Cityscape palimpsest of our living culture

Abstract

While we move from one city to another, we identify, experience and compare them by their cityscapes. We operate in, interpret and remember an urban setting by its streetscape, skyline, vista, landmark, visual fabric and so on, aided mostly by our visual memories. And that interaction constructs the perceptual image of a city to us, as Kevin Lynch (1960) suggests. In macro-scale MRG Conzen (1960) demonstrated how the urban morphology represents a city's identity by showing its characters. Thus cityscape, predominantly to our understanding is the identity of a city framed by visual and formal elements. While that frame constructs city's identity, on contrary the frame itself is not constant. "Cities do not sit still for portraits. A 'still life'-nature morte-portrait of a city is a death mask from life. While there are many cities of the dead, there has never been a dead city"-as Philip J. Ethington starts in a book on cityscape. It is an utter statement on the core nature of cities: a complex setup of humanscape layered on time-history and consistently changing to make a cumulative embodiment of living past. Citiscape is the palimpsest of that dynamic process over time.