Call for Papers: The City As Palimpsest, CIRICE 2020 9th International Congress. Naples, 22-24 October 2020
Traces, gazes and narrations on the complexity of historical urban contexts
André Corboz used the term palimpsest to propose an effective metaphor (Le territoire comme palimpseste) between the parchment document and the city and/or territory on which man applies his doing. The parchment, which has handed down the scriptures since the Middle Ages, was a material of great value and was reused, abraded, sometimes inverted and rewritten several times, while never losing its ‘stratification’, traces of which remained legible.
The city and its territory are like a parchment, transformed by the action of nature and man, and endowed over the centuries with different meanings in relation to the societies that modify them, without however erasing the signs of time, both natural and anthropic. Are the studies that have improved over the years still current? The answer is clearly affirmative and the layers that appear today superimposable in urban fabrics and in their territories represent for our society a legacy not to be erased, but, indeed, to be known and enhanced.
We would like to ask ourselves about this complex patrimony of tracks, images, narrations: how did we get to the current urban complexity? how can we describe our cities? how do we see and represent them? how can we recover and enhance them?
Interested scholars can register on the OCS conference website indicating the Topic for the proposal with an abstract (Italian/English languages, max 1,000 characters, blanks included) by 15 February 2020.
The full call for papers with the synopsis of the different sessions can be downloaded here.