Memory City

"Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb take an elegiac look at Rochester, New York. For this project, Alex took images with his last rolls of Kodachrome, a formerly vibrant color film that can now only be processed as black-and-white. The resulting photos have a weathered quality akin to a fading memory. Alex also took to the streets of Rochester and shot in digital color--work that punctuates the black and white work with images from his signature style. Rebecca, who still uses film for all her work, responded to the medium's uncertain future by creating an elegiac refrain of color still lifes and portraits of Rochester women past and present. Woven into the book are quotes by many of the famous writers and thinkers who have been connected to Rochester, including women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and poets John Ashbery and Ilya Kaminsky. And the authors have also created a timeline on the cultural history of the city that traces the evolution of a once-vibrant and now complex city."--

Describes the visual and mental models by which urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. This analysis draws from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting to identify these maps of the city - as a work of art, as panorama and as spectacle.

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens. Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for---if not invent---amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the "past misfortunes," of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis---simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition---is at the heart of their politics. Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement---in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.

Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Popular Music Books (2002) Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's (SEM) Alan P. Merriam Prize (2003) Salsa is a popular dance music developed by Puerto Ricans in New York City during the 1960s and 70s, based on Afro-Cuban forms. By the 1980s, the Colombian metropolis of Cali emerged on the global stage as an important center for salsa consumption and performance. Despite their geographic distance from the Caribbean and from Hispanic Caribbean migrants in New York City, Caleños (people from Cali) claim unity with Cubans, Puerto Ricans and New York Latinos by virtue of their having adopted salsa as their own. The City of Musical Memory explores this local adoption of salsa and its Afro-Caribbean antecedents in relation to national and regional musical styles, shedding light on salsa's spread to other Latin American cities. Cali's case disputes the prevalent academic notion that live music is more "real" or "authentic" than its recorded versions, since in this city salsa recordings were until recently much more important than musicians themselves, and continued to be influential in the live scene. This book makes valuable contributions to ongoing discussions about the place of technology in music culture and the complex negotiations of local and transnational cultural identities.

These essays by leading figures from academia, architecture and the arts consider how cultures of memory are constructed for and in contemporary cities. They take Berlin as a key case of a historically burdened metropolis, but also extend to other global cities: Jerusalem, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and New York.

After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorializing of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialization and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanization of memory.

Ancient cities served as the actual, worldly landscape populated by “material” sites of memory. Some of these sites were personal and others were directly and intentionally involved in the shaping of a collective social memory, such as palaces, temples, inscriptions, walls, and gates. Many cities were also sites of social memory in a very different way. Like Babylon, Nineveh, or Jerusalem, they served as ciphers that activated and communicated various mnemonic worlds as they integrated multiple images, remembered events, and provided a variety of meanings in diverse ancient communities. Memory and the City in Ancient Israel contributes to the study of social memory in ancient Israel in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods by exploring “the city,” both urban spaces and urban centers. It opens with a study that compares basic conceptualizing tendencies of cities in Mesopotamia with their counterparts in ancient Israel. Its essays then explore memories of gates, domestic spaces, threshing floors, palaces, city gardens and parks, natural and “domesticated” water in urban settings, cisterns, and wells. Finally, the studies turn to particular cities of memory in ancient Israel: Jerusalem, Samaria, Shechem, Mizpah, Tyre, Nineveh, and Babylon. The volume, which emerged from meetings of the European Association of Biblical Studies, includes the work of Stéphanie Anthonioz, Yairah Amit, Ehud Ben Zvi, Kåre Berge, Diana Edelman, Hadi Ghantous, Anne Katrine Gudme, Philippe Guillaume, Russell Hobson, Steven W. Holloway, Francis Landy, Daniel Pioske, Ulrike Sals, Carla Sulzbach, Karolien Vermeulen, and Carey Walsh.

As a continuation of ‘Identity of Cities and City of Identities’, this book covers the arguments around the memory-experience-cognition nexus concerning palimpsests and urban places. As cities experience transitional phases of growth, development, decline, and decay, the author urges considering the notion of urban memory in place-making strategies and design decision-making processes. These explorations would add value to primary fields of architecture, architectural history, cognitive science, human geography, and urbanism. Divided into eight chapters, this book puts together a comprehensive knowledge of urban memory in city transitions. By studying urban memory, the author delves into conceptions of mental mapping, knowledge of environments, cognition of places, and the perceptual dimension of urbanism. Undoubtedly, urban memory plays a significant part in the future movements of humanistic urbanism. Given the significances of scale, pace, and mode of city transitions globally, we should remember who are the ultimate users of those living environments. Therefore, in this book, the author debates two contradictions of ‘memory of place vs. place of memory’, and ‘significance of place vs. place of significance’. Each of these is believed to be a paradox of its own, indicating places are significant through the systematic networks of cities, memories are meaningful through the neural information processing, and place memories are the essence of urban identities. The book's ultimate goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the space-time frame of place in making memorable places. Through the comprehensive explorations of many global examples, we can evaluate the significance of place in mind more carefully. This is narrated based on the recognition of nostalgia in cities, socio-temporal qualities in places, and the network of processes in our minds. In return, the aim is to provide new knowledge to make memorable cities, enhance social experiences, and capture and value the significance of place in mind.