The map is the brainchild of Urban Remembrance and Memory of Europe (URME), a project started in Romania - URME means "footprints" or "tracks" in Romanian - to map the cultural landscape of seven European cities with the assistance of young urban researchers. In addition to Budapest, maps are being made of Athens, Arles, Lodz, Zaragoza and Potenza.
On its website, URME says it aims to lay "the grounds for a future European network of Centers for Urban Research and Creativity that will enable mobility in the fields of urban anthropology and literature studies."
The aims of the project are to re-activate the urban memory of seven European cities, through multidisciplinary studies that re-create the cultural atmosphere at different moments in their historical development; to support the mobility of the urban researchers for workshops and comparative studies of the European cities within the context of their belonging to a common literary and cultural European heritage; and to create a European literary routes system with the urban elements and sites of heritage value from the partner's cities.
Dániel Bíró, the creative director of Laterna Magica Kulturális Szolgáltató Bt., which is in charge of putting together the URME map of Budapest, says "we have only just scratched the surface," commenting on the progress of the map. Work is underway on a website and 150 locations have been found for the map.
"We divided the inner city into districts and in six different walks - which last for 2-3 hours - we put together paths which feature both real and virtual places," said literary historian Ágnes Széchenyi, one of the researchers for the project.
Researchers from the other six cities involved in the URME project recently visited Budapest to see the progress Hungarian researchers are making. In addition to the usual tourist attractions, the visitors were taken to see some important places that may not be included in foreign guidebooks, such as the arboretum in Budapest's District VIII which was made famous by Ferenc Molnár's novel The Pál Street Boys, still required reading in many schools in Europe, and the Ervin Szabó Central Library, housed in a renovated palace. The researchers were also introduced to Budapest's underground culture, visiting West Balkan, one of the city's many trendy clubs set up in vacant buildings.
Author: Roland Borsos
