Interrupted Spaces, Engineered Traditions

International conference in Bamberg / online, 30 June 2021

Co-organized by the History Department and the Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technologies, the conference explores spatial interruption as a practice for creating/erasing political or cultural identity.
 

Since the first pioneering studies on cultural memory and the invention of traditions, scholars of this field have consistently turned to spatial references to frame their research questions. As the study of cultural memory is expanding conceptually to include processes of “social forgetting” (Guy Beiner), urban space continues to be a promising field of study for understanding how the contours of memory cultures are drawn (Jan Assmann) or, in our case, engineered.

The international conference “Interrupted Spaces, Engineered Traditions” examines case studies, where spatial interruption was used as an opportunity or was deployed as a tool for creating/erasing political or cultural identity. Interruptions of the cityscape were non-linear processes leading to a variety of outcomes. In each case, however, the moment of interruption itself became a cardinal point in emerging, often conflicting narratives. It is the relationship between the interpretation of moments of spatial interruptions and political culture that our conference seeks to examine.

Supported by the Women's Representatives at Bamberg University through the SPOT Program

Program

The conference will take place online as a Zoom Meeting.

WEND. 30 JUNE 2021

9:45 CEST / 3:45 am EDT Welcome address and introduction by Carmen M. Enss and Heléna Tóth

10:00 – 12:00 CEST / 4:00 – 6:00 am EDT Panel I: Urban Space – Archive of Interruptions
 

Maria Grazia D’Amelio (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy); Lorenzo Grieco (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy; University of Kent, Canterbury, UK):  Interrupted Interruptions: Urban Politics and Unexecuted Projects in Rome during Fascism

Daniel Hadwiger (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany):  Transforming a City’s Image by Destruction. The Demolition and Reconstruction of the Old Port of Marseille, 1943–1958

Carmen M. Enss (University of Bamberg): Scraping the Palimpsest: City Planning and Map Making in Early Post-War Europe

Katrina Gulliver (Bristol University, UK):  Commercial Identity and Community Identification: Interrogating Urban Memory in the US

12:30 – 14:00 CEST / 4:30 – 8:00 am EDT Panel II: Spatial Politics in Engineering the Socialist New Man
 

Olga Marassanova (Perm State University, Russian Federation):  Electric Frontier of Soviet Urban Space: The Cultural History of the Energy System, 1920-1930 in Ural City Perm

Heléna Tóth (University of Bamberg, Germany):  Engineering Grief: The Politics of Cemetery Architecture between Technocracy and Ideology in Neubrandenburg, 1964-1976

Nicoleta Şerban (Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, Romania):  The Project of Rural Systematization in Communist Romania, 1988-1989

14:20 CEST / 8:20 am EDT Welcome address by Prof. Mona Hess (University of Bamberg, Germany)

14:30 – 16:00 CEST / 8:30 – 10:00 am EDT Panel III: Interrupted Spaces, (Post-)Colonial Heritage Making
 

Paridhi David Massey (Ashoka University, India): Shri Govind Dev and the Claims to the Past: Life of a Temple in the Pilgrimage-city of Vrindavan, 1880-1950’s

Lisandra Franco de Mendonça (Lab2PT, University of Minho; TU Berlin):  Topographies of Loss and Liberation: Colonial Disentanglement and the Quest for Mozambicaness — Maputo’s Socio-Urban Space in the Aftermath of Independence

Ritika Sahu (Cotton University, India):  Park(s), Public space(s) and the Past(s): A Study of Urban Parks of Sivasagar, Assam

17.30 CEST / 11:30 am EDT: Keynote Lecture
 

Francesca Russello Ammon (University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, USA):  Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape

20:00 CEST / 2:00 pm EDT: Keynote Lecture
 

Tijana Vujosevic (University of British Columbia, Canada):  Space-Making as Ideological Practice: Modernism and Soviet Identities in the 1920s and the 1930s

Abstracts
 

Panel I: Urban Space – Archive of Interruptions

Maria Grazia D’Amelio (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy); Lorenzo Grieco (University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy; University of Kent, Canterbury, UK): Interrupted Interruptions: Urban Politics and Unexecuted Projects in Rome during Fascism

The contribution investigates the several projects of the Fascist period which comprised an interruption in the urban tissue of Rome. The demolitions for the tracing of new urban axes and the building of new infrastructures, resorted to precise utopic and political views which profoundly changed the image of Rome. Due to different reasons, some of these engineered interventions were not completed. They are interrupted projects which survive only in the dimension of paper, as well as in the virtual memory of the city.

