The cultural production of the urban landscape is a complex and contradictory phenomenon as the city provides channels of interaction that affect socio-economic, political and cultural structures of society. The complex and multilayered ecology that defines the city space invites an interdisciplinary approach to its analysis. The field of urban studies has embraced this interdisciplinary perspective by bridging the social sciences with contributions from fields such as literature, history, philosophy and the like.

Humanities-based investigations bolster a deep understanding of the ways urban life shapes notions of community and identity. On the one hand, the city has always been a special object of representation in literature and the arts; on the other, these representations are key to understanding the significance of urban architecture beyond its materiality. Encoded in it are ideas, ideologies, as well as political and economic worldviews. Yet these are not presented in abstract form, but as concrete buildings and monuments, streets and squares that are themselves forms of representations. The city has a symbolic and material nature, each based on and affected by the other; its complexity cannot be captured within one single discipline.

In his seminal work, The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre talks about “the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias.’” Joe Moran, applying Lefebvre’s view of the urban space, affirms that:

Cities are clearly material entities, products of some of the traditional concerns of geography such as labour, land and capital, but they are also textualized. In a sense, the city can only ever be understood textually, because it is far too complicated and labyrinthine to be encapsulated in its material totality: we only ever have access to a selective interpretation of it. In this volume we approach the city as a textual representation, or better yet as a plurality of textual representations. We aim to capture the multifaceted identity of the city, physical and symbolic, so as to acknowledge its cultural and anthropological nature.