This article searches the present transformation of the urban space of Rethymnon, Crete, a city richly endowed in monuments, history, culture, and natural setting. The urban space is led towards postmodern dystopias and polarities through two parallel urban processes: on the one hand the production of a postmodern landscape in the new part of the city across the eastern coast which accords with the dominant tourist economy of the city, and on the other the production of monumentality and of urban gentrification in the Cretovenetian Old Town. The article analyses the quality and the intentions of the postmodern architecture of Rethymnon vis a vis the creative challenge posed by the presence and the quality of the city's early Renaissance modernism. The postmodern aesthetic conceals a series of extremely important social and economic processes that include the following: the role of the Local Authority, the simultaneous confrontation and convergence between national and local identity, the questioning of the symbolic weight of Athens, as this is represented by the local services of the central state, the constitution of monumentality as a partial expression of a national monumental geography, the role of the archaeological discipline and policy, the social, economic, and symbolic influence of the exceptionally dynamic tourist capital, power structures on various levels inside the local society and out. and the importance of culture The article argues that the synthesizing Renaissance Weltanschauung of the island should be appropriated for a contemplative, emancipation-orientated, sensitive artistic creation and development trajectory.