Daniel Hadwiger (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Germany): Transforming a City’s Image by Destruction. The Demolition and Reconstruction of the Old Port of Marseille, 1943–1958

The presentation aims to show how the destruction and reconstruction of the port area in Marseille in the period of 1943–1958 was politically justified and how the port district influenced the image of Marseille. The destruction of the port in 1943 by German occupation forces and the reconstruction after the war were highly controversial. The debates on the “interrupted” space in the heart of the city reflect the different points of view on the identity of Marseille as a cosmopolitan or as a French city, as a popular or as a bourgeois centre.

Carmen M. Enss (University of Bamberg): Scraping the Palimpsest: City Planning and Map Making in Early Post-War Europe

Archives of war-damaged cities hold damage maps that were created during and after World War Two. These understudied documents provide insights into the early post-war period when compared with post-war reconstruction plans. New streets were carved into the built urban fabric and zones of tradition were created within the damaged city. The talk discusses to what extent war damage and city planning correlated with each other. In many cases, spatial interruptions were triggered by war, but were completed only during rubble-clearing campaigns. Concurrently, supposedly surviving historical architecture and urban spaces were shaped in the post-war reconstruction era.

Katrina Gulliver (Bristol University, UK): Commercial Identity and Community Identification: Interrogating Urban Memory in the US

In 2004, a neon Pepsi sign was dismantled on a rooftop in Queens, NY. The sign, which had been on the roof of the Pepsi bottling plant since 1936, had lingered after the factory was closed. It was finally taken down when the building was sold for redevelopment. To the company’s surprise, its disappearance led to pleas for it to be returned. After lobbying by locals who wanted to save it, the sign was placed atop a nearby apartment building. This is the perfect example of how an element of the urban viewscape, designed to bring to mind a commercial product, becomes in itself an object of affection. Its long tenure on the roof made it part of the landscape and one people regarded as a landmark–and this community connection went beyond its role promoting a particular product. At a smaller scale, this affection also lingers for “ghost” signs–often advertising products (unlike Pepsi) that are no longer available. These elements are part of how people experience cities, whether intended by their planners or not.

Panel II: Spatial Politics in Engineering the Socialist New Man

Olga Marassanova (Perm State University, Russian Federation): Electric Frontier of Soviet Urban Space: The Cultural History of the Energy System, 1920-1930 in Ural City Perm

In addition to the appearance of technical gadgets and new working processes, electrification changed the impression of the urban space. This phenomenon is a subject of the paper. The aim of the study is to analyze the influence of electrification on representation practices of city landscapes based on materials about Southern Ural cities in the 1930-50’s. This phenomenon is shown in a presentation on materials of the little town Kudymkar which obtained the city status in 1938. During the next twenty years the understanding of space had changed, because of new social practices, which appeared after the emergence of electricity.

Heléna Tóth (University of Bamberg, Germany): Engineering Grief: The Politics of Cemetery Architecture between Technocracy and Ideology in Neubrandenburg, 1964-1976

Focusing on the history of the Carlshöhe cemetery in Neubrandenburg, this presentation interrogates urban planning as a tool to influence ritual behavior. Funerary culture played a significant role in creating the socialist “new man” in the GDR. Memorial ceremonies and state funerals were cathartic moments designed to forge historical narratives and cultivate political identity. The translation of state ideology into funeral culture for ordinary citizens was, however, more complicated and was expected to be a slower process. The “modern” socialist funeral was meant to be secular rather than religious and the form of disposal was preferably cremation instead of inhumation. Cemetery infrastructure was supposed to enable and propagate the broader transformation of choices related to both ritual and the disposal of dead bodies. Through case study of the founding of the Carlshöhe cemetery in the early 1970s, the presentation examines the extent and the limitations of considerations of the ritual elements of funerary culture on urban planning decisions.  

