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

by M. Christine Boyer

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, History, Urban Planning

572 pages, Paperback

First published November 2, 1994

Reviews

[Angeliki Mourelatou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely wide range of information and while so usufull for actual research etc its poetic way of writing makes it even entertaining .

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost