This book explores new approaches towards developing memorial and heritage sites, moving beyond the critique of existing practices that have been the traditional focus of studies of commemoration. Offering understandings of the effects of conflict on memories of place, as manifested in everyday lives and official histories, it explores the formation of urban identities and constructed images of the city. Topographies of Memories suggests interdisciplinary approaches for creating commemorative sites with shared stakes. The first part of the book focuses on memory dynamics, the second on Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and the third on physical and material world interventions. Design practices and modes of engagement with places of memory are explored, making connections between theoretical explorations of memory and forgetting and practical strategies for designers and practitioners.
"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)
"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)