Amnesia, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Place Memory

Margaret E. Farrar1

Political Research Quarterly 64(4) 723735 2011 University of Utah Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1065912910373553 http://prq.sagepub.com

Abstract This article examines two seemingly opposed modes of place-making, urban sprawl and historic preservation, and their relationship to memory. The author contends that urban sprawl creates a landscape of either willful or accidental amnesia, where the powers of place are neutralized by ignoring them or removing them from history. Historic preservation, however, can have equally depoliticizing effects by conjuring up peculiar, selective, or even wholly imaginary pasts. Despite their apparent opposition, both practices often work against a meaningful understanding of the relationship between identity, memory, and place. Rather than accept the false choice between amnesia and nostalgia, the author advocates for an ethos of what Walter Benjamin calls porosity in creating, maintaining, and evaluating the vitality of our urban spaces. Keywords memory, place, urban planning, nostalgia, amnesia, porosity

Without the enduring permanence of human artifact, there cannot be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. Hannah Arendt, quoting Ecclesiastes, The Human Condition

This article is written at the intersection of place, memory, and politics. My broad claim is that urban planning practices should be of interest to political theorists, and not only for the role they play in creating and sustaining economic and racial injustice (Bickford 2000; Farrar 2008; Hayward 2003), or for their ability to influence practices of citizenship (Kohn 2004; Kogl 2007; McBride 2005). Urban planning practices are certainly important to political theorists for these reasons, but they have an additional political dimension: specifically, they help to cultivate or diminish our understanding of the past and our place in it. How we choose to build history into or eradicate history from our cities and towns shapes our understandings of identity, community, and responsibility. In short, how we attend to the past through the medium of the built environment has political implications for our future. Recognizing the political power inherent in the construction of landscapes makes it easy to be critical of the state of contemporary American urban planning. By any measure, the most pervasive form of planning is what its detractors call urban sprawl. For anyone interested in

fostering sustainability and vitality in American cities, sprawl is an anathema: a twenty-first-century topography of distinctly unmemorable landscapes characterized by endless, homogeneous stretches of drive-by scenery, drive-through eateries, and stunningly forgettable architecture. Yet many of the popular, academic, and practitioner responses to sprawl come uncomfortably close to what one might call landscapes of nostalgia; the rarefied remembrances celebrated by historic preservationists are one such example. As sprawl has proliferated over the past five decades, the reclamation of past spaces for preservation and beautification has proceeded apace. In direct contrast to placeless places, designated historic sites attempt to shore up memory, putting it at the front and center of public consciousness. This article, then, is motivated by the question, What effects do these recent, and seemingly opposed, trends in place-making have on our relationship to the past, and on our capacity for politics? My answer is grounded in recent accounts of memory that emphasize its visceral and embodied qualities, as opposed to locating it solely within the realm of consciousness. At the same time, however, I take
1

Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, USA

Corresponding Author: Margaret E. Farrar, Augustana College, 639 38th Street, Rock Island, IL 61201, USA; phone: 309-794-7313 Email: margaretfarrar@augustana.edu

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724 issue with this line of thought when it ignores or undervalues the role of place in the formation of political identity. Instead, I suggest here that individual and collective memory can be inherited, buttressed, or devalued through the medium of the built environment and that neither urban sprawl nor historic preservation provides the tools necessary to make space for democratic politics.

Political Research Quarterly 64(4) Connollys work can be read as an example of this tendency, as he self-consciously privileges movement and speed over place.1 For Connolly, a notion of place is often linked to a too-easy equivalence between geography and identity, a territorial unitarianism that requires us to slow time to a snails pace (2005, 28-29). It is therefore not surprising that Connolly links territory with terror and contends that places are most often perceived through the optics of political nostalgia (Kogl 2007, 65-66). To pay attention to place, Connolly occasionally implies, is to advocate for an exclusionary and potentially reactionary politics (Farrar 2009). I detail Connollys concerns here because they are representative of a long-standing bias against place in philosophical writinga bias that is not entirely without justification.2 Especially when coupled with an interest in memory, attention to place might easily lend itself to particularly essentialist or fundamentalist forms of political identity. One can certainly read this tendency in philosopher Edward Caseys work; if Connolly is unreasonably suspicious towards place-based politics, then Casey who is probably the best-known philosopher of placeis excessively sanguine. As Casey argues, It is the stabilizing persistence of place... that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability.... We might even say that memory is naturally place-oriented, or at least placesupported.... [Memory] thrives... on the persistent particularities of what is properly in place: held fast there and made ones own (2000, 186-87). Caseys language here of stabilization, persistence, and holding fast is exactly the kind of sensibility that makes some theoristsrightfullyquite nervous, because it binds memory too tightly to place and, thus, to a potentially restrictive conception of political identity. Indeed, this equation of territory and self is at the heart of the most virulent forms of nationalism, which function by strictly limiting access to the polity, excluding outsiders, and positing citizenship solely as a means of expressing allegiance to and protecting the homeland (Booth 1999, 251). In other words, closely linking a certain type of memory with a specific understanding of place too often can have the effect of producing of a xenophobic and bellicose blood and soil ideology, which renders those judged outside its territorial borders incapable of possessing the common understanding required for participation in political life. But does linking memory and place necessarily produce this outcome? I posit that if we accept that as a foregone conclusion, we are left with a fairly anemic (and, I would argue, unrealistic) understanding of political identity: a neighborhood of the rootless, as W. James Booth says, not unlike the highly abstracted, atomistic, rights-bearing individuals of Rawlsian liberalism. Instead, a nuanced politics of place should be tied to an understanding of memory as lived viscerally. After all, being embodied requires

