Lens: Lieux de Memoire
Over the course of a semester in which Urban Imagination introduced a diverse suite of tools to understand “urbanism as a complex cultural phenomenon,” perhaps none seemed more compelling than the analysis of memory and its relationship with urban cultures. We’ve seen that, around the world, memory has influenced urban populations self-understanding and the interpretation of the city. Nevertheless, memory has proved itself to be a slippery thing. The ways in which it functions, relates to urban institutions and collectives of people, and is manifested in the urban fabric and be difficult to tie down.
Pierre Nora, in his “Between Memory and History,” offers a fruitful lens through which to grasp the dynamics of memory in the urban. Nora offers that our contemporary relationship to the past is caught between two competing instincts: memory and history. Memory, he argues, is the traditional strategy, borne naturally in societies to transmit value from one generation to the next and preserve identity, and is ultimately employed as a means for individuals and the societies they constitute to understand themselves (p. 7). History is a modern phenomenon, a “reconstruction” of the natural process of memory under the auspices of an intellectualized and rationalized regime, enforced by state and academic institutions (p. 8). The struggle between memory and history as means of understanding is represented in the lieux de memoire, physical sites within which legacies of memory have crystallized and toward which there is an attempt to historicize (p. 7). He writes that the lieux de memoire are “the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age” (p. 12). Thus, in examining such sites, we are introduced to an epistemological conflict in the city: the process through which individuals and institutions decide the best way to understand the past and to understand themselves.
In this exhibit, I’ll revisit several sites that I covered in previous units and, through Nora’s lens, discuss how these sites function as lieux de memoire and how they give us access to the above epistemological conflict.