Monday, July 30, 2007

reviving the city, idea under construction

hello, i'm posting this from my dissertation to see if posting it will sharpen my attention and generate any helpful ideas from a reader or two. so please send me your reaction/thoughts if you're reading this. i suppose it doesn't really make sense without providing some background, but i don't have time right now. maybe later. sorry if this sounds stuck up, but that's what higher ed is all about. i'll take it down or better explain it later. thank you in advance!

Andreas Huyssen in his academic book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory talks about “the explosion of memory discourses at the end of the twentieth century” (__). The tendency in nearly all of the academic scholarship that has been published in the last two decades on historic memory is to advocate a need for recuperating the memory and history what has been lost to past dictatorships, wars, exile. While I agree with him that “memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space” (__). I also see the politically and emotionally stalling and depressing nostalgia it produces this makes me wonder: when will the process of recuperating historical memory complete? When a certain quota of monuments that commemorate marginalized subjects in the center of the city has been fulfilled? When utopia is achieved? What is needed to demystify and defragmentize urban history? These are important questions if we want to alleviate the pain of us urban-nostalgics and increase a more humanitarian historical consciousness in theory and practice. Perhaps the only solution lies in the hypothetical? Now I’d like to share a hypothetical scenario that has been tickling my imagination for a couple years now. What if nothing was ever destroyed in the city? Let us use our imagination to rewind Barcelona for a moment. Imagine if the turn-of-the-century textile factories returned to the Raval and the SEAT factory to Poble Nou, if the cheap desarrollismo construction in the periphery remained, if Franco’s equestrian statues returned to the plazas, if the shabby barracas reappeared along the coast, if the trolleys began retracing their routes from Gràcia to the Plaça de Catalunya, if in the Eixample still glimmering with beautiful modernist buildings but next to them grazed pigs and sheep and the wheat that preceded it, if the medieval walls went back up around the historic quarter, and so did the medieval synagogue on Call street, and if the streets were dirt, cobblestone and slick asphalt at the same time, and the Greek and Phoenician tombstones rose to the surface? Many questions occur to me. For example, by what names would we call the streets? Would there be unemployment? What would happen with places whose function is out-dated, such as dirt roads and the Roman cloacae? With so much ethnic architectural diversity would there be more social tolerance? How long would the farm animals survive in the Eixample? Why is this scenario confined to the hypothetical realm to begin with? Because there’s not enough space in Barcelona or any European city. The city would have had extended lengthwise running itself into the sea and mountains. But what if space were unlimited or in more abundance like in American cities? So much monumental and abolished history would be disclosed and on top of each other. It’s a hypothetical translation of Benjamin’s/Klee’s angel, the ultimate palimpsest, loads and loads of historical residues accumulated before us. Architects, students of art history, architectural preservationists, sociologists, and tourists would have a ball with their notepads and cameras. Not only that, but, returning to the topic of this chapter, could one still critique censorship, fragmentation, and mystification of history/memory if all its material references reappeared in public space? What would we learn about history? How would the state redefine cultural heritage (patrimonio cultural)? How would that time-intense scenario make us feel? Would we be able to emotionally take it--would we pass out or would we simply get used to it, developing an even thicker version of Simmel’s numbing blasé attitude to protect ourselves from the abundance of stimuli and surprises?

While the idea is fun to think about, in practical terms, I believe that the process of recuperating historical memory will be more so “complete” when authority stops exerting their hegemony over history, when memory is liberated to take it’s own organic narrative and duration. I suppose this could be reduced to our basic need for “belongingness” (Abraham Maslow). This need relies on ontological competition, the creation of enemies. With competition and enemies, memories of different political ideologies, different religions, different genders... will always be in conflict and one will continue to shade the other. If we could abolish the competitive instinct, then perhaps we would be able to strike a more peaceful balance with temporality (and our neighbors)!!


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