Nicoleta Şerban (Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, Romania): The Project of Rural Systematization in Communist Romania, 1988-1989

In 1988, Nicolae Ceauseşcu, the Romanian dictator, wanted to erase half of the Romanian villages (about 8.000), and to build new towns, new rural blocks, and to move the population resulted from the process (a few million people) over night. Ceausescu’s idea was to gain land for agriculture, and therefore to restrain the land of the villages by demolishing them and building new rural blocks. For the rural population, this would have been a terrible transformation, meaning losing their houses, garden, traditions, their lifestyle; leaving their little house and moving to an apartment, without being asked if they agree or not. Demolition of 8.000 villages, this would not be interrupted spaces, but erased entirely and rebuilt from the start. In the new blocks, the living was uniformised: everybody had to live in the same type of apartments, as opposed to the traditional house. This meant a radical configuration of the settlements, and transforming the population into the new communist man: without tradition, history, memory, sense of community. This project caused a lot of protests from inside of the country, but also from the international community, that considered it as a cultural genocide. Fortunately, the regime’s fall in December 1989, and the project resulted in the erasure of only a few villages; after 1990, people recovered their old land and rebuilt their houses.

Panel III: Interrupted Spaces, (Post-)Colonial Heritage Making

Paridhi David Massey (Ashoka University, India): Shri Govind Dev and the Claims to the Past: Life of a Temple in the Pilgrimage-city of Vrindavan, 1880-1950’s

This paper is conceived in the form of a case-study of the long life of a Hindu-Vaishnava temple in colonial north India. It seeks to situate the temple within the broad canvas of the political, spatial, architectural, and cultural history of the pilgrimage town of Vrindavan. The temple as a site has been read, analysed and reinvented through diverse historical periods and actors who attempted to appropriate its physical, material and symbolic space, and accord it multiple meanings in time. My work tries to understand how colonial and post-colonial interventions in India from the late-nineteenth to the middle twentieth centuries reinvented and re-created the spatial identity of the temple of Sri Govind-Dev in Vrindavan using the structural apparatuses of the newly formed archeological and public-works departments.  The temple is re-casted in the novel language of colonial governmentality, rhetoric of the civic and municipal and re-casted as a 'public monument' in British India. The paper seeks to unfold this long-life of the temple and its metamorphosis from a ‘monument’in the British colonial period to that of a symbol of national culture in post-colonial India. 

Lisandra Franco de Mendonça (Lab2PT, University of Minho; TU Berlin): Topographies of Loss and Liberation: Colonial Disentanglement and the Quest for Mozambicaness — Maputo’s Socio-Urban Space in the Aftermath of Independence

Throughout the Transitional Government (1974-1975) and on the aftermath of the independence of Mozambique (25 June 1975), the European socio-economic and built topographies of Maputo, characterised by precise socioracial and functional zoning (both in urban and building design), strong urban developments and a doctrinaire collection of memorials, were profoundly challenged. The (unfulfilled) promise of social equality and modernisation implicated all sectors of society, from the statiation of services (such as the practice of law, education and health, funerary parlours, insurance companies, etc.), to the nationalisation of land, key industries, vacant houses and buildings purposefully built for rental yield — which also translated into the swift substitution of city dwellers. Along with dozens of laws, orders and directives (a superficial reading of the government’ Boletim da República accounts for this frantic activity), limiting the liberties of civilians (to fight so-called anti-decolonization manoeuvres), appointing new managers or workers’ committees in private companies from all sectors of activity; the new 24/20 order forced many to leave the country in 24 hours carrying only 20kg of baggage. FRELIMO’s programme for Culture focused primarily on products adequate to the Revolution. In that regard, the entire state apparatus dedicated to Education and Culture was reformulated and a campaign to inventory cultural heritage was set in motion between 1978-1982, under the tutelage of the National Service of Museums and Antiquities (SNMA). The SNMA fond sheds light on a number of realities linked to decolonisation, the institutionalized production of knowledge, and on FRELIMO’s “master narrative” as the sole bearer of liberation and (forced) progress, making use of the kaleidoscopic valences of heritage in projecting multiple interpretations, nurturing (somewhat divergent) collective memories. It presents “new data” that counter Portuguese narratives around certain memorials. In this regard, historic sites of the pacification campaigns were then reappropriated under a narrative of resistance and as a means of political legitimation. Maputo’s “city of cement”, on the other hand, was described as a newly conquered patrimony that came with obligations (such as adequate use, according to the state manuals produced to aid new tenants in the use of the nationalised property). This paper addresses Maputo’s urban space and social refashioning in the aftermath of independence, understood primarily as a political manifesto and secondly as spatial and material archive. It draws on archival and field research conducted in recent years and aimed to provide background for understanding urban space reconfigurations in Maputo’s post-independence reimagined community.

