Cities have stories to tell. While Urban Transcripts is in the midst of such a storytelling, unravelling public space in Athens in our Transforming the [Re]Public workshop, our Letters from the City section launching in this issue brings to the fore an experience of the city through the personal stories of its citizens. First in this series, Balfron Tower: the artwash of an icon unfolds a process of gentrification and social injustice in an East London housing estate. This issue’s articles discuss new spaces of representation in Cairo, explore the utopian thought of John Hejduk, alert us to the horrorscapes of our near future, and invite us to the hypereality of the post-nocturnal city. Furthermore, this issue presents work in photography, mapping, and urban intervention, on themes including urban rituals in Naples, community mapping in Bloomsbury, London, inventive transformation of urban infrastructure into public space in Berlin, and a critical performative reading of contested boundaries in Nicosia.

A great thanks to all authors from around the world who have responded to our call for submissions on “Tourism and the City”, submissions accepted for review are already with our editorial board and reviewers, we are looking forward to publishing them in our Spring 2018 issue. In this current issue we are calling for submissions that critically, analytically, creatively, explore and reflect on public space and its role in the city.

As our editorial line is further developed with thematic issues starting Spring 2018 and new sections being gradually introduced, including interviews and book reviews, our team is about to become bigger with a Publishing Editor and a Content Editor as well as new members of the editorial board joining us from December onwards. We are already impatiently looking forward to a very exciting year.
 
 
 
 
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UPDATE: Since our Vol. 2, no. 2 October 2019 issue, the Letters from the City section has been dedicated to poetry and creative writing. The section’s content published prior to that change now forms part of Reportage, the section of the journal introduced in 2021 with a focus on documenting the lived experience of urban change.

Volume 1, no. 3 Autumn 2017