LINE THE STORY

unfolding urban tales along the cityscape

Authors:

Elena Stamouli / Anastasia Borodiienko

“To live, every being must put out a line, and in life, these lines tangle with one another. “ Tim Ingold

The objective of this project is to propose a framework for analysis of personal movements and daily routines in

order to unveil invisible layers of the experienced city and users-driven identity of a place. Focusing on

elementary forms of human interaction - walking and story-telling - we illustrate that the formal structure of

urban life has two modes - physical and mental, and two aspects - spatial and temporal.

The stories of the city are created by its users. They are woven from memories and daily novels of citizens

everyday life. They are embedded in the structure and very essence of each city. The role of certain urban forms

can be both diminished and exaggerated by means of implication which users give to it. How do our daily routines

shape the city?

URBAN ROUTINES / PERSONAL STORIES

The research was conducted in two different urban environments, two cities with different physical, economic and

political context - Athens and Kyiv. Different urban morphologies and spatial forms, that interweave with different

notions and mentalities. Is there any common ground?

The idea of this project is based on the very strong connection between the city fabric and the human nature.

Therefore, we put people’s stories in the centre of the research. Mental mapping and interviewing of city users

were chosen as basic tools for creating urban tales. These stories are translated into new kinds of poetic maps that

have their origin in the complex tissue of the underlying stories with the physical structure of the city. Every story

is a travel story - a spatial practice, a city journey.

WALKING

Walking - the elementary form of the experience of the city - is chosen as a key case study. The aim is to identify

how urbanites experience the city through walking and how their perceptions of the city are influenced by the

urban morphology. Movement with the city fabric is never random, and more specifically in case of daily routines.

In this part of the research personal urban stories were unfolded along the walking route. These are oral tales

narrated from memories evoked from the imaginary walk along the most common everyday routes. Thus, a

perception of every route is strongly correlated with the person’s position in the city and experience of the urban

environment and his perception.

VERBAL MAPS

By putting all the stories together, we created so-called verbal maps for both cities, which represents what the city

actually means for their users. Therefore, every separate map describes the image of the city verbally.

This mapping project can be considered as a milestone for further city studies through the lens of personal

experience. It reminds us again that every city is an organized complexity containing multiple layers of urban life.

“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind[..] memory is redundant: it

repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.” Italo Calvino