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 participatory 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 beyond — 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 projects, 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.
Kerry Whigham, Binghamton University - "Local Memory, National Impact: Building Resilience through Grassroots Memory Initiatives"
The creation of memory spaces in the form of memorials, memory museums, or other memory initiatives, has become a widely implemented practice in post-atrocity contexts. Designers, funders, and governments involved in their creation often refer to them as serving both a reparative function and a preventive function in society. And yet, large-scale, national memory spaces, which receive widespread attention and the majority of the resources to carry out these goals, struggle to develop long-term relationships with local audiences, attracting instead an international crowd of interested tourists who visit the space once in their lives. On the other hand, hyper-local memory spaces that are developed and run by grassroots, community-based organizations, often have far fewer resources, but are much better equipped to develop long-term relationships with the communities they serve. They are consequently better positioned to deal with the needs and risks that their communities face. This presentation presents evidence from site visits to over 100 memory spaces in seven different post-atrocity countries (Argentina, Cambodia, Colombia, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and South Africa) to demonstrate the outsized impact of small, grassroots memory spaces in responding to present-day risks for identity-based violence and mass atrocities. In doing so, it presents a new model for thinking about how to assess memory spaces and their contributions to atrocity prevention.
Rita Velloso, Federal University of Minas Gerais - "The insurgent collective memory in the context of a prefigurative action: MUQUIFU – Museum of Urban Quilombos and Favelas in Brazil"
This proposal presents a case study of MUQUIFU (Museum of Urban Quilombos and Favelas), a community-based museum located in one of Belo Horizonte’s largest favelas. The name Muquifu originates in the Brazilian dialect of Afro-descendant people and is a pejorative term in Brazilian Portuguese for precarious dwellings. Reappropriating this word, the museum subverts its stigma through semantic reclamation, transforming it into a symbol of cultural resistance. This language subversion forges a new narrative, repositioning the word Muquifu as a testament to resilience within the urban fabric. It also establishes a political link between Quilombos (historical communities of freedom built by escaped enslaved people) and Favelas, conceived in this context as urban quilombos, representative of insurgent forms of spatial praxis, born from self-organisation and resistance to the dominant urban order. It is an experiment in co-producing knowledge from below. As a prefigurative praxis, aligned with prefigurative politics (Graeber, 2004; Leach, 2013), MUQUIFU establishes a communal territory that provides visibility into aspects of contestation within the Afrodescendant community. This study adopts a qualitative case-study approach. Participant observation enabled direct engagement with MUQUIFU’s daily practices, while interviews emphasised the recognition of situated, embodied knowledge. Findings indicate that: (a) MUQUIFU reframes marginalised histories as active resources for political imagination; (b) its hybrid practices disrupt hegemonic urban policy framings and generate zones of social autonomy; and (c) its aesthetic and spatial interventions forge networks capable of influencing alternative policy agendas. These dynamics show how urban conflict, beyond antagonism, can cultivate radical democratic capacity and transformative potential.
Ulrike Capdepón, University of Guadalajara "Urban interventions of families of the disappeared in Mexico"
This paper aims to analyze symbolic interventions of Enforced Disappearance, particularly in the city of Guadalajara (Mexico), as practices of visibilization and resistance in the face of the ongoing human rights crisis, since according to official governmental data, around 134.000 persons are currently missing.
Focusing on the work of search collectives, the contribution is based on three central questions: how to understand and differentiate the complex ways of representing forced disappearance in urban spaces as strategies of counter-memory? What narratives symbolically are challenged when making disappeared persons visible, questioning the official discourse, which often tends to be discriminating, revictimizing and criminalizing? Furthermore, how can civil society and affected families counteract attacks on their commemorative practices?
Methodologically, I propose a classification of different ways in which victims of disappearance are commemorated in urban spaces, as an attempt at categorization to untangle the terminology of forms of public memorialization. While the most significant form that has evolved in the last years in Mexican cities is the construction of Antimonuments, that aim to remember a recent violent event or seek justice for crimes to which the government has not given a satisfactory response - and therefor can be understood as a claim directed against State violence and impunity - the resignification, and appropriation of public space by the massive intervention with posters of the disappeared is a powerful tool for mobilization and re-humanization, with the aim of pressuring state authorities to take action. In addition, the memorialization of disappearances often includes ephemeral practices, such as graffiti or murals, symbolically reflecting the absence of bodies in multiple ways, or protest marches that establish a counter-memory in the urban fabric, vindicating the demand for truth and justice.
Cullan Bendig, Charles University - "Digitizing Made in Italy: heritage play and the global reception of cultural memory in digital games" This paper aims to analyze how digital games produced by local Italian studios that represent local sites of memory contest the traditional, tourist-oriented construction of Italy in the global gaming industry. Recently there have been efforts to consider how digital gameplay can function as heritage-like experiences to project previously-unfamiliar local spaces into the digital milieu. However, more work must be done to understand how those experiences confront established sites of memory. This paper attempts to address that gap by considering representation of Italian spaces in digital games as a contested site of memory with global perceptions of places, history, and culture on the one hand and local lived experiences on the other. Historically, this contest has been one-sided in favor of global perceptions that overpowered the representative power of the small domestic gaming industry. Over the last decade, this trend has begun to change as new games focusing on local places and themes are gaining traction and some commercial success, including receiving support from local cultural policy actors. Starting from the history of Italian representation in digital games, the paper combines a comparative close reading of recent domestic and international games that depict Italian sites of memory with analysis of digital play as a space capable of affording authentic heritage experiences. Interviews with developers show that they are largely motivated to depict local places by their personal curiosity and proximity to these sites. They are also situated within culture industry and policy contexts that present unique opportunities and challenges in Italy, which carries disproportionate cultural weight globally relative to Southern Europe’s semi-peripheral game production studios.
20260731T154520260731T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires10.12. Memory in the City: Sites, Museums and Urban Practices IIA112MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