Memory and Place in Political Theory

I begin from the Nietzschean assertion that memory is embodied and that its physicality is political. While Nietzsches description of mnemotechnics links memory to pain (1887/1967, 61), his insight into the physiological aspects of memory can just as easily be extended to experiences of intense anger, pleasure, clarity, or sorrownot to mention the more extreme case of psychic trauma (see, for example, Edkins 2003; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003). In all of these instances, we possess a body memory of these eventsa memory that exists alongside and also deeper thanour conscious narrative about the past. That what is memorable is written on and in the body resonates not only with Nietzsches work but also with Bergson, Proust, and contemporary studies in neuroscience illuminating the specifically physical impacts of memory on the brain (Lehrer 2007). The important point to be taken from these diverse sources is that the body is not simply a container for perception or a vessel to fill with our recollections but is, instead, the intermediary between thought and world, shaping and shaped by both whenever we remember. Body memory, then, is not prepolitical, something that happens before the real stuff of politicsdebate, discussion, decision makingtakes place. Instead, as William Connolly convincingly argues, an understanding of memory as embodied means that politics is deep-seated and unconscious, part of our lingering prejudices, immediate reactions, and snap decisions (2005, 102, 36). And so a memory is never as simple as a story we tell about our past; instead, it lives on in us in ways that we do not fully control. When political theorists ignore this visceral register of being, Connolly warns, they jeopardize their ability to understand how politics operates in preconscious or subconscious domains and risk overlooking the most intransigent (and often, most interesting) aspects of our political lives. If recognizing the embodied quality of memory is becoming more prevalent in political theory, though, describing its emplaced quality is not. In fact, some of the recent work on memory neglects or disparages the role of place in these complex relationships, and an interest in place becomes synonymous with a propensity for antimodern, or even premodern, politics. In some ways,

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Farrar that one is, in fact, emplaced; the lived body is lived somewhere. And when we rememberevents from childhood, first love affairs, or defining political momentsour memories are rarely if ever of unplaced people or events detached from their surroundings. Rather, our memories are almost always in situ (Where were you when Kennedy was shot? When the World Trade towers were hit?). Places become written on the body, wired into memory; places become part of us, quite literally. Through placemaking, we reify both our individual and collective identities. To paraphrase Connolly here, when political theorists ignore this spatial register of being, we risk not fully comprehending how embodied memory functions in our lives and in our political imagination (Farrar 2009). A sense of place, then, is inextricably linked to memory formation, which is, of course, crucial to identity formation, both at the individual and the collective levels (Booth 2008; Dienstag 1997). This does not, however, mean that our political identities are solely determined by place, or that these places are in any sense pure representations of our identity. To be very clear here: I do think that we have every reason be wary of place and, by extension, place memory. Like all bases for individual and collective identity, making a fetish of place has the potential to coalesce into forms that are less than liberating, and I will explore one version of that tendency below. But to exclude place from our understanding of memory and identityor to treat all place-based politics as inevitably culminating in (at best) essentialism or (at worst) fascismis not consonant with our everyday, lived experiences of political life. All of which brings me to my central question: if our selves are brought into being at the intersection of place and memory (that is, if the self is constituted in part through its sense of place), then what impact will our new configurations of spacesuch as the generic topography associated with urban sprawl and the regimented preciousness of much historic preservationhave on us and on our capacity for place memory?

725 One need not be a cartographer to notice how significantly urban areas have grown over the past two decades. Not simply in regards to population; urban areas have grown in terms of how deep and wide a swath development has cut through our landscape. Alternately called exurbia, edge cities, or boomburbsand most commonly derided as urban sprawl3these are the places created as highways have unfurled across farmland and small towns, connecting city centers by way of a seamless and nearly homogenous web. These same places are routinely excoriated by cultural critics who decry the social, economic, ecological, and aesthetic tolls this sort of development takes on an area. And although critics also regularly predict the imminent demise of this mode of spatial practice (Kunstler 1993), the speed and scale of land development has only increased with each passing decade: between 1994 and 2002, for example, real estate developers finished 1.5 million new housing units each year, the majority of which were suburban single-family dwellings (Hayden 2004a, 4). Although its advocates insist that sprawl results from Americans conscious choices about where to live and work, critics contend that sprawl actually produces very little in the way of choice. Sprawl is most often characterized by a housing and retail monoculture and a landscape dominated by automobiles. This absence of diversity in sprawling areas is evident from the floor plans of the individual homes that are erected to the layout of the boomburb itself. Especially in moderately priced developments, nearly identical homes are the norm; in the past ten years, these have been overwhelmingly beige vinyl snout houses that feature a large garage that protrudes towards the street (Hayden 2004b, 92). Even very expensive developments are most often characterized by an architectural style that is replicated in similar class enclaves across the country, often regardless of geography or climate; one wide, winding, sparsely landscaped street dotted with starter castles is endlessly repeated in countless subdivisions nationwide. Retail areas are also notoriously repetitive from one city (or even one side of town) to the next, creating a commercial glut of chain stores, fast food, megamultiplexes, and generic hotel rooms, all surrounded by vast acres of blacktop parking. Both academic and popular critiques of sprawl are legion; I will not rehearse these complaints here.4 What I am interested in is exploring how continuing to build this sort of space impacts place memory, which in turn has consequences for our abilities to think and act politically. If one is examining sprawl from the perspective of place memory, two things become immediately apparent. First, sprawl seems to produce what geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson called a vast landscape of the temporary (1980). This new landscapes impermanence can be documented in any number of ways: the homes whose

Amnesia
Everyplace becomes more like every other place, all adding up to Noplace. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Americas Great Cities We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire

