Karen E. Till

Staging the past: landscape designs, cultural identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache

The controversies surrounding the re-establishment of a national memorial in Berlin, the Neue Wache, are examined to discuss the process of public memory. After unification, West German media continued to define public debate. ‘Established’ interest groups (politicians, victims, historical experts and citizen groups) were included in media discussions whereas others (East Germans, marginalized groups) were not. Criticisms about the function, form and ‘forgetfulness’ of the memorial reflected West German memory politics (Erinnerungspolitik) about the historical uses of: national institutions, religious (but not gendered) national symbols, and social categories of victim and perpetrator. In response to criticisms, a plaque was added to the memorial. Locally, activists created inclusive spaces to address critically the meaning of the National Socialist past in contemporary landscapes. The memorial is thus both a material object and a site of negotiation; it remains ‘entangled’ with the ongoing creation of historical narratives, official visions, local memories and cultural productions.

Neotraditional Towns and Urban Villages: The Cultural Production of a Geography of ‘Otherness’

The ‘neotraditional’ planning movement in the USA is criticized through an analysis of promotional materials for the urban village of Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County, CA. The ‘traditions’ of towns and villages are viewed as recent ‘inventions’ created by corporate planners; they are attempts to validate the establishment of residential communities through ambiguous, yet familiar, historical symbols. Yet the identities constructed for neotraditional towns and urban villages make sense only in relation to the ‘other’. In southern Orange County, corporate planners present their master-planned communities as ‘distant’ from the suburbs and cities located in Los Angeles and in northern Orange County according to a scale of temporal, geographic, and social values. Implicit to neotraditionalism is a geography of otherness. This geography reinforces existing social and spatial divisions, promotes reactionary and exclusionary territorial identities, and legitimizes the status quo.

Artistic and activist memory-work: Approaching place-based practice

While an emerging interdisciplinary field of memory studies exists, what it is and might become remains open to debate. This article calls for a memory studies agenda that remains sensitive to the ways individuals and groups experience memory as multi-sensual, spatial ways of understanding their worlds. Artistic and activist memory-work in particular offers at least two contributions to such an agenda. It challenges ontological assumptions that underpin much of the recent interdisciplinary body of research on memory, including understandings of site, social and body memory, and the role of place in memory; and it invites scholars to consider their research in terms of socially responsible place-based practice. In this article, I discuss sites of social engagement, embodied and social memory, and wounded places to consider how artistic and activist place-based practice might fundamentally change how memory studies scholars think about their research.

NEW URBANISM AND NATURE: GREEN MARKETING AND THE NEOTRADITIONAL COMMUNITY

A central goal of New Urbanism (NU) is to provide alternatives to suburbs through ecologically sound designs and more natural communities. This article situates NU environmental rhetoric culturally and analyzes why this form of nature is being promoted now. I argue that NU anthropocentric understandings of nature reflect and resonate with dominant mainstream environmental ideas in American culture. To understand why NU planners may uncritically adopt these socially and spatially limited understandings of nature, I discuss the institutional contexts of the planning profession. For various reasons, planners historically have understood nature in geographically restricted ways, as Utopian garden, mappable data, and consumer product. More recently, NU ideals of community have been defined by representations of nature that may be construed by consumers as a form of green politics. This article concludes by stressing the need for further research and advocating more inclusive understandings of human-environment relations in the planning process. [Key words: New Urbanism, mainstream, environmentalism, planning profession, green marketing.]

(RE)PLACING THE NEW URBANISM DEBATES: TOWARD AN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AGENDA

New Urbanism (NU) is a complex planning paradigm and social movement that has recently become influential in planning, residential development, and government housing circles. To introduce this special issue on NU, we describe the history and important figures of the movement and provide a brief literature review of popular, academic, and professional presses. Because NU is a multifaceted phenomenon, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach to understanding it, one that would promote constructive dialogue and a range of perspectives (and choices) within and between disciplines, professions, and communities. From the vantage point of the academic community (in particular, geography), we argue that various theoretical and methodological perspectives can contribute to a more progressive understanding and implementation of NU practices at various scales. We conclude by outlining three areas for future research: documenting how NU is understood and implemented by urban professionals, analyzing urban infill projects, and conducting ethnographies of neotraditional towns. [Key words: New Urbanism (NU), neotraditional towns, residential communities, interdisciplinary research.]

Mapping and excavating spectral traces in post-apartheid Cape Town

This article explores how spectral traces at places marked by acts of violence and injustice allow residents to come into contact with past and future inhabitants of the postcolonial city. We examine controversies surrounding Prestwich Place, Cape Town, an informal burial ground for colonial underclasses that was unearthed when construction began for an upscale ‘New York-style’ apartment and office complex. The human remains that emerged embodied a past that exceeded national narrations of public memory and presented this past as an object of concern for private capital and activists. Rather than offer a biography of the site, we develop two concepts, memorial cartographies and haunted archaeologies, that represent terrains not visible on Cartesian mappings. We understand these narrative strategies as creative acts that honour those who have gone before; both practices encourage us to listen as witnesses to geographies of loss that continue to structure contemporary urbanisms.

Interim Use at a Former Death Strip? Art, Politics, and Urbanism at Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum

Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re) building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic facades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine. Although these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first 15 years of Berlin’s post-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center might replace this former GDR parliamentary building. Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Kobberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms that led down into those sites. Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn It One More Time (2006–2008), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the division.

Spectral Ground in New Cities: Memorial Cartographies in Cape Town and Berlin

More than a decade after the fall of apartheid, Cape Town is a city marked by the construction cranes and scaffolding of urban development. Reimagining itself as new, Cape Town appears eager to submerge remnants of its colonial and apartheid pasts behind new facades and building sites. Sometimes the spirit of reconciliation is etched into the city’s new architecture: Mandela-Rhodes Place, a complex of chic innercity hotels and restaurants, names both the struggleicon Nelson Mandela and the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. Other times, gentrification overwrites histories of violence. In Green Point, an innercity precinct where cemeteries for slaves and members of the colonial underclass once existed, a thriving gay and lesbian night scene, boutique designer stores and world-class restaurants seem to leave little room for such memories of shame and exclusion. Instead, a new 2010 World Cup football stadium rises up in the midst of the neighbourhood, as another urban icon that will perform a cosmopolitan new South African nation on the world stage.

book reviews: Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities. By Paul Williams. Oxford and New York: Berg. 2007. viii + 226 pp. £19.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781845204891

Memorial Museums seeks to interpret critically ‘the emerging but under-explored field of memorial museums’ (p. 22) and to provide an international survey and evaluation of historic site museums that document, commemorate, and represent events of human atrocity. Such a study has been long overdue. However, Memorial Museums, which could have made a significant contribution to this ‘global institutional development’ (p. 8), provides neither a systematic examination of the history and types of memorial museums that now exist, nor a theoretically sophisticated study. Instead, this random collection of superficially described examples must be judged a missed opportunity.