CITIES AND MEMORY: CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL SPACE AND THE MNEMONICS OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Hunter ReinhardtUW Dept. of History

HSTRY 494Prof. Elena Campbell

11 December 2016

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CITIES AND MEMORY: SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE AND THE MNEMONICS OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

In 2008, the world passed an important threshold; for the first time in the history of

civilization, a majority of the world’s population lived in urban environments.1 Cities are not a

new phenomenon any more than collectivity and human relations are; yet, for the first time in

human history, most of the world lived in urban built environments, and this fact has largely

come to define the conduct and context of modern civilization. The implications of global

urbanization are multidisciplinary, and express themselves across an exhaustive number fields

through an equally exhaustive number of vehicles. The social construction of space—the

imbuing of physical geography with meaning—has become a major consideration in not only the

development of urban space, but also in the understanding of personal and communal

experiences and identities.2 Though the subject is ostensibly rooted in geography and sociology,

the intrinsic elements of social space—as well as how it is formed, maintained, and changed over

time—are necessarily and inextricably connected to history through the memorialization and

imbuement of meaning in built environments. From the Viennese coffee houses, which stood as

a defining element of Austrian intellectual and social culture,3 to the innumerable culturally

unique variations of temples—pagodas, synagogues, wats, and every other unique permutation of

symbolic and religious architecture—the cultural construction of meaning in space is illustrated

through the dialectic understanding of architecture and human communalism.

1 Xing Quan Zhang, "The Trends, Promises and Challenges of Urbanisation in the World," Habitat International 54 (2016): 241.2 Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).3 Robert Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 95. Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously defined it as a special sort of institution, which represented a “sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.”

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As such an expansive and comprehensive topic, a holistic understanding of the social

construction of space in urban built environments—in short, cities and memory—must

necessarily stem from a variety of fields. This paper will assess the historiographic

understandings of memory in urban landscapes through three prisms: social geography,

architectural history, and archaeological representations of the two. The three books under

consideration here all provide valuable insight into the methodology, practicality, and teleology

of memory in urban space, both in terms of the theoretical underpinnings of collective memory

and the applications of theory in empirical evidence. By comparing these books’ presentations on

Lefebvrian space, monumental memory, and the continuity of meaning through dialectic

conflicts, a meaningful interpretation of cities and memory is elucidated through the

understanding of the core mechanics of memorialization—specifically, the dialectic contestation

of memory through the social construction of space.

One of the most expansive subjects regarding the social construction of space—

sociological geography—is the lens through which urban historian Dolores Hayden presents The

Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.4 Based largely on her Los Angeles project

of the same name, which she founded in 1984 and directed for eight years, Hayden presents a

call to action for urban designers and preservationists to orient their work towards considerations

of space. Her argument, in the context of both her work with the Power of Place project and the

book, is that LA’s historic and cultural identity lacked a “socially inclusive landscape history,”

and thus omitted an important ‘human’ element in its planned environment.5 The book itself is

structured as first a theoretical exploration of “place memory,”6 and then an illustration of theory 4 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).5 Ibid., 12.6 Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, 46. The concept of “place memory” is attributed by Hayden to philosopher Edward S. Casey, who postulated that memory was naturally place-oriented, and represented the human ability to connect with both the built and the natural

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in practice. The first part of her book, “Claiming Urban Landscapes as Public History,”

documents the historiographic understandings of public history as it is elucidated in the context

of modern geography; primarily, this means the dialectics of identity, biopolitics, and the broader

implications of meaning in space, as well as why “social and aesthetic perspectives on the

historic built environment have traditionally been fragmented.”7 Hayden establishes the primary

constructions of memory in the built environment to be the result of dialectic politics of space,

and claims that urban landscapes are vehicles of meaningful and substantial exegeses of public

history. The second part of her book, “Los Angeles: Public Pasts in the Downtown Landscape,”

explores the politics of space and mnemonic urban landscapes in the context of LA’s historic

districts, as well as in a thorough case study of the homestead and memorial of “Grandma”

Biddy Mason, a laywoman who served as an important and massively influential communal

matron in the mid-19th century African American community of LA. Here she turns to the work

of her organization’s project, which largely aimed to reconstruct perceptions of the city by

making visible the marginalized history of the city’s working-class, ethnic, and female

populations.8 Hayden’s exploration of the Biddy Mason case is particularly enlightening, as it

documents how the memorialization of her legacy was constructed physically and socially, as

well as how it was received and interpreted by the public at large.

