Book on ‘Memory and the City' research receives prize
Florence Graezer Bideau © EPFL
"Porter le temps. Mémoires urbaines d'un site horloger" (MētisPresses, 2021) edited by CDH senior scientist and lecturer Florence Graezer Bideau and Professor Filippo De Pieri of the Politecnico di Torino, has been awarded the Koos Bosma Prize in Planning History Innovation by the International Planning History Society (IPHS).
The prize was awarded on July 6 at the biennial IPHS biennial conference in Delft, the Netherlands. The award-winning publication is the outcome of the research project Memory and the City (2016-2018), which focused on assessing tools studying the relationship between collective memory, urban space, and design in contemporary cities.
According to a press release prepared by the Politecnico di Torino, the research stems from the observation that the dimension of memory is now an inescapable component of debates about cities. It questions how the roles of the historian, the social scientist, and the planner are changing in a time when images of the past constitute an essential element of legitimacy for architectural and urban design. The volume develops these approaches using the case study of two Swiss cities traditionally characterized by watchmaking, Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds, which were established as a joint UNESCO site in 2009.
The prize jury noted in its decision that the researchers’ creative methodology, which combines documentary research with fieldwork, produced “a new kind of history, where the narrative is both descriptive and inventive, capable of generating new identities through the multiplication of sources."
The book is published in print and as an open access digital download.