Place-making from the Urban Palimpsest

Abstract

Based on the concept of the city as a palimpsest, a kind of constant superimposition of physical layers and traces of tangible and ephemeral memories to be explored again in each historical moment and each urban path, the article proposes reading and interpreting some examples of territorial inscriptions in Europe and Latin America, the tensions generated by them and the spatial and socio-cultural strategies that frame and constitute them.

In this respect, the text seeks to broaden the notion of urban memory, on the one hand, while inviting us to understand urbanism, beyond its technical function of territorial planning, as a collective practice, and an exercise in summarising and bringing together the intrinsic logics of a place with its social use. It defends transformative power in the short and long term, and the place-making capacity of some civic, political and artistic actions in the urban space. At the same time, it explores its experiential and commemorative potential to imagine an urban planning more oriented towards making places capable of meeting the demands of contemporary urban societies in all their diversity. It calls for a Geddesian reading of cities and argues for a kind of urbanism of memory that can emerge from a holistic view of the place and all its physical and social layers.