Hayden’s exploration of the power of place is an important window through which the

interface of memory and the urban environment can—and, as Hayden argues, should—be

viewed. Nicely illustrated and written as personal experience, Hayden’s call for sociopolitical

revisionism in designing and understanding urban environments only falls short in terms of

subjectivity. Although she ties the subject and content of the book strongly to her work with the

environment.7 Ibid., xii-xiii.8 Ibid., 83-238.

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Power of Place project in LA and states her involvement in the process of defining the

organization’s mission,9 she does little to address the subjectivity her work and research entails

in terms of historiographic revisionism. The structure of the book, though ostensibly

straightforward, changes sharply in the latter half as Hayden explains the various projects her

organization was involved in without referencing the theoretical understandings set forth in the

first part of her book. She even addresses this weakness in the preface of the book, explaining

that, as a construction, “a book does not easily reflect the iterative process of working with

abstract ideas in social contexts, where practice informs theory as much as the other way

around.”10 However, this deficiency is addressed and, to some extent, overcome in the final

chapters of her book, wherein she draws connections between her work and the social-

geographic rhetoric detailed extensively in the former part of her book. Overall, Hayden aptly

defends her interpretation of urban landscapes as being representative both of collective memory

and public history, and provides a key illustration of the interactivity of urban space and

memory, both theoretically and practically.

Fairfield University historian Gavriel Rosenfeld explores a somewhat narrower, if no less

ambitious, subject. Stemming from the same understandings of social construction of space

explored by Hayden, but contextualized in the field of architectural history, Rosenfeld’s Munich

and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich is an intriguing and

thoroughly thought-out documentation of Munich’s built environment, and how its urban

landscape reflected a reluctance and ultimate inability to properly address the memory of Nazism

9 Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, xi. Hayden prefaces the book by asserting that “[the book] is an extended reflection on [her] eight years of experience in both research and practice, an exploration of how the social history of urban space may lead to public history and public art,” as well an explanation of her organization’s mission to “situate women’s history and ethnic history in downtown, in public places, through experimental, collaborative projects by historians, designers, and artists. 10 Ibid., xiv.

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in the Haupstadt der Bewegung, the ‘Capital of the Movement’.11 Drawing extensively on the

architectural legacies of the city, Rosenfeld documents the physical memorialization of Munich’s

cultural identity through four vectors: the reconstruction, restoration, and preservation of existing

or destroyed buildings; construction of new buildings in the city, and the elements and dialectical

nature of postwar architecture; Nazi architecture, and how the physical reminders of the Third

Reich were handled; and the demolition, restoration and, most importantly, the erection of new

monuments pertaining to the Nazi past.12 Though potent in their own elucidation, these elements

become especially meaningful to the discussion of cities and memory through Rosenfeld’s

examination and comparison of them through three periods of Munich’s architectural biography.

Rosenfeld shows that throughout the restoration (1945-1958), modern (1958 -1975) and

postmodern (1975-2000) periods, the built environment of the city was a sociopolitical

battleground between traditionalist and modernist forces, both of which—much to Rosenfeld’s

obvious chagrin—denied the centrality of Nazism in Munich's history.13 How Munich failed to

address its Nazi past in its urban architectural vernacular, according to Rosenfeld, represents the

fact that Vergangensheitsbewältegung—“the process of coming to terms with or mastering the

past”14—has no clear point of termination; rather, it is constantly played out and contested in the

construction of urban space.

Rosenfeld divides Munich and Memory into three parts, each dealing with one of the

aforementioned timeframes: restoration, modernism, and postmodernism. Within each of these

11 Gavriel Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).12 Ibid., 6-7.13 Ibid., 8-9, 304. “No matter how much competition there has been over the legacy of the Third Reich… a careful survey of Munich’s postwar urban development strongly suggests that, in the final analysis, the city has generally adhered to a traditionalist view of the Nazi past.” “In short, only this conservative strategy of coming to terms with the past seemed able to effectively suppress Munich’s past as the Haupstadt de Bewegung.”14 Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory, 1.

