“Writing is like a city, for which words are a thousand gates.”
- Walter Benjamin
No roads or maps lead to them. Yet, many of the cities imagined in literature feel more tangible than real ones, capturing the human imagination with their fantastical sparks. The rich geographical, cultural, and social detail of cities like the famous Macondo, from One Hundred Years of Solitude, frequently places a magnifying glass over the relationship between territory and its inhabitants.
According to researcher Sandra Jatahy, in the article “Cidades visíveis, cidades sensíveis, cidades imaginárias” (Visible Cities, Sensitive Cities, Imaginary Cities), this is because the city has, from early on, been a stronghold of a new sensibility. “Being a city dweller, carrying an urban ethos, and belonging to a city has always implied ever-renewed ways of representing that city, whether through the written or spoken word (...) Real, concrete, visual, tactile cities, consumed and used in daily life, have been mirrored by just as many imaginary cities, showing that the urban is indeed humankind's ultimate creation—a creation we never cease to reconstruct, through thought and action.”
