Urban space is both a repository and a medium of memory. Cities materialize layers of remembrance and erasure through their architecture, planning, and everyday practices, while also serving as stages for the reactivation and contestation of collective memory. This panel examines how memory is constructed, negotiated, and reimagined within the urban realm — across sites of memory marked by violence, displacement, or exclusion, and through community-based, artistic, and activist interventions including museums, archives and other practices that reclaim the right to remember. The contributions explore diverse geographies — from Latin America to Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and the US — to reveal how memories of urban destruction, violence, and structural inequality are inscribed and reinscribed in the city’s fabric and across sites and museums. They trace practices of what might be called memory urbanism, the transformation of contested or marginalized spaces into places of engagement, learning, and repair. Through artistic persistence, spatial reactivation, and community initiatives, these cases demonstrate how civic actors, architects, and activists mobilize memory as an urban practice, generating alternative narratives that challenge official histories and hegemonic urban planning.
By juxtaposing state-driven and grassroots memory initiatives, the two sessions that comprise the panel foreground the tension between institutionalized memorialization and insurgent, locally rooted efforts that redefine what counts as heritage and whose stories are told. Together, the papers invite reflection on how memory work in the city can foster resilience, democratic participation, and social imagination — turning spaces once marked by destruction or dispossession into laboratories of coexistence and collective future-making.
Gruia Badescu, University of Konstanz: "Memories of Urban Destruction and Displacement: Spatial memory-work and community engagement in Bucharest and Buenos Aires"
Urban destruction is not only a feature of war but also a central element of urban reconfigurations serving diverse ideologies, as well as modern city planning in general. As Anthony Vidler has argued, the modern plan itself embodies a “war ideology”. This paper examines memory work in the aftermath of such urban destruction by analyzing two cities that underwent spatial and social reshaping during their last dictatorships: Bucharest, under Nicolae Ceaușescu, where entire quarters were demolished and 80,000 people displaced to build the “Victory of Socialism” boulevard and the new city center; and Buenos Aires, where during the last military dictatorship, intendant Cacciatore demolished and displaced communities to make way for new urban highways and to eradicate the city’s villas (informal settlements).
The paper explores how the memories of destruction have resurfaced in the last decade and discusses several memory projects that focus on the recovery of spatial memory—what I call spatial memory-work—as well as reparative memory practices that attempt to make sense of displacement. It draws from practices led by architects and communities to interpret and repair destroyed spaces, engaging in a dialogue between the Eastern European and Latin American contexts.
Kathrin Golda Pongratz, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech-UPC: "Resistance through persistence: The case of El Camp de la Bota in the context of contested spaces of memory in Barcelona"
Places of memory, traumatic sites, and generational sites overlap in territories “like the inscriptions in a palimpsest” (Assmann 2010). Even if many of them are overwritten and made invisible, they are not lost—following the logic of the palimpsest—and can be reactivated at any time. Overwriting and revisiting constitute the essence of urban planning, landscape design, and cultural history itself. (Golda Pongratz 2018). Such a palimpsest is the Camp de la Bota, located between the cities of Barcelona and Sant Adrià de Besòs, formerly a shantytown where during Franco’s dictatorship regime opponents were executed between 1939 and 1952. With the recovery of democratic freedoms in Spain, civic associations demanded some kind of marking before the unstoppable urban development (first by the Olympics in 1992 and then by the construction of the Forum of Cultures in 2004), giving rise to a place of multi layered memorial conflicts (Conesa 2023). The persistence of the artist Francesc Abad, closely connected to victims’ families, his documentary and interpretative work and finally also the political will to trace the layers of this contested space of memory, allowed the creation of a sculptural work, “Bosc d’Empremtes” (Forest of Imprints) to be inaugurated in September 2025. The paper analyses the evolution of this memory space and its layers of intervention based on a longitudinal study: visiting and documenting the site since 2009, closely accompanying the artistic process of Francesc Abad and transmitting its potential through the interpretative concept of memory urbanism. An intensive workshop and exhibition become part of the methodology to connect spheres and to convert a public sculpture into a pedagogical element.
Maria Adamopoulou, IEG Mainz: "Ghosting the Ghosts: postwar Salonica's urban memory, erasure and resistance" Salonica is known mostly from Mazower’s best seller Salonica City of Ghosts and it has attracted scholar attention as an Ottoman multicultural and cosmopolitan metropolis. Nevertheless, there is not much written for its postwar development; the city grew considerably, but was shadowed by the astonishing growth of Athens. In the 2022 film “The City and the City” by directors Passalis and Tzoumerkas the silence around the Jewish heritage of the city is problematized, while in the literary works of Giorgos Ioannou in the 1960s and 1970s there is a lamentation for the city's transformation from the diverse metropolis which welcomed the 1922 refugees from Asia Minor to a faceless modern fast paced urban space without memory or identity. Manolis Anagnostakis in his “Thessaloniki, Days of 1969 AD” also hinted at the fact that change at the micro level of the urban space mirrored the overarching metamorphosis of the whole country into a consumerist paradise, a superficial and kitsch facade of an unfortunate land and its oppressed people. Recent scholarship has explored the everyday lifestyle and the urban realities of postwar Thessaloniki, together with the impact of spatial planning and land policy. I argue that the postwar transformation of Salonica was a conscious effort to ghost the ghosts of the past and to emphasize the new elites' space appropriation and hegemony. Eradicating traces of its multiethnic character and replacing synagogues, hamams and local squares with modern blocks of flats and department stores was meant to give to the city a fresh profile aligned with prototypes of modernization imported from Western Europe. By using literary works of the period, my aim is to study the resistance voiced in the face of of the city's violent makeover.
Susana Kaiser, USFCA: "Spaces of Resistance and Activism: the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory in Buenos Aires"
As Argentina approaches the 50th anniversary of the coup that installed seven years of state terrorism where 30,000 people disappeared, Milei’s administration is dismantling official policies of memory, truth and justice. This presentation is about the ESMA Museum, a landmark in the topography of terror recognized as a UNESCO Heritage of Humanity Site. It explores its vital role as a space of resistance and activism, challenging authoritarian and antidemocratic moves. Official attacks to the museum include defunding and the firing and replacement of its director with an unqualified political appointee. This occurs amidst a context of measures offending survivors, activists and large sectors of society—e.g., denying state terrorism’s crimes, questioning the number of disappeared people. Several questions guide my inquiry: how have budget cuts impacted the museum’s mission and functioning? How are visits affected? Has the script/narrative been altered? How has the museum personnel responded to changes? How do visitors react to them? Can we identify new ways of engaging with the space? I base my analysis on multiple visits to ESMA since Milei took office. These involved ethnographic observations and conversations with visitors, which I compared to my previous studies conducted since ESMA opened in 2007. These focused on visitors’ interactions with the space and ESMA’s relevance as an activist museum. Special attention is given to the spatial narratives and the memories embedded in the building—itself a “scene of the crime(s)”—and their links to the museum’s script and visitors and guides’ voices. I argue that ESMA continues to function as an activist museum, confronting new challenges in innovative ways. It is a space of resistance where visitors’ participation is crucial to reaffirm its role as a site for memory activism.
Ulrike Capdepon, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires5.7. Memory in the City: Sites, Museums and Urban Practices ISV403 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
