IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section B

Abstract

Walter Benjamin (1940) stated that the “great accomplishments of any civilization – its monuments – inevitably further the interests of the victorious at the expense of the vanquished.” Many of our public spaces are de facto monument themselves, the subject of preserving cultural heritage. This paper, using several case studies, critically interrogates how urban public spaces act as intentional records and unintentional repositories of memory, as locations where histories are remembered, reproduced, enacted, and contested. Beyond locating complex sentiments and responses that are central to reflecting on the past in uncertain times, among them nostalgia, denial, loss, hopelessness, and hope, urban spaces both construct and reconstruct memories over time and through collective experiences, and thus are places where meanings are shaped by various actors. How do such spaces become battlegrounds for competing narratives of history, identity, and belonging? How are they contested, symbolically and materially, by different social groups, governments, and political movements? Whose histories are materialized and celebrated, and whose are excluded, forgotten and de facto erased? The notion of “simultaneous presence and absence” and the attendant inventory of the lacunae, of what and who is absent, missing, hidden, invisible, or unseen in public space guides a reflection on how urban spaces act as living archives, where collective memories are continuously built, erased, and renegotiated, and counteract a hegemonic manufacturing of idealized and idolized pasts as a method of creating particular identities and exclusive forms of belonging vis a vis a vis “liquid modernity” and “liquid fear” (Bauman 2000 and 2006).