Writing Urban Atmospheres: Literary Methods to Investigate the Thresholds of Atmospheres

This chapter sets out to explore how literary language can offer methods to investigate the complex affective relations between citizens and urban space. The affective relationships that people establish with places are simultaneously conscious and embodied, material and conceptual, spatial and temporal. In these relationships, the notion of atmosphere appears as a mediating force. Using some fragments of my own literary texts, I investigate a number of thresholds of architectural experience, such as subject-object, individual-collective, naivety-expertise, here-there, parts-whole. By these means, I aim to show how literary language, which by definition deals with such thresholds, offers possibilities to conceptualize and evoke atmospheres in writing.