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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel is dedicated to the lostness (Reckwitz, 2021; Pohl, 2021) of the whole city/town or some parts of its geography or materiality. As a rather fluid theoretical lens, the idea of lostness nevertheless allows to avoid some stigmatizing connotations of related terms such as "left-behind," "declining," or "ghost" cities. While "ruin" is often the figure of thought that increasingly frames losses in human geography (Edensor, 2005), the authors of our panel turn to the notion of "rupture," which could be applied both to the breaks in narrative descriptions of the city's history and to the material deconstructions and disappearances that can be a source of nostalgic feelings and initiate rethinking (political, economic, or artistic; elite-driven or grassroots) of urban temporality and materiality.
The authors of the papers included in the panel examine different types of urban "loss" in German and Russian cities, as well as popular media images and theoretical efforts to examine the urban loss.
The panel is supported in part by the research project "Cities 'becoming lost': the ruptures of grand narratives of modernity," funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Sub Unit

• Urban Studies, Built Environments

Chair

• Natalia Kolyagina, Sorbonne U (France)

Papers

• Beyond Atlantis: Reframing Urban Loss Between Scholarly Methodology and Public Imagination - Anna Chirkova

• Resisting Oblivion: Memory, Agency, and the Local Identity of Protvino’s Residents in the Face of the Loss of the City's Autonomy - Viktor Fedin, Ruhr U Bochum (Germany)

• 'Both modern and with echoes of the past': Time and Nostalgia in Wooden Architecture Regeneration Projects in Russian Cities -

• Military Ghosts: JHQ Rheindahlen and the Multidimensional Process of Urban Lostness -

Discussant

• Olga Linnaeus