“Memory tells the city.” This is a collective publication released by Pletheon Editions, focusing on oral history and the memory of urban space.

How do people remember cities? How do they narrate their past within them and the past of the cities themselves? How does their memory create new meanings of cities? Experiences such as exclusion and marginalization take on what significance in the memories of those who have lived them in their everyday lives? What relationship do the stories offered by oral testimonies about the cities have with the established public images and biographies of the cities?

The starting point of this volume is two key assumptions. That the meeting between the study of urban space and oral history can generate original and radical forms of history of cities and the people who inhabit them temporarily or permanently. And that time and space equally constitute historical experience and, consequently, the memory that composes oral testimony.

Since oral history works in close relation to the specific place at any given time, it helps articulate how people experience it and often manages to change the established perceptions of it. Thus, through the collection and analysis of oral testimonies, it becomes possible to conceptualize the variety of the local and highlight the many cities within the city.

The authors of the volume examine how the process of memory activated by oral narration mediates the experience of the city, what it silences, how it manages the traumatic and the everyday. They focus on the convergences and divergences between individual and collective memory and identify points where social memory conforms and others where it resists the hegemonic narratives of urban space.

They are interested in the “others” of the cities, the memories they carry, and the memories they create in new places of settlement. In urban spaces, a multitude of memories from different groups intersect or overlap, forming urban palimpsests. These palimpsests intertwine, in various forms, with discourses of difference and narratives of hatred, influencing identities, bodily encounters, and practices that shape the fabric of contemporary cities.

Due to the bond that oral history maintains with locality, subjectivity, and experience, it can address such aspects of the urban phenomenon as part of a history of cities with many shades, angles, and dimensions. Oral testimony can destabilize images of space considered immutable and allow connections between the past and the present, as well as among the different subjects experiencing this change.