Between Texts and Cities

Abstract

TEXTS+CITIES explores the relation between texts and urban spaces in contemporary culture and society. Cities have often been compared to palimpsests, their streets, buildings, and subways pleated, crumpled, written and rewritten over and over again: as material texts, poïesis. What is at stake in this conflation of city and text? How do urban spaces relate to artistic, political, or economic texts and ideologies? What transformations occur between the designing of urban spaces, and the building and eventual inhabiting of those spaces? TEXTS+CITIES aims to bring together scholars and practitioners within an interdisciplinary range of social sciences, humanities, art, design, and media to reflect on ways of producing, reproducing, and experiencing the urban.