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Like literature and literary studies, cultural geography acknowledges “the importance of representations, imaginaries, discourses, and systems of signs in the functioning and dynamics of societies” (Lévy 29). In his introduction to L’Imaginaire géographique: essai de géographie littéraire, Lionel Dupuy highlights key convergences between the ways these disciplines question how we inhabit the world. This special issue of Géographie et cultures on the literary geography of urban space does not focus on the “geography novel” studied by Dupuy but rather proposes an exploration of the book city: urban space permeated by literature and its material and symbolic traces. How does literature shape the urban landscape? How do urban architecture and its modes of organisation and circulation foster new iconotextual forms of writing and reading? Conversely, what does literature do to the city? How does literature visible in the city contribute to the invention of new individual and collective ways of inhabiting and experiencing cityscapes? Rather than analysing how literature represents or metaphorises the city, this issue seeks to map out what literature does to our experience of urban space or to forms of shared culture that are legible spatially.

Long regarded as confined to libraries or classrooms, literature nonetheless occupies public space in discreet yet significant ways. It appears in many forms: street plaques (commemorative plaques, London blue plaques, etc.), statues, writers’ houses, posters, murals, and works of street art that are explicitly or allusively literary. This material presence anchors citizens’ everyday lives in a cityscape saturated with literary culture, while fulfilling memorial, educational, symbolic, and, at times, festive or creative functions. Urban territory—shaped by concerns related to the preservation and promotion of literary heritage and matrimoine, as well as to the construction of cultural identity and collective memory—is also fissured by zones of “vandal” literary rebellion or appropriation. Contributions may map out literary formats, modes of address (caricature, humour, irony, poetry, activism), and practices of fragmentation and citation used to honour an author or address passers-by. They may also examine how literature materialises—or has materialised in the past—through tangible cultural objects, embedding itself within symbolic and pragmatic networks of power and counter-power.

Signage is a key medium through which literature gets inscribed in the urban landscape. The names of streets, avenues, or institutions (schools, libraries, media libraries) pay tribute to major figures of national or international literature. These toponyms are not neutral administrative choices: they reflect decisions to promote—or to obscure—a shared intellectual heritage, and to elevate certain authors as models of thought and as cultural and moral reference points. The cityscape, walked though and experienced, thus becomes a site of transmission, a symbolic geography. Contributors may explore the regimes through which literature is visible in the streets and its role in the symbolic construction of public space. If culture is the sum of the stories humans tell themselves in order to constitute themselves as human, what role does the public display