The City and Topologies of Memory

Abstract

The relationship of space and time has become a vexed issue in accounts in the postmodern metropolis. Rich and enlivening accounts use spatial categories to describe the interrelationships of elements of the city—moving from historicism to geography, to gloss Jameson's development of cognitive mapping. Postmodern geographies utilising the ideas of cognitive mapping show marked similarities with the accounts of time and space describing classical and medieval arts of memory and the Romantic writings of Flaubert on Athens. However, spatialised accounts of the city often seem to replicate problematic divisions of space and time that also underlay historicist accounts and merely invert the latter's priorities. The work of Bergson offers key insights into how this division occurred and a sense of temporality that may be lost in spatial metaphors. This is a sense of difference and alterity that we trace in the work of Proust and argue can be brought to inform the urban theatre of memories through a careful reworking of ideas suggested by de Certeau and Derrida. In this paper we take the case of Athens, bringing together East and West, ancient and modern, original and copy, as a grounding to discuss these issues. We suggest a sense of time- space as both fragmented and dynamic; a sense of the historical sites as creating instability and displacement in collective memory.

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

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A Conceptual Urban Quality Space-Place Framework: Linking Geo-Information and Quality of Life

“…), giving rise to the intersection of multiple spatialities [26]. In the urban environment, places are not stable or temporally homogeneous, and blend different realities originating from complex spatialities and temporalities [27]. Cities are not homogeneous, but are historical and cultural productions [28].…”

Becoming Tourist: Renegotiating the Visual in the Tourist Experience

“…I therefore suggest, photographs are not memories in themselves for that would indicate a misconstrued interpretation of photography as a replacement for memory (see Sontag, 1979). Rather, they offer "fractured pasts" (Nora, 1996) that emerge as "memorial sites" upon which theatres of memory are constructed (Crang & Travlou, 2001). They become co-performers in the creation and subsistence of memories; a series of guiding structures upon which remembrances are inscribed as places are produced and consumed via ideology-fuelled stories (Hirsch, 1981(Hirsch, , 1997Rose, 2003).…”