Mobile media, urban nostalgia and memory politics: media archaeological study of their mutual shaping in Narva, Estonia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Narva, Estonia’s easternmost city, was once famous for its baroque Old Town, but this was sadly destroyed during World War II. When Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the border town quickly became a site of complex memory politics, intensified by a widely felt loss of its former architectural and industrial status. This was particularly manifested in growing nostalgia for the Old Town and discourses on rebuilding it, despite the changed urban dynamics. Building on a media archaeological approach, this paper explores the role of nostalgia and local memory politics in conditioning the emergence of novel kinds of mediations of the ‘lost city’, especially in the form of specific mobile media and augmented reality (AR) applications aimed at mapping the whole of the city and allowing experiencing it first-hand. Second, the paper studies the roles these same forms and mediations play in further channelling the nostalgia and modes of reproducing Narva’s destroyed Old Town.