The notion of ‘newness and emergence’ as pertaining to ‘the city’ is one that has eluded architects and designers for centuries. Due to the very nature the question it would be easier to ascertain just what a new city is not, than what it is or appears to be.
Although, by definition, a city may be described as a center of population, commerce and culture; we cannot simply ascribe ‘newness’ to each of these parameters and establish a deductive definition. Else, we would refer to pretoria as a new city due to sudden and rapid influx of Zimbabwean immigrants, or Copenhagen due to its economic resurgence, or even New york because of its perpetual contribution to an ever-evolving pop-culture. Yet this is not the case.
Clearly, there is a more abstract meaning behind this notion of ‘newness’. One which i would ascribe to the experientiality of a place. By experienciality i mean all of that which we experience in a place. The sights, sounds, smells etc. a combination of which make that place or city unique unto itself. Yet this does not fully capture the notion of newness. We cannot refer to a city as new simply because we all have never been there before. There is more to it. I would argue, that occasionally, this experienciality which the city provides is unique not only unto itself, but unto the very idea of cartegorization which it would ordinarily be governed by. In other words, by its very existence, it would be an offering of an exercise in ‘trace and erasure’. It would be something brought forth by what was there before, yet not of what was there before, gloriously unique and ‘new’. Two examples of Istanbul and Lagos.
In his book, ‘Istanbul: memories and the city”, Orphan Pamuk describes this feeling, “...what i am trying to describe now is not the melancholy of Istanbul but the huzun in which we see ourselves reflected, the huzun we absorb with pride and share as a community. To feel this huzun is to see the scenes, evoke the memories , in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence of huzun.
