Session 1.18. Authoring Absence: Demolition, Forgetting, and the Wounds of the Contemporary City (20th-21st Centuries)
The Wounded City. Urban Spaces as Sites of Conflicts, Life, and Memory
XIII Congress AISU – Genoa, Italy, 7-10 September 2027
Deadline for paper proposals: 18 October 2026
Submissions: https://aisuinternational.org/en/genova-2027-sessioni-macrosessione-1-proposta-paper/
When part of a city is demolished, two wounds open at once. The first is physical: a street is cleared, a neighborhood is removed, a monument is dismantled, and the urban fabric carries the mark of what no longer stands. The second is slower and less visible: collective memory loses one of its material anchors which causes a social amnesia, and successive generations of inhabitants lose access to the spatial conditions under which their society’s past could be known and transmitted. The social discontinuity that follows demolition, across generations, and across the historical depth from which a society can understand its own present, is itself a wound, distinct from but bound to the physical absence in the ground.
This session interrogates who has held the authority to author these paired wounds across the contemporary city. Following Maurice Halbwachs’s foundational claim that groups remember through spatial frameworks, and Paul Connerton’s argument that modernity produces its own characteristic forms of forgetting, the session treats demolition as a productive historical act through which political administrations, planning and conservation institutions, property regimes, and emergency authorities shape what successive inhabitants of the city are able to remember.
The session welcomes work across the long twentieth century into the present, attentive both to historical episodes of authored clearance and to ongoing demolitions in the contemporary moment, including but not limited to mega-project clearances, gentrification-driven removals, and the contested afterlives of inherited political structure and spaces. We invite historically grounded papers built on close engagement with primary evidence. Preservation enters the analysis where it functions as part of the demolition story – through withheld designation, selective listing, withdrawn protection, or partial conservation. Cases from a range of political contexts are welcome – including fascist and totalitarian regimes, socialist and post-socialist transitions, post-authoritarian moments, and contemporary democratic and populist administrations – while recognizing that the institutional mechanisms of demolition authority differ significantly across these contexts.
The session asks: who authors the wounds of the contemporary city, and how do those wounds become the conditions of its forgetting?
Convenors:
Gunce Uzgoren (Politecnico di Milano);
Basak Kalfa (Çankaya Üniversitesi, Ankara)
Email: gunce.uzgoren@polimi.it