It’s been a challenging but exciting few months since our launch. We have been slightly overwhelmed by the amount of high-quality work submitted in response to our first call for submissions, yet privileged to have attracted such an interest. We are delighted that the “refreshing” format of the journal resonates with the extended toolkit that our authors — scholars, creatives, professionals — employ in their own work. This issue brings together articles, video, urban projects, work in photography and drawing, on themes including urban gating in Sweden, homelessness in London, public space reactivation in Cyprus, reconstructed cityscapes in Moscow and Berlin, imaginary urban futures in Cairo, coastal development in Australia’s Gold Coast.

The uniqueness of each submission calls us to continuously reassess how we as a journal “format” the City and the Urban. As our “Long Articles” section is introduced in this issue, we are already planning for a new “Letters from the city” section shortly, bridging the gap between scholarly article and personal story. With submissions subject to an editorial review, this more journalistic format will allow us to look at the city through a personal experience that functions as a lens to comprehend aspects of a broader reality. Further developing the journal’s editorial line, from Spring 2018 each issue will be focused on a particular theme with content curated through a specific call for submissions. Timely published in the current issue, “Tourism and City” is the first such call, reflecting a theme Urban Transcripts is itself working on in its Urban Laboratory in Dubrovnik, starting later this week. These steps will enable us to strengthen our diversity of mediums through which we explore the urban and at the same time establish a consistent thematic agenda with clearly set priorities.

Welcome to our second issue.
 
 
 
 

Volume 1, no. 2 Summer 2017