Charley, Jonathan. Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestoes.
Choi, Lisa
Charley, Jonathan.
Memories of Cities: Trips and Manifestoes.
Surrey, UK 8c Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2013. 228 p.
ISBN: 978-1-4094-3137-4.
In Memories of Cities, Charley employs a rich mix of political and
economic history, literary works, and images to explore the
multi-faceted and often contradictory production of modern urban space.
Set in different moments in time as well as different locales,
Charley's narratives use a variety of styles including essays,
interviews, letters, and diary entries. By skilfully drawing connections
between 'here' and 'elsewhere' as well as
'now' and 'then,' he situates the modern city at a
nexus between remembering, forgetting, and imagining: past urban
chronotopes and their underlying ideologies are transformed, displaced,
and relocated. Imbued with ideology, the material architectures of
Paris, Glasgow, Marseille, and Moscow, among other cities, are
politicised and speak to social architectures (i.e. social relations)
within and across urban contexts. Through a Marxist and a critical urban
lens, Charley explores themes of capitalism, empire, revolution, and
utopia to unearth the ideologies that have driven urban imaginaries in
the past, present, and future.
A chronological organization of chapters is used, though not
without interventions prompting the reader to consider ties to other
temporalities. Images allude to different space-times, directing
attention to the symbolic value of the places they memorialize. The city
as discourse is written and read, but there is always more to be
'seen and revisions to be made. Charley's selections of images
also work in tandem with his texts to explore the dialectical
relationships between creation and destruction, utopia and dystopia, and
liberation and domination. This dynamic interplay reminds the reader
that the city is always in a state of transformation and contradiction.
While Charley's essays frame different architectural examples as
monuments to a given ideology, they also allude to the simultaneous
masking of the politics of their making. The architecture of the city,
then, prompts both remembering and forgetting.
Memories of Cities traces the entwined histories of several
European cities. Different geographic and temporal contexts as well as
modes of production are juxtaposed, often exposing deep inequalities and
contradictions. As Charley notes, however, the places from where capital
is extracted is masked, reproducing the disconnection between the
European 'here' and the colonized 'elsewhere'. While
he notes this spatial inequality, his focus on the recipient cities
where the extracted wealth is transformed into architectural monuments
can be interpreted as further exacerbating this dissonance.
Additionally, given the author's explicit Marxist and critical
urban approach, it is no surprise that a significant portion of the book
explores labour relations and class struggle in different places and
times. However, the essays only briefly address the significance of
other key social dimensions that are entwined within these labour and
class relations, merely alluding to the masculinist production of urban
space through the personification of Glasgow and Marseille, for example.
Last, the roughly linear progression of time throughout the book
initially leaves the reader with an uneasy feeling of failure upon its
conclusion. In the final chapter, an adventure across literary urban
worlds concludes as Charley suggests that the creative drive towards
utopia is spent, leaving only reiterations of the existing dialectic
between capitalism and communism. His final narrative ends abruptly as
if being sharply awoken from a dream. In this conclusion, or rather in
this 'interruption, the 'future memory' of urban
development is fissured--rendered incomplete, unknown, and unmade.
Charley's initial call for an alternative architectural practice is
recalled from the introductory chapter, reminding the reader to holdfast
to a critical reflexivity that continues to interrogate the social,
political, economic and material production of the city.
While Charley's varied writing styles may be less suitable for
a classroom setting, his critical and interdisciplinary approach to
architecture, socio-spatial relations, and literary as well as visual
representations, make Memories of Cities an intriguing and stimulating
text for architects, geographers, and other urban thinkers. Ultimately,
Charley's visual and literary narratives blend politics, history,
and storytelling to reveal "the ideological character of buildings
and cities" (xii). In doing so, his essays are stylistically
captivating while implicitly and explicitly revealing his
subjectivities. Hence, the reader should never forget that, like the
cities and buildings in his essays, Charley too is telling a story.
Lisa Choi
DPhil Student
Department of Geography & the Environment
University of Oxford
