Author 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.