The special issue Writing Urban Places: New Narratives on the European City, marks the culmination of an international research network that delved into the intricate interplay between communities, urban spaces and narratives. At its core, this endeavour introduced an inventive approach aimed at deepening our comprehension of urban communities, their dynamics and their rootedness, all through the lens of narrative methodologies. This collection gives an account of the dynamics of this network of academics, which consists of over 175 individuals from 35 different European countries and a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. As such, the issue offers a conclusion to the Writing Urban Places COST Action while also, hopefully, providing a springboard for further reflections and discussions on urban narratives, and the role these could play in spatial developments in the European city.

This issue of Writingplace Journal moves into the field, exploring the moment when reflection turns into action, and questions how knowledge produced via research is appraised and applied on the ground. In the articles, authors reflect upon their concrete experiences where insights regarding the city and its narratives have been made operational. Understanding the urban as a complex expression of social, historical, material, spatial and temporal relations between people and their built environment, we argue that this comprehension of places demands and envisions action, by which active and transformative processes take place in the real world. Fieldwork is in this sense both research and event, both investigative process and performative project.

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft.

This introduction to the proceedings of the PhD training school at the Estonian Academy of Arts presents the context and scope of the Training school on 'local urban stories', and tells the story behind the relocation of the Estonian Art Academy in Tallinn.

The concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ was formulated in 1958 by the Hungarian chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. Polemical in nature, it was part of an effort to refute the idea that scientific knowledge can be reduced to closed sets of statements or logical propositions. For Polanyi, scientific knowledge implied a worldly commitment on the scientist’s part, manifest in the artisanal aspects of constructing experimental installations that involve the mastery of embodied non-explicit knowledge, or ‘tacit ways of knowing’. Beyond the mere mastery of technical skills, tacit knowledge could, in Polanyi’s view, also be found in the beliefs and traditions shared by a community of scientists. Generally transmitted in non-verbal form, these beliefs and traditions, Polanyi held, constitute the basis from which explicit knowledge can emerge, and explain why one always knows more about a particular subject than one can put into words. Polanyi thus positioned tacit knowing in between an idea of ‘embodied knowledge’ and ‘[socially] shared knowledge’ that remains unspoken. [...]

This issue is an invitation to look beyond the definitions of meaningfulness, appropriation and integration, and explore the relations between them. We have liberally arranged the articles under the three main themes but, as it can easily become clear, there are overlaps among the themes. In that way, this issue offers not only a geographical journey along different urban narratives, but also an expedition into the network of interrelated terms and spatial practices.

This contribution takes the notion of situated experience as a starting point for explorations in practices of moving and making. Striving to privilege embodied experience and situated meanings, this contribution presents an experimental educational project at a former industrial site in Finland. The on-site intervention has been developed by the Master of Architecture research and design studio ‘Transdisciplinary Encounter: Choreographing Architectural Values’ by combining philosophical reflections on the experience of place and situation with a practical perspective. Twenty-four students from the studio based at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) worked in a context that encompassed a former pulp factory and a manor house in Tampere, Finland. Engaging this urban site in the direct vicinity of forests and lakes, and foregrounding our bodies’ capacity to ‘make space’, the studio explored research and making methods derived from the field of dance and choreography, particularly focusing on the relationship between movement and ‘situatedness’.

In this contribution, I will describe the Mercado Libertad, designed by Alejandro Zohn and built in the 1950’s, by highlighting the activities that takes place inside through the course of a day and through the eyes of several characters. My aim is to not only describe the ingenuity of the design, its remarkable roof, its position in the city and its simultaneous presence of various scales, but also to evoke the imagination of embodied experiences that the building affords. In the following passages, I will attempt to give voice to different characters populating the market. Seeing though the eyes of these characters, and experiencing through their bodies, I hope to illustrate how the architecture of these different scales and materialities, of openness and enclosure, of smoothness and roughness, dignifies their everyday activities in the heart of the city, making it come alive.

