There’s a sound beneath every city, a kind of heartbeat we pretend not to hear. It hums through pavement cracks and lingers in dust swept from demolished doorways. We call it progress when the skyline rises. But I keep wondering: progress for whom, and at what cost?

While editing this special issue of Socio-Cultural Theory, I wasn’t just reviewing articles. I was walking through a chorus of quiet testimonies. In Journeys through deathscapes in the contemporary city, cemeteries came alive not as mere endings, but as sanctuaries of pause, places where silence speaks louder than traffic, where the living go to remember how to feel. In Dark Travel, roads became archives of fear and defiance, charting the hidden routes African Americans once relied on for safety in a country that demanded both movement and invisibility. Then came Erasure of Urban Detritus, a story of Toronto’s “Sin Strip,” where queerness once glittered defiantly before being sterilised into absence under the banner of urban renewal. And finally, Transforming Heritage Discourse on the Landscape at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a woman named Hester, an enslaved fugitive, reshaped history with her courage, only to be edited out of the national memory she helped define.

Each piece echoed the same truth: spaces remember, even when we don’t.

We often speak of cities as blank canvases awaiting new visions. But they aren’t. They are palimpsests layered, overwritten, yet never fully erased. Every transformation carries traces of those who came before, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Yet too often, we refuse to listen.

We draft policies in rooms far from the streets they will transform. We praise “revitalisation” without asking whether life was already there. We measure sustainability in wattage and waste reduction but rarely in dignity, memory or belonging. We build for efficiency and call it empathy.

But what if progress didn’t require forgetting?

What if we built with grief as carefully as with steel? What if we treated cemeteries as classrooms, protest routes as heritage trails, erased neighbourhoods as sacred texts? What if every planner, architect, policymaker and citizen began not with ‘what should we construct?’ but with ‘what must we remember?’

AMPS is one of the few journals willing to let architecture breathe to acknowledge that buildings are not only material, but emotional. That cities are not diagrams, but diaries. AMPS allows for vulnerability, contradiction, unfinished thoughts and that is where truth lives.

Because this issue is not a call to go backward. It is a call to go deeper.

Nostalgia is not the goal. Reverence is.

Cities, like people, cannot grow without roots. Progress without memory is not development it is displacement dressed as improvement. A future that does not make room for those who built its foundations is not a future worth inhabiting.

So here is my quiet proposal: before we build higher, may we learn to bow lower. May we walk through cemeteries and contested streets with softer steps. May we speak the names that history tried to muffle. May we listen for the hum beneath us that says, ‘we were here. We still are.’

Because cities do not forget.

And if we are wise, we will finally learn to remember with them.

Reflecting on the significance of location, personal experiences and the human condition in the era of advancement by Santosh Kumar Ketham (School of Collectively Building, Austria) is part of the AMPS series Socio-Cultural Theory and published in Architecture_MPS, volume 32.

Santosh Kumar Ketham is a practicing architect, educator, philanthropist and Ph.D. researcher at Innsbruck University, Exparch, Hochbau, Austria. He is the founder and director of School of Collectively Building in Austria, NGO Thinking Hand and Studio Ketham's Atelier Architects. His work and talks inspire and empower people while contributing to the reform of neglected communities. Currently, he serves as an external faculty member at Exparch, Innsbruck University, where he teaches timely and important topic Climate Responsive Architecture for Bachelor and Master Students.

He has taught design, architecture, and urbanism at various international universities in India and Austria and has been honoured with numerous international awards and recognitions. Additionally, he has been invited as a lecturer, chair conferences and critic at several renowned organisations and institution, including IITH, NIFTH, SPAV, JNAFAU, HITS, UIBK, UNI-AK, Josh Talks and Amps. His work has been featured in prominent media outlets such as Deutsche Welle Documentary, 3Sat, ORF TV, ArchitectureLive, Shoutout DFW, The Hindu Newspaper, The Times of India and others. He is the editor of the book Speculative Designs: Rethink Mumbai Flooding (April 2025), Sustainable Six Designs (July 2025), Rethink Austria Flooding (August 2025) and further invited editor for the Socio-Cultural Theory Journal (SIP), published by UCL Press and AMPS (Sep 2025). In 2023 he was nominated as someone who has the potential to be a candidate for a Loeb Fellowship, Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

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