Response, Not Reset: What a Thesis on Santiago Taught Me About How Cities Carry Their Past

Figure 1. Yeouido today — the same ground has served state ceremony, mass protest, and everyday recreation, showing how different eras can accumulate within a single public space.

Imagine a person who rewrites their identity every ten years — sheds the last version completely, and starts again with a clean biography. We don't call this person "grown." We call them inconsistent, maybe unreliable. Something in us insists that identity, however much it changes, has to carry its own history forward. It is not allowed to restart simply.

I kept returning to this thought experiment while reading a graduate thesis a few months ago. I want to be clear about something before I go further: this is not a critique of that student's work, and I'm not going to identify the paper, its author, or its institution. Finishing a thesis is its own achievement — I remember my own, years ago, when "finish it" mattered far more to me than "perfect it." This piece isn't an evaluation of that thesis's quality. It's an argument of my own, built from a question the thesis raised — one I think belongs to everyone working in this field, not to one student.

The thesis argued that after Chile's 2019 social uprising, Plaza Baquedano — the square protesters renamed Plaza Dignidad — had acquired a new social meaning and identity, and that this new identity should now be designed into the square through a citizen-participation process. I followed the logic for a while. Social crisis, public space, monument, participation — these are all subjects worth taking seriously. But the further I read, the more a different question formed underneath the argument.

Is the identity of a public space really redesigned after a defining event? Or does something else happen to it?

I don't think it's redesigned. Public spaces change users and uses across time — a plaza is a parade ground in one era, a protest ground in another, a place for festivals and ordinary life in a third. That shift in use is real. But it isn't identity being replaced. It's closer to memory being layered: one period's use settling over, not erasing, the one before it.

Seoul's Yeouido makes this concrete. Under military rule it was a runway and a parade ground for state ceremony. Later it became a staging ground for mass rallies during the democratization years. Today it is where people cycle, picnic, and gather for a spring flower festival. No one describes Yeouido's identity as having been redesigned three times. What actually happened is that three eras left their residue on the same ground, and all three are still legible there, in different registers, to anyone who knows where to look.

Plaza Baquedano can be read the same way. If it was once a site of national symbolism and later became a site of civic resistance, the important question isn't how do we design its new identity. It's how do we interpret and hand forward a place where state memory and civic memory now sit on top of each other — which is a very different design brief.

Where heritage practice diverges from ordinary urban design

This is the point where the thesis pushed me to separate two things I think get conflated too often. In ordinary urban design, the present user's needs are the priority. If a room built as a classroom now works better as a student lounge, adjusting the room to that use is simply good design. Heritage is not that. In heritage work, what matters is not only how a place is used today, but why it exists at all, what history it holds, and how that history is interpreted and carried to the next generation. The identity of a heritage place is not something a designer invents.

It has already been formed, by history itself. Our role is not to create it — it is to read it correctly, protect it, and interpret it responsibly. Yangdong Village is a heritage site because Joseon-era life is still legible in its layout and its houses; adapt it entirely to present-day convenience and it stops being the same artifact, however comfortable it becomes.

None of this makes public space a museum. It stays alive; it keeps absorbing new events and new memory. But a new layer of memory does not delete the layers underneath it. The 2019 uprising is better understood as an important new layer on Plaza Baquedano's accumulated history than as the event that finally invented its identity.

A frame I've used before, extended

Figure 2. Change-as-Response vs. Change-as-Reset — one builds on accumulated history and remains answerable to it; the other treats rupture as an opportunity to begin again.

In an earlier piece on Munich's Kaufingerstraße, I drew a distinction between a conserved place — fixed, protected, changed as little as possible — and a managed one, where change is continuous but negotiated against what came before. Reading this thesis pushed me to sharpen that distinction into something more specific: change-as-response versus change-as-reset. A response builds on accumulated history and answers to it. A reset uses a rupture — a crisis, a vacancy, an opportunity — as license to declare the slate clean.

 Figure3. Continuity within the AIM redevelopment: the heritage-listed Singer-Haus is retained within a substantially redeveloped urban block, illustrating how significant physical change can occur while a historic anchor remains. Sources: Left — Singer-Haus, Munich, 2014. Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Right — AIM redevelopment project visualization, ACCUMULATA Real Estate.

It's worth noting, too, that the debate over redesigning Plaza Baquedano did not begin in 2019. In 2015, Santiago's regional government ran an international competition for the "Nueva Alameda-Providencia" corridor project, which included the plaza, and awarded it to a team led by architects Alejandra Bosch, Arturo Lyon, Danilo Martic, Clara Oloriz, and Alfredo Ramírez. By October 25, 2017 — two years to the day before the mass demonstration that would come to define the 2019 uprising — the project's stakeholders had already agreed on eighteen design criteria the redesigned plaza would need to meet.

