Beyond Atlantis: Reframing Urban Loss Between Scholarly Methodology and Public Imagination

• In Event: Cities Lost and Found: Ruptures of Memory, and Nostalgia as Future Making

Abstract

The fascination with cities that have completely disappeared has a long history, dating back to ancient times with examples such as Atlantis and Pompeii. But urbanists who study "losses" within the urban fabric more often do not study the whole "lost city," but rather examples where certain components or dimensions of cities have disappeared or been abandoned. While entire cities can still disappear physically, symbolic losses such as the erasure of historical names or the removal of official city status have no less significant impact on cities and their inhabitants.
This paper compares theoretical frameworks used to study urban loss with popular representations of "lost cities," revealing the divergence between public imagination and methodological approaches employed by urbanists and urban sociologists. This analysis provides a foundation for understanding the subtler connections across the subsequent papers in this panel. Although the other presenters of this panel examine phenomena from different countries and at varying scales, all papers share a tension between imaginary and material aspects, demonstrating how disrupted temporality manifests in both symbolic and physical dimensions of the urban fabric.

Author

• Anna Chirkova