《The City of Collective Memory》简介：

Winner of the 1994 Lewis Mumford Prize given by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH).

Christine Boyer faces head-on the crisis of the city in the late twentieth century, taking us on a fascinating journey through theaters and museums, panoramas and maps, buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation, a complex cultural entity. Boyer brings together elements and concepts from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature, and painting in a synthetic and readable work that is broad in its reach and original in its insights. What finally emerges is a sense of the city reinvigorated with richness and potential.

The City of Collective Memory describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized, depicted, and planned. Boyer identifies three major "maps": one common to the traditional city—the city as a work of art; one characteristic of the modern city—the city as panorama; and one appropriate to the contemporary city—the city as spectacle. It is a richly illustrated and documented study that pays considerable attention to the normally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on and derived from the city. A wide range of secondary historical literature and theoretical work is considered, with evident debts to structuralist analysis of urban form represented by Aldo Rossi, as well to much post-structuralist criticism from Walter Benjamin to the present.

《The City of Collective Memory》摘录：

In the "analogous city" of memory that Rossi proposed, the concepts of permanence and change were revealed in the grammatical structure of the city. Monuments became primary elements of the city persisting through time; built forms such as the trace of an original street plan, the impression of a city's pre-urban nucleus, or the material evidence of its neighborhoods, streets, bridges, and arcades. Uncovered in the study of a city's history, these mental images impressed themselves on the spectator's or architect's mind; they formed both the memory of each city and created a formal unity out of all of its parts. They were the past we still experience in the present, and they enabled us to read the city in a contiguous manner.