Walking through the urban memory palace: Embodied memory, temporality, and urban fragmentation

This article examines how embodied urban memory is reorganized through fragmentation, demolition, rebuilding, and digitally mediated spatial experience. Drawing on the method of loci (MoL), embodied cognition, and phenomenological approaches to spatial experience, the study conceptualizes the city as a dynamic memory palace structured through bodily movement, sensory engagement, spatial orientation, and habitual routes unfolding over time. Rather than treating urban memory as anchored solely in monuments or symbolic representations, the article argues that mnemonic continuity emerges through embodied relations between landmarks, pathways, atmospheres, and everyday practices of walking. Focusing on the transformation of İzmir’s Kordon waterfront, the discussion explores how demolition, land reclamation, infrastructural intervention, and repetitive rebuilding destabilize the mnemonic structures through which urban space becomes recognizable and experientially coherent. From the perspective of the MoL, urban fragmentation affects not only isolated buildings or images, but also the broader spatial organization sustaining embodied spatial knowledge. The article further argues that profound experiences of urban loss emerge when the pace and temporality of spatial change exceed the adaptive rhythms of embodied orientation and lived familiarity. Under such conditions, contemporary urban memory increasingly operates through hybrid configurations in which archived street imagery, locative technologies, and digitally mediated environments coexist with material urban space within lived experience.