Topographies of Memories

Anita Bakshi is Instructor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University, USA. She has studied the relationship between place and memory in divided cities with the Conflict in Cities Research Programme at Cambridge University, UK, and exhibited original maps and drawings documenting her ethnographic research in partnership with the UNDP.

“The strength of the book is in the tracing of events in time and place, with Anita at home in the cultural mapping and the case-study of the Nicosia buffer-zone. This is, indeed, an important contribution in itself but, with a bibliography that is rich and engaging, more references need to be devoted to the theories of cultural mapping and the attributes that are necessarily relevant to each particular geo-cultural contexts.” (Michael Turner, Heritage & Society, August 01, 2018)“Bakshi’s examination of Nicosia is innovative in its analysis, rich in its use of data and highly important in the conclusions that are drawn. … The wider literature across a range of disciplines has beenexhaustively researched by Bakshi, as an approach that encompasses maps, advertisements, interviews, art, architecture and literature has been built. … Bakshi’s assessment of Nicosia represents the potential of discovery and meeting within the winding streets of the ancient city.” (Ross J. Wilson, International Journal of Heritage Studies, February, 2018)“Topographies of Memories is an extremely sophisticated study of how the fraught and complex processes of ethnonationalist conflict—and thus, its repair—work through personal and social relationships to the built and imagined environment. … This beautifully written work is both a study of the material and imagined dimensions of place, and a proposal for foregrounding place as a method for bringing together communities with memories of conflict in divided cities.” (Amy Mills, The AAG Review of Books, Vol. 7 (1), 2019)

• Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Contortions of Memory.- Chapter 3. Tracing Times in Place.- Chapter 4. The Reserve of Forgetting.- Chapter 5. Remains of the Day.- Chapter 6. Modes of Engagement.- Chapter 7. Materializing Metaphor.