ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his 1925 essay “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” the American urban sociologist Robert Park stated that, “we are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate knowledge of contemporary urban life.” 1 This suggests that for the fields of urban planning and architecture, which by their very nature deal with urban life and modes of human behavior in the city, such ‘literary knowledge’ is indispensable. Almost a century since this insightful observation, an ever-growing interdisciplinary scholarship has begun to explore how we can profit from the fascinating richness and intimate knowledge that literature can provide in our understanding of buildings and cities.
