Ruptures in the City Retrospective Memory in Benjamin’s Paris and Koolhaas’s New York

Post-urban spaces are drained of monumental memory and the security in the collective that it provides, and have lost the optimism and progressiveness of modernism, with its hope of, and drive towards, a utopian future. This chapter explains that a resolution, or at least response, to this collapse of spatial memory might be found by returning to the apparently depleted energies and utopian drives of modernity. To develop this idea it examines two texts: Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, which takes as it focus early twentieth-century Manhattan; and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, which explores nineteenth-century Paris. The appropriation of urban memory is central to the Arcades Project, and determines Benjamin's methodological approach, which relies heavily on quotations from other texts as the raw material from which to depict a largely vanished, but fundamentally modern society.