Remembering in the city: characterising urban change

City form conveys two images – the experiential and the remembered. The urban environment therefore is a cacophony of complex visual stimuli experienced with the often conflicting memory associations we attribute to them. Our appreciation of the rapidly changing built environment is therefore relative rather than absolute. In this sense the temporal and spatial components of the city merge to form our interpretation of city space. This paper presents emerging retrogressive landscape analysis, from the domains of landscape planning and heritage, to examine the possibility of a city-wide assessment of its potential to create ‘double exposure’ – walking simultaneously in the past and the present. This is not simply derived from our experience of individual architectural structures (urban form), but also our interpretation of past movement routes, boundaries and morphology (urban code). For this reason it may be necessary to look beyond a heritage which focuses on distinct ‘special’ places and protected buildings and look toward a heritage of temporal change processes and ubiquitous urban evolution; since it is also our interpretation and understanding of these which contributes to our full appreciation of city ‘character’.