Architectures of Memory: When Growth Machines Embrace Preservationists

Abstract

Studies of urban redevelopment demonstrate how growth coalitions and city residents use ideas about local history and culture to facilitate or oppose interventions in the built environment. Building on this literature, we introduce the concept of architectures of memory to describe methods of remaking urban space, relying on historical representations. We argue that preservation, demolition, and reproduction are practices that are often conflated but that have different dynamics in the relationship between growth and preservation. Although each advances urban planners’ visions of a historicized cityscape, they recapture that past through different design processes. Using case studies of redevelopment in Philadelphia—Independence National Historical Park and the adjacent Society Hill neighborhood, both of which were transformed through urban planning interventions post–World War II—we examine how interpretations of the built environment's economic and symbolic value influence redevelopment projects. The multiple interpretations and collective memories about the built environment create frameworks that advance, as well as contest, strategies of redevelopment. We argue that growth machines and preservationists do not inevitably have contradictory goals and strategies, but on occasion preservation and reworking of public spaces through a historical imaginary can support both growth and memory, two components of an urban elite.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.