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subdivisions, the rough outline of each part is relatively formulaic. The first chapter of each part

addresses the rough definitions of these frameworks’ stylistic and ideological characteristics, as

well as the sociological and cultural ‘roots’ of each era—that is, how these frameworks are

characterized in the physical and social landscape of the urban environment. This is followed by

explorations of the specifics of Munich’s architecture in relation to the city’s ‘mnemonic’

history, and how the physical geography of the city interacts with the socially constructed

narrative expressed in the urban architectural vernacular. Rosenfeld dedicates one chapter each

to the historic preservation, postwar architecture, Nazi architecture, and monuments of each era,

with the exception of the final part— “Postmodernism, 1975-2000”—which groups together the

architectural legacies of the Third Reich with the collective built environments of the city. The

structure of the book lends itself well to Rosenfeld’s primary argument that the collective

memory and socially-constructed space of a city is explicated in the contestation of space and the

“constancy of mnemonic competition,”15 and is shaped indefinitely through interpretations and

localizations of memory. By exploring the same architectural and mnemonic elements

throughout Munich’s postwar history, Rosenfeld demonstrates that the history of the city is

inundated with—and largely defined by—the same sociocultural and historiographic themes,

particularly the contention of modernist and traditionalist forces and the unwillingness (or

inability) to meaningfully address the Nazi legacy.

His insistence on the latter theme, however, represents a considerable weakness of the

book and its central argument. Although he does aptly describe how Münchners did little to

admonish (or even acknowledge) the Nazi legacy of the city, his insistence on its centrality

becomes tedious well before the end of the book. What he demands of the city—that it present

itself physically as a place dedicated to the "jarring of memory" so that the legacy of the Third

15 Ibid., 7-8.

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Reich remains vividly fresh and present16—is, holistically, unrealistic. It is impractical to assume

that the entire population of Munich was (or even should be) motivated by moral or

philosophical introspection. Overall, however, he does well to address the contestation of space

and memory in the city and to assert its importance in the institutionalization and construction of

social space.

Having explored both the socio-geographic and architectural understandings of cities and

memory, it is important to identify how these fields interact and overlap: in what ways, or

through which conceptualizations, can the two be synthesized? Omur Harmansah’s Cities and

the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East provides an interesting illustration in

consideration of this question, as it explores the construction of social space through the prism of

archaeology.17 This field constitutes an important and particularly unique factor in the study of

urban memory and the construction of space, as it allows for both the examination of historic

processes of social construction and—more idiosyncratically—the foundation of cities and urban

centers. Harmansah sets out with these considerations in mind, and quickly establishes the

foundation of cities as being an invaluable addition to the discussion of socially constructed

space and memory. To Harmansah, the founding of cities is a "negotiated, dialectic process"; by

contextualizing the short-term agency of political elites within “longer-term settlement trends,

landscape processes, and broader environmental histories,” his monograph aims to develop an

understanding of the nature of space-producing similar to those espoused by Rosenfeld and

Hayden.18 Through detailed architectural and archaeological analysis of ancient Mesopotamian

build sites, as well as thorough explorations of ancient texts pertinent to the discussion of social

16 Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory, 313.17 Omur Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).18 Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, 5.

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space in the construction of cities, Harmansah demonstrates that city foundations of the royal

elite in Assyria and the Syro-Hittite polities are “reappropriations of existing places of cultural

significance into coherent, state-sponsored urban construction projects,” and that constructing the

urban landscape “entailed the gradual building up of public spaces through the making of

ceremonial and ritual spaces.”19

The structure of the book is somewhat more fragmented than the works of Rosenfeld and

