Narrating the city. Urban tales from Tilburg and Almere

Abstract

In contemporary academic debates on the city, it is generally agreed upon that there are many different ways to represent or imagine a city and that these multiple representations and imaginations are dependent on their temporal and spatial context. In line with these debates, the city is understood in this study as a simultaneity of stories-so-far. Accordingly, this study brings together a wide variety of urban representations into one empirical project and, in doing so, it aims to reflect and interrelate the rich diversity and complexity of contemporary urban life in two medium sized Dutch cities: the former industrial city of Tilburg and the new town Almere. Diverse locally grounded urban tales are juxtaposed with the life stories of urban dwellers and the academic stories of urban theorists, to create an understanding of the multiple and interrelated ways in which the city and urban life are articulated. By using the concepts of emplotment and interpretative repertoire, the narrative analysis of this multiplicity of urban tales provides on the one hand an insight into individuals' experiences and the meanings they make of them, and on the other hand it provides an understanding of the intersubjective meanings shared by the whole of the community. In the end, the narrative analysis of these tales above all aims to bring to light the ways in which many different voices can integrate in complex and often contradictory ways to build a previously unavailable image of the city. In doing so, it creates space for different perspectives on Tilburg and Almere that at first touch upon each other obliquely, but eventually start to overlap, without ever being absorbed completely by one another.