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726 voluminous rooms and square footage make them the very definition of unsustainability; the enormous mortgages required to support these homes (often financed, as we have recently learned, through variable-rate loans that have led to a record number of foreclosuresand thus displacements); the various super stores that outgrow their square footage almost as soon as they have their grand openings; and the record number of storage facilities sprouting kudzu-like on undeveloped acres, ready to be demolished when the next and more profitable venture comes along. It is difficult to imagine how such a landscape could age gracefully, and it is only a little cantankerous to complain about its intrinsic absence of dignity. Even Jacksona great lover of temporary landscapes and vernacular architecturespoke of the necessity for ruins to spur renewal (1980, 89-102); for many critics, it is hard to visualize how one might become inspired to resuscitate an empty strip mall or to restore a beige, vinyl-sided McMansion to its former glory. Far more likely is that this is understood to be an architecture of obsolescence, built to be razed rather than reused or refurbished. Second, this landscape of the temporary has been produced in conjunction with and to service a population that is also temporary: the armies of executives made increasingly mobile through various communication technologies, the countless numbers of part-time and temporary workers who staff big box retail, and the multitudes of immigrant workers who both help to build our dream homes and to put food on our tables.5 The landscape of the temporary, then, includes not only the usual culprits indicted by cultural critics (the ubiquitous McDonalds and Starbucks) but also the warrens of hotel rooms and conference centers around airports; the parks filled with mobile homes housing mainly the countrys working poor; and even elite housing, whose amenities are often designed for resale value more than actual use (Leach 2000, 76-81). What happens when an entire ethos of planning and architecture (to paraphrase Marx, an entire mode of construction) is geared towards movement rather than emplacement?6 This landscape of the temporary means that many parts of our citiesindeed, perhaps even entire cities themselvesdefy urban planner Kevin Lynchs prescriptions for truly vibrant urban places: places that can be easily read and remembered by their citizens. Lynch calls this imageability, the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern. What gives a city imageability is its having distinct districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable, thus allowing its citizens to produce a mental map of their environs. Imageability is crucial for Lynch because it is only through our ability to make sense of places that we can move freely through them; that is to say, mobility

Political Research Quarterly 64(4) first requires orientation. To think about it in the reverse: mobility without orientation will result in chaotic, inefficient, and potentially hazardous movement. Structuring and identifying the environment is a vital ability among all mobile animals, Lynch argues, while disorientation produces anxiety and terror (1960, 2-3). In other words, unlimited movement is not freeing but is instead deeply frightening; a person needs a stable sense of her or his place in the world to be able to function effectively within it. When cities cease to be memorable, in some sense they also cease to be livable. The consequences of profound disorientation are well documented by those who study stress and trauma (see, for example, Fullilove 2005). Rather than being limited to a specific population (such as inner-city African Americans displaced by urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s), in our contemporary milieuwith its distinctly unmemorable topographyit is reasonable to assume that disorientation becomes diffuse and pervasive, contributing to a widespread sense of ennui, at bestand at worst, widespread psychological distress. Indeed, beginning in the years of the postwar building boom, any number of authors responded to the rapid pace of construction of placeless places with descriptions of the tolls taken on us by these new environments. In 1976, Edward Relph was the first to use the term placelessness to describe our relationship to this new American landscape, chronicling the lack of connection we feel to our physical surroundings. In recent years, this collective alienation has become manifest in our cultural anxiety about food and the movement from organic to locally grown produce and meats; any number of best-sellers (for example, Barbara Kingsolvers Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Michael Pollans The Omnivores Dilemma) make the connection between displacement and loss of self through the medium of the American meal.7 What I want to emphasize here is that placelessness is not only a psychological condition but also a political phenomenon; its effects are not only individual or collective alienation but also may be the diminishment of political engagement and efficacy.After all, landscapesshared spaces, recognizable boundaries, identifiable landmarks, common sites of remembrancehelp to establish relationships between people. They serve not simply as the stages on which social and political interaction occurs but as facilitators or inhibitors of those interactions. However exclusionary those relationships might be, they are also inclusionary, providing a basis for collective political action. Places provide a grounding (quite literally) for the enactment of we, the people. As discussed above, some political theorists remain wary of the role of place in progressive political activism. This is not without reason; in its most troubling

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Farrar manifestations, place becomes the basis for a narcissistic patriotism or a reactionary nationalism, one that prohibits critical examination of our values and our histories. But place-based political engagement is not necessarily narcissistic or nationalistic; rather, there are a number of examples describing the importance of place for progressive political action. We only need to remember Simone de Beauvoirs astute observation that one of the difficulties women face in becoming organized politically is that they live and work geographically dispersed among men (1989). In fact, historically marginalized and oppressed groups often use place as a way to forge oppositional identities, and populations who choose to build communities located in or around particular places do so with the understanding that they are doing more than putting down roots; instead, they are creating the infrastructure for an expansive social and political life. As Melissa Harris-Lacewell (2004) has demonstrated, for example, many African Americans utilize community spaces such as barbershops and churches to develop sophisticated political ideas through everyday conversations. Even more intriguing for those interested in a politics of deep pluralism is Elizabeth Armstrongs work on the expansion of the gay movement in the 1970s. Armstrong focuses on the social, cultural, and commercial ties that were cultivated in the Castro district in San Francisco; in her words, it is these synergistic and mutually reinforcing relationships, continually buttressed by spatial proximity, that provided the basis for community organizing. Contrary to those who would see place as necessarily exclusionary, Armstrong argues that the creation of a gay neighborhood (as opposed to individual gay venues) provided the genesis of the diversification of the gay movement. In this case, and perhaps counterintuitively, place-based activism provided the resources for pursuing a goal that is more inclusionary than exclusionary: that is, the expansion of the range of ways to express gay identity (2002, 114). This ongoing struggle to ensure the proliferation of differencegrounded in a community that contains the history of this struggle represents the progressive possibilities inherent in some versions of place memory, where places serve as the basis for civic organizations and for citizenship. Placelessness, then, has a clear political dimension and political consequences. The built environment serves as a storehouse for social and collective memory: memories of our family lives, our work lives, and our lives as citizens. Creating placeless places eviscerates the vitality of our shared spaces. As Richard Sennett argues, A bland environment assures people that nothing disturbing or demanding is happening out there. You build neutrality in order to legitimate withdrawal (1990, 65). Placeless places dull our ability to think about our connections to each other and transform our understanding of shared social obligations

