed in the works of sociologists, geographers and art historians since the 1920s. The so-called cultural breakthrough in historical sciences in the 1970s has contributed to the increasing interest in the problem of the representation of cities. The essence of the new approach has become the interest in the principles of creating an image, the ways of its construction and its functions. The priority in undertaking new methodological challenges in the research on the perception of cities and its representations should be attributed to researchers of literature and art historians. Historians started to be more seriously interested in the area in the 1980s. According to the author, the studies developing until the beginning of the 21st century were characterized by a large methodological diversity. Over the last ten years, the focus of researchers has been the issue of creating an image of their own city in various research contexts: city representation, city branding, symbolic communication and communal staging.