Urban memory: suburban oblivion.

Abstract

The methodological issues raised by psychoanalysis for reconceptualising spatial and historical vectors of culture are explored here are developed via work on the ‘suburban' as site of modern subjectivity. This partly evolves from the traditions of modernity found in the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin on the urban subject of modern life. The concerns with liminality and liminal space arise from thoughts formulated at the conference Post Industrial Manchester, at Manchester University, School of Art History and Archaeology in October 2002. This research has been continued in the collaboration between members of the Visual Culture group and the Museum of Domestic Architecture, which has resulted in the conference, The Return of Suburbia, at which I gave a paper on the infantile unconscious of the suburb