727 (Aug 1995). They also retard our capacity for imagining future, better places by instituting a paralyzing uniformity. One might reformulate Foucaults famous insight Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (1979, 228)to read, Is it any coincidence that the mall looks like the airport looks like the office park looks like the mall? in order to appreciate more fully the scope and significance of this new architecture. These are sites of either willful or accidental amnesia, where the powers of place are neutralized by ignoring them or removing them from history. Of course, the monotonous landscapes produced in sprawl areas also contribute to the flip side of architectural amnesia: nostalgia, or the longing for a past place, either real or imagined. Nostalgia results in the impulse to preserve, maintain, or create a sense of place in ones surroundings. Hence our next question: does nostalgia, particularly as it is manifest in historic preservation efforts, provide a solution to the amnesic architecture of urban sprawl?

Nostalgia
The only paradise is paradise lost. Marcel Proust

The proliferation of placeless places has produced enormous anxiety since social critics began to notice it during the postWorld War II building boom (see, for example, Mumford 1961). As U.S. downtowns and inner suburbs began to experience serious population declines in the 1960s and 1970s, and as the imperatives of midcentury modernism dictated a clean slate for development, worried citizens and city leaders watched as high-rises, highways, and parking lots began to replace older urban landmarks. Almost as soon as the traditional form of the American city began to slip awayand it is an open question what this traditional form might have entailedpeople began to mourn its passing. The response to placelessness often takes the form of nostalgia, a particularly acute form of place memory. Nostalgia is literally a painful (i.e., physical) longing (algos) for home (nostos). Tellingly, Johannes Hofer first described it in 1688 as a disease in his Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia: a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from ones home or country; severe homesickness (Casey 2000, 201). In his study of displaced persons, Hofer found that nostalgia produced in its victims erroneous representations that caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present but that it also manifested

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728 in physical symptoms ranging from loss of appetite to cardiac arrest (Boym 2001, 3). It was only later, in the twentieth century, that the term nostalgia became associated with a sentimental longing for the past. This brief etymology suggests how closely linked our senses of time and place must be as we seek to orient ourselves both in the physical world and in history, and there is much evidence to suggest that Hofers original definition which emphasized nostalgias status as a physical as well as a psychological maladyis closer to the reality of the experience than the less precise, later definition. When we experience nostalgia (a longing for a particular place and time), it is a bodily experience, often prompted by sensory data (a particular smell or taste), and producing physical effects (depression, illness). Nostalgia allows us to be thrust back, transported, into the place we recall (Casey 2000, 201). And accounts of peoples experiences of displacementwhether as migrant, exile, or refugee repeatedly emphasize the interconnections between body, mind, and place (Farrar 2009). In this understanding of nostalgia, time, place, and loss there are phenomenological realities, and it is easy to see how echoes of past places might reverberate for and in particular populations: the plantations of the antebellum South; the steel mills on the Great Lakes or the coal mines in Appalachia; the old country for recent immigrants; the reservations out west. And it is just as easy to see how the loss of a particular landscape might produce a keen sense of nostalgia for what has been left behind. In the United States, treating our collective nostalgia for old places has become a matter of public policy.8 After two decades of observing intensive postwar clearing and suburban build-out, the United States Conference of Mayors argued in their 1966 report that as a result, the country was suffering from a feeling of rootlessness. The historic preservation movement, the report continued, could provide American society with a much-needed sense of orientation by using structures and objects of the past to establish values of time and place (Datel 1985, 125). The National Historic Preservation Act was passed shortly thereafter, and it explicitly linked this feeling of rootlessness, and hence the necessity of historic preservation, to concomitant suburbanization: In the face of ever-increasing extension of urban centers, highways, and residential, commercial, and industrial developments, the present governmental and nongovernmental historic preservation programs and activities are inadequate to ensure future generations a genuine opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the rich heritage of our Nation. (Public Law 89-665; 80 Stat. 915; 16 U.S.C. 470 [1966])

Political Research Quarterly 64(4) If one is concerned about sprawl and the diminishment of place memory, then it might seem that historic preservation provides the necessary antidote. Historic preservation is, after all, the logical opposite of sprawl, and since the 1966 law was passed, local historic preservation initiatives have mushroomed in every town and city across the country. As J. B. Jackson wryly notes, There is hardly an enterprising town located on the more popular tourist routes that does not have some kind of reconstructed historical environment (1980, 90). If anything, Jackson underestimated the trend: in 2006, there were an estimated twenty-three hundred preservation commissions in the United States attending to more than one million historic properties, and heritage-based tourism is one of the fastest-growing segments of the world tourism market (Kreyling 2006).9 Similarly, in their important study of Americans attitudes about the past, Rosenzweig and Thelan found that more than half of their respondents had visited a historic site or building over the past year (cited in Page and Mason 2004, 2). Clearly, Americans are nursing their geographic ennui by investing both their tax dollars and their discretionary income on the production and consumption of nostalgic landscapes, so much so that the phenomenon can easily be called a nostalgia industry (Edensor 2005, 127). Yet it is evident that historic preservation is not an ideal solution to our diminishing sense of place memory. Instead, it often does more to insulate us from place memory than to cultivate it, for several reasons. Some of these reasons are a result of the power relations inherent in any attempt to codify memory: for example, because preservation efforts often aim to safeguard places of architectural significance, it is far more likely that the residences and cultural institutions of the elite will be preserved than the ordinary dwellings, workplaces, or community centers, recent populist trends in preservation notwithstanding. Indeed, historic preservation originated in preserving the homes and properties of great men (and occasionally women) rather than the vernacular architectures of everyday life. In some of its less appealing forms, historic preservation is less concerned with memory than accuracy, where it demands of its adherents a kind of reverence most akin to religion. Second, far too often, preservation is only pursued as a path to economic development, as cities and towns have increasingly realized the potential for marketing their histories. The result of linking preservation so tightly to travel, tourism, and economic growth, of course, is that what is most often preserved are also the properties or areas most likely to attract consumer dollars. Places and place memoryfrom buildings to battlefields to designated wilderness areasbecome commodities to

