Kırklareli Urban Design Studio: Palimpsest

The word palimpsest names a surface that has been scraped and written over, again and again, where earlier text is never fully erased but only overlaid. It describes not just an old manuscript but a mode of existence: a present haunted by absence, where every new inscription carries the ghost of what came before, and where meaning is layered rather than singular.

The vertical studio takes Kırklareli, in Turkish Thrace, as exactly such a surface. Rather than treating the city as a clean slate, students read it as sedimented time, tracing the layers of memory, use and erosion accumulated in its fabric, and asking how a new design intervention can become one more layer that lives in tension with the ones beneath it rather than erasing them.