The “city as palimpsest” idea is powerful and whether or not it originated with Teju Cole, this passage in Open City immortalizes the metaphor:
“This was not the first erasure on the site. Before the towers had gone up, there had been a bustling network of little streets traversing this part of town. Robinson Street, Laurens Street, College Place: all of them had been obliterated in the 1960s to make way for the World Trade Center buildings, and all were forgotten now. Gone, too, was the old Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the late 1800s. The Syrians, the Lebanese, and other people from the Levant had been pushed across the river to Brooklyn, where they’d set down roots on Atlantic Avenue and in Brooklyn Heights. And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. There had been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored his ships in the narrows, or the black Portuguese slave trader Esteban Gómez sailed up the Hudson; human beings had lived here, built homes, and quarreled with their neighbors long before the Dutch ever saw a business opportunity in the rich furs and timber of the island and its calm bay. Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories.” [1]
This follows a detailed and evocative meandering description of the site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers and surrounding streets during some moment in the decade after 2001.
He sees the memorial plaque, a slab of blank marble, then notes skateboarders making unauthorized use of the scene. He walks up an overpass and takes in the perimeter of buildings, and then “the sudden metallic green of a subway train hurtling by, exposed to the elements where it crossed the work site, a livid vein drawn across the neck of 9/11.” Commuters march on, and the writer-observer feels rushed away from his reflections. [2]
This passage seems like a key one in Teju Cole’s work, judging by his reuse of it; Cole gave a 2012 presentation called City as Palimpsest springboarding off the idea.
Recently while re-reading Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory, Lefebvre’s formulations of appropriated space and dominated space reminded me of Cole’s city-as-palimpsest idea.
Lefebvre says that over time, spaces change but “no space ever vanishes utterly” because even sites of ancient ruins like Troy carry a trace as the spaces metamorphosize. I don’t take this to be a ghostly trace but a more of a complex physical and social one. Lefebvre talks of an interpenetration happening, of “superimposed spaces” as successive iterations of a city pass through time and “each new addition inherits and reorganizes what has gone before.” [3]
For Lefebvre, “what has gone before” is a kind of back-and-forth tension between dominated space and appropriated space. Dominated space is defined by political power, expressions of order and functions of utility. It can be useful, like highways, or hostile, like military architecture, but it’s “usually closed, sterilized, emptied out.”
The “opposite and inseparable concept” paired with dominated space is appropriated space, which is instead adapted to local use-patterns like the hand-built structures in a village.
This is not to say there is a simple binary between them; Lefebvre says these two kinds of space mix and blend. There is a constant process of space becoming dominated by the functions of planning and organization, and then reappropriated by improvisations and adaptations.
Recalling the skateboarders Teju Cole watched from the 9/11 memorial, even the most monumental space of ruin and memorial, of somber “blank marble,” rustles at the periphery with new life.
References:
[1] Pages 58-59 from Open City by Teju Cole. New York: Random House, 2011.
[2] Pages 56-57, Open City.
[3] Pages 164-165 from The Production of Social Space by Henri Lefebvre. 1974. Blackwell, 1991.