The argument for redesigning this square, in other words, was already active, funded, and under formal design review well before the uprising. That doesn't make the uprising incidental to what followed — it clearly reshaped the debate, most visibly in the 2021 removal of the Baquedano statue. But it does complicate any account that treats 2019 as the origin of the desire for change. The more honest question is whether the rupture created that desire or simply accelerated and re-narrated a debate that was already underway.

Figure 4. Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin — preserving openness can itself be an active urban decision. In 2014, Berlin voters rejected development on the former airfield, allowing its open character to remain.

Kaufingerstraße's current redevelopment is a useful test of what a response looks like in practice. The project underway on the former C&A block involves demolishing part of the Fürstenfelder Straße wing along with the roof and fifth floor of the adjoining structure, and adding new upper floors above — a genuinely significant physical change. But the listed Singer-Haus, the historic anchor of that same block, is being retained intact within the new composition, and the design brief was explicitly built around the surrounding streetscape rather than around a blank site. That is demolition and addition sitting inside continuity, not replacing it — a response to seven centuries of a street that has never stopped changing, rather than a reset of it.

Berlin's Tempelhofer Feld shows the same logic from the opposite direction: sometimes the most decisive response is to build almost nothing at all. When the Berlin Senate proposed developing part of the former airfield's edge with roughly 4,700 apartments, a citizen-led referendum in May 2014 rejected the plan, with 64.3 percent voting to keep the field free of construction.

The result became law that June, and the statute goes so far as to protect the site's Weite — its openness, its unbroken long horizon — as a legal value in its own right. Refusing to build there wasn't a passive default. It was an active, majority-backed decision about which layer of the site's history — the postwar public field, not the interrupted 1930s master plan — deserved to keep governing the ground.

Where preserved form is not the whole answer

Figure 5. A memorial to forced labour at Columbiadamm — a reminder that preserving physical openness does not necessarily give every layer of a place’s history equal visibility.

I don't want to overstate this into a rule that says keeping the form is always the correct answer. Tempelhof itself complicates that. The field's Nazi-era layer includes the Columbia-Haus concentration camp that once stood at its edge and the forced-labour camps that supplied its wartime aircraft production — and today those histories are marked mostly at the scale of a small plaque and a walking-tour stop, not at the scale of the vast open field visitors actually experience.

Preserving the site's physical openness protected one kind of memory — the postwar civic one — very effectively. It did not, on its own, guarantee that the harder layer underneath it would be carried forward with equal weight. Physical continuity is not automatically complete stewardship. Sometimes the thing you didn't build tells you less than the thing you didn't mark.

That's the real test I'd apply to any post-crisis public space brief, including Plaza Baquedano's. Not: has something changed? Change is constant, and refusing it isn't the goal either — Kaufingerstraße's demolition proves that outright. The test is: does the change answer to what accumulated here, including the parts that are inconvenient, or does it use the rupture as permission to write over them?

Why this matters beyond the plaza

Most people who use these spaces will never read a policy document about them. The commuter cutting through Kaufingerstraße, the cyclist circling Tempelhof's old runway, the family with a picnic blanket on the Yeouido riverbank don't need the layered history narrated to feel it — it's carried in the texture of the place itself, in the retained façade, the untouched field, the plaza that still gathers crowds the way it always has, just for different reasons now.

The people who write the redevelopment briefs face a different pressure. A "new identity, newly designed" is easier to fund, brand, and put on a tourism website than an accumulated, occasionally uncomfortable layering of memory that has to be interpreted rather than resolved — and that pressure is where the reset narrative tends to win, not because it's true, but because it's simpler to sell.

The choice also shapes how a place gets governed, not only how it gets described. A brief that treats a post-crisis plaza as something to be designed invites a competition, a jury, one winning concept — the apparatus of authorship.

A brief that treats it as something to be interpreted invites historians, long-term residents, a slower process, and a willingness to leave some tensions visibly unresolved rather than smoothed into a master plan. Cultural tourism strategy tends to prefer the first, because one clear new story photographs better than an ongoing argument between eras. Heritage practice, done honestly, keeps having to choose the second — even when it's the harder story to commission and to sell.

The question I'm left with

The thesis I read didn't get its answer wrong so much as ask the wrong kind of question. It isn't our job, as designers or heritage managers, to decide what a place should become next. It's to notice, carefully, what it has already been carrying — and to be honest about which of those layers we are still choosing not to see.

This piece extends a question first raised in "When the Hoarding Tells the Story," an earlier look at continuity and change on Munich's Kaufingerstraße. Together, they're the beginning of a longer inquiry — Adaptive Continuity vs. Redesign-as-Reset — that I plan to develop further as a fuller case study once field documentation from Berlin is complete.

View the Kaufingerstraße case → Click here