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ON PRACTICING PALIMPSEST : MEMORY AS AN URBAN REGENERATION TOOL
SARC 351 Assignment One: Critical Discussion/ Review of an Urban Design Issue Tutor: Luke Allen Sophie Hamer 301025629 March 12 2010
SARC 351
Sophie Hamer
ABSTRACT This paper aims to point towards a framework pertaining to discussions of urban heritage and regenerative practices whilst suggesting a theoretical foundation for the understanding of how similar frameworks effect and affect the city as lived space. In alignment with these discussions, this paper will explore an often elusive and neglected terrain in thinking about contemporary heritage practice: social memory. Emerging alongside the development of societal concern for the past, conservation strategies, and the conceptualization of the city as image, social memory poses a particular problem for urban spaces. The theological debate between history and memory realigns the notion of heritage, shaping the ways in which temporal dimensions of urban systems function. This paper considers modes of dealing with configurations of space as they unfold over time, and how social memory might provide an alternative to the “constitution of heritage and conservation practices found within regeneration and their presentation as spectacle.� (Hetherington, 2008) Finally, it proposes a broader perspective on the question of stasis and change at the scale of Urban Planning.
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CONTEXT As globalization continues to swallow time and space, the unique city becomes increasingly desirable. The past is emphasized as an image of uniqueness, becoming a resource beyond memorial. This desire to preserve historic artifacts and to encapsulate stylistic moments has brought about a series of globally visible waves of historic preservation, growing from the policy of protecting individual structures, to the protection of townscapes and historic districts, to a more general public curatorial commitment. (Tiesdell, 1996)However, the current super-modern state produces time as static, universal and unchanging, underscoring the capitalist society’s obsession with ‘the now’. Guy Debord’s ‘City as Spectacle’ was concerned with how “social relations get mediated by forms of appearance” and is again applicable due to the recent theoretical shift from conceptualizing the city as text, to viewing the city as an image. (Hetherington, 2008) The new political goals of the city are not internalized, but externalized. Today’s city promotes its history as spectacle, it models itself for the city tourist, and it aims to lure. Since the city inherently expresses the progression of time, this image of the past mediates current social relations. The city has taken to viewing itself as an object, as a consumable. The experience of such a city for the city dweller is fragmented and distracted. (Hetherington, 2008) There is a need to reestablish depth and lived space in the urban environment.
ON HISTORY/MEMORY We know the city to be a palimpsest; its space constructed by complex layers of history. The discussion is principally of material history – with much weight given to the dust, stone, and earth which can be physically experienced and cut away to reveal pasts. However ‘city as palimpsest’, considers the city not simply as an aggregation of material structures and a containment of people, but as an expression of human life – built of societal identifications, political beliefs, economic and cultural change. The debate between history and memory can provide a way to reconsider how material layering of history can generate successful lived environments. The debate considers the role of flexible memory constructs in creating ‘past’ against the notion of history as linear and having chronological, narrative position in time. The impact of the prevailing weighting of history on the development of the city is important in consideration of built and lived spaces. In critiquing the traditional and the national, Constructivism implies that every “act of memory carries a dimension of betrayal, forgetting, and absence.” (Huyssen, 2003) Where the past was used to legitimize the present, it is now constructed on the grounds of societal inclinations, desires for identity, and ways of conceptualising the world. The act of remembering is always “in and of the present, while its referent is of the past and thus absent.” (Huyssen, 2003) The site of ‘a memory’ within time is thus unlocatable – relocating ‘history’ as a series of constructed ‘nows’. 3|Page
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Further, the act of remembering in a social context is carried out by a populous, who take on a memory and retell it in ways which identify their place and right to space. The concept of the memory storehouse is no more. (Cubitt, 2007)Social memory is not a categorizable collection of definitive historic events, but a changing conglomeration of constantly recreated memories. Cities are made sense of by those who live in them via a “selective forgetting” based on broader stories, lived experience and notions of identification. (Hetherington, 2008) The term heritage realigns itself according to the construct of social memory. Heritage identifies the inherited – that which is not fundamentally owned by the present society, but which, by lineage and social construct, comes to identify and be under ownership of that group. Inherent within culture and cultural link to space is a “desire for narratives of the past” which allow the present society to construct, define, and defend itself. (Huyssen, 2003)As such, social memory and its magnitude explain how politics come to be manifest in material. At stake in the history/memory debate is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a fundamental crisis to our imagination of alternative futures. The crisis of the interfacing of past, present and future built space is fundamental to Urban Design.