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Farrar be consumed; as one scholar notes, for the contemporary tourist, the world has become one large department store of countrysides and cities (Schivelbusch quoted in Urry 2002). And everyone wants to cash in; old-fashioned, downtown shopping districts are a favorite in small towns across the country as postindustrial, population-starved municipalities eagerly tuck-point brick, install faux gas-lit lamps, and replace boarded-up display windows to provide would-be tourists with the charm and authenticity they cannot find at the local mall. In these instances, it is unclear whose sense of place memory is being amplified through these reconstructions since locals will likely avoid the tourist areas, shop in their own neighborhoods or at the mall, and leave historic downtown to the visitors. Even if the local population does make use of these historic shops, however, the implication of this is rather grim: through the production of urban history as commodity, citizens become tourists in their own cities, consumers of memorable milieu instead of producers and interpreters of them (Boyer 1994). In either case, producing a wholly commodified place memory means endorsing a particular kind of history: specifically, a coherent, seamless story about the way things were... banish[ing] ambiguity and the innumerable ways of interpreting the past (Edensor 2005, 133). Place memory thus becomes spectacular and televisual, rather than a vehicle for active engagement with and contestation of the meaning of a place. Finally, efforts at historic preservation can have the perverse effect of displacing some (lower-income, often African American or recent immigrant) populations in an effort to reclaim a more authentic sense of place. What is preserved in various historic neighborhoods, for example, is not the long period of time that an old mansion was subdivided into separate apartments housing poor or working-class families, but its true identity as a lumber (oil/cattle/steel/railroad) barons stately residence. Indeed, the periods of subdivided apartments and workingclass families are often treated as aberrations or unfortunate interruptions in the structures or the neighborhoods noble history, despite the fact that this period might have lasted many decades. Although some preservationists are quick to point out that the designation of a historic property itself does not lead to a neighborhoods gentrification and/or widespread displacement of current residents, one certainly must acknowledge that preservation is always a choice about whose memories are considered worthwhile and whose places are given preference. While these concerns are themselves significant, they are also symptomatic of the larger tensions illuminated by our thriving nostalgia industry: the fraught relationship between memory and history and the difficulties inherent in trying to institutionalize collective memory. Historian

729 Pierre Nora argues that the reason for the proliferation of these lieux de memoire is that because there are no longer real environments of memory: the places where collective memory is inculcated and thrives because of thick familial and cultural ties. Instead of the traditional, collective memory inherent in peasant culture, he argues, mass society produces history: the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer (1989, 8). Rather than memory occurring spontaneously and naturally, in contemporary society we rely on the frenetic and deliberate approximation of memory; we anxiously assemble archives, invent or revive rituals, and organize celebrations, searching for traces of what we have lost. The less memory is experienced internally, Nora points out, the more it relies on its exterior scaffolding and outward signs (1989, 12, 13).10 The market, of course, feeds the nostalgia industry in its own way. Real estate developers, city planners, and architects have reacted to the proliferation of placeless places by offering a prepackaged sense of placehence the burgeoning popularity of master-planned developments that claim to resurrect lost places, or provide sites of manufactured community. As Eugene McCann notes wryly, this is why every new restaurant is dripping with personality and every new housing development is stiff with character (quoted in Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001, xx). Celebration, Florida, is perhaps the most striking (and oft-cited) example of a topographical realization of this response to placelessness. Disneys manufactured small-town America, located near the companys theme park in Orlando, markets an idealized version of smalltown life, asserting the presence of a old-fashioned home town without challenging the economic, geographic, and social infrastructures that render those communities presently so difficult to achieve. In fact, Celebration itself is located in the center of bustling, exurban development; with the creation of Celebration, Disney ironically provides a haven from its own sprawl (McBride 2005, 89). Moreover, Celebration accomplishes this without acknowledging that the identity of this community is created in large part through exclusionary practices (although with single-family homes starting at more than $300,000, these particular exclusions are fairly self-evident). If, as McBride argues, the creation of communities such as Celebration, Florida, represent a longing for an idealized individual childhood (2005, 107), then it is possible that historic districts more generally feed many of these same desires? In the case of a historic district, perhaps it is an idealized national childhood we are seeking to bring into being, where the past is nothing more or less than a remote, ill-defined period or environment when a kind of golden age prevailed, when society has an innocence

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730 and a simplicity that we have since lost (Jackson 1980 p. 98). Surely a casual survey of the nations historic downtowns can tell us that much: which historical period, exactly, is being represented in these downtowns, with their faux gas-lit lamps and boutique shops catering to older, upper-middle-class women? The answer is both none and all; this version of history is nothing more than an empty signifier that simultaneously helps to create and satisfy our desires for authenticity and feeling at home in the past. Historic preservation then can become nostalgic in the most reactionary sense. Like nostalgia more generally, it may too easily slip from an intensepotentially disruptive and transformativeplace memory into a wholesale idealization of a (perhaps nonexistent) place. It is significant to note that many historic areas and structures communicate nostalgia for our industrialized past; John Urry suggests that deindustrialization has produced a profound sense of loss for both past technologies and the social relations of the period (2002, 97). In its worst forms, historic preservation evokes a very peculiar, selective, and imaginary time, where we are all encouraged to identify with wealthy (most often white and male) elites: touring the manor, strolling down the promenade, chatting with the shopkeepers. In so doing, historic districts depoliticize place (and, ironically, remove it from time) by bracketing relations of power and domination in favor of promoting a fantastic metanarrative of universal privilege. Similarly, this kind of preservation encourages us to ignore the enormous human and ecological costs wrought by industry and to imagine that the lumber (oil/cattle/steel/ railroad) barons manses could be built through practices that did not extract tremendous tolls from people and earth. In historic shopping districts especially, such fantasies often coincide with the myth of authentic localism, where we cheerfully buy our hand-crafted Christmas ornamentsornaments that are, as it turns out, locally handcrafted in China. Historic preservation, when pursued in this manner, gives us the past as radically other, making it a world apart (Nora 1989, 17); it imposes a kind of memory from above that is at once both rigid and expansive enough to eradicate any spark of political possibility. All of this is not to imply that historic preservation is not a worthwhile endeavor. It is to argue, however, that the politics and ethics of preservation are more complicated than many sprawl busters typically admit.11 To wit, when describing the difference between the prerogatives of sprawl versus the prerogatives of preservation, critics frequently cast these differences in terms of artificial versus natural development. In their oft-cited antisprawl manifesto Suburban Nation, for example, New Urbanist architects Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck argue that unlike the traditional neighborhood model, which evolved

