Auckland: City of Volcanoes Part 3 – Place, identity and memory

Written and Posted by Janet Sayers - please acknowledge

“The spirit of a place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end, the strange sinister spirit of place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens, and all that we think the real thing will go off with a pop, and we shall be left staring” (D.H. Lawrence, 1956)

Rangitoto from East Auckland - On Wikimedia

This entry, the third so far, introduces some theory about place and its relationship to identity in the context of the city.

Part 1: Visual Representations of Auckland to 1987 (Historical Maps and other Images)

Part 2:  Visual representations of Auckland  - Now 

Part 3:  Place, identity and memory 

This entry is the most theoretically dense to date, but its purpose is to argue that the history and landscape of Auckland is centrally important to its collective sense of itself. In further posts I will link this argument  to Auckland’s business development, Auckland City’s volcanic landscape art, and to tangata whenua.

City identity and place

Modern cities have been argued to encompass characteristics of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000; Connerton, 2009). Connerton uses the work of Frances Yates (1966) who views memory as being dependent on stability (also see Halbwachs, 1950). Contemporary city life is characterised by change and movement and so Connerton concludes that 'forgetting' is characteristic of modern cities. Five factors contribute to this forgetting, all of which relate to cities’ time and spatial characteristics. 

Forgetting in cities occurs because of:

1. the speed at which people live their lives (Jacoby, 1975);
2. the enormous size of cities which make them incomprehensible and literally un-memorable, so that is impossible now, as it was in medieval times, to ascend a tall building (a city cathedral, or a local mount) and see the entire city from one vantage point;
3. consumerism which is disconnected from the labour process, making production all but invisible, and making cities primarily commodity-exchange cultures with no memory;
4. the short life-span of urban architecture which makes forgetting easier;
5. social relationships are less clearly defined as they are in smaller slower communities, which can be cemented more firmly in place by the stability of place and architecture.

These factors, according to Connerton, erode the foundations on which modern city subjects can build and share memories and creates a conundrum for cities in building and sustaining a sense of identity.

Matukutureia or McLaughlin Hill - On Wikipedia Commons

Although this argument resonates, it is contestable and others have argued that actually city dwellers do weave identity and memory through their everyday place-practices. Citizens create their individual identities in their everyday embodied memory practices through their being-in-the-city. Human life is always inextricably interwoven with place because place is related to culture, especially in the way we symbolise it through stories and art for example “Memory needs a place, a context.  Its place, if it finds one that lives beyond a single generation, is to be found in the stories we tell” (Kenny, 1999, p. 421). Kenny describes this phenomenon as the ‘metaphorical landscape of memory’. Extraordinary events create firmer bonds due to the greater clarity that destructive forces can wend, a point that is particularly salient and poignant considering the recent series of earthquakes in Christchurch (Halbwachs, 1950).  

Tim Ingold has written extensively about place practices and how they relate to identity and suggests that people perceive their environment, not in static frames, but through constant movement (1993, 2010). Connerton echoes these sentiments:

A sense of place depends upon a complex interplay of visual, auditory and olfactory memories ... These are acoustic, visual and other sensory experiences; familiar places are appropriated by my lived body that does not give us a position in objective space, but a sense of emplacement through their incorporation into the corporeal life of my habitual movements … (p. 32-33)

The most obvious ‘sense’ used in these placement activities is the visual. People orient themselves in relation to ‘seen’ objects within space. This argument about the relationship of memory to image will be developed soon as it is vital to attempts to visually symbolise Auckland. Place is used to remember as orientation to spatial features is essential in memorising practices; this practice creates strong empathetic emotional connections to place. The use of place to cement memory is an art-form, and is explained here as the ‘Method of loci’.

Place and Politics

So far I have introduced several ideas about the relationship of city identity to place and memory practices.  I live in NZ so I’ll be plain about the next point: place is political. Place is not and never has been neutral.

