The Ghost Dimension the theory of hostalgia in immigrant urbanity

The eye sees all, but the mind shows us what we want to see, said William Shakespeare. As I was walking along the streets of Perth, I was astounded by the truth of this statement following a startling and almost physical zoning out to a junction in Colombo. This amicable experience was triggered by a very large tree in a dark niche in the street façade. Yet nothing in their physical composition was similar, nor were the people around.  
“Architecture is something invincible. Something you cannot separate into a number of elements.”-Steen Eiler Rasmussen (Experiencing Architecture, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1959, p.9) 

NOSTALGIA: Nostalgia is explained as the bittersweet longing for things, persons or situations of the past. It is the effect that breaks one inside for a few minutes. In Greek it means “the pain from an old wound”. It can come in many forms-a feeling of a place-where one aches to go again, a song, a whistle through the misty air, a scent, a window, a photograph, etc. But here is another truth of nostalgia: one doesn’t feel it for who one was but who one wasn’t. One feels it for all the possibilities that were open, but didn’t take. It is subtle but persuasive. It is a pang in one’s heart far more powerful than memory alone-a yearning so strong for the lost places in the past that it actually provides one with the briefest moment of time travel through a tunnel of emotional echoes, producing perspective and objectivity. One tries desperately to hang on to it, wanting to experience more, yet it slips through the fingers like a forgotten dream.
 

“The more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it is” - Vladimir Nabokov

The types and mechanism of reminiscence has been interpreted in many ways;

1. Herman Ebbinghaus: Recall, Recognition, Re-construction, Re-learning and Saving

2. John Robert Anderson: Procedural (skills, abilities, and schemata acquired through life), Declarative (knowing what ‘events’ have happened), Semantic (knowledge we possess regardless of personal experience), Episodic (Own experience and events)

3. Paul Connerton: Personal, Cognitive, Habitual

Therefore, acquiring and storing of memories are so complex to the point of being metaphysical. They are intertwined with a person’s intricate and singular 5 senses along with that discreet sixth sense, while also being in rebellion with time. Hence nostalgia and its fictive memory is even more inconspicuous to find. But one can safely conclude that there is a definite link between: Place + Space + Memory + Nostalgia + Time.

NOSTALGIA IN URBANITY: Architects are taught to feel the ‘spirit’ or the ‘pulse’ of the place before designing. Surely, this is not to be in terpreted as a 3-dimensional existence. It has to be more than that; the X-factor of design. Similarly, in some of the recent studies nostalgia is brought to the forefront as a legitimate judging tool for spaces through the analysis of users’ individual memory links to a city space.
 

It may be called the ‘ghost dimension’ in urban design. The ‘seeds’ of this effect have grown through time and space, stratum after stratum, becoming justifiable in an immensely complex and personalized background. It is like the ‘karma’ of city design-cause and effect. The complexity of this theory is that it requires the acceptance that there are immeasurable layers of characteristics in the built form as well as measurable. Immeasurable does not mean ‘void of presence’ but ‘void of definite quantity’. In fact the immeasurable are often the most important, powerful and the most beautiful physiognomies that cities have incorporated, however small in quantity. Its relativity to time is, in fact, the most effectual phenomenon: some merits of an urban space could have been ‘expired’ at a given time while some merits could have been reincarnated. These are the rudiments that produce  nostalgia due to their presence in an unformed, dis-orderly, un-translucent state and in an ethereal or spectral fashion, articulating our experience of the space without absolute rules- transcending through time. 

“For stories and buildings alike, incremental change has been the paradoxical mechanism of their preservation” -Edward Hollis (The Secret Lives of Buildings, London: Portobello Books Ltd, 2009, p.14)

The stories, myths and legends that are both local and foreign embodied in a certain fabric provides a visitor with an experience which can be tailored and limited only by their own imagination and genetics: enchanting narratives and illusions that make them belong to that time and place. An extraordinary method of perception bespoke for their emotional survival. The phantasm of built form.

