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Christine Boyer faces head-on the crisis of the city in the late twentieth century, taking us on a fascinating journey through theaters and museums, panoramas and maps, buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation, a complex cultural entity. Boyer brings together elements and concepts from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature, and painting in a synthetic and readable work that is broad in its reach and original in its insights. What finally emerges is a sense of the city reinvigorated with richness and potential.

The City of Collective Memory describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized, depicted, and planned. Boyer identifies three major "maps": one common to the traditional city--the city as a work of art; one characteristic of the modern city--the city as panorama; and one appropriate to the contemporary city--the city as spectacle. It is a richly illustrated and documented study that pays considerable attention to the normally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on and derived from the city. A wide range of secondary historical literature and theoretical work is considered, with evident debts to structuralist analysis of urban form represented by Aldo Rossi, as well to much post-structuralist criticism from Walter Benjamin to the present.

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CHOICE Review

This fascinating work began as a critique of historic preservation, urban design, and postmodern architecture but evolved into an exploration of how 19th-century images have been translated into contemporary views of the city and how restoration has forged a hybrid layering of architectural sites. Although the book contains many contemporary buzzwords--e.g., "collective memory," "models," "images"--and has numerous references to Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, it is a detailed study of the contemporary city and its sources. Boyer (Princeton) considers the city as a work of art, as panorama and spectacle, and as a study of the place of history and representational form. The illustrations, usually well reproduced, are most provocative and include stage designs and scenic wallpaper. Although there is no separate bibliography, the notes are very complete and include numerous PhD dissertations, some of which have been later published. There is no comparable study, and the work will be of particular interest to faculty, graduate students in architecture and planning, and the intelligent general reader. T. J. McCormick; emeritus, Wheaton College (MA)