Nature is always interpreted through human culture and so place is fundamentally ideological. Culture is not static but constantly being created. Consequently culture is connected to action; what happens in a place is active and purposeful (Carter, 1987). Recent work by anthropologists shows that it is a peculiar notion of Western culture/s to see nature as passive, and relates to the modernist and colonial frame of reference for seeing. For many cultures, and this is especially obvious in Australian Aborigine culture,  visual representations of landscape are at one and the same time “a topographical map, a cosmological exegesis, a ‘clan-scape’, a ritual and a political landscape” (Bender, 2002). In other places, the lived experience of a place can be so overlaid with ideas about them, e.g. Jerusalem, that the actual place is almost completely obscured (Said, 2000).

These questions of the relationship between people, identity and place are recognised in wider geographical and post-colonial literary theory.  Osborne notes that a self-aware ‘geography of identity’ presupposes an ‘a-where-ness’ that “nation states occupy imaged terrains that serve as mnemonic devices” (Osborne, 2001).  Said has also been influential is raising the spectre of memory and imagery in relation to national identity building. He commented:

 “Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority. Far from being a neutral exercise in facts and basic truths, the study of history, which of course is the underpinning of memory, both its schools and university, is to some considerable extent a nationalist effort premised on the need to construct a desirable loyalty to and insider’s understanding of one’s country, tradition and faith” (Said, 2000, p. 176)

Even further, Said argues that memory is not only a social, political and historical exercise, but a matter of ‘invention’. Rulers ‘invent’ memories of the past as a way of creating a new sense of identity for ruler and ruled: “The invention of tradition is a method for using collective memory selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others, elevating still others in an entirely functional way” (p. 179).  Some memories are banished, especially those that the dominant hegemony feels the need to suppress.

In the post-colonial world, memory and identity is always ideologically related to colonialism; and with regard to landscapes with the way they are framed as ‘territories’ through mapping practices. Imperialists in history have shown a strong attachment to the visual, to maps, landscape art, and repeatable facts, which help the emplacement of person to memory-culture in certain ways.

Landscape features, city-scape skylines, maps, and brands are significant to citizen orientation as they are static elements of the seen environment and consequently people from diverse backgrounds can share their iconography. Landscape and environment provide the common shared tropes through which multiple subjects from diverse backgrounds can form memories and identities. In further posts I will link this argument back to Auckland’s business development, Auckland City’s volcanic landscape art, and to tangata whenua.

References

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Bender, B. (2002). Landscape, Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (pp. 4): Taylor and Francis.

Carter, P. (1987). The road to Botany Bay: An exploration of landscape and history London: University of Minnesota Press.

Connerton, P. (2009). How modernity forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1950). The collective memory (L. Coser, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago.

Harley, J. B. (1988). Maps, knowledge and power. In D. Cosgrave & S. Daniels (Eds.), The iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments (pp. 277—312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ingold, T. (1993). The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology, 25(2), 152—174.

Ingold, T. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34 (1), 91—102.

Jacoby, R. (1975). Social amnesia: A critique of conformist psychology from Adler to Laing Boston: Beacon Press.

Kenny, M. (1999). The place for memory: The interface between individual and collective history. Comparative Studies In Society And History, 41(3), 420—437.

Lawrence, D. H. (1956). Sea and Sardinia. London: William Heinemann.

Osborne, B. S. (2001). Landscapes, memory, monuments, and commemoration: Putting identity in its place Canadian Ethnic Studies, XXXIII(3), 39—77.

Said, E. W. (2000). Invention, memory and place. Critical Inquiry, 26(2), 175—192.

Yates, F. (1966). The art of memory. London: Routledge Paul

To reference this work:

Sayers, J. (2011). Auckland: City of Volcanoes Part 3 – Place, identity and memory. On Managing Services Blogspot, at http://managingservicesblogspot.blogspot.com/2011/10/auckland-city-of-volcanoes-part-3-place.html, Downloaded xx/xx/xxx.

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