There is also the painful fact that architecture or urban design is never completely well-defined. Therefore, spaces in an urbanity do not have a substantial architectural distinction and produce a thousand conjectural interpretations to those places for a thousand dissimilar individuals. 

“The narrative of one’s life is part of an interconnecting set of narratives.”-Paul Connerton (How Societies Remember, Cambridge University press, 1992, p 21)

NOSTALGIC PERCEPTIONS: 

Contrary to the convenient interpretation that perception is the expression of socio cultural identity, it is far more a subtle act relating to the human body and its 5 perceptions.  For instance, eyes probe a space, making thousands of subconscious computations per second. According to the Abhidamma preached by Buddha, at one blink of an eye, one makes 10 into the power of 12 thoughts. (Chiththakshana) These are made based on thoughts born on each sense that are called-‘prasaada rupa’.

‘Structuring and identifying the environment is a vital ability among all mobile animals. Many kinds of cues are used: the visual sensations of colour, shape, motion or polarization of light, as well as other senses such as smell, sound, touch, kinaesthesia, sense of gravity, and perhaps of electric or magnetic fields’ –Kevin Lynch (The Image of the City, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960, p.3)

The processing of visual information sometimes triggers cognitive loopholes. These loopholes are known as optical illusions. For instance there is a phenomenon called ‘Shape Constancy’. It allows one to make illusions of the scale of objects they are already familiar with due to memory instead of resulting in spatial effect. 
 
De-constructivists believed that an individual’s perception was predetermined by their thoughts, knowledge, and cultural background. Postmodernists took a linguistic approach to this and adopted the viewpoint that language and therefore symbolism were the building blocks of architecture. The contemporary view is in agreement to the nostalgia theory: people first perceive, then think, and thirdly conceptualize thoughts-allowing also for the individual design and experience of space- becoming momentary architects.

IMMIGRATION & NOSTALGIA: 

As to why people migrate, given the difficulties it embodies, is a complex study. Among many theories, ‘Osmosis’ is considered the most unifying: humans simply migrate from countries with less migration pressure to those with high migration pressure, in the way ions of water are absorbed by semipermeable membranes. Whatever the reason, it is now a dominant global phenomenon that forces its impact on ‘designed’ cities and vice versa, to be discussed. 

“It is not a walk in the park” –Lorri Craig (article ‘Migrants: The psychological Impact of Immigration’, 2018). The article rounds up the basic ‘losses’ faced by a modern day immigrant. Having to decide what to take and what to let go, touch and smell of family and friends, values, privacy, self-esteem, mother language, familiar food, work, systems (housing, transport, 

Parallel Worlds : 4 parallel streets next to water, shift one from one parallel world to another, time and again. Movement and pace of these streets are subtle yet magically insistent, making expectations of the heart- possible. 
“Mama tried to save us from the streets, but the streets were too strong”-Barry White

Colonial Cousins: Colonials planted a seed in bricks and stone, engineering this future nostalgic link between the buildings of Perth and Colombo. The ‘Dead Colonials’ and their rough textures now vow and persevere among the sleek modern fabric.   

Hybrid Piazza: ‘Posh’ or ‘humble’, people seeped to it- escaping from their domestic ways, seeking that spot, to hide in plain sight, or to become ‘alone’ in the crowd.

“Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate”-Shana Alexander
Trains Of Thoughts: A station is always a stage. Expectancy, silent dialogues, secret admirations, kindred smiles and the lulling chorus of a moving train. The shell maybe different, yet the drama is the same

“Sometimes the wrong train takes you to the right station”-“The Lunchbox” (2013) 

World Under The Tree: The rain, the sun, plants, trees, water and birds-soft and contrasting troposphere of parks, perform the ‘familiar’ gist to all. 

“Come sit with me and be at ease, to look upon these wondrous trees.”-H R Carpes 

Travels In A Book: The library is a universal constant. The volumes, the smell of aging books and traces of human skin on them, the cosy corners and the disappearance from one’s self.

“With books, flowers, and the moon who could not be happy?” 

–Oscar Wilde