Memory Culture and the Contemporary City makes a series of new interventions in the topical and contested field of urban memory. It features accessible and illuminating essays by leading figures from a range of academic disciplines (history, cultural geography, architecture, film studies, and cultural theory) as well as practitioners in architecture and the visual and performance arts. The book considers how cultures of memory are constructed for and in contemporary cities, their architectures, memorials, museums, and artworks. It takes Berlin as a particularly telling case of a 'building-site' city dealing with historical burdens and divisions, but also extends to other cities marked by the fraught legacy of conflict and violence: Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Dresden, and New York. Through bold critical readings of their sites and constructions of memory, these cities are shown to both display and conceal remembrance in their cultural building work.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
PART I
Monument and Melancholia; V.Burgin
Sonnen-Insulaner: On a Berlin Island of Memory; T.Elsaesser
Arrivals and Departures: Travelling to the Airports of Berlin; H.Reeh
Global Building Sites – Between Past and Future; D.Libeskind
PART II
Spectral Ground in New Cities: Memorial Cartographies in Cape Town and Berlin; K.E.Till & J.Jonker
Designing the Biblical Present in Jerusalem's 'City of David'; W.Pullan & M.Gwiazda
Historical Tourism: Reading Berlin's Doubly Dictatorial Past; M.Fulbrook
Sacralized Spaces and the Urban Remembrance of War; J.Ward
Paradise for Provocation: Plotting Berlin's Political Underground; C.Scribner
PART III
Architecture as Scenography, the Building Site as Stage; S.Bürkle
Buenos Aires 2010: Memory Machines and Cybercities in Two Argentine Science Fiction Films; G.Kantaris
Perpetuated Transitions: Forms of Nightlife and the Buildings of Berlin in the Work of Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tilmans; P.Ekardt
On the Road with mnemonic nonstop; L.Ruprecht with M.Nachbar & J.Roller
Notes
Index
UTA STAIGER is Coordinator of the Research and Strategy Programme Intercultural Interactions at University College London, UK. Her research and publications focus on the role of culture in contemporary politics, particularly urban and European citizenship. She has a background in cultural policy research and international cooperation.
HENRIETTE STEINER is Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Architecture, Society and the Built Environment at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Having moved between literature and urban studies, her current research investigates Zürich as a topography of exile.
ANDREW WEBBER is Reader in Modern German and Comparative Culture at the University of Cambridge, UK. His books include The European Avant-Garde: 1900-1940 (2004), Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (2008) and, as co-editor, Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (2008).
Description
Memory Culture and the Contemporary City makes a series of new interventions in the topical and contested field of urban memory. It features accessible and illuminating essays by leading figures from a range of academic disciplines (history, cultural geography, architecture, film studies, and cultural theory) as well as practitioners in architecture and the visual and performance arts. The book considers how cultures of memory are constructed for and in contemporary cities, their architectures, memorials, museums, and artworks. It takes Berlin as a particularly telling case of a 'building-site' city dealing with historical burdens and divisions, but also extends to other cities marked by the fraught legacy of conflict and violence: Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Dresden, and New York. Through bold critical readings of their sites and constructions of memory, these cities are shown to both display and conceal remembrance in their cultural building work.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
PART I
Monument and Melancholia; V.Burgin
Sonnen-Insulaner: On a Berlin Island of Memory; T.Elsaesser
Arrivals and Departures: Travelling to the Airports of Berlin; H.Reeh
Global Building Sites – Between Past and Future; D.Libeskind
PART II
Spectral Ground in New Cities: Memorial Cartographies in Cape Town and Berlin; K.E.Till & J.Jonker
Designing the Biblical Present in Jerusalem's 'City of David'; W.Pullan & M.Gwiazda
Historical Tourism: Reading Berlin's Doubly Dictatorial Past; M.Fulbrook
Sacralized Spaces and the Urban Remembrance of War; J.Ward
Paradise for Provocation: Plotting Berlin's Political Underground; C.Scribner
PART III
Architecture as Scenography, the Building Site as Stage; S.Bürkle
Buenos Aires 2010: Memory Machines and Cybercities in Two Argentine Science Fiction Films; G.Kantaris
Perpetuated Transitions: Forms of Nightlife and the Buildings of Berlin in the Work of Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tilmans; P.Ekardt
On the Road with mnemonic nonstop; L.Ruprecht with M.Nachbar & J.Roller
Notes
Index
Authors
UTA STAIGER is Coordinator of the Research and Strategy Programme Intercultural Interactions at University College London, UK. Her research and publications focus on the role of culture in contemporary politics, particularly urban and European citizenship. She has a background in cultural policy research and international cooperation.
HENRIETTE STEINER is Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Architecture, Society and the Built Environment at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Having moved between literature and urban studies, her current research investigates Zürich as a topography of exile.
ANDREW WEBBER is Reader in Modern German and Comparative Culture at the University of Cambridge, UK. His books include The European Avant-Garde: 1900-1940 (2004), Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (2008) and, as co-editor, Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (2008).
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