City as space, city as place: sources and the urban historian

As historians, the sources that we use affect the way we view the city in the past. Documentary sources composed by experts on the city such as urban planners are generally useful ways to understand urban ‘space’: the city viewed as an abstract physical entity. But we need human stories also to understand urban ‘place’: the lived experience of a locality. This paper draws upon research into Melbourne’s urban environment in the 1950s which compares the ways in which urban planners viewed the city and the ways in which children experienced the city. Urban planners tended to talk about the city in quantifiable terms, mapping school locations, administrative boundaries, traffic routes and recreational spaces. People who were children in the 1950s were more likely to describe their neighbourhoods in social, emotive and phenomenological terms, for these are the types of associations which embed memories. For urban historians, our choice of sources fundamentally shapes the ways in which the historical cityscape can be remembered and recreated.