Melisa Rüzgar

The city – a layered construction displaying formal diversities in the course of historical urban development. The city is a collection of memories immortalised in the urban landscape, a palimpsest of historical layers, some of which have disappeared while others remain active in constituting contemporary identities. The urban identity however concerns the configurational properties of emergent layers in the spatial system of a city in relation to urban life. A superposition of history and collective memories.

Some memories can be completely rewritten from a series of events, the act of unconsciously altering one’s cognition – often linked to trauma. Memory is both personal and collective, it is shared, appropriated, and reassigned depending on individual values. Trauma can prevent information like images and sounds from combining to form semantic memory. The urban scape can provide an example of the physical representation of memory trauma, a disaster can erase spaces, buildings and structures once linked to historical urban development. Now lost in time the urban spaces are but a barren landscape removed from history, much like the displaced peoples being forcibly stripped from their urban spaces leaving only memories behind.

Memory is not only cognitive security, but psychological safety. Architecture plays a role in weaving the layers of memory and history together, revealing construction and reconstruction as ongoing layers of history itself.