The City of Collective Memory

The City of Collective Memory
Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments
- M. Christine Boyer
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Kritha-1006

• “Collective Memory” , in general, refers to shared memories of a particular group or family
framed in space and time.
Eg. Collective Memory of a nation is represented partly by the memorials it chooses to erect.
Whatever a nation chooses to memorialise in a physical monument is an indicator of its
collective memory.
• The city is a colllective expression of architecture and it carries the memory traces of earlier
architectural forms, city plans and public monuments.
• The physical structure of a city always evolves ,being deformed or forgotten, adapted to
other purposes or eradicated by different needs.

The Generating Powers of a City Plan
• The contemporary city suffers from an inadequate and misguided process of planning, and so
the reexamination of some of the latter’s historical roots might awaken forgotten intentions.
• Behind every city plan lies a belief that society is progressing towards a better future.
• A city should become the locus of collective memory and not simply an outdoor museum or
a collection of historical districts.

Inversion of Public & Private Space
• The word “public” is misrepresented when applied to city places.
• Before the end of 18 th century public space was usually designed as an honorific place to celebrate
the power of the king, queen or aristocracy holding tableaux vivants.
• Due to the revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, public spaces became democratic spheres
where public space was extended to include places of public debates and gatherings.
• Public authority was linked to a system of norms and regulations.
• Throughout the 19 th century, illiterate class grew in numbers, the public sphere was
reconceptualised in terms of the rich and the poor.
• With the beginning of the 20 th century, municipal buildings, public libraries, railroad stations, public
parks etc came up to establish beauty & order.

• In the last few decades, “public” has become a negative concept comprising of unruly
bureaucracies, corrupt officials, inefficient management.
• “Private” has been refurbished with a new image: freedom of choice and style.
• Civic improvement schemes play on this inversion of values- creating private preserves for
the wealthy which are transformed into “public amenities”.
• Thus, city’s public is fragmented into marginalised groups.

City Images & Representional Forms
• 3 aesthetic conventions representing the image of cities in the traditional, modern &
contemporary time periods are identified: 1. The City as a Work of Art,
2. The City as Panorama,
3. The City of Spectacle.

The City as a Work of Art
• Until the end of the 19 th century, builders of modern
industrial cities were absorbed with picture-making.
• This picture frame became emblematic of its unified
and closed spatial order.
• This period witnessed an architecture of ceremonial
power whose monuments spoke of exemplary deeds,
national unity and industrial glory.
• The City as a Work of Art was an attempt to fulfill
cultural and aesthetic needs destroyed in the turmoil
of progress.
View of Palace de la Concorde

The City as Panorama
• In the early 20 th century the city appeared as an open &
expansive panorama, ruled by the transformation of
space & time that modern modes of travel provided.
• The pictorial image of the City as a Work of Art was
replaced by the city of soaring skyscrapers.
• Railroad travel had erased the idea of in-between space.
• Mobility in space thus enabled a juxtaposition of
disparate but sequential images.
• So the city was no longer seen from a static frontal
perspective, but as a multidimensional traveling view
that was itself a new spatialization of space.
Robert Delaunay, Eiffel Tower

The City of Spectacle
• By the 1980s, the transformation of the material
world by invisible bands of electronic communication.
• It decomposed the bits and pieces of the city into an
ephemeral form.
• Art & architecture based on the recomposition &
recombination of borrowed imagery appeared to
make reality.
• There was a juxtapositioning of high and low art
forms to give a sense of theatricality.
• There was revitalization of traditional building
typologies or construction of new compositions.
Paul Citroen, Metropolis

The Politics of Representational Forms
• As every economic formation or structure engenders a cultural form or an aesthetic
convention, the representational forms of the City as a Work of Art, Panorama, or Spectacle
reflect different stages of capitalism.
• The term “work of art” implied that there existed a market for these “works”, that art was a
commodity for sale & no longer limited only to the aristocrats.
• This 19 th century art market was compromised : the old aristocrats and acamedicians still
ruled over popular taste.
• To cover the changes wrought by political revolutions, industrialization, rise of capitalists with
their materialistic aspirations, old styles such as Gothic, Baroque or Classical was used all over
again.
• Thus the battle of styles & the City as a work of art were nothing other than a backward
binding gesture.

The City of Collective Memory
• The City of Collective Memory should focus on creation of meaningful & imaginative public
spaces.
• Should have continuous urban topography, a spatial structure that covers both rich and poor
places, honorific and humble monuments, permanent and ephemeral forms, and should
include places for public assemblage and public debate, as well as private memory walks and
personal retreats.
• In the City of Collective Memory, the architect, city planner, and spectator must begin to
move beyond the will to instrumentally formulate historical unities.
• It should have a play of oppositions, the existence of randomness, disturbances, dispersions
& accidents.
• The City of Collective Memory will require a double reading of 19 th & late 20 th century forms.