The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

On Memory and the City
ings of note, or significant sites, but usually stand on the foundations of
“lost” structures. As buildings and space configure forcefields of memory,
significance spills over into locales and districts, or fails to find attachment.
Extensions, changes of use, transformations of status, growth, decay, and
gentrification—the variously prioritized geometry of main roads, backstreets,
culs-de-sac, and shortcuts—all resonate with ways of memorializing
existence.
It is inevitable that cities provoke psychic analogies and meditations
on the reciprocity of urban experience and the realms of consciousness.
Lewis Mumford used the geological metaphor of “strata” to describe the layering
of cities. As a modernist, he tended to favor the newer, more flexible
and renewable “deposits” and assumed that overbuilding was inevitable.
Sigmund Freud, employing a more purely architectonic metaphor, was careful
to distinguish between “authentic” remains and the superstructures
built upon them by the subject. Georg Simmel identified the ramified city
as characteristic of modernism by virtue of its temporal complexity, its proliferation
of historical styles, and its general density of reference, all of which
played a part in the intensification of stimuli he regarded as symptomatic of
the urban experience.
Memory is one of the key ingredients in the creation of place, although
it is important to acknowledge that memory is subject to political
as well as psychic operations. Although it can be regarded as an antidote to
selective and tendentious histories, memory can also be structured and
guided. A number of the essays in the 1996 Strangely Familiar collection focus
on how power is exercised over memory to construct various regimes of
access and control. Dolores Hayden suggests ways in which memory can be
comoposed to supplement and realign existing histories, Iain Chambers indicates
how memory and habituation constitute indwelling resistances to
“progress,” and Christine Boyer considers the role of memory in the transition
from realism to simulation. 18
Although memory is involuntary and transient, it can also be stimulated
and preserved. James Young, writing on Holocaust memorials, asserts
the importance of memory as a disruptive practice:
By returning to the memorial some memory of its own genesis, we
remind ourselves of the memorial’s essential fragility, its dependence
on others for its life, that it was made by human hands in human
times and places, that it is no more a natural piece of the
landscape than we are. For, unlike words on a page, memorial icons
seem literally to embody ideas, to invite viewers to mistake material
presence and weight for immutable permanence. If, in its