Cities are often described as living archives of human memory. Walk through an old neighbourhood in an Islamic city like Fez in Morocco or Cairo in Egypt, and you can see layers of history in its streets and buildings. Traces of the past remain visible in everyday life.
Urban historians sometimes call this a palimpsest – a place where layers of history remain visible, like old writing faintly showing beneath new text.
But in many parts of the world today, cities are being transformed so rapidly that these historical layers are disappearing. Entire neighbourhoods and older areas are demolished and replaced with new districts, infrastructure corridors, or megaprojects. It’s a process that might remind one of French civil servant Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s dramatic demolition and reshaping of Paris in the 1800s.
