Introduction In this paper we attempt to clarify the implicit models in current debates over the role of space in social theory by drawing out some approaches relating space and time through memory.We follow Halbwachs's (1992) approach where sites of memory hold communal identities together öor divide them öand where the spatiality of memory links the social and the personal.We explore the interplay of the spatial arrangement of elements, temporality, and the experience of the city.We begin with a moment in theory and a place that seems both to support and to destabilise some contemporary ideas.We look to Athens as a city marked by a juxtaposition of different temporalities abutting discontinuous moments on the urban stage. The Saint Simonian dream of a great temple housing ``les panoramas et les dioramas qui re¨uniraient en un seul point tout l'espace et tout les temps'' (Prendergast, 1993, page 48) is revisited as a space of incoherence rather than (visual) command, where the rule of spatial and temporal interval is abandoned to allow objects to transgress upon one another (Krauss, 1988, page 63); temporalities collide and merge (Burgin, 1996) causing the ``postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication'' (Olalquiaga, 1991, page 19). The landscape becomes a juxtaposition of asynchronous moments where space forms a container for different eras producing a depthless world where time as process is erased, as in themed environments, and which demands cognitive mapping (Jameson, 1992) of `juxtastructures' (Shields, 1991). This process can be read as a metaphor for commodi- fication, bringing different times into one homogenised (and marketable) field öthough this is not to say that the uses and practices of such spaces are thus homogenised (Crang, 1994a; Game, 1991).We suggest different ways of reconnecting time and space, while outlining the risks of a spatialised time that merely inverts the binary models of historicism. We want to explore the issues raised by seeing places as becoming, with The city and topologies of memory Mike Crang, Penny S Travlou Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Site, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England; e-mail: M.A.Crang@durham.ac.uk, pennytravlou@yahoo.com Received 5 October 1998; in revised form 12 November 1999 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2001, volume 19, pages 161 ^ 177 Abstract. The relationship of space and time has become a vexed issue in accounts in the postmodern metropolis. Rich and enlivening accounts use spatial categories to describe the interrelationships of elements of the city ömoving from historicism to geography, to gloss Jameson's development of cognitive mapping. Postmodern geographies utilising the ideas of cognitive mapping show marked similarities with the accounts of time and space describing classical and medieval arts of memory and the Romantic writings of Flaubert on Athens. However, spatialised accounts of the city often seem to replicate problematic divisions of space and time that also underlay historicist accounts and merely invert the latter's priorities. The work of Bergson offers key insights into how this division occurred and a sense of temporality that may be lost in spatial metaphors. This is a sense of difference and alterity that we trace in the work of Proust and argue can be brought to inform the urban theatre of memories through a careful reworking of ideas suggested by de Certeau and Derrida. In this paper we take the case of Athens, bringing together East and West, ancient and modern, original and copy, as a grounding to discuss these issues. We suggest a sense of time ^ space as both fragmented and dynamic; a sense of the historical sites as creating instability and displacement in collective memory. DOI:10.1068/d201t