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As a figure to represent multi-layered configurations of meaning, the palimpsest has become increasingly prominent in reflections upon the urban; particularly, though not exceptionally, in contexts which bear the scars of violence, civil war, dictatorship or colonialism, as well as rapid or destabilizing social and cultural change: cities, in short, which are in states of mutation.1 As Andreas Huyssen observed in Present Pasts 'we have come to see cities and buildings as palimpsests' (Huyssen 2003: 7). Indeed, palimpsestic readings of the city-texts are themselves multi-layered: encompassing urban topographies and the relationship subjects have with cities in space and time. Cities and their (dis)contents are not only palimpsests in terms of the material and architectural changes they undergo, but because, as Bachelard reminds us, 'our imagination resides in space' (Bachelard 1994: xxxvii). Interpretations are variable and 'memories of what was there before and imagined alternatives' (Huyssen 2003: 7) are always possible. In this way, representations of cities that break down hegemonic urban narratives can also be understood through the application of a palimpsestic paradigm.
Furthermore, the city-palimpsest as layered text can be revisited through cultural, literary and cinematic representations. As Max Silverman argues, responses and particularly hybrid memories of this nature depend upon the exploitation of underlying traces which have never fully disappeared: 'the palimpsest captures most completely the superimposition and productive interaction of different inscriptions and then spatialization of time central to the work of memory' (Silverman 2013: 4). In this sense, we understand the palimpsest not as overwriting and effacing or obscuring what was there before, but as permitting the co-existence of traces of the past. Exploration of traces and the palimpsest also brings about a compelling urge to assess the archive and processes of archiving, of understanding the workings of the urban memory-machine. As Huyssen states, 'the seduction of the archive and its trove of stories of human achievement and suffering has never been greater' (Huyssen 2003: 5). A study of the urban palimpsest must not only include discussion of the cities themselves, but the way in which the city and its spaces and places are written, reinterpreted and reframed.
Connecting memory, the palimpsest, and mutations of a diverse collection of cities and representations of the urban, this special issue will showcase interdisciplinary...