Political Research Quarterly 64(4) organically as a response to human needs, suburban sprawl is an idealized artificial system (2000, 4). When confronted with this kind of argument, one must ask the question, At what point was the creation of towns and cities ever natural? At which point did city planning veer into the unnatural? To what moment in a communitys history do we plan to return, and at which moment can clearly separate a towns natural growth from its artificial development? In fact, many portions of the cities lauded for their naturally evolving neighborhoods were in fact quite consciously planned by giants such as Frederick Law Olmstead and Daniel Burnham. In the case of green field development, we can take this criticism even a step further: if we object to city planning that turns fertile soil into pavement, do we also object to the agricultural technologies that turned prairie into field? Which is most authentic landscape in this case, and should it matter? While preservation is certainly an important part of producing and sustaining memoryif only in this diluted, modern formthe widening gulf between urban sprawl and historic enclave may further isolate us from, rather than reacquaint us with, the past. More often than not, preservationists want to freeze time and limit the possible interpretations of a given space. Rather than the intermingling of past and present, our current situation often finds historic districts segregated from the rest of town, creating temporal as well as spatial boundaries so that place memory ceases to be integral to the fabric of our everyday lives.

Porosity: Towards a Critical Place Memory

No more tourist traps until the streets are exhausted from invention. Well muster an army to sidewalk-chalk the way. Ryan Collins, Whatever Happened to the Worlds Fair?

The placeless places created by exurban sprawl and the quaint blocks of yesteryear tended by historic preservationists illustrate two approaches to place memory that, on the surface anyway, appear radically opposed: the first treats place memory as utterly unimportant by embracing a landscape that is radically impermanent, while the second fetishizes place memory to the point of quarantining what it deems authentic places from lived use. These trends illustrate not only two distinct modes of spatial practice but also a kind of schizoid temporality: the first looks forward, albeit in a way that may indicate a distinctly dystopian future, while the second harkens back to a highly

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Farrar selective and idealized past. What is apparent, of course, is that landscapes devoted either to sprawl or to preservation are not terribly good at helping us to nurture what Dolores Hayden calls the power of place, which she describes as the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory (1997, 9). I would add that neither sprawl nor preservation presents an approach to place-making that is particularly democratic; the former most often relies on nothing but market logic to determine the shape of our cities, while the latter too often uses the dubious benchmark of authenticity either to foreground very peculiar histories and/or to cordon off properties from active use. A third way in this debate is not easy to find. More common by far is to posit a dichotomous choice: that either we reject the notion of place memory and simply learn to embrace the landscape of the temporary or that we fight to reclaim some version of an idealized past that may not only be impossible, but also undesirable, to reproduce in the twenty-first century. If we do not accept either of these options as especially attractiveor if we reject the stark dichotomy of these optionsthen how then do we approach the issue of place memory in a way that neither dismisses outright the possibility of a progressive, place-based politics nor uncritically embraces place as a panacea to the myriad problems of late capitalism? I want to suggest that we resist this choice, and instead focus on the cultivating a quality of space-time that we might describe as porosity. Walter Benjamin uses this term in his work on the city space of Naples to evoke a sense of the past haunting the present, in cities and places on the verge of disappearing. In his essay, Benjamin describes how many different elements of that city are porous: its spaces are rich with the intermingling of public and private, exterior and interior, past and present. The stamp of the definitive is avoided, he states approvingly. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its thus and not otherwise.... In such corners one can scarcely discern where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has set in. For nothing is concluded (1978, 166-67). Pierre Nora does not use the word porosity to describe his lieux de mmoire, yet he certainly captures that sensibility when he writes that the lieux we speak of, then, are mixed, hybrid, bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mbius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane (1989, 19). Appreciating porosity requires that our response to the transformations of space through time should never be simply or only nostalgic. Rather, porosity speaks to a sense of place that understands how history and memory seep into landscapes, allowing the past to coexist alongside the present. Such coexistence is an ontological (un)

