ABSTRACT

Literary urban studies thus understood, more so than established approaches to studying ‘literature and the city’, must be concerned with conceptualising the relation between the textual and the material city, between ‘the city’ and ‘the text’. However, more clearly than in Mahr’s original conceptualisation, where “model of” and “model for” are two sides of the same coin or may only be gradually more or less prominent in different models, “model of” and “model for” are introduced as a heuristic distinction based on which the field of literary urban studies can be charted or mapped. While, as part of the “story turn in planning”, numerous studies from the field of planning research and planning theory have engaged with the role of narratives in planning, this is hardly true to the same extent for literary and cultural studies despite their specific competence in the analysis of narratives. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.