Places are made of wax

"It is an assistance to the memory if localities are sharply impressed on the mind… We require places, real or imaginary, and images or simulacra which we must, of course, invest for ourselves… As Cicero says 'we use places as wax'."

"The most complete pictures are formed in our minds of the things that have been conveyed to them and imprinted on them by the senses."

The 'memory palace' gave the ancients an understanding not only of the importance of order to memory but also of the role of the senses in building what Ad Herennium called "the treasure house of invention."

"'Change life! Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space."

"(Social) space is a (social) product."

Planning is an ideology — an urban ideology — which "formulates all the problems of society into questions of space and transposes all that comes from history and consciousness into spatial terms."

Fixed myths of the city risk "fetishising space in a way reminiscent of the old fetishism of commodities… instead of uncovering the social relationships that are latent in spaces, we fall into the trap of treating space 'in itself', as space as such."

"Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world."

Abstract spatiality carries "within itself the seeds of a new kind of space" — Lefebvre's differential space.

An image is experienced not purely by its visual impact but through its "reverberations" — the aural metaphor establishing a continuous, rhythmic connection between subject and object; the poetic image possessed of a "sonority of being."

"For a knowledge of intimacy, localisation in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than the determination of dates."

"He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging… Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently, remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever new places, and in the old ones delve to ever deeper levels."

"The historical materialist must sacrifice the epic dimension of history. The past for him becomes the subject of a construction whose locus is not empty time, but the particular epoch, the particular life, the particular work."

To Horkheimer's claim that "past injustice has occurred and is done with," Benjamin replied: "What the science has 'established', recollection can modify."

"The modern is always the main stress… but it is precisely the modern which always conjures up pre-history."

"I needn't say anything. Merely show."

"What was carved in it four thousand years ago today stands at the centre in the greatest of city squares. Had that been foretold to him — what a triumph for the Pharaoh! Not one among the tens of thousands who pass by pauses; not one among the tens of thousands who pause can read the inscription."

The archaeologist is concerned with the forgotten dead — "beneath our feet are the countless bones and remains of those who have no monument, no landmark to indicate their passing."

"But the rags, the refuse — these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them."

"An urban culture that predicates itself chiefly on an obsession with development is not worth having. A city needs deep memory, without which it becomes merely a stage set."

"Perhaps we should be happier in our cities were we to respond to them as nature or dreams; as objects of exploration, investigation, and interpretation, settings for voyages of discovery."

There is no 'earlid' (Schafer). As Cage put it: "try as we might to find a silence, we cannot."

Hearing is passive; listening implies an active attentiveness to auditory information and a desire to establish meaning. Auditory geography is "time-space geography, a dynamic geography of events rather than images."

"I have come to think of these contested recordings of urban memory as resonant traces… reverberating with the echoes of past battles, evidencing the often contested, productive possibilities of a given location."

"Something of an archaeological dig for media artefacts buried beneath the surface of the emergent digital terrain, this dig of mine is not for physical remnants, but for sound traces… an archaeology of recorded action, rather than of surviving artefact."

Koolhaas once remarked that the most attractive parts of a city are often those where "nobody has ever done anything." "We could apply this thinking to the way we approach the city's resonant spaces. It's not the interactivity of mobile listening platforms per se that sounds these spaces, but the capacity for an everyday attentiveness to the political and poetic possibilities of the city. Media recordings or platforms don't themselves have that capacity. But we do."

Space is "the sphere of possibility of the existence of plurality, of the co-existence of difference." It is not "a static slice orthogonal to time" but has "time/times within it. This is not the static simultaneity of a closed system but a simultaneity of movements."

Time-spaces "normally co-exist, folding into one another, existing in the interstices between each other, creating all manner of bizarre and unexpected conditions."