Story Cities: A City Guide for the Imagination

Story Cities is a collaborative research project led by Rosamund Davies, Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Writing and Kam Rehal, Senior Lecturer in Graphic and Digital Design. It explores ways in which stories might respond to, reference, reflect and re-imagine the city – the journeys we take, the situations we encounter and the dialogues and connections we make – in order to highlight universally shared experiences and understandings of the city and / or imagine them differently. Rosamund and Kam have written several short fiction pieces (under 500 words) and invited other writers to do the same. More than 50 UK and internationally based writers are taking part. The stories are written in response to 12 key city locations/modes of transport: Market, Square, Café, Hotel, Park, Station or Port, Main Street, Side Street, Crossroads, On the train, On the bus / tram. These provide a means to link the spatial syntax of the city with its counterpart in language, offering multiple perspectives on the experience of urban space. These stories have been collected and produced as a physical designed book object that readers can carry into cities. The aim is to activate a shared conversation between the reader, the page and the environment, in which the stories act as keys for reflection on the city