Concrete and Ink

Is there a path between utopian and dystopian visions of future cities?


What role does storytelling play in urban imaginaries? How do these imaginaries converge or diverge from reality? Can we use stories to test ideas for future architecture?

This book is the first of a new series on stagecraft and the city. This volume brings together commissioned writing in fiction and non-fiction, graphic stories, illustrations and interviews, narrating buildings, housing estates and cities, between utopias and dystopias, through imagination, dreaming, magic, games and concrete realities, across past and present, and into the future. Contributors include acclaimed international writers: Ben Okri, Sophie Mackintosh, Adania Shibli and Alia Trabucco Zerán.

Concrete & Ink: Storytelling and the Future of Architecture is the first volume in the series Staging Cities, presented by Theatrum Mundi – a European centre for research and experimentation in the culture of cities. Borrowing from the toolbox of storytelling, choreography, and sound and lighting design, the series proposes new approaches to questions faced by city-makers.