Symbolic destruction

So, this is the only parking lot in and around the square. It is just between Zrinksi Trg and Ban Jelacic Trg, which makes it really prime real estate. Now, you might ask yourself, why haven't they built on the land. That is an interesting question. Up until WWII there was a building here. In an act of architectural cleansing, the building was destroyed. But, in this part of the world, when you destroy a building like this, you don't build a new one on top of it. That actually defeats the meaning of what you are doing. The point is to leave the open space so that everyone knows what was removed. If you built on top of it, then people would forget that you destroyed what was there, and the whole point of symbolic destruction is, well, that people remember that something was destroyed. I've always been interested about why Westerners in general, and Americans in particular don't understand this dynamic. It's not about erasing the memory that people were here, it's about preserving the memory that people were here, but those in charge have the power to make them go away.