Navigating the ‘archive city’

Abstract

This article examines the idea of the ‘archive city’: a spatiotemporal construct oriented around the central metaphor of the ‘city as archive’. Surfing the cusp between the material and immaterial, the tangible and intangible, the embodied and virtual, the producer and consumer and – not least – the analogue and the digital, the archive city denotes a conceptualization of ‘archival space’ that straddles the material and symbolic city and which invites reflection on the ways cultural geographies of memory – in this case those specific to cities and other urban landscapes – are enfolded across the multi-sited and multilayered spaces of everyday urban practice. Reframing the ontological question of ‘what is the archive in the digital age?’ in terms of ‘ where is the archive?’, in the first part of the article I survey the theoretical precincts of the archive city before moving on to discuss how we might conceive of a digital spatial humanities in which this more open and purposefully elusive conceptualization of the archive can productively inform debates and practices relating to urban cultural memory. The article then discusses two case studies, both of which map the cinematic geographies of cities: Liverpool in the north west of England and Bologna in Italy. The article ends with some concluding thoughts on the role of digital spatial humanities in urban-based cultural memory studies and the broader theoretical and practical implications this has in relation to digital and ‘open’ archival practices.