http://cgj.sagepub.comCultural Geographies DOI: 10.1177/1474474007072824 2007; 14; 148 Cultural GeographiesJames D. Sidaway and Peter Mayell Monumental geographies: re-situating the statehttp://cgj.sagepub.com The online version of this article can be found at: Published by:http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:Cultural Geographies Additional services and information for http://cgj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://cgj.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: at SONOMA STATE UNIV LIBRARY on April 15, 2009 http://cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded fromcultural geographies in practiceMonumental geographies:re-situating the stateJames D. Sidaway, Peter MayellSchool of Geography, University of Plymouth, UKNational Centre for Research on Europe, University of Canterbury,Christchurch, New ZealandA radical review of the proposed memorial at the site of the destroyed World Trade Centre was underway yesterday after it emerged that the current plans could cost $1bn (£540m) to complete. ... The NewYork Daily News condemned the $1bn figure as ‘unaffordable, impractical [and] rather shocking’. TheNew York Times, which obtained a confidential memo revealing the estimate, called it ‘breathtaking’.1In the light of such a revelation that the cost of the proposed memorial to theimmediate victims of ‘9/11’ was double earlier estimates, and in view of ongoingcontroversy over its format and style, the ‘big picture’ of official memorials andassociated narratives of memorialization remains in critical focus. The former site of the‘twin towers’ will inevitably attract much more scrutiny in years to come. The memorialthere will become emblematic of what is widely seen as a defining moment of the newcentury. In this, a voluminous critical literature on monuments and memory will nodoubt be drawn upon. In tandem with historians and cultural critics, cultural andpolitical geographers have long scrutinized other monuments as embodiments ofofficial memory and mission. Memorials and monuments in sites as widespread asSouth Africa, Russia and Scotland have been examined as icons of nation-building.2This work has explored the ways in which the entire layout and function of a capitalcity, its distribution of monuments and public buildings, can very often become anexercise in national ideology and power. Such monuments are invariably designed tobe substantial and permanent structures: in Nuala Johnston’s words, they are nationalartefacts ‘cast in stone’.3This codification is what makes changes in their function, oroutright destruction (by insurgents during a war or revolution), such potent symbols ofthe struggle for and expression of power, and is the reason why their meaning isfrequently contested.4The focus on such official memorialization rightly remains important. Moving beyondthese, however, David Simpson has recently examined the wider culture of# 2007 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1474474007072824cultural geographies 2007 14: 148 155 at SONOMA STATE UNIV LIBRARY on April 15, 2009 http://cgj.sagepub.comDownloaded fromcommemoration around 9/11 in the United States, looking beyond official statements,acts and sites to the popular imagination (hence his study of obituaries for 9/11 victimsthat appeared in the New York Times ). Simpson is concerned with:the location of 9/11 within the longstanding rituals and short-term political strategies that it embodies andenables: so we have sacred ground , Ground Zero ... to the Freedom Tower itself. All of these terms,and others like them, have already been naturalized and pass without question in the national media andpopular imagination.5In broader terms, Kenneth Foote explores varied landscapes of violence and tragedyin America (disasters, battles and murder) noting how their sites are variouslydesignated, sanctified, venerated, rectified or obliterated in complex manoeuvres andcontests of memory and forgetting.6Yet it remains very easy to overlook those formsof memorialization which both lack official sanction and sponsorship and aretemporary. The ‘memorial’ at the wire fence surrounding the reconstruction site at‘Ground Zero’ is one example (Figure 1).7Celebrating an Anglo-American common-ality and alliance, evoking a past and future alliance, this ‘memorial’ has (in commonwith many others, as it turns out) a personal and temporary character. Thisimpromptu memorial has something in common with a flower at a grave or afuneral, but it is placed at what is not (yet) an official site of memory, grave ormemorial. In its unauthorized and public character, the ‘memorial’ has something incommon with graffiti (which has been examined by geographers as a manifestation ofdissent and transgression8), yet it is clearly not reducible to that genre. Nor is it simplya personal memorial (in the style of flowers at the site of a fatal accident or at afavourite site where a named deceased person once enjoyed being), yet nor is itwholly separate from (by virtue of its location) official memorializations.9This‘memorial’ will have gone long before these words and the reproduction of it appearhere, only to be replaced by other similar artefacts. Through its reproduction here, italso acquires a digital and printed permanence, along with thousands of other imageswhich extend the memorialization through time and space (something which willremain largely beyond our scope here).10It is, however, one of hundreds of othersthat have  in their collective presence  become part of the memory of 9/11 (seeFigure 2). As Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin noted:Attached to the barricades around ‘Ground Zero,’ or placed on bus stops, hospitals and other publicsurfaces, fliers of the ‘missing’ appeared, beginning on the day of the attack. Soon, makeshift memorialsformed beneath and around these photocopied photographs. Scraps of paper were added, containingmessages. Flowers, too, were taped to them. ... Two months after the attacks, some ideas for permanentmemorials began to make reference to these.11With these (and other analogous) artifacts in mind, we might therefore propose atypology of monuments and memorials. This is done in the hope of shifting the balanceof scrutiny somewhat towards the temporary and unofficial and away from a de factohierarchy in which all that seems to matter is the official and the state.