Monuments to the City's Persona
"A city's monuments display its persona. They are like a showroom window. They create a city's face to the world around, and they represent its (more or less ideal) self-image. They may also serve to conceal what the city wants to hide from itself and from others, including its soul. They can tell one about a city's cultural identity, about its cherished public values, and about how it puts itself into play with other cities. The monuments display its conscious self-awareness, and they tell the citizen and the visitor what a city wants to project to its present and future inhabitants, to other cities, and to casual tourists passing through. If one looks into the stories behind these images, however, one often finds some fascinating and sometimes curiously discordant information, a shadow dimension concealed by the persona. In and behind the persona there are hints of what a city consciously is about and stands for and of what perhaps unconsciously it wants to reveal but cannot do so directly or officially."