731 certainty; urban spaces (and our everyday lives) always are characterized by this porosity, whether we choose to admit it or not. The past is always leaking into the present, despite our best attempts to cover it over, or to keep it at bay. And simultaneously, what is old is never static, fixed, or unmarked by the passage of time. In short: there is nothing that is either purely past or wholly present. Most importantly, in their slippage between public and private, porous landscapes contain and communicate both individual and social memory that influence thought and action at an almost subterranean level. Here (to return to where we began) memories are not simply stored, wholesale, in the recesses of our consciousness, but are reactivated and transformed through physical engagement with particular places. It is through ones lived encounters with landscapes and architectures that one makes sense of and remembers the world; it is through ones own body that one experiences the past, reflects on it, and reinvents it. Walking through a place is itself a form of Nietzschean mnemotechnics, where social and political relationships write themselves on and through the body. In this way, urban history is thus intensely physical, located in a being filled with memories that spill over into the present, a body shot through with other places, other times. Consequently, the most interesting places are places that celebrate and incorporate, rather than repudiate, the porous quality of urban life. What might porous places look like? Two examples come to mind. First, we might find porosity in the myriad structures seemingly built for obsolescence that have been repurposed for uses that exceed and even subvert their creators original intentions. As the form of the typical suburban shopping mall evolves, for example, strip malls and local malls become outdated, replaced by enormous regional monoliths like the Mall of America, or by upscale streetscape malls, such as Cumberland Mall in Atlanta (which, ironically, seeks to re-create the main streets of yesteryear). In the normal life cycle of a shopping center, outmoded structures typically attract fewer and fewer high-profile retailers, until their tenants eventually vacate entirely, leaving ghost malls: empty shells of spaces, the bleak remains of a particular epoch of capitalism. Rather than remaining relegated to the past, however, many of these places are being transformed instead of razed. In the 1980s, Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, Washington, had degenerated into a drug-ridden, high-crime area, a consequence of its being rendered largely obsolete by a mall that catered to high-income residents. Today Crossroads is still a shopping venue, but it now doubles as a robust community center, featuring weekly live entertainment, a farmers market, a community garden, and a library (Mattson 1999, 139-41). Similar instances of reclaiming and repurposing mall space can be found

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732 all over the United States (Southworth 2005); in each case, it is clear what once inhabited each space; the outlines or traces of the structures former existence are immediately recognizable, iconic in their banality. And yet they are invigorated by new users whose lived experiences of the space often contradict its earlier function. A second and perhaps more powerful example of porosity can be found in settings where place memory is consciously nurtured, even as these environments simultaneously encourage new ways of thinking about the space. Such a place can be found a few miles east of where I write this article: Sylvan Island Park, located in the heart of downtown Moline, Illinois. Sylvan Island is an artificial island, created in the Mississippi River in 1871 to provide a channel for generating hydraulic power for industry. For more than a half century, Republic Iron and Steel was located there, as well as a stone quarry and an ice-cutting business. The city of Moline bought the island in 1966, when it was already well on its way to industrial blight. For nearly thirty years, the city debated what to do with the island, and during this time it fell into further disarray: vegetation grew riotously, prying apart the old brick walls of the buildings that had been erected, splintering the long cement loading docks. Trash accumulated and trees proliferated. In the early 1990s, a group of enterprising citizens ambitiously calling themselves the Sylvan Island Dreamers set to work to implement their vision of the island and to sell that vision to local community leaders. Today the island is a special kind of park, resembling nothing so much as an urban forest, where hiking and biking trails are interspersed with industrial remains. A visitors center and a monument to the islands former Republic Steel workers serve to welcome people to the island, which also features a nationally recognized single-track bike trail. But the islands paths often incorporate Republics crumbling bricks, and in an instant, you can find yourself standing on a slab of old factory floor... in the middle of the woods. Railroad tracks, exposed rebar, and half-demolished concrete walls riddled with graffiti coexist with the parks picnic tables, benches, and drinking fountains. It is a porous place, a place where one can feel the weight and depth of time without even trying. Its ghosts are noisy and discomfiting; they remind visitors both of our impermanence and of the relentless rhythms of nature in its reclamations of the manmade. And yet the island itself is irresistible, drawing visitors and community volunteers to it every day. It should be noted that these examples, on the surface anyway, do not have much in common. The first (Crossroads Mall) was accomplished by a single, large developer in a relatively short period of time; while the second (Sylvan Island Park) emerged out of a grassroots, community nonprofit effort, over a period of many years.

Political Research Quarterly 64(4) Crossroads Mall is still, at its heart, a commercial entity, although one that caters to a diverse neighborhood and puts emphasis on the well-being of its host community. Sylvan Island, on the other hand, is a community space devoted to passive recreation: biking, hiking, bird-watching, and kayaking. This contrast suggests that there is no single blueprint required for the creation of porous places and no single formula for their success. Furthermore, neither of these is a political place, strictly speaking, although both foster civic life. Yet both examples speak to the persistence of place, and the stubbornness inherent in place-making: we create new places, even in the face of obsolescence, even in the grip of industrial decay. But what does such an understanding of porous placesof embodied and emplaced memoryget us? What does it do for our understanding of political life? What is important about embodied, emplaced memory is how it informs our capacity for political judgment; memoryespecially when it is unbidden, not quite conscious, at the margins of our self-understandinghas the potential to bring into being new ways of thinking about the world around us. Memory interrupts our linear and normative accounts of self, politics, and culture in ways that are appealingly disruptive and potentially transformative. In opposing it to history, Nora writes that memory remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived (1989, 8). One of Noras interpreters suggests that this means that Nora sees memory as passive, or feminine (Legg 2005, 494); but I see memory here as analogous to democracy: in its most radical form, it is unruly, uncertain, unfinished, collaborative, alive. If place plays a role in how our memories are formed, held, and activated, then we need to be mindful of the kinds of places we are creating and preserving. To the extent that our landscapes and cityscapes thwart our potential for spontaneous, unscripted remembranceby creating resolutely unmemorable spaces or spaces which authorize only specific kinds of memorywe limit the potential of this powerful political resource. A nuanced account of place memory should assume that a sense of place is not simply aesthetic and certainly not only visual; geographers have described this understanding as attending to the texture of a place (Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2001, xiii). Far from being simply points on a map, places are shot through with relationships, tensions, contradictions, and time; geopolitics is thus always also chronopolitics. A nuanced understanding of place memory, then, presupposes that place is not static or fixed (i.e., is not simply the inert object of a nostalgic gaze looking backwards, not simply standing still) but

