Spatial planning

The thirteenth entry is le remembrement urbain, and an English reader hears the wrong Latin verb inside it at first glance. « To remember » descends from memor, mindful, by way of memorari; the French word descends from membrum, a limb, and there is no memory in it anywhere. Old French had remembrer in the plain sense of putting the parts of a body back together, and its exact opposite is still in daily use and still faintly gruesome: démembrer is to dismember, and le démembrement is what happens to an estate broken up among heirs. Land follows the same picture. Generation after generation of inheritance leaves a block as a scatter of strips too narrow to build on, each one a severed limb of something that was whole; le remembrement gathers them in and draws the boundaries again, so that what comes out is a body rather than a heap of pieces. English has no single verb for the operation and reaches for « readjustment » or « consolidation », which name the paperwork and lose the surgery.