The City Haunts Itself

“Most metropolises are overrun with ghosts,” asserts Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel in a piece on Aeon. But Khatri-Patel isn’t just referring to the unfortunate souls that populate urban legends. Rather, “Our lives in cities are shaped by invisible hands, body-less voices and an eerie automation of infrastructure.”

For Khatri-Patel, “The automation of cities has the effect of alienating people from a state of personhood. It’s as if there is a tacit shadow-self that urban life produces.” Khatri-Patel recounts the anecdote of the woman whose deceased husband recorded some of London’s famous “mind the gap" announcements. After the transit agency switched the announcements to automated voices in 2012, Margaret McCollum’s story made national news, striking a chord with the public and prompting Transport for London to restore the original recordings at the station nearest to McCollum.

The article gives a wide range of examples of how the tension between tradition and modernity, between established customs and industrialization, between humans and automation, creates a need for urban ghost stories and legends about the abandoned spaces and mysterious nooks of modern cities. As Khatri-Patel points out, “Utilitarian approaches to urban planning do not leave room for emptiness. Spaces that fall into disuse for one purpose are quickly repurposed for another.” When spaces do stay vacant, they take on an eerie atmosphere, lending themselves to shadowy entities both literal and metaphorical.

“Yet there is a potent reconciliatory power to memory and ghosts. As we mark ghosts, we return their personhood,” Khatri-Patel concludes. Acknowledging urban ghosts means understanding the layers of history and meaning that accumulate as cities and society continuously evolve.