Collective memory, collective imagination, place-making, and the discursive (RE) construction of the gateway district

This dissertation examines major newspaper coverage of Salt Lake City's Gateway district redevelopment project between the years of 1996 and 2001. Via the application of grounded theory methodology, the discursive constructions of the district redevelopment were analyzed through the lens of Michael Ian Borer's conceptualization of collective memory-collective imagination. In doing so, this dissertation project demonstrates evidence of Salt Lake City's ‘Olympic imperative,' which involved discursive processes of forgetting, reconstructing public memory, and collective imagining that articulated representations of a revitalized Gateway as an area of ‘loft-living' within a ‘nation-class' city. These discursive processes also functioned via renegotiations of district spatialities, which revealed collective anxieties related both to the district and the redevelopment efforts aimed renew it. I argue that attention must be paid to temporal discourses of both the past and future in order to fully understand how they operate on the present in order to generate spatial, cultural, and social rhetorics related to urban redevelopment plans and collective memory.