Hayden. The introductory chapter makes it clear what philosophical influences shape the

presentation, and outlines Harmansah’s thesis—the sociological exegesis of Syro-Hittite city-

founding. Harmansah then turns, in chapters 2 and 3, to the archaeological data and landscape

geography used for analysis and interpretation, establishing the contextual built and natural

environments in which space is socially constructed. After providing the larger geographic and

historic context of his study—the larger regional landscapes in which the main cities discussed

are to be found—Harmansah explores the sociocultural meaning of monuments, urban space, and

spatial narratives of identity, citing and explicating case studies such as Carchemish, Nineveh,

and Kalhu. In chapter 4, he synthesizes the contextual exposition of chapters 2 and 3 into a

broader sociological understanding by examining the spatial narratives promoted in the

monuments, urban spaces, and commemorative festivities of these ancient cities, concluding that

the steles and orthostated architecture that constituted the mnemonic vernacular were defined

through the interface of political discourse and the social construction of space.20 Drawing

directly from Henri Lefebvre’s pioneering work in the field of social geography, Harmansah

asserts the centrality of social-spatiality in understanding the construction of a city in the context

19 Ibid., 190-191.20 Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, 134. "With a critical understanding of the distribution and configuration of monuments in public spaces, spatial narratives allow us to reflect on the relationship between political discourse and landscape, between colonial power and the making of space, between state monuments and collective memory."

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of the ancient Near East.21 Chapter 5 is loosely constructed as an examination of architectural

technologies and the poetics of urban space, and examines the depositional practices, urban

environment, and landscape architecture of Syro-Mesopotamian societies, drawing from the

same vehicles of exegesis discussed in chapter 4. Harmansah then concludes with a broad

summation of both his work and the normative interpretations of social space that Cities and the

Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East endorses. This latter point is perhaps Harmansah’s

most important contribution to the discussion of socially constructed space, as it promotes the

understanding of cities as social products of space that encapsulate the surrounding environment,

past traditions, architecture, historical meaning, and ultimately the desires of their rulers: as

Harmansah overarchingly demonstrates, “the practices of historical commemoration in buildings

make use of socially recognized systems of representation, both textual and pictorial, and operate

at a societal level of historical consciousness and collective memory."22

Where Harmansah’s monograph falls short, however, is in terms of the interconnectivity

of his interpretations. While he does offer a sufficient array of published and known results from

several sites and regions in the Near East to lay out the case, his presentation is not explicative in

exactly how landscapes, nature, abandoned settlements, and architectural histories combine, at

such various scales, to allow meaning to emerge at these specific sites. The fragmented structure

of his book—while addressing a wide variety of ways in which memory may emerge—does little

to describe how memory does emerge, specifically in a way that constitutes a cohesive societal

consensus or collective memory. Additionally, his citation of the sociological works and

understandings of space of Henri Lefebvre (among others) breeds a necessary air of caution; it is

21 Ibid., 104-108. Henri Lefebvre’s hallmark study, The Production of Urban Space (1974), is widely considered to be one of the most foundational works of social geography. Lefebvre particularly emphasized the conceptualization of urban space as a social product; his work will be discussed in full on page 1022 Ibid,, 185.

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conceptually difficult to take a method based on 20th-century ideas (necessarily products of their

time) and apply it to past cases, especially considering ambiguous data that does not lend itself

easily to understanding urban meaning and identity. Asserting, for instance, that the orthostatic

masonry techniques of the Middle Bronze Age urban landscapes have direct mnemonic and

representational meaning, and constitute “symbolically charged technological [styles] that gave

shape and meaning to [Syro-Mesopotamian] urban spaces”23—without adequately illustrating

how it provides shape and meaning—falls just short of teleological pigeonholing. This is not to

say that Harmansah’s work is invalidated by ascribing modern values to ancient traditions.

Rather, it illustrates that the diverse multidisciplinary interpretations of socially constructed

space are rooted historiographically in poststructuralist understandings of urban space and

identity and their contextual environments.

Each author presents a unique prism through which the social construction of urban space

and the mnemonics of the built environment are refracted. Their idiosyncrasies—both in terms of

their content and of the fields from which they originate—are overshadowed by a number of key

similarities, which provide a broader synthesis of how cities and memory are interconnected.

Each study, for instance, though rooted in varied fields and dealing with independent subjects,

relied heavily on the conventions of Lefebvrian social, political, and economic geography. Henri

Lefebvre’s understandings of space as a necessarily social product—and his elucidations of

representations of space, representational space, and spatial practice—inundate many discussions

of social memory and space.24 Of the monographs considered in this essay, Harmansah addresses

these elements most directly; his assertion that the practice of founding of cities rests on the

convergence of “(a) the utopic ideals of the imperial agents, (b) the social significations of space,

23 Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, 178.24 Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (Continuum Studies in Philosophy, London; New York: Continuum, 2004).