ON HERITAGE Let us put this crisis into context. Urban Design has undergone a rejuvenation of concern for heritage quarters. The term heritage denotes a link between human occupation and a specific structure of space, which forms a spatial container for meaning, identity and progress. However, along with rejuvenated interest has come a disjunction between the intent of heritage and the actual role heritage plays in shaping urban spaces. Heritage value lies in a site’s capacity to describe and give form and shape to the structures, events and memories of past, according to a precise aim and vision. (Krier, 1998)The designation of heritage status aims to acknowledge and preserve such value within urban contexts. (Wellington City Council, 2006) However, once heritage status is conferred to a site, the value attributed to and drawn from that site becomes non-critical, attached more to the status of heritage than to sitespecific qualities. (Stubbs, 2009) The danger here is an ensuing destabilizing of history and mistranslations of built form, resulting in a destabilization of the present. Heritage has undergone a transformation from a state latent within structures as they age, to a component which may be added to a site at any point in its history, embellishing it with value. Krier argues against such motion in his call for “nameable objects” not “so-called objects”. (Krier, 1998) Heritage runs the risk of replacing the very tectonic depth it wishes to maintain with surface depth – the ‘so-called object’ which is titled but does not embody its own title.
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Urban Design is in a constant battle for stabilization against the destabilizing forces of time. The World Heritage Council’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage notes changing social and economic conditions “aggravate the situation with even more formidable phenomena of damage or construction.” (Council, 1972) The view of changing social and economic conditions as negative for and separate to built urban environments undermines the governing notions of urbanity. Given this perceived relationship, the designation of heritage importance to areas results in a figurative removal of those built areas from the surrounding urban social and economic conditions. Heritage buildings thus become identifiable not only by their characteristic aesthetic, but also because of the way in which they stand outside present day society, apart from the urban functionality, and distinct from interactions of the city. The direct outcome of this distinction, in urban terms, is that heritage has become an urban typology in and of itself; expected, function-definable by image, locatable and characteristic to most present urban scenes. In its current capacity and defined limits, heritage is fast becoming a modern consumable. (Hetherington, 2008) Amid concern for representation of the past, the heritage industry in fact forgets the city acts as palimpsest, and in doing so reduces societal interactions with the urban space.
ON PRESERVATION Alongside heritage distinction sit policies to negate potential future detriment to the defined districts. 1 The transitory step of problem definition is integral to forward progression. Too often problems are defined by superficial parameters, non-critical and non-specific to the environments which they claim to serve. The profession’s desire for correct choices is complicated by “multilayered histories and choices for their presentation". (Latham, 2000) To this end, ‘detriment’ is most commonly defined in physical terms. Urban system problems are usually treated in both policy and practice as definable and represent-able by “aggregated information taken from data ranging from existing statistics…to newly collected information.” (Hulsbergen, Klaasen, & Kriens, 2005)This mode of problem definition is assumed to be the best definition possible due to its transparency of process, traceability and quantitative nature. The resulting modes of regulation and administration of heritage, largely defining physical rather than social or economic issues, have systematically reduced the urban architectural experience to object. Where deep significance of heritage lies in the relationship between subject (society) and object (urban form), such a reduction towards privileging the object omits the potential for society, as a changing and fundamentally forward looking subject, to warp and grow the object to best fit needs. However superficial, this relationship is not hidden, resulting in a scenario where as long as 1
Wellington City Council, 20.2 Heritage Objectives and Policies, Policy 20.2.1.2 states that the council will “Avoid the loss of heritage value associated with listed items”. (Wellington City Council, 2006)
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‘authority’ has the right to decide what is or isn’t ‘heritage’ the public have the right to just as arbitrarily reject it. (Krier, 1998) Such rejection is a clear response to the Wellington City Council’s preservation of heritage buildings in the Upper Cuba St Heritage area as part of the Bypass Project. Public calls for sympathy to the complex balance of societal, economic and built heritage factors within the site were met with building-to-building decisions ranging from re-construction, to re-location, to demolition – reducing the urban form to a series of objects which, now turned back to the community, have lost societal value and their key urban functions. 