scholarly journals PRACTICES OF URBAN COMMEMORATION: FEATURES OF THE CITY CULTURAL MEMORY FORMATION

Author(s):  
Natalia G. Fedotova ◽  

From the standpoint of the cultural approach, the cultural memory of the city is a complex space for storing, transmitting and updating the cultural meanings of the city (events, dates, legends, myths, famous personalities, places, etc.). The scientific interest in its research is explained by the fact that the cultural memory of the city is a symbolic resource capable of determining the urban reality, identifying the present and future of the city. The presence of current and potential layers gives the cultural memory of the city the property of mobility, which makes it necessary to artificial support the city cultural meanings and, on the contrary, opens up the possibility to update their repertoire in the urban space. This function is performed by the practice of urban commemoration as a means of forming the cultural memory of the city. Since the cultural memory of the city is a socio-cultural construct, there-fore, the role of urban commemoration increases, which, through the actualization of episodes of the past, determines what to remember and how to perceive cultural meanings. The identification and analysis of urban commemoration practices can be carried out on the basis of studying the specifics and conditions of broadcasting commemorative information, through an in-terdisciplinary synthesis of available fragmentary studies. Thus, a variety of urban commemoration practices should be presented using the following typology: a) visual and verbal practices; b) emotion-al and cognitive practices; c) institutional practices; d) performative practices; e) symbolic practices. Separately, it is necessary to highlight the practices of urban commemoration, which purposefully shape the cultural memory of the city and are directly related to the memorial culture of the city, which sets the contours of the social policy of memory. The general condition of commemorative practices is communication, which provides the process of structuring cultural memory itself. It is in the process of communication that symbolic marking of the cultural meanings of the city is carried out through the transformation of individual memories into collective ones, as well as through the cultivation of the city memory fragments (actual or latent). In the era of the information society, a special communica-tive role belongs to the media as a powerful generator of cultural meanings that accumulates com-memorative practices. Becoming a part of the media field, a fragment of cultural memory can acquire a certain value, become famous, get a peculiar assessment and interpretation. The presented typology of practices of urban commemoration and the revealed features of their representation in the urban environment are primary in nature and are an attempt to unite separate studies into a single continuum, thus creating the conditions for a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism of the city cultural memory formation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-364
Author(s):  
Natalia G. Fedotova

The article is devoted to the discourse of the city’s cultural memory. The relevance of studying this topic is determined not only by the fundamental aspect associated with the episodicity of existing studies of this phenomenon. From an applied point of view, the city’s cultural memory is a symbolic resource that can be used to create an appealing image, form a sustainable urban identity, and strengthen the citizen’s sense of belonging to the city. The accumulation and objectification of cultural memory take place in symbolic forms, which makes it important to study the practices of symbolizing the urban past, the essence of which is to generate the significance of the relevant or latent layers of cultural memory for the citizens.The article presents the results of the final stage of research related to the study of the process of constructing the cultural memory of the city. The purpose of the article is to analyze modern practices of symbolizing fragments of the urban past, which mean their significance for contemporaries. Basing on the culturological cross-section of the issue, the author integrates different research contexts. The methodological basis of the article is the communicative approach that focuses on the processes of meaning formation, and the constructivist method that considers memory as a multi-layered and dynamic construct. Analyzing the practices of symbolizing the urban past by the example of Russian cities, the author of the article demonstrates how the episodes of the city’s memory are updated in the modern world, how cultural meanings become memorable for citizens. The author uses the results of previous studies and identifies the following elements of the symbolization of the urban past: a) ways of encoding fragments of the past; b) communicative trajectories of memory symbolization; c) factors of producing meanings about the collective past of the city. The obtained results open up new frontiers in understanding the processes of formation of the collective ideas about the city, and prospects for empirical research, forecasting and constructing the cultural memory of Russian cities, giving them the opportunity to change their present and future.


