IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE to move through a European or American city without passing memorials that prompt us – if we notice them at all – merely to scratch at some fading memory. Instead of recalling civic or national heroes, important events, or victories in battle, we see the erosions of time, the way they make way for the daily pulses of urban movement, or how commerce corrals them into corners where they can grow old invisibly. Even the most familiar memorials, ones that we use repeatedly or ritualistically to cultivate a sense of collective recall, constantly confront obsolescence and alienation. Who are these strangers and how did they get that way? How, moreover, are we to understand them in their ever-changing states?

Memorials and cities have a conflicted relationship, the latter often sacrificing the former to its changing speed, scale, material reality, or, just as importantly, modern disregard. This disregard has taken the shape of movements against traditional memorials, even against the project of memorialization itself. At other times it has overflowed into outright disgust, ending in acts of iconoclasm or wilful destruction. Most often, it takes the form of neglect, arguably the most damning dismissal of all because it entails forgetting – the precise thing memorials are supposed to ward against. Neglect, however, is difficult to study, and even harder to historicize. Beyond the mere process of forgetting, which one can find in literal deterioration, as when nostalgic patina turns into irreversible destruction, neglect is also quite literally a passing matter.