Tales of Cities as (Resistant) Practices (REPRINT)

Paper in proceeding, 2021

Originally published in the volume Across Theory and Practice: Thinking Through Urban Research, edited by Monika Grubbauer and Kate Shaw
(Jovis, 2018), this article offers reflection on the opportunities and challenges presented by telling embodied-situated stories of architecture and cities. Situated and relational approaches are considered here as a way of challenging unhelpful divisions between theory and practice, and as an opportunity to address urban and architectural questions through their specificity rather than a generalized relevance or appeal. However, such situated stories do not come without struggles. I will thus ask: How to write stories in a situated manner and also keep stories situated? How to determine which stories are worth telling? And how can stories make a difference? This short article offers an occasion to reflect on such questions by exploring my earlier experiences with researching architectural and urban practices in a specific city—Brussels after 1968—and by thinking through such questions on the occasion of a thematic journal issue jointly edited with Hélène Frichot for Architectural Theory Review (2018).