Ritika Sahu (Cotton University, India): Park(s), Public space(s) and the Past(s): A Study of Urban Parks of Sivasagar, Assam

This paper examines how the past is configured spatially at urban parks. Particularly, the historical parks and other parks themed around historical events or individuals, which are invested with a sense of collective memory. I will focus on parks in Sivasagar, a district in Assam, India. These parks not only beautify the landscape, but, over a period of time, they also transformed the space and helped in promotion of images that shape the idea of a region, a community and nation. In my analysis, I point out that the regional (as against a unitary national) character is pre-dominant here.

Keynote Lectures:

Francesca Russello Ammon (University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, USA): Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape

Through a history of the bulldozer, this talk considers how postwar Americans came to equate destruction with progress. Construction equipment contributed vitally to Allied victory during World War II; afterwards, war-honed machines, men, methods, and metaphors effectively came home to reshape the domestic landscape. This was evident in the postwar practices of urban renewal building demolition, suburban land clearance, and demolition and earthmoving for interstate highway construction. Meanwhile, the bulldozer also permeated popular imagination in postwar literature, films, and art. Before the efforts of historic preservationists, neighborhood activists, and environmentalists began to temper the bulldozer’s work, the ideology, technology, policy, and practice of large-scale destruction dramatically transformed the American landscape.

Tijana Vujosevic (University of British Columbia, Canada): Space-Making as Ideological Practice: Modernism and Soviet Identities in the 1920s and the 1930s

The October Revolution of 1917 was one of the main “interruptions” in contemporary history, a moment that marked the emergence of modernity’s most radical social, political, and aesthetic project. The lecture explores the role of spatial practices – domestic design, urbanism, architecture – in the creation of new identities in the first two decades after October. To consider architecture and design as tools of forging identities and inventing a communist tradition means considering ways in which values are manifested in the built environment and ways in which the language of the senses articulates the nature of citizenship and institutions. The lecture will look at space-making as an ideological practice, albeit one that hinged not merely on the dissemination and control of ideas and narratives but also on concrete, material interventions in environments Soviet citizens lived in.

Participants
 

Maria Grazia D’Amelio is a Professor of History of Architecture at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Specialised in Baroque and Early Twentieth-century architecture, she is the author of a book on the Obelisk of the Foro Mussolini, Rome (2009), and editor of the book Per non dimenticare: Sacrari del Novecento(2019), on the architecture of World War I memorials in Europe.

Francesca Russello Ammon is associate professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. She is a cultural historian of the built environment, focusing particularly on the 20th century American city. Professor Ammon is particularly interested in the history of urban revitalization, with an emphasis on urban renewal; digital public history as a tool for community-based research and engagement; and the ways that visual culture has shaped understanding of what cities are, have been, and should be. Her talk today draws upon her book of the same title, which received the 2017 Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book in American planning history.

Carmen M. Enss is a researcher in heritage conservation and architectural history at Bamberg University in Germany. Currently, she is head of the research consortium UrbanMetaMapping. The group analyses city maps as a visual medium of urban transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939–1949.

Lorenzo Grieco is Phd in Civil Engineering at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and Phd candidate in Architecture at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has investigated Renaissance and Contemporary architecture, with a particular focus on postwar ecclesial architecture in Britain and the enduring memorial of blitzed churches.

Katrina Gulliver teaches history at Bristol University. She holds a PhD from Cambridge and has worked at universities and museums in the US, UK, Germany, Singapore and Australia. Her first book, Modern Women in China and Japan, discussed the development of feminism and modernity in the 1920s and 30s. Her research interests include Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the development of port cities. She has taught courses on the histories of Asia since the spice race, urban history, and the development of policing and forensics. She is also the co-editor of the ‘Pacific Worlds’ series from the University of Nebraska Press, covering the histories and cultures of the Pacific. She is the creator of the podcast Cities in History, which is used in college classrooms around the world. Katrina’s articles and reviews appear regularly in The Spectator and Reason, and she has written for TIME, The Atlantic, The American Conservative, The Wall St Journal, and The Weekly Standard. Currentlyshe is working on a history of urban life.

Daniel Hadwiger works as a research assistant at the Leibniz-Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung (IRS) in Erkner on a research project on urban authenticity in the built heritage of Marseille in a historical perspective. His research areas are urban history in Germany and France in the 20th century,  history of the national socialism and the Vichy-Regime. He recently published Nationale Solidarität und ihre Grenzen (Steiner Verlag) about welfare in Germany and France during the Second World War.

Olga Marassanova is pursuing postgraduate studies at Perm State university (Russian Federation) in Russian history (this is a specific category). She has worked extensively on local history and public history projects. Her main research areas include the representation of local history in public practices and cultural history of technology.

