Cities and memory: a history of the role of memorials in urban design from the Renaissance to Canberra

In recent decades, there has been a significant revival of interest and growth in numbers of public memorials – sculptures and structures in public spaces that convey information and social attitudes about past persons, events and ideas. This renaissance has been most marked in national capital cities. To better understand this recent revival of interest in memorials, and their potential to reproduce or transform social and spatial relationships within cities, this paper examines the historical evolution of the role and form of memorials within the overall planning and development of Western capital cities, both existing and new, from their origins in Ancient Rome and through their later development from the Renaissance to the beginning of Modernism. It charts memorials’ ongoing contribution to the role of the capital city as a diagram that defines and communicates national history, identity and politics, contrasting this to ways that memorials have adapted to changing technological and political realities of land development and management.