Monuments and ‘nonuments’: A typology of the forgotten memoryscape

Abstract

We live surrounded by sites of memory, and are broadly aware of their existence, sometimes their significance. But what often goes unremarked in the memoryscape – the spaces and places of memory that make up a geographic or abstract area – are the monuments, memorials and museums that are partial, missing or never existed. This article proposes a new type of monument – the ‘ nonument’ – as a site of both remembering and forgetting that is yet a key contributor to latent narratives of cultural, individual and collective memory. The article proposes five categories of nonument – the Rejected; the Removed; the Ruined; the Rebuilt; the Repurposed – and demonstrates these categories primarily through the development of the urban memoryscape of Paris since the French Revolution (1789), founding event of the French nation, and key contributor to ideas of a French collective and cultural memory.