With the work of Chilean photographer Marcelo Montecino and his record of the Barrio Franklin neighbourhood as its starting point, this article discusses the ways in which a city and its transformation over time can be portrayed. Expanding the field of vision of urban representations, Montecino focuses on daily life: on the marks and imprints left by the community on the spaces it inhabits. Such actions are not judged as anomalies of the urban order but rather as evidence of a pattern of meaning that diversifies our reading of the city. Thus, through this photographic narrative of daily life, we recognise a forgotten city, a flawed one even, but one that is still fundamental to the processes of reconstruction of urban memory. It is the very relationship between representation, everyday space and memory construction that guides discussion in this study, conducted from a theoretical and critical perspective.