“The city does not tell its past, but contains it, like the lines of a hand.”

When I first read Invisible Cities, “Zaira” from the “cities and the memory 3” left me in awe. It was not the most interesting, nor the most whimsical, but perhaps the most honest.

a city is made not of buildings, but of what has happened there.

calvino offered only fragments; a lamppost, a rope, a hanged usurper, A railing, a queen’s procession, a cat on a gutter. these fragments offered the reader the city as a whole.

a lamppost,

a nuptial procession,

a gunboat,

rips in the fish net,

a rope,

a railing,

a destroyed gutter,

three old men.

a hanged usurper,

a cat on a gutter,

a fish net,

Maybe a good city isn’t one that resists time, but one that holds onto it. That gathers traces. That accepts the weight of what’s happened.
And changes because of it.
And I wonder if we should be designing more like it; Not erasing the past, but allowing it to leave marks.