Cities are sedimented ruins of dead human projects.

Evidence

The project then leaves behind it these aggregates of matter in the form of totalities, or husks of dead projects, traces of human action which has long since vanished. In this sense, our cities are sedimentations of such totalities, like a sitting room whose owner has died. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 5413

Categorization

• FICTION: The city as a mausoleum of half-dead projects — a sitting room whose owner has died — is a haunting image for any urban narrative.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s later point here about cities as sedimentations, and to Walter Benjamin’s urban fragments; also to the reader’s interest in infrastructure.

Related

• The human project organizes the environment as a totality that reveals its own inertia (similarity 0.79)