Memory, catastrophe, destruction: Walter Benjamin's urban renewal

For some time now, urban theorists have looked for inspiration to the pioneering metropolitan works of Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish literary critic who tragically took his own life in 1940 while attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France. In this essay, philosopher Max Pensky examines some of the key components of Benjamin's description of modern, urban life. Specifically, he contrasts Benjamin's understanding of the modern capitalist city as a locus of both myth making and breaking with Sigmund Freud's attempt to equate the urban experience with psychic development itself. While both Freud and Benjamin suggest that the modern city is a site of collective memory, Pensky argues that Benjamin's dialectical approach is, in the end, more capable of capturing the redemptive, or utopian, potential of the urban environment. Despite surface similarities, Freud and Benjamin's analysis of urban psychic life are actually quite distinct and lead to very different conceptions of the city's relation to both individual and collective psychic experience.