ABSTRACT
In the town spaces of all the border cities studied in this volume the competition between differing memory politics, mnemonic policies, and frontier urbanism is very evident. This competition may take place chronologically, often after changes in state borders or politics, or simultaneously in ethnically double or multicultural cities. We were interested in towns shaped by borders and therefore by diverging attitudes to the place’s history. All the cities presented here are situated in borderscapes that saw significant changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the cases which experienced population exchanges after the Second World War the exchange in urban societies was accompanied by the destruction and reconstruction of the urban fabric that formed new images of the cities based on national connotations. Tendencies of nationalization, which led to diverging narratives of the city’s history, emerged in all six cases. The sites often remained, but their meanings were changed in a process of adding new semantic layers to cityscapes that transcend dualistic constellations like one national narrative against another or of national versus socialist/Soviet heritage. However, instead of clashing national memories, there has also been a focus on multinational urban heritage in recent decades.