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and (c) the material practices of the society” directly parallels Lefebvre’s understandings.25

Similarly, Hayden’s discussions of the theoretical implications of socially constructed space

draw from concepts of Lefebvrian space, albeit from a more selective reading of his work. Her

interpretation of social reproduction as being expressed through the built urban environment—

defined in turn by the dialectic politics of space—is directly drawn from Lefebvre’s

understanding of political and economic geography, which argues that every society in history

“has shaped a distinctive social space that meets its intertwined requirements for economic

production and social reproduction.”26 Rosenfeld’s monograph is the only of the three that does

not directly cite Lefebvrian concepts; however, the author’s description of conflictual memory—

expressed, as he effectively argues, through the physically built environment of the city—closely

parallels Lefebvre’s understanding that social space is “a means of human reappropriation

through the development of counter-spaces forged by artistic expression and social resistance.”27

The ubiquity of Lefebvrian concepts, terminology, and understandings across all three books

demonstrates the pervasiveness of his work through the interactivity of urbanism and memory;

holistically, the dialectic of place is dominated by the considerations of how societies imbue

space with meaning.

A second consideration in synthesis of these sources is their consideration of specifically

and purposefully mnemonically-charged urban environments—in short, monuments and other

vehicles of physical memorialization. Here the most obvious illustrations are evident in

Rosenfeld’s work, as his monograph largely focuses on the mnemonic implications of the built

environment of Munich. Specifically, Rosenfeld thoroughly documents the sociocultural 25 Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, 105.26 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Qtd. in Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, 19.27 Chris Butler. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City. Nomikoi. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012.

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relevance and implications of monuments through his extensive inventory and analysis of

postwar monuments; his presentation of the subject of monuments is a meaningful one, as it

establishes both the normative expectations of memorialization and examples of its failure.

While defining monuments as “designed exclusively to serve memory,” and recognizing that “it

is less what monuments represent than the reasons why they are erected that sheds light upon the

construction of local memory,” he also rightly notes that many monuments are ineffective

because they are hidden away, badly sited, or include ambiguous texts, and thus do not serve the

purpose of creating or shaping critical collective memory.28 By conflating this inefficacy with

Munich’s “inability to mourn,” Rosenfeld implicitly establishes monuments as being a direct

representation of social space and collective memory. Harmansah continues in a similar vein by

describing the social narratives espoused by commemorative monuments concomitant with the

urban construction projects of Iron Age Syro-Mesopotamian cities. Drawing again from

Lefebvrian thought, Harmansah claims the sociocultural importance of monuments is

exemplified in their displaying of ideologically charged narratives of the state into sites of public

gathering and ritual practice, and that monuments actively represent the dialectic of space

production through their dynamic reorientation of culture and rituality along public dimensions.29

Hayden’s commentary on the interactivity of the built environment and social memory

through the vehicle of monuments is less explicit, but holistically represents a broad synthesis of

Rosenfeld’s and Harmansah’s understandings of monuments. Hayden’s Power of Place project—

as discussed earlier—aimed to restructure the paradigmatic understandings of Los Angeles’

public history and collective memory through the pluralistic ‘revealing’ of marginalized

histories. The organization’s call to action (and, consequently, Hayden’s) was to allow

28 Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory, 107-147.29 Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, 152.

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communities to collectively define their past, present and future through the reinterpretation of

built environments; the memorialization of Biddy Mason’s homestead and the shaping of

collective memory in “Little Tokyo” both represent such attempts at sociocultural

‘revisionism’.30 Mnemonic physical environments, accordingly, represent a union of Rosenfeld’s

normativity—with regards to what monuments should intrinsically represent—and Harmansah’s

expression of power in space. The holistic understanding of monuments as social vehicles is thus

necessary to the exploration of cities and memory, as it represents both a bidirectional link

between the two and the normative implications of socially constructed space.

