De Certeau and 'Writing' the Palimpsest

A photo of Michel de Certeau, author of "The Practice of Everyday Life."

This process in which an urban palimpsest is created and observed may be better understood through the concept of ‘writing’ a city, which Michel de Certeau in his work “The Practice of Everyday Life[1]” claims people to unknowingly do through their daily lives on the ground. De Certeau claims that while one may be able to perceive the greater urban picture of a city from a position more removed from the city, such as the 110^th floor of the World Trade Center, those on the ground and actually moving through the midst of a city are not aware of the key role they play in writing the “urban text” of the city. He states that:

The city is provisionally created as a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints and opinions. "The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order." 

                                         Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life" 

This may remind us of the aforementioned human interactions and contributions of individuals within Istanbul’s Spice Market that play a critical role in the site and city’s identity as a palimpsest. However, perhaps this reference to ‘individuals’ may extend beyond human beings and perhaps be generalizable to each and every ‘force’ that shapes a city – whether it be time, space, or human interest – that collectively form each and every layer of the palimpsest. Consequently, just as individuals on the ground cannot perceive the larger urban text they create, perhaps it is impossible to truly understand a complex urban city just by examining each individual force or a single dimension – say, the temporal layer of 1830’s Black Boston. Perhaps only by removing ourselves from the midst of the city and viewing all the layers that come before and after us – ultimately creating this urban palimpsest- could we truly understand the true nature of an urban city. As a result, perceiving a city as a palimpsest becomes virtually essential by helping us understand that an urban city is constantly expanding and recreated with the addition of more and more layers that encompass much more than those that we and our contemporaries weave in our own restricted lifetimes and immediate localities.

A picture of a section of the Archimedes Palimpsest, a medieval parchment palimpsest. This thirteenth century prayer book contains erased texts that were written several centuries prior, including two treatises by Archimedes that can be found nowhere else [2]. Individual city-dwellers write and rewrite the urban city just as scholars do so on parchment palimpsests like these. 

As much as de Certeau acknowledges the significance of individual “pedestrian speech acts” (114), or the footsteps and walking movements that spatially ‘act’ and ‘live out’ the space of the city (114), which may form a palimpsest itself on a microscopic level by constantly superimposing new pathways and “pedestrian enunciations” (116) on old ones, it is just as necessary to zoom out and perceive the grander “symbolic order of the unconscious” (117) that they form. To understand a city without being carried away by all the microscopic complexities that seem to present infinitely many conflicting definitions of it, we must acknowledge that these smaller displacements and walks, or relationships and intersections, all “intertwine and create an urban fabric” (117) that itself forms just one of many layers of a dynamic, flourishing and fluid urban palimpsest.