Author(s):  
Samuel Llano

Scholarship on urban culture and the senses has traditionally focused on the study of literature and the visual arts. Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in the effects of sound on the urban space and its population. These studies analyze how sound generates identities that are often fragmentary and mutually conflicting. They have also explored the rise of campaigns against the negative effects of noise on the nerves and health of the population. However, little research has been carried out on the impact of sound and music in areas of broader social and political concern, such as social aid, hygiene, and social control. Based on a detailed study of Madrid from the 1850s to the 1930s, this book argues that sound and music have played a key role in structuring the transition to modernity by helping to negotiate social attitudes and legal responses to problems such as poverty, insalubrity, and crime. Attempts to control the social groups that own unwanted musical practices such as organ-grinding and flamenco performances in taverns raised awareness about public hygiene, alcoholism, and crime and triggered legal reform in these areas. In addition to marginalizing and persecuting these musical practices, the authorities and the media used workhouse bands as instruments of social control to spread “aural hygiene” across the city and wipe out unwanted musical practices.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.


Author(s):  
Elena A. Kranzeeva ◽  
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Evgeny V. Golovatsky ◽  
Anna V. Orlova ◽  
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...  

The relevance of the study is associated with the speed of modern sociopolitical processes in the territories, the emergence of new participants and tools for achieving their own and collective interests. The aim of the article is to describe the real urban processes of sociopolitical interaction in the conditions of reactive relations, taking into account the interests and positions of the participants, the content and dynamics of interaction. The methodological basis of the study is the concept of social action and power relations by M. Weber, the concept of resources by A. Giddens, research works by L.L. Shpak, who considers interaction in the aggregate of regional everyday sociopolitical practices. The article proposes a framework for the study of rapid reactive actions and relationships that can significantly accelerate the flow of social and political interactions. The analysis of reactive relations, the dynamics of the nature of social and political interaction on the scale of the urban space, as well as confirmation of signs of reactivity of relations, is based on the analysis of two cases of Kemerovo related to the improvement of the urban space, demonstrating at the same time the practice of social and political communications. For the Statue of Saint Barbara case, the method of content analysis is used to study the Internet audience; the method allows analyzing the density and coherence of information communications taking into account the inclusion and/or belonging of users in relation to the analyzed data. The use of the method of analyzing event data in the media (event analysis) for the Lazurny case illustrates the dynamics of social and political interaction. As a result, it has been revealed that, in the context of new reactive relations, the communicative potential of ordinary users (citizens) grows in the social and political interaction of a city or a certain territory. The practices of social interaction considered in the article are replenished from the implementation of innovative projects within the framework of urban communities. An important role is played by the constantly changing conditions for the transmission and accumulation of information significant in the urban space, as well as by the activity resource – active drivers of modern communication. The prospect of further research is the search for new tools and indicators of a new quality of social and political interaction in the context of reactive relations


Author(s):  
Юрий Владимирович Преображенский

Рассмотрен вопрос о сущности социокультурного пространства и его пересечении с экономическим пространством города. Показано, что наиболее эффективная организация пространственного взаимодействия данных пространств во многом является географической задачей. Предлагается метод изучения социальных практик населения для локализации точек и линий взаимодействия социокультурной и экономической сфер. Рассмотрены практики, в ходе которых создаются социокультурные ценности, положительно влияющие на экономическое пространство города. Обсуждается проблема влияния пешеходных пространств (наиболее насыщенных практиками) на формирование имиджа города. The question of the essence of the socio-cultural space and its intersection with the economic space of the city is considered. It is shown that the most effective organization of the spatial interaction of these spaces is in many ways a geographic task. A method is proposed for studying the social practices of the population to localize points and lines of interaction between the socio-cultural and economic spheres. The practice is considered in the course of which socio-cultural values are created that have a positive effect on the economic space of the city. The problem of the influence of pedestrian spaces (the most saturated with practices) on the formation of the city's image is discussed.


Author(s):  
Jacob Kreutzfeldt

Street cries, though rarely heard in Northern European cities today, testify to ways in which audible practices shape and structure urban spaces. Paradigmatic for what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the refrain’, the ritualised and stylised practice of street cries may point at the dynamics of space-making, through which the social and territorial construction of urban space is performed. The article draws on historical material, documenting and describing street cries, particularly in Copenhagen in the years 1929 to 1935. Most notably, the composer Vang Holmboe and the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen have investigated Danish street cries as a musical and a spatial phenomenon, respectably. Such studies – from their individual perspectives – can be said to explore the aesthetics of urban environments, since street calls are developed and heard specifically in the context of the city. Investigating the different methods employed in the two studies and presenting Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain as a framework for further studies in the field, this article seeks to outline a fertile area of study for sound studies: the investigation of everyday refrains and the environmental relations they express and perform. Today changed sensibilities and technologies have rendered street crying obsolete in Northern Europe, but new urban ritornells may have taken their place.


Author(s):  
Ilaria Geddes ◽  
Nadia Charalambous

This project was developed as an attempt to assess the relationship between different morphogenetic processes, in particular, those of fringe belt formation as described by M.R.G. Conzen (1960) and Whitehand (2001), and of centrality and compactness as described by Hillier (1999; 2002). Different approaches’ focus on different elements of the city has made it difficult to establish exactly how these processes interact or whether they are simply different facets of development reflecting wider socio-economic factors. To address this issue, a visual, chronological timeline of Limassol’s development was constructed along with a narrative of the socio-economic context of its development.  The complexity of cities, however, makes static visualisations across time difficult to read and assess alongside textual narratives. We therefore took the step of developing an animation of land use and configurational analyses of Limassol, in order bring to life the diachronic analysis of the city and shed light on its generative mechanisms. The video presented here shows that the relationship between the processes mentioned above is much stronger and more complex than previously thought. The related paper explores in more detail the links between fringe belt formation as a cyclical process of peripheral development and centrality as a recurring process of minimisation of gains in distance. The project’s outcomes clearly show that composite methods of visualisations are an analytical opportunity still little exploited within urban morphology. References Conzen, M.R.G., 1960. Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis, London: Institute of British Geographers. Hillier, B., 2002. A Theory of the City as Object: or how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space. Urban Des Int, 7(3–4), pp.153–179. Hillier, B., 1999. Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids. Urban Des Int, 4(3–4), pp.107–127. Whitehand, J.W.R., 2001. British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition. Urban Morphology, 5(2), pp.103–109.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Carla de Lira Bottura

This article introduces partial discussions from a doctoral research in progress that has as object of study the tendency to paci cation and concealment of con icts veri ed in the production process of contemporary urban space - particularly in the most recent Brazil- ian cities - as well as its strategies and mechanisms of control. As a eld of study, it is proposed the city of Palmas, capital of Tocantins, last planned capital of the twentieth century, founded on May 20, 1989, a year that symbolizes the opening of the Western world to the neoliberal economic policy. Based on the observation of the absence of signi cant movements of resistance to the urban space production process at Palmas and interpreting it as a re ection of pacifying tendency of consensus and appeasement / masking of con icts as a feature of neoliberal city, we propose the hypothesis of physical and territorial con guration of the city as a laboratory of the neoliberal model of urban management, in which socio-spa- tial dynamics gradually developed in other contemporary cities through processes historically constructed, get explicit and take place, immediately or in a very short time. Through a historical ap- proach to the context of its creation and occupation, we propose an urban space production reading based on the recognition of char- acteristics relating to its conditions of New Town and neoliberal city as well as the incipient action of the social movements dedicated to the struggles for housing as social agents in this process. 


Author(s):  
Valentyna Bohatyrets ◽  
Liubov Melnychuk

Nowadays, in the age of massive spatial transformations in the built environment, cities witness a new type of development, different in size, scale and momentum that has been thriving since late 20th century. Diverse transformation of historic cities under modernisation has led to concerns in terms of the space and time continuity disintegration and the preservation of historic cities. In a similar approach, we can state that city and city space do not only consist of present, they also consist of the past; they include the transformations, relations, values, struggles and tensions of the past. As it could be defined, space is the history itself. Currently, we would like to display how Chernivtsi cultural and architectural heritage is perceived and maintained in the course of its evolution. Noteworthy, Chernivtsi city is speculated a condensed human existence and vibes, with public urban space and its ascriptions are its historical archives and sacred memory. Throughout the history, CHERNIVTSI’s urban landscape has changed, while preserving its unique and distinctive spirit of diversity, multifacetedness and tolerance. The city squares of the Austrian, Romanian and Soviet epochs were crammed with statuary of royal elites and air of aristocracy, soviet leaders and a shade of patriotic obsession, symbolic animals and sacred piety – that eventually shaped its unique “Bukovynian supranational identity”. Keywords: Chernivtsi, cultural memory, memory studies, monuments, squares, identity.


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