The Street as Locus of Collective Memory

Abstract

In discussing the role of streets and urban spaces as a locus of collective memory, I draw a distinction between overt commemoration of public memory and the accumulation of group memories in the setting of the everyday street. Community struggles over postwar street clearances stimulated interest in the physical layout of the public realm as a gestalt for shared memory, a theme of earlier work on memory and urbanism by Maurice Halbwachs. I show how Aldo Rossi and colleagues put the concept onto a practical footing by making morphological analysis the basis for urban infill, repair, and extension, most ambitiously and controversially in the ‘critical reconstruction’ of modern Berlin.