On the city memory notion for Housing Studies: a study note

 

On the city memory notion for Housing Studies: a study note

By Joseph, K.K. Ho   dated: December 21, 2022

 

A summary: The notion of city memory offers a sophisticated intellectual lens to study Housing Studies topics that exhibit subjective, inter-subjective and critical considerations. The ingredient ideas and propositions from the pertinent academic literature are capable to be applied based on the unitary, pluralist and critical theoretical perspectives. This study note, with ideas embedded in extracted quotations, serves to introduce the city memory notion to Housing Studies students for their learning and research purpose.

 

Introduction

In Housing Studies, the topics of city heritage, quality of residential life, urban planning and design, urban regeneration, sense of home, sense of place and place-based identity are related and important ones. In this regard, the analytical notion of city memory in the subject of Geographical Imagination, as a Housing Studies subject, offers insight on these Housing Studies topics. This study note portrays the ingredient ideas as well as the analytical propositions of the city memory notion by drawing on five academic articles from the pertinent academic literature associated to Geographical Imagination. The content, primarily in the form of an organized study note on quotations, is grouped into two subcategories, with two illustrative examples included. The aim is to sensitize Housing Studies students to the conceptually rich notion of city memory; the notion, enables them to examine Housing Studies topics as an analytical approach option.

Two subcategories of ideas on the city memory notion

Subcategory 1 focuses on the description of ingredient ideas of the city memory notion (i.e. for conceptual clarification) while subcategory 2 is attentive to the analytical propositions underpinning the city memory notion (i.e. for analytical practice). The ideas, embedded in quotations, are in bold characters; they are shown as follows:

Subcategory 1: On the description of the ingredient ideas of the city memory notion

Idea 1.1: “… the urban fabric is seen as an arena where different historical eras converge. This shift may be interpreted as ``the transformation of the time of progress into the space of seemingly meaningless juxtapositions'' ..” (Crang and Travlou, 2001);

Idea 1.2: “Space acts to bound and contain an archipelago of incidents, or as Poulet (1977, page 90) puts it ``closed vases'' that are left by the withdrawal of life. The work of memory is an incessant process that puts these places in juxtaposition rather than melding them into a whole” (Crang and Travlou, 2001);

Idea 1.3: “Memories are organised and called up by attention to the present and the future; what Bergson calls ``attention to life'', or we might say being-towards” (Burgin (1996, page 25) cited by (Crang and Travlou, 2001);

Idea 1.4: “The action of memory is like a cuckoo, laying eggs in others' places. Space is practised place and is mediated via memory” (Crang and Travlou, 2001);

Idea 1.5 “with the different times coexisting, `places' are not unitary spaces and times but include sub-terranean landscapes of fragmented spaces” (Crang and Travlou, 2001);

Idea 1.6 “Nora’s (1989) conception of lieux de me´moire (realms of memory) …. highlighting both material sites of memory, including battlefields, burial places, cathedrals and prisons, and non-material sites of celebration, spectacle and ritual. ….  I situate urban memory in the body through an exploration of sensory remembrance, which, according to Bennett, is central to the concept of enchantment, defined as ‘a state of wonder . . . a condition of exhilaration and acute sensory activity’ (2001: 5) centred around a collection of smells, sounds and tastes” (Lahiri, 2011);

Idea 1.7: “City spaces are filled with symbols that communicate certain stories about a community’s past. Symbols are understood here as signs embodying multiple meanings, carrying a face and an underlying sentimental value that gives the symbol its stability and effectiveness (Bartlett, 1924; Wagoner, 2017a). Symbols could be seen in monuments, historical buildings, politicians’ billboards, graffiti and street art, or ruins of destructed structures. They are all symbols that shape the public space by preserving certain memories while intentionally concealing others” (Awad, 2017);

Idea 1.8 [an illustration] “Kolkata was also represented as a soundscape, a city of sound and music, giving primacy to auditory over the visual senses. From the cries of the street hawkers selling their services and wares, to radios blaring out film music and city dwellers practising musical scales that would percolate out of their homes and into the streets providing a varied soundtrack to Brahmo and more broadly, Kolkatan Bengali urban memory” (Lahiri, 2011).

 The ideas gathered can be comprehended as “capable to be” affiliated with different underlying theoretical perspectives. This is presented below as a rough intellectual exercise with the multi-perspective, systems-based research (Ho, 1996) flavour:

 The unitary perspective (concerning how to comprehend a prevailing culture): idea 1.1, idea 1.3, idea 1.4, idea 1.6., idea 1.8.

The pluralist perspective (concerning how to appreciate, nourish and flourish in cultural diversity): idea 1.2, idea 1.4, idea 1.5.

The critical perspective (concerning how to evaluate power [especially the oppressive one] and gain healthy human development conditions): idea 1.7.

Subcategory 2: On the analytical propositions and analytical value underpinning the city memory notion

Idea 2.1: “In shaping how we think of our world, what and how we remember (even when those memories turn out not to comply with the facts) matters” (Møller-Olsen, 2021);

Idea 2.2: “So for Halbwachs (1992) space functions for collective memory by stabilising and anchoring identities” (Crang and Travlou, 2001);

Idea 2.3: “Degen examines how urban regeneration is made effective through the organisation of sensory experience. As she argues, ‘bodies make places and places make bodies’ (Degen 2008: 199). Rather than a humanistic appeal to view the body as a constant through which imprints of the city are read, cities are rendered meaningful through memories of bodily movement and sensation” (Lahiri, 2011);

Idea 2.4: “Memorative signs’ (Starobinski 1966: 93) revive urban nostalgia, not just through an image of the past, as Starobinski suggests, but through additional sensory stimuli including taste, smell and sound” (Lahiri, 2011);

Idea 2.5: “Space is a reality that endures: since our impressions rush by, one after another, and leave nothing behind in our mind, we can understand how we can recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings. It is to space—the space we occupy, traverse, have continual access to, or can at any time reconstruct in thought or imagination that we must turn our attention” (Rosenberg, 2012);

Idea 2.6: “Collective memory, Halbwachs claimed, exists within spatial frameworks. He argued that collective memory is socially constructed and formed around collective identities defined by kinship, class, religion. Identity is anchored in physical space; and space offers the stability necessary to gain access to the past” (Rosenberg, 2012);

Idea 2.7: “memory is evoked and mediated by our relationship to physical place through the commemorative practice of walking. … For the walker, place is not stable, but ephemeral and contingent. Rather than use place to evoke a fixed idea of the past, [these works suggest that] places are physical situations that are ambiguous and contested and experienced in the present” (Rosenberg, 2012);

Idea 2.8: “… to adequately understand the urban environment is to capture the physical as well as the mental representations of the space (Foucault, 2008), to explore it as a ‘‘fully lived space, real and imagined, actual and virtual, a place for individual and collective experience and agency,’’ what Soja (2000) refers to as third space” (Awad, 2017);

Idea 2.9 [an illustration]: “Sanjoy’s multi-layered auditory memoir of Kolkata, in which the public and private spaces of the city converge: My memories of shutting and opening different windows in the morning and my mother moving from room to room. I could hear her bangles clinking, that is a very intimate sound . . . the constant noise of traffic because I live at the main crossing. … the radio also connected city dwellers in their homes and on the street to an Andersonian ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006) of radio listeners: Calcutta radio on Saturday at 1 o’ clock; everybody works until one on Saturday” (Lahiri, 2011).

 Repeating the same intellectual exercise for subcategory 1, the subcategory 2 ideas are grouped as follows:

The unitary perspective (concerning how to comprehend a prevailing culture): idea 2.2, idea 2.4, idea 2.5, idea 2.6, idea 2.7, idea 2.9

The pluralist perspective (concerning how to appreciate, nourish and flourishing in cultural diversity): idea 2.3, idea 2.8

The critical perspective (concerning how to evaluate power [especially the oppressive one] and gain healthy human development conditions): idea 2.1.

 The set of ideas gathered from the city memory literature underscores the fecund nature of the city memory theme. These ideas are capable to endorse specific theoretical perspectives; how a particular idea is theoretically anchored to which perspective in an analytical exercise in Housing Studies is largely the researcher’s own choice under his/her tailor-made theoretical framework employed in particular research application.

 Concluding remarks

The city memory notion, as introduced in this note, offers a sophisticated approach to examine an array of Housing Studies topics; this can be performed with unitary, pluralist and critical considerations simultaneously. In this respect, the city memory notion and its ingredient ideas make available an academic language to comprehend and articulate thinking on Housing Studies topics. The note points to some pertinent academic sources to study this notion. Thus, it serves as a useful study material for Housing Studies students, especially those who study the subject of Geographical Imagination.

 

References

Awad, S.H. 2017. “Documenting a contested memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo” Culture & Psychology 23(2): 234–254.

Crang, M. and Travlou, P.S. 2001. “The city and topologies of memory” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19: 161 – 177.

Ho, J.K.K. 1996. “MPSB Research Explained” Journal of the Operational Research Society 47, Operational Research Society Ltd.: 843-852.

Lahiri, S. 2011. “Remembering the city: translocality and the senses” Social & Cultural Geography 12(8): 855-869, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2011.615665.

Møller-Olsen, A. 2021. “The city is a journey: heritage and memory in Zhu Tianxin’s novella The Old Capital” International Journal of Heritage Studies 27(8): 819-829, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2020.1731839.

Rosenberg, E. 2012. “Walking in the city: memory and place” The Journal of Architecture 17(1): 131-149, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2012.659914.