Memory “within”, “of” and “by” Urban Movements

This is a comparison between two urban movements: the Green Bans in Sydney (Australia) and the initiatives for the preservation of historic workers settlements in the Ruhr (Germany). Both were very active in the 1970s. The article suggests three different perspectives on the relations between collective memory and social movements: first, it looks critically at the role of memory within the two movements. Memory can inform collective identities, which some scholars in the field view as important for the existence of social movements. Memory, moreover, can be used by social movements to instigate and legitimate political action. Second, the comparison discusses how social movements are publicly remembered today. The memory of social movements can be highly political, and be subject to contestation as well as banalization over time. Third, it discusses the relations between memory within and memory of the movements in order to gain insights into how historical cultures have been shaped by the two movements, and confront social movements’ agency with their intentionality. The memory within the two movements discussed here, of the movements and by the movements have been fundamentally elite driven and cannot be seen as disconnected from each other. After the demise of the movements, movement elites, that is, the informal, intellectual and cultural leadership of the movements, continued to play important roles in the shaping of historical cultures, even if neoliberal urbanism has ultimately proved more powerful than the sensitive structures of movement memory in its capacity to install alternative futures.