The Role of Reviving Ancient Walls in Collective Memory

Abstract

The concepts of the wall and the city intertwined in many ancient civilizations. These walls are historical evidence of specific periods of time that the city passed through and reflect its collective memory that crosses with time. The walls had an actual presence in the lives of residents and builders and their memories. With the passage of time and technological acceleration, the pace of urbanization and development in cities accelerated, which led to the widespread destruction of the walls that reflect the identity of cities and their established image memory. This research aims to study the physical and symbolic revival of the remains of ancient walls and gates due to their importance in enhancing collective memory and identity. To this end, the remnants of the walls in restoring collective memory were studied and presented through global and local propositions through contemporary urban development strategies. The research assumes that the walls are important in conveying the history of the city, so the remains of the walls in the holy city of Najaf were taken as the living historical evidence that reflects the stories of the victories of our fathers and grandfathers over the invasions. Where the old city wall was the fortified wall that protected its people. The number of defensive walls was five, according to another narration, six, and each wall is a reflection of a specific time period and a specific story in the ancient history of the city. Therefore, the rest of these walls must be preserved because they constitute important scenes in the history of the holy city of Najaf, where a framework was used to provide recommendations to evoke the walls as landmarks and determinants influential in the city, this framework was done in the research in Table 1, which is a conceptual framework that was extracted from the previous literature. The results indicated the possibility of investing historical walls as effective drivers in building collective memory and restoring its unique urban identity through a set of mechanisms within the retrieving strategy represented by the virtual renewal of the walls using traces or signs, the work of virtual preservation, and digital documentation, physical renewal of the remains of the walls through literal cloning, deletion and addition, cultural (community) renewal due to the visit.