This dissertation argues that pictures of changes occurring in seventeenth-century Dutch cities---burning, demolition, construction, renovation and social change---activated collective memories that viewers used to craft their personal, professional, and political identities. Physical urban change, both intentional and unexpected, was ubiquitous in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, and its pace and extent so great that change itself became characteristic of Dutch urban life. The dissertation challenges the predominant scholarly opinion that cityscapes are foremost expressions of pride. Falling outside many of the subject matter conventions of cityscapes, images of change often depict areas that are dirty, in chaos, or that no longer exist. Such images were related by artists and viewers to past political and social events through quotations of visual precedents and accompanying textual interpretations.

Part I of the dissertation studies the city dismantled by fire and demolition. Chapter 1 analyzes Jan van der Heyden's Fire Hose Book of 1690, arguing that Van der Heyden's fire imagery recalls the horrors of war, and then combines image and text to provide the reader with a means of participating in protecting the city from such threats. Chapter 2 examines images of demolished buildings that allowed the viewer to position himself as a social "insider" by claiming a personal relationship to memories of the pre-change urban landscape. Part II studies the city rebuilt by construction, renovation, and social change. Chapter 3 looks at images of urban growth and renovation and argues that these physical turning points in the city's development gave artists and viewers the opportunity to attach meaning to the economic and aesthetic consequences of growth.

Chapter 4 examines images of social interactions in the city, arguing that a variety of relationships to urban "others" could be asserted, from a socially distant acceptance to a restatement of the status quo that mocked one's social inferiors. The final chapter proposes avenues for further research, including the expression of time in cityscape imagery.