City layers

Traveling by bus is like embarking on a journey of thought. I observe the city and look for its constant elements, its layers, its structures.

The city is made as if by superimposing tracing sheets on an overhead projector. The drawings of the subsequent sheets hide parts that are more or less large than the previous ones. Thus different conceptions - urban, economic, cultural, religious, social - of the city overlap with previous ones, redesigning them, resemantizing them, recombining them. As we proceed, the signs on the sheets at the bottom become opaque and become less legible and it becomes less easy to understand their meaning or purposes. Until they become purely ornamental pen strokes.

Many signs, in the course of superposition (or sedimentation), change purpose and meaning, even several times.

It seems that urban fauna also works like this. Different layers – in terms of culture, wealth, ideology, age – are found together like different systems grouped in the same whole.

They often change, intersect, break down and recompose into new systems. Cultural, ideological, ... nuclei are combined together within the meshes of a network.