Special issue: City margins, City memories

The mainstream imagination of the European city is commonly based around a cultural topography of the ‘centre’: the urban ‘core’ in which power, history and collective social life is performed. These identities are most readily articulated through the stereotypical itineraries of the tourist, and perpetuated in the monikers of Paris as the city of lights and love, Berlin as a city of war and walls and Milan as the city of fashion and food.

While these clichés have their roots in the material histories of each city, they become potential tools in the era of neoliberal marketing for the instrumentalisation of the past. This packaging of the past potentially neglects the experience of those who do not conveniently fit the promotional image of the city. But, in its complexity and mobility urban space defies clichés, and as such has continuously been the site of tensions between governmental and planning ideals of coherence, order and continuity on the one hand, and the realities of the city as a complex assemblage of subjectivities, societies and environments in flux on the other.

The three cities - Berlin, Milan and Paris - discussed in this special issue each provide different contexts for the exploration of this complex, multilayered fabric of urban life. As the articles gathered here demonstrate, the question of what it means to live, and what life means in the contemporary European city is often most fiercely debated, contested and decided at the edges of the neoliberal hegemonic centre.

Articles in this special issue:
+ Introduction: city margins, city memories - Gillian Jein, Laura Rorato & Anna Saunders
+ Creating a new community in the 'zone': borders, foreignness and the Cité Universitaire in interwar Paris - Jehnie Reis
+ Remembering on the city's margins: the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris - Nadia Kiwan
+ The reconstructed City Palace and Humboldt Forum in Berlin: restoring architectural identity or distorting the memory of historic spaces? - Carol Anne Costabile-Heming
+ Remembering at the margins: trauma, memory practices and the recovery of marginalised voices at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen memorial - Deirdre Byrnes
+ The return of Berlin-Kreuzberg: brought back from the margins by memory - Hanno Hochmuth
+ City margins as spaces of becoming: inclusions, exclusions and intersections in Milan's contemporary urban territory - Martina Orsini
+ Re-writing complexity through fragments: mapping Milan in the twenty-first century - Laura Rorato