narrative archaeology (original) (raw)
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Urban Narratives: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects
KALEIDOSCOPE, Book of Abstracts, International Conference for Doctoral, Post-Doctoral Students and Young Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023
The communication intends to present an introductory study on the notion of „urban narratives": the delimitation of the main conceptual and theoretical aspects, the determination of the defining characteristics and investigating a new possibility of „place-making” through narrative. In the era of globalization and multiculturalism, the city becomes an element of maximum reference.
Narrative Language, Architecture and the City
2020
The contribution offers a new perspective on the topic of narratives, settling links between the city, cognitive theories and the history of Architecture. As it has been neglected from a historical perspective, the power of narratives in architecture is being investigated at its most intimate roots. The paper succeeds in this work by drawing on the theories of cognitive and semiotic psychology, shedding light on architecture through its users. The individual in society, its construction, and most intimate contamination are intrinsically linked to the milieu of his/her own communities, in a continuous interaction between actions and habits, between phenomena and consolidated, stored narratives. A new space for architecture emerges. A space that not only supports as a shelter but also influences these habits, actively participating in the urban storytelling training process. Thus, as part of a whole, the architect finds his own place in contemporary cultural narratives, abandoning the...
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Inria, 2003
The city's surface is thick with its living citizens. Its earth is richly sown with its many dead. The city is a repository of narratives, of stories. Present tense, past tense or future. The city is a novel. Cities are simple things. They are the conglomerations of people. Cities are complex things. They are the geographical and emotional distillations of whole nations. What makes a place a city has little to do with size. It has to do with the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut of their clothes, the sound of their shouts. But most of all, cities are the meeting places of stories. The men and women there are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing.
Excavating the Cityscape through Urban Tales and Local Archives
Art Education , 2013
A “cityscape” is defined as an artistic representation of an urban environment. Artistic representations can take shape through narrative, mythology, performance or visual metaphor. Cities are extremely complex and dynamic entities, offering substantial assets toward the re-envisioning of art education in contemporary society. This article explores the potential of narrative for unveiling the curricular value of places within our city neighborhoods.
Mapping Urban Narratives, the extremes of the everyday
The city landscape – its maps as the narratives that emerge from its everyday and its extremes – has inspired this ongoing open-ended research-paper-presentation which is the dialogue’s outcome between two theoretical approaches of man’s relation to space and practices of its representation. The first approach originates from an ongoing research on the narrative dimension of space (M.V.) and the second from an ongoing research (K.Z.) on the cinematic dimension of architectural representation. We would argue though that the extremes of the everyday have revealed unexpected spatial qualities and conditions that may surprise the disparate disciplines that address the urban thematic issue. The objective of this research is not to talk directly about the map but to analyze the palimpsest of the narratives it inscribes. The material, the fragments, the layers, the conflicts, the negotiations of the signifiers and the signified, all leave their marks in urban space and landscape. The map is there to narrate stories in space and time.
Culture & History Digital Journal, 2020
In "The Idea of a Town: Anthropology of Urban Form" (1976), architecture historian Joseph Rykwert defined six archetypes used in Etruscan rites for the foundation of urban settlements, which continued to be used in Classical Greece and Ancient Rome. He proposed to use these same categories for the study of cities in different eras, as a methodology to develop a global urban history. This paper projects Rykwert's concepts to cities created during the XXI century, specifically those designed for video games with historical themes, and provides the reader with an experimental methodology for assessing digital architectures and environments. Spatial and narrative archetypes will be identified in two different video games, as well as their connections to imaginaries born in the Classic period. In Age of Empires (En-semble Studios, 1996-2005) urban foundation corresponds to the idea of the town as a place for dominating territory. Their variable structure is grounded on a systemic set of rules that benefits tactic configurations designed by players. In contrast, Bioshock Infinite (Irrational Games, 2013) proposes an immobile storyline built around the city as its leading narrative voice. Its urban spaces direct the action through archetypes such as the "center", the "labyrinth", and the "door".
Enacting Literary Geographies: Urban Narratives from Space Representation to Spatial Practices
2016
This work aims to address the emerging field of geohumanities, with particular attention to the approaches and methodologies developed in the field of literary geography. The six chapters focus on different urban contexts (North-eastern Italy's polinucleated city, international metropolises such as New York and Berlin, the Po Delta region) and disparate literary works and genres (novels, short stories collections, graphic novels and comic books) to analyse the representation and experience of contemporary urban life from a mobile geocritical perspective. Particular attention is paid to the narrative representation of urban practices, as well as to the exploration of interdisciplinary research methods informed by both urban/cultural geography and literary theory and criticism.
Tehran's narrative A method for analyzing textual representations of urban space
2021
Cities are constantly represented in a huge, ever-changing network of daily micro-narratives, news, literary works, and on top of all, social media posts. Space is being produced within a trialectic comprising spatial practices in perceived space, space representations and the space represented in lived space. Drew upon this, our work is based on the idea that spatial practices can be interpreted through textual representations. Here, we present a perspective on people and places' dynamic nature, allowing us to capture how residents represent urban space through social networks. We use a huge dataset of geo-referenced tweets alongside with surfing urban textual representations by users. This enables us to study the spatiality of urban practices where the lived experience of residents took place. We associate these representations of Tehran with fluctuation of property values, constructions, gentrifications, and developments, i.e., the production of Tehran. Our study explores the relationship between Tehranners' everyday experiences and property values, which reveals how they predict or influence each other to define and describe at least one aspect of Tehran.
Sulimma, Buchenau, Gurr: City Scripts in Urban Literary and Cultural Studies
City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures, 2023
This introduction extends an invitation to a new kind of transdisciplinary narratology. It also provides a conceptual frame for the study of urban scripts. Our book responds to calls by literary theorists such as Rita Felski in Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020) and Paula M. L. Moya in The Social Imperative (2016) to develop methods for a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things” (Felski 42) by, for instance, allowing their readers to enter into emotionally and epistemically transformative “interracial friendship[s]” (Moya 51) with literary characters and with the narrative progression that can and will “prompt a reader to question and then revise some of her assumptions about structures of racial and economic inequality” (Moya 58). We are particularly interested in how narratives take action in everyday life. This book will analyze polysemic assemblages of narrative, media, and poetics with their multiplying and contesting temporal, spatial, and material groundings. We define scripts as “artful combinations of narrative, medial as well as figural acts of framing, inscription, description and prescription [that . . .] establish contingent connective tissues between the past, the present and the future” of cities and their frequently anti-urban constituents and contexts (Buchenau and Gurr, “Urban Development” 142). This colloquial art of crafting connective tissues between an emotionally charged past, a contentious present, and an anticipated future is especially prominent in scenarios of massive deindustrialization and selective reindustrialization experienced in many second cities across the United States and Germany, the regional foci of our examination.