ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the concept “literature of urban decline” to identify a distinct genre of urban writing with a global presence: literature that deals with the decline of city centers following processes of urban sprawl. The chapter examines the complex interplay between the changing urban reality, the “urban imaginary,” haunted by a persisting sense of loss, and the literature that depicts these once-central urban spaces after their decline. The chapter demonstrates the palimpsestic literary devices this genre employs in order to resurrect the past layers of the urban space and offers to see these literary devices as textual attempts to intervene in the present urban reality through an imaginary act of restoration. Thus, this literature suggests new imaginative framings of the past, present, and future of the city.
The case study presented to illustrate the characteristics of this genre is that of Hadar HaCarmel, once a lively center of the city of Haifa, Israel. As its idealized past continues to haunt the city’s urban imaginary, the literature describing the neighborhood after its decline employs palimpsestic literary devices to complicate the relations between the spatiotemporal layers of the city, both real and imagined.