Paridhi David Massey is pursuing her doctoral studies at the Department of History, Ashoka University, India. She is engaging with the question of the 'sacred' in the re-making and planning of the town of Mathura in colonial north India. Her dissertation interrogates the world of colonial urbanism and town-planning as unfolded in the administrative and spatial re-imagination of the pilgrimage city, seen through the life of its built environment and physical landscape. Her research focuses on the themes of pilgrimage and pilgrimage-towns, cantonments, colonial governmentality, spatial histories, monument-making and cityscapes. “Vrindavan- A Land of Living History”, Oral Traditions, Myths & Legends of India, Indian Trust for Rural Heritage and Development, Delhi, Special Issue, 2, 2017.

Lisandra Franco de Mendonça. An architect, architectural history researcher and former Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, Lisandra Franco de Mendonça was educated at the Universities of Porto and Sapienza of Rome, and obtained a double PhD degree in 2016 (Universities of Coimbra/ Sapienza of Rome) with a study of 20th century architecture in Maputo, Mozambique. She is a researcher at the University of Minho and a visiting researcher at TU Berlin. Her most recent and upcoming publications include: “Architecture, Urbanism, Construction Work and Local Labor in the Turn of the Twentieth Century in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique.” In Seventh International Congress on Construction History. CRC Press/Balkema, 2021 [in press]; “The Inheritance of Modern Architecture and Urban Landscape in the ‘Cement City’: Maputo, Mozambique.” In Realtà dell’Architettura fra materia e immagine. Per Giovanni Carbonara: Studi e Ricerche Vol. 2 (Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura. Numero Speciale 2019), edited by D. Esposito and V. Montanari. Roma: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2021 [in press]; Franco de Mendonça, L. and Mendonça, R. “Culto dos monumentos históricos e projeto imperial na década de 1940: Negociando um passado colonial em Maputo e além [Cult of monuments and imperial project in the 1940s: Negotiating a colonial past in Maputo and beyond].” urbe, Rev. Bras. Gest. Urbana vol. 13 (2021) [forthcoming].

Ritika Sahu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Cotton University. Her area of research is the history and archaeology of South Asia –in particular, the region of North East India. Some of her publications include: “The excavated maidam: Towards an Archaeological Interpretation,” in Archaeology in North -East India, Essays celebrating 150 years of research- Recent trends and Future Prospects, edited by Milan Kumar Chauley and Manjil Hazarika, Research India Press, 2020, pp. 309-322; “Memory, Power and Sacredness: Exploring the mortuary space of Charaideo, In 50 years after Daojali Hading- Emerging perspectives” in the Archaeology of North-East India, essays in honour of Tarun Chandra Sharma, edited by Tiatoshi Jamir and Manjil Hazarika, Research India Press, New Delhi, 2014. pp.283-291; “Places, Memory and Nostalgia: The abode of the royal Ahoms of Assam,” in Indian History Congress, Proceeding of IHC 2012, New Delhi 2013, pp.1261-1267; “Locating the ‘Neolithic’- A comparative study of ceramics of North-East India and South-East Asia”, Proceeding of IHC 2011, New Delhi 2012, pp.1179-1188.

Nicoleta Șerban (b. 1985) historian, graduated from the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest (2008). Doctor in history at the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest, and EHESS Paris (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) (2014). Expert within the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER), since 2016. Areas of interest: the memorial public space, the Romanian exile (1947-1989), the memory of the Romanian communism.

Heléna Tóth is lecturer of Modern and Contemporary history at the University of Bamberg. Focusing on East and Central Europe, her research interests include the history of political exile in the 19^th century and the cultural history of socialism. Her publications include An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution, 1848-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); edited with Katrina Gulliver, Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience (London: Ashgate, 2014); edited with Charlotte Lerg, Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 (Leiden: Brill, 2017); edited with Todd Weir Religion and Socialism in the Long 1960s: From Antithesis to Dialogue in Eastern and Western Europe in Contemporary European History (29:2) (2020).

Tijana Vujosevic teaches architectural history at the University of British Columbia. Her writing on ways in which modern architecture and urbanism shape notions of citizenship and identity has been published in a wide range of journals across different disciplines, including Grey Room, Leonardo, Slavic and East European Journal, Architectural Histories, Cultural Geographies, and Journal of Design History. Her major research monograph Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man came out with Manchester University Press in 2017.