De professie van bouwkundig ontwerper kan op heel veel verschillende manieren worden uitgeoefend. Er zijn ontwerpers die aan allerlei verschillende opgaven werken, maar ook specialisten in bijvoorbeeld parkontwerp, de rehabilitatie van achterstandswijken, woningbouw, verbouwingen, ziekenhuizen of publieke gebouwen en noem maar op. In de keuze om aan bepaalde opdrachten te werken spelen ook politieke en sociaalmaatschappelijke (en vroeger ook religieuze) opvattingen en betrokkenheid. Bouwkundig ontwerpers hebben vaak hun eigen visie op het vak, en op hun taak om aspecten van de maatschappij ruimtelijk vorm te geven.

This essay focuses on imagination as a crucial source of innovation and makes a plea for an approach to architectural education that enables imaginative thinking about new spatial and temporal realities. It starts by foregrounding the strong connections between imagination, stories, and language. It then proposes the reading, telling, writing, and making of stories as four approaches in introducing exercises of literary imagination within architectural education that touch upon such themes as meaning, empathy, temporality, and the poetics of making. The contribution unpacks these approaches in a twofold way, pairing an academic grounding of each theme with a short narrative piece describing a pedagogical example. By means of this sequence of thematic explorations and examples, we aim to tangibly illustrate the power embedded in stories for future architects’ education.

Foreword to the book Building Paradise by Harry F.Mallgrave

For pressing and complex spatial or social urban agendas, understanding and interpreting place has always been an important issue. In-depth and close explorative reading of a site—in which drawing, modeling and writing (the basic tools of architecture) become instruments to open up new perspectives—is vital for imagining site-specific architectural possibilities. We thus see creative imagination, related to and emerging from place, as a crucial source of innovation. As educators, therefore, we need to examine how to guide students explore their imaginative faculties. Our pedagogic approach is founded upon the philosophical thought of phenomenology, theory on place, findings from neuroscience, and examination of architectural precedents. Based on these underpinnings we developed a course that focused on enhancing students’ spatial imagination and challenged them to think how the tools of architectural analysis and design can offer new imaginative ways to approach the local, social and historical aspects of a place. The paper illustrates how this framework is brought into architectural education by engaging the example of “Methods of Analysis and Imagination,” a master level elective course we taught in 2019. It presents the course’s overarching structure, as it unfolded over three intensive workshops on drawing, modeling and writing respectively. Investigating a selected site—through readings, conversations, exercises, hands-on and in situ assignments—the three workshops explored the way imagination can help us look at a place, and discover new and unique spatial or architectural relationships lurking in the banal and the ordinary. Through selected students’ work the paper concludes situating the course in an educational context that cares to expand spatial and architectural imagination, trusting imagination to be the productive and valuable answer to the many critical contemporary conditions we face as architects.

De professie van bouwkundig ontwerper kan op heel veel verschillende manieren
worden uitgeoefend. Er zijn ontwerpers die aan allerlei verschillende opgaven
werken, maar ook specialisten in bijvoorbeeld parkontwerp, de rehabilitatie van
achterstandswijken, woningbouw, verbouwingen, ziekenhuizen of publieke
gebouwen en noem maar op. In de keuze om aan bepaalde opdrachten te werken
spelen ook politieke en sociaalmaatschappelijke (en vroeger ook religieuze)
opvattingen en betrokkenheid. Bouwkundig ontwerpers hebben vaak hun eigen visie op het vak, en op hun taak om aspecten van de maatschappij ruimtelijk vorm te geven.

Elaborating on a host of historical and theoretical references, in this conversation Alberto Pérez-Gómez suggests a course of action for the development of the architectural discipline; opposing the banality of scientism and rationalism, and recognizing instead the need for a degree of obscurity and ambiguity as essential to the full exercise of our humanity in relation to what we build and inhabit. Metaphors, myths, stories and poems, he notes, are not only useful instruments to represent architecture’s aesthetics and purpose, but elemental human practices that define who we are and how we know. Tense between different polarities, the conversation explores architecture as a way to find sense and meaning by relying on timeless wisdom in the face of the many distractions and distortions that characterize our time.