Exploring On The Subject Of "Urban Memory Project"

"Urban Memory Project" is an archival work for the purpose of the saving and reserving of all kinds of cultural media. With the high development of urbanization in our cities, it becomes a highlight that many cities are being lost in memory. In order to save the urban memory, a dozen of provincial or local Archives, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Dalian, etc. started to operate the "Urban Memory Project" after Qingdao, Which was the first city who advanced the project, under the help of local governments. It is becoming a common phenomenon that local governments rely on "Urban Memory Project" to save and reserve their urban memory. Then, what is "Urban Memory Project"? Is it a reliable way to save urban memory? How about the results of its operation? Through the veil of "Urban Memory Project", what could we see about the new characteristics of Archives and archival work?This article holds a negative attitude to "Urban Memory Project" for its goal of saving and reserving the urban memory. In order to analyze the project's contents and characteristics more clearly, this article analyzed the relationships between "Archives" and "Social Memory", "Social Memory" and "Urban Memory", and "Urban Memory" and "Urban Memory Project", bringing out three main misunderstanding for "Urban Memory Project" at the same time.This article was rooted in archival basic theories. Besides the massive reference of psychological theories, urban geographical theories and social theories, it also quoted a number of data and analyzed some relevant cases to prove its points, breaking the limits of traditional Archives. Archives and archival work was being examined under the circumstance of the "Big Culture", and Archives was considered the research object not the research location to analyze the characteristics of our days and the new characteristics of archival work.Based on the author's lacking of enough knowledge and capacity, the article may contain some flaws and mistakes. Therefore, I will really appreciate about any advice or comment given either by my professors or classmates. I look forward your opinions and ideas. Thank you very much!...