Urban Spaces

This entry offers some reflections on memory activism, with particular attention to ideological and structural transformation in cities, and changes in the way historical consciousness has been practically articulated in contemporary urban society. Studying urban memory activism offers a method to attain a more complex picture of the diverse agents in the (de)construction of historical cultures. Memory activism over cities has changed in accordance with the way the past has been constructed and deconstructed over time. Since the 1960s, western society has seen efforts to democratize historiography by constructing the past “from below,” and this went hand in hand with growing demands for a more critical evaluation of the dominant memory regimes in traditional urbanism, which had left little room for alternative voices in urban history and heritage. In this entry, some examples of postcolonial and postindustrial urban memory are discussed in detail to demonstrate such changes.