If Lefebvrian thought and a discourse on the meaning of monuments are defining

elements in the relationship of urban environments and memory—which, as this essay has

argued, they are—then what, in turn, defines these overarching themes? The answer lies in

understanding the theoretical underpinnings of both subjects; at the root of both physical

memorialization and the broad school of Lefebvrian thought is the dialectic contestation of

memory. The former—physical memorialization—is best summarized by Pierre Nora’s

conceptualizations of lieux de mémoire, which holds that the memorialization of history in

physicality represents “a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up

with the sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the

embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.”31 Central

to history, according to Nora, is “a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory,”

which establishes lieux de mémoire as phenomenal and abstract, and necessarily subject to

teleological subjectivity.32 Lefebvre’s understandings similarly reflect the dialectic contestation

of memory, as the social production of space is defined through both the reproduction of society

30 Hayden, The Power of Place, 82-24031 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire," Representations 26 (1989): 7-24.32 Ibid., 7.

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through social action and the “unequal, unbalanced distribution of agencies at work in the

making of urban space.”33 Lefebvre, in the same vein as Nora, also conceptualizes mnemonic

environments and artifacts as being “concrete abstractions”: paradoxical representations of the

interface of history and memory.34 Through understanding the mechanics of Lefebvrian social

space and physical mnemonics, the theoretical interactivity of cities and socially constructed

space becomes evident in the conflictual nature and continued discourse of memory.

The elements of the dialectic contestation of memory are expressed in many ways, but

nonetheless are present in nearly all considerations of the construction of space and memory. For

Rosenfeld, this is the constant contention between traditionalist and modernist forces in the

shaping of Munich’s built and socially constructed urban environment. The fragmented

conceptualization of local memory—predominantly favoring traditionalism, but nonetheless far

from monolithic—shapes the discourse throughout Rosenfeld’s study; in all three timeframes, he

characterizes Munich’s architectural legacy and cultural identity as being defined by “the

constancy of mnemonic competition.”35 In the context of Hayden’s work—both her LA project

and The Power of Place—the contestation of memory is the defining element in the theoretical

and philosophical platform from which her objectives stem. In bringing together planners, artist,

historians, geographers, activists, and members of the community to collectively ‘reveal’ LA’s

communal memory by realigning development of the built environment towards considerations

of Lefebvrian space, Hayden intrinsically (and explicitly) establishes her work as a counter-

memory to traditionalist Anglo-American history that dominates historic architectural 33 Łukasz, Henri Lefebvre on Space Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, 133-35.34 Ibid., 136.35 Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory, 8. This competition is present throughout his discussion, with small idiosyncratic variances between timeframes. In the immediate post-war era, it is conflicting impulses towards restoration and renewal that represents this conflict; in the modernist period, it is the conflict between populist historic preservation movements and actors of revisionist reconstruction; and in the postmodernist period, it is the recontestation of the modernist memory of the Third Reich that stigmatized architectural tradition.

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preservationism, and thus the mnemonic vernacular of the city.36 Even in ancient Syro-

Mesopotamian societies, as Harmansah argues, the architectural legacy and social history is

shaped by the interaction of political discourse and collective social activity.37 The construction

of space in ancient urban centers, shaped largely by the interface of imperial cosmopolitanism

and vernacular social practices of Iron Age society, conveyed conflictual implications of short-

term political motivations and long-term considerations of settlement trends and societal

processes.

Considering all three monographs in tandem, the key mechanic of social

memorialization, and of the mnemonic imbuement of meaning in the built environment of cities,

is revealed to be the necessarily conflictual nature of memory. This foundational method of

mnemonic construction, though potent in its own right, is more meaningful in its ubiquity and

fundamentality across multiple subjects, disciplines, and conceptualizations. The context of this

discussion has been of multidisciplinary and dialectic exploration into the implications of global

urbanism; the importance of this topic, accordingly, is expressed through several independent

fields of research, and its relevance is implicated in the consideration of these fields as

interconnected and meaningfully complex subjects. In a world that is increasingly and

objectively defined by urbanism—both socioculturally and demographically—the

historiographic understandings of memory bear a significant weight in pursuit of understanding

not only the contemporaneous contexts of the past and present, but also in the exploration of

what it means to be a communally-defined species. Memory, in other words, is an important

window into the one universal constant in civilization as we know it: the condition of being

human.

36 Hayden, The Power of Place, 245.37 Harmansah, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, 102-153.

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