ABSTRACT
The city is like a palimpsest, a product of collective memory and the materialization of the culture of its inhabitants along a historical timeline. The city is a repository of history; it is the locus of the collective memory of the people who have been living there from the first generation to the present one. Social, cultural, historical, and physical narratives are observable through different time in history chronologically and synchronically, and through the relationship of different aspects in a certain period of time diachronically. Comprehensive and holistic readings of the city based on a three-dimensional model of time (history), scale levels (form and space), and layers (physical, social, and ideological) are useful to read the historical morphology of the city.