2 This failure to find new uses for preserved buildings “condemns the city to an existence as an open air museum’”. (Tiesdell, 1996) The complete value attributed to the object leaves the question of whether a functioning subject-object relationship can be forged from object (ground) up. In terms of the Upper Cuba Heritage Precinct, development of such a relationship is not yet evident, with the majority of buildings unoccupied. Traditional urban architectures clearly distinguished between public sacred buildings, and private utilitarian buildings. Today, little variation of preservation strategies across differing typologies and scales confuses utilitarian buildings with sacred buildings and makes private spaces public via the museumification of space which preservation obliges. These current methods of preservation call on the user to be a spectator, and promote a non- practicing of space. The city as spectacle is reinforced. This memorialization results in an interface between past and present defined by non-active social memory, linear chronology and privileging the spectacular representation of history over present use values. Maleuvre went so far as to argue that lived history disappears in such spaces. (Maleuvre, 1999) Furthermore, there exists potential for inadequate appropriation of past forms due to biases of social memory. Preservation as a practice refuses to acknowledge its situation within current memory – instead projecting the ‘now’ above time to an externalized viewpoint, in line with Viollet-le-Duc‘s aim for restoration to re-establish the site “to a complete state, which may never have existed at any particular moment.” (Boito, Summer 2009) Preservation can thus be described as the transformation of traditional-looking buildings into authentic fakes. This imitation, while attempting to honour the past and traditions, results in an identity-less clone imposed by modernist values. In fact, Boito comments that “the better the restoration is conducted, the more insidious is the lie…” (Boito, Summer 2009) The result is a falsification of history which instead of projecting depth into the present, flattens and constricts social memory.
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In a report titled “Progress v Preservation,” Erin Menzies comments that “Heritage has undergone a transformation from a state latent within structures as they age, to a component which may be added to a site at any point in its history, embellishing it with value.”
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ON REGENERATION Preservation is a static practice, reaching an endpoint with the material completion of the object, yet figuratively reaching this endpoint at commencement. Regenerative efforts are postulated to work against the stasis of the ‘endpoint’. Regeneration accepts that single moments can exist only as that, striving for applicability of built space alongside long term change in the urban environment. Approaches to the regeneration of Historic Urban Districts are necessarily complex in that they must deal with “physical-spatial as well as social, economic, cultural, ecological and administrative aspects….and find a more sustainable solution within each of them.” (Hulsbergen, Klaasen, & Kriens, 2005) The requirement for professionals to engage with time as a construct is intrinsic. Each regenerative intervention in the urban realm is necessarily based on value judgments, requiring a historiographic view of the present at each step. Following this, regenerative urban processes have the potential to be vehicles to call for and express a move from the concern with the “pastness of the past” to “a future for the past”, and within that, for a discussion of a post-mimetic future. (Tiesdell, 1996) Regeneration as a social memory activity gains tract considering the recent shift of the urban construction site from opportunistic to threat. There exists a fear of building over, of insertions, of what might threaten the ground by which society defines itself and cities represent themselves. (Krier, 1998) Such fear is abated by the prospect of constructing in time defined by social memory, not by linear and complete historic events. As social memory underlies the worldwide existence of the city which facilitates “human needs for (re)producing their cultures and themselves, as a species,” there can be no undesirable outcomes of an urban regenerative construction move, as no desirables are pre-defined. (Hulsbergen, Klaasen, & Kriens, 2005) The ‘threat’ is derived from the conceptualisation of identity as static but fragile, rather than subject to cultural shift. Given then, the increasing stock of conserved space in urban areas, regeneration affords a progressive, non-affrontive mode of social growth, interested in how the urban encounters the materiality of other times at broader scales. Current regenerative practice does not reach this potential due to its operation within political and public administrative contexts. The demands for frameworks for managing change, for clear desirable outcomes and for short term achievable successes overlay chronological and material dependencies. (Stubbs, 2009) Such rigidity reduces the opportunity for specific, responsible, and socially motivated responses to urban issues. Due to this formalization, regeneration also has difficulty in determining a lived process as well as a lived output, and can often result in gentrification. (Stubbs, 2009) Areas have to cope with extensive change, physical constrictions and economic flux in the interest of long-term regeneration efforts. Even temporary dissolving of social and cultural industry is difficult for precincts to
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recover from, or can significantly redirect social and cultural spatial practices and attitudes.
ON THE NOW The call for rethinking urban material heritage preservation may be misconstrued and subsequently sidelined as a return to a modernist rejection of the place of the historic referent in the city. However, where modernism compresses time and space to promote the universal and the abstract, regeneration practices engaging with palimpsest constantly shift time, space, memory and geography in and out of view. Space undergoes a re-legitimization as separate from material, to defined instead by social and cultural memory and use. ‘Practicing Palimpsest’ is also aligned with a strand of urban practice which defines and critiques ‘placelessness.’ Practicing palimpsest is perhaps particularly poignant to New Zealand, a young urban society, where concern for historic preservation is relatively new, and the depth of heritage is relatively shallow. In this scenario, Heritage is clung to as a raft, defining our place to belong in the world, yet also, through its rejection of social memory, negating our potential to develop a more meaningful and higher functioning urban social place. The intense desire to define and contain history which comes with youth creates a flattened image of spatial use which impedes development.
IN RE-COLLECTION In order to move forward from this crisis of interfacing past, present and future in a way which is productive, respectful and progressive, a choice must be made. The urban conservation profession, instead of sitting between history and memory and thus producing superficial and gentrifying projects, must hold steady either history or memory, allowing one to shift around in relation to the stable notion. History must be understood as existing only as an image of itself, while social memory must be understood to be continuous and changing. This relocating of the profession against time encourages a shift towards process over product in the planning of urban environments. As the city is an ongoing lived spatial construct, regenerative projects must begin to promote themselves in time rather than against time, seeking modes of naturalizing change and embracing unexpected societal directives. Finally, as more and more ‘heritage’ is created every day, regenerative practice must become aware of its critical place within theoretical debate and cultural shifts.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Boito, C. (Summer 2009). Restoration in Architecture: First Dialogue. Future Anterior , Volume VI (Number 1), 68-83. Council, W. H. WHC Convention Concernting the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Cubitt, G. (2007). History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dorrian, M., & Hawker, A. (2002). Metis: urban cartographies. London: Black Dog Pub. Fitch, J. M. (1982). Historic Preservation: curatorial management of the built world. New York: McGrawHill. Hetherington, K. (2008). The Time of the Entrepreneurial City. In A. M. Cronin, & K. Hetherington (Eds.), The Consuming Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory, Spectacle (pp. 273-291). New York: Routledge. Hulsbergen, E., Klaasen, I. T., & Kriens, I. (2005). Shifting Sense: looking back to the future in spatial planning. Amsterdam: Techne Press. Huyssen, A. (2003). Present Pasts: urban palimpsest and the politics of memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krier, L. (1998). Architecture: Choice or Fate. Windsor, Berks, England: Andreas Papadakis. Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary Cities: between modernity and development. New York: Routledge. Sieverts, T. (2003). Cites without Cities: and interpretation of the Zwischenstadt. London: Spon Press. Stubbs, J. H. (2009). Time Honoured: a global view of architectural conservation: parameters, theory & evolution of an ethos. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Tiesdell, S. (1996). Revitalizing Historic Urban Quarters. Boston: Butterworth-Architectural Press. Worthing, D. (2008). Managing Built Heritage: the role of cultural significance. Oxford: Malden, MA.
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