CRASSH

Considering how the city has become a key site for investigations in the arts, humanities and social sciences, the interdisciplinary scope of the conference aimed to stimulate cross-sector discussion and raise awareness among scholars of linkages and frictions between their respective approaches to place-making, the politics of memory and representation in the contemporary city, and the transformations of the urban fabric. Organised in two strands, the conference first engaged with generic issues of the city as a witness to political and social alterations to and in urban topographies, as well as with ‘the urban’ as an entity that is itself be witnessed by the cultural undertakings emerging in and about the built environment. Specific contributions dwelt on the mapping of memorial sites in post-conflict urban places, and the marking of these through cultural interventions, but private engagements with memory, history and displacement in urban topographies – as well as representations thereof – also considered the potentially contested nature of such remembrance. Taking the changing nature of individual or collective recourse to storage, archive and memorialisation as their theme, other papers concentrated on the impact of digital and technological advances on urban memory cultures. The second strand of the conference sought to take the measure of the modes of witnessing at work in cities by concentrating analyses on a single one: Berlin. As an urban icon with a uniquely drastic twentieth-century political history, it became apparent that Berlin often assumes a paradigmatic status for rethinking the construction and conflict of ideologies in urban form. Not only examining the official effort of memorialisation and reconstruction in central Berlin sites, papers also discussed how these may be at odds with the inadvertently registered urban interventions that contest what should be made evident in, and taken in evidence of, the city. Again, familial genealogies of specific sites, as they intersect with public narratives and sediments of historical conflict were made to correlate with institutional representations of memorial culture and place-making in this European capital.

The conference, held in Cripps Court Conference Centre (Magdalene College, Cambridge), attracted wide interest, counting with over 80 participants from the UK, Germany, and the US. Feedback on the conference, during the event and since, has been very positive throughout. The combination of very senior with graduate scholars, the cross-disciplinary approach and the inclusion of artists’ performances, the devising of a small-scale but high-quality exhibition space in the venue, and the overall design of a web and publicity presence in correspondence to its extra-academic support, seems to have proved very successful. We have now begun work on developing a publication gathering selected contributions from the event, to be presented to a publisher of high standing. Edition and publication are foreseen for 2008/9, until which time the conference website will remain online.