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Artikelen > a walk to the cherwell river meadows

Saskia de Wit, a walk to the cherwell river meadows,
city narratives as places of meaningfulness appropiation and integration

The Writingplace journal for Architecture and Literature acts as a vehicle for exchange of knowledge on the relationship between architecture and literature and to address and promote alternative ways of looking at and designing architecture, urban places and landscapes through literary methods. 

The sixth issue is an invitation to look beyond the definitions of meaningfulness, appropriation and integration, and explore the relations between them. The articles are arranged 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.

 

a walk to the cherwell river meadows

Meaningfulness in the urban landscape is guided by perception: the qualities of the environment only become meaningful if they can be experienced. Experiences are localized in the physical environment: the form of the (urban) landscape - which includes materiality as well as structure - creates the conditions, the organisation, of experience. Thus, the (urban) landscape serves as a stimulus or catalyst for the meanings/meaningfulness each of us derives from, or attributes to the environment. However, the elements of the urban landscape are not so much images with a predefined meaning, but bodily perceivable kinaesthetic events that allow for each and every urban dweller or visitor to create their own narrative, based on these kinaesthetic events being strung together in a perceptual sequence, in mutual, spatiotemporal relationships. In order to generate insights in the role of perceivable form, the position of St. Catherine’s College between Oxford and the Cherwell river meadows will be studied from the narrative, spatiotemporal perspective of the experiencing subject moving through the city.


In Sonja Novak Angeliki Sioli Susana Oliveira and Klaske Havik eds. Writingplace No. 6 City Narratives as Places of Meaningfulness Appropriation and Integration https//doi.org/10.7480/writingplace.6 pp. 12-26.