Constructing the History of Working-Class Neighbourhoods: Communicative and Cognitive Reference to the Past in Conflicts Over Urban Redevelopment in West-German Cities in the 1970s and 1980s

This article analyses how activists turned memories and history into a resource in conflicts over urban redevelopment during the 1970s and 1980s. It scrutinizes this process from two distinct vantage points. In a first part, it draws on the concept of communicative memory to demonstrate how memories acquired social meaning that constituted a shared understanding of the past and supported critical interpretations of urban redevelopment schemes. The second part focuses on the cognitive dimension of historical culture. In the conflicts, it was essential that claims transcended the realm of memories and were also accepted as representative of the true history of the affected neighbourhoods. Thus, activists applied a whole range of historiographic methods to support claims about the past with evidence. Taken together, the article argues that integrating the construction of communicative memory with the cognitive dimension of historical culture helps to analyse how the construction of popular knowledge about the past became a resource in social conflicts.