engleski

Public Memory and Cultural Diversity in a City (Re)Creation: Advantages and Disadvantages

Public memory and cultural diversity as inspirational drivers and value landmarks in designing cultural development strategy of a city have been objectified in the historical constant of the city persistence in the course of the centuries in a way in which inhabitants recognize their basic identity, civic and cultural determinants. Collective identity is made of three basic constituent parts: awareness of a common space, awareness of a common history, and awareness of a common culture. Ivana Crljenko believes that the beginnings of geographical interest in identities derive from the French modern school of geography strongly influenced by Paul Vidal de la Blache at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. By advocating a regionalgeographical concept, Blache believed that regions could be distinguished on the basis of the culture and lifestyle (genre de vie) of the community, manifested through common tradition, institutions, language, customs, eating habits etc. His idea has been developed, among others, by Alison Blunt, who notes that geographers' interest in identities has been reactivated in response to the positivist spatial analyses. The humanistic geographers then began to deal more intensely with the questions of place, that is, the perception, experience and sense of a place. Their aim was to replace the "rational" man (object) with a humane man (subject) with all his thoughts, experiences, values, emotions and behaviour. In doing so, they emphasized that each individual is completed and defined by his or her intense sense of attachment to some space (supra-local identity) or place (local identity). In their research, according to the Ivana Crljenko, geographers view space, on the one hand, as a basic element in the formation of a collective identity, and on the other, as a medium in which it manifests itself. The paper aims at detecting the multiplicity of spatial identification, which means that it can take place at several levels at the same time, so that national identity is presented as one, consisting of other forms of spatial identities that go beyond local and regional attachment, affiliation to social classes, political parties or religious beliefs. The paper analyses the image of the Inner City of Osijek, which in its national and regional environment proves to be a harmonious blend of military fortress and properly organized urban life imbued with the religious and spiritual life of its inhabitants, which implies that the focus of urban life had been concentrated in this fortress for more than two centuries.

public memory ; cultural diversity ; spatial humanities ; cultural geography ; city

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