The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments

About this book

Christine Boyer faces head-on the crisis of the city in the late twentieth century taking us on a fascinating journey through theaters and museums panoramas and maps buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation a complex cultural entity. Boyer brings together elements and concepts from geography critical theory architecture literature and painting in a synthetic and readable work that is broad in its reach and original in its insights. What finally emerges is a sense of the city reinvigorated with richness and potential. The City of Collective Memory describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized depicted and planned. Boyer identifies three major "maps": one common to the traditional citythe city as a work of art; one characteristic of the modern citythe city as panorama; and one appropriate to the contemporary citythe city as spectacle. It is a richly illustrated and documented study that pays considerable attention to the normally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on and derived from the city. A wide range of secondary historical literature and theoretical work is considered with evident debts to structuralist analysis of urban form represented by Aldo Rossi as well to much post-structuralist criticism from Walter Benjamin to the present.