Memory of City

The realization that our knowledge of history is associated primarily with places that are revealed in the cities, first of all, through building substance, transforms the city into an important subject of cultural and historical research. There is a basic question: how exactly history fits in urban space and “anchors” in it, how it is altered, renewed, destroyed, how it is challenged? And how are related memories to these spaces? These questions bring us to the interplay of space, time, memory, identity, which we deal in details on the example of four aspects. The distinguishing between space and place (1) opens the two perspectives of perception: space as such, provided for the organization and reorganization, and place that we understand through the richness of its history and memories, passed through the narrative. The city is perceived as palimpsest (2), when becoming visible the layers that reveal history as a collective work of different generations, epochs, and periods of settlement. The concept of “reconstruction” (3) denotes a new practice in architecture, which involves rebuilding after 1989, historic buildings, destroyed by war with either ideological or modernization motives. Historical continuity (4), in its turn, means attitude to historical building substance that combines again more closely the past and the future.