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Farrar is more along the lines of a memory trace: modifying and modified by our actions in the present (Connolly 2002, 120-23). Places do not simply eradicate or reflect history; rather, they are always imbued with multiple temporalities. Such an understanding of place comes tantalizingly close to Lynchs recommendations for livable and memorable cities. Memorable cities, Lynch argues, contain evidence of time, helping us to interpret both our history and our present circumstances (1960). What this indicates is that we should be less inclined to see places only as thingsparticular buildings to be preserved, specific neighborhoods clearly delineated on walking tour mapsbut also as processes, as relationships and practice. How we decide to engage the activity of place-making is a political decision. As political theorists, then, we need to be attentive to the politics of place construction: not only how the places we make are shaped through the exercise of power and privilege but also how they assist or inhibit the potentially transformative work of memory. The idea of porosity suggests that when we create, preserve, and evaluate places, we do so with less attention to the criteria of either economic development or authenticity and with more attention to how these places multiply possible readings of space and of history (Edensor 2005, 4.); in other words, we need to cultivate places that do not occlude, romanticize, or overly prescribe our histories. Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my colleagues at Augustana College, especially Jeff Abernathy, Adam Kaul, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, and the members of the Faculty Research Forum for their ideas and support. The article also benefited from the thoughtful, provocative questions posed by Margaret Kohn and by the anonymous reviewers at Political Research Quarterly.

733
long-term political problems; however, he quickly puts this hesitation aside to contend that attempts to slow down political time are more dangerous than speed, asserting that these are almost inevitably fundamentalist in nature, taking the forms of either nationalist ideology or religious dogma (pp. 178-79). This is not to say, however, that Connollys conception of a robust, pluralist democracy is inhospitable to place-based politics; any reading of Connollys work reveals how important places have been to his own political development. The introduction to Pluralism, for example, vividly captures a moment in time in a particular place Flint, Michigan, during the McCarthy eraand illuminates how deeply that memory affected Connollys sensibilities towards politics and political theory (2005). 2. For a detailed account of how the concepts of place and space have been typically opposed in philosophy, often to the detriment of place, see Edward Caseys The Fate of Place (1998). 3. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, exurbia is the oldest of these words, first used by Auguste Comte Spectorsky in 1955 in his book The Exurbanites, a study of New York Citys commuter settlements. http://dictionary .oed.com/cgi/entry/50081215?query_type=word&query word=exurb&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort _type=alpha. Edge city is the phrase used by Joel Garreau in his book of the same title, to describe what he saw as a new trend: settlements that no longer rely on a central city to provide employment or commerce. The term boomburb was coined by Robert E. Lang and Patrick A. Simmons in their article Boomburbs: The Emergence of Large, FastGrowing Suburban Cities in the United States. Sprawl is defined by the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation as poorly planned, low-density, auto-oriented development that spreads out from the center of communities and consists of single-family dwellings spread over a large land area; single-use zoning that separates residential from commercial properties; the absence of a recognizable town center or main street; and planning practices that privilege automobile use over other forms of transit. Sprawl is not limited to booming cities but can also happen as urban areas expand geographically while maintaining (or even losing) population. 4. For excellent accounts of how suburbanization and sprawl diminish public life, see Hayden (2002, esp. chaps. 2-3) and Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck (2000, esp. chap. 7). For a thorough catalog of the various problems created or exacerbated by sprawl, see Dreier, Mollenkopf, Swanstrom (2004, esp. chaps. 2-3). 5. These various populations intersect in the parking lot of Home Depots, where scores of migrant laborers in various communities across the United States wait for local construction crews to pick them up for a days work building homes in sprawling subdivisions.

Authors Note
A version of this article won the best paper award at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2008.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: My work was funded in part by a sabbatical leave grant from Augustana College.

Notes
1. In his 2002 book Neuropolitics, Connolly first acknowledges that speed is dangerous when it is organized around a military culture, or when it inhibits our ability to solve

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6. Is a temporary landscape necessarily incompatible with a robust political life? Some might argue that such a transitory geography is a part of (or even intrinsic to) U.S. democracy: that the American propensity for spatial mobility is an indicator (or has even helped to cause) class mobility and perhaps that (in a broad sense) amnesia can be directly linked to increased tolerance. While I do not have the space here to consider this argument in detail, it is worth noting that the construction of suburbs (and now exurbs, or edge cities) typically does not correspond to greater integration in the United States, especially economic integration; instead, economic segregation increased dramatically between 1970 and 1990. While there is some evidence to suggest that this trend abated somewhat after 1990, in part this may be because first-ring suburbs have been growing poorer, while (some) central cities have become more affluent (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2004, chap. 2). 7. To wit, the Oxford Word of the Year for 2007 was locavore. As the Oxford University Press blog explains, The locavore movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation. Available at http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/locavore/. Thanks to Chad Lavin for the word-of-the-year tip. 8. This phenomenon is, of course, not unique to the United States. John Urry (2002) reports that in Britain (by the mid1990s) there were 500,000 listed buildings,... 17,000 protected monuments, and... 5,500 conservation areas in addition to 1,750 museums, more than half of which had been established since 1971. 9. The National Trust for Historic Preservations Heritage Tourism program states, In addition to creating new jobs, new business and higher property values, well-managed tourism improves the quality of life and builds community pride. According to the 2003 The Historic/Cultural Traveler study by the Travel Industry Association and Smithsonian Magazine, 81% (118 million) U.S. adults who traveled in 2002 were considered cultural heritage travelers.... Visitors to historic sites and cultural attractions stay longer and spend more money than other kinds of tourists. Available at http://www.culturalheritagetourism.org/ documents/2007CHTFactSheet.pdf. 10. Of course, as Stephen Legg notes, Noras work on memory and history itself might be interpreted as nostalgic, where Noras lost object of desire is the milieu de memoire (2005, 489). 11. For an excellent summary of some of these tensions, see Lowenthal (2004). As Lowenthal argues, the urge to preserve (to claim, categorize, classify, and intellectualize) the past might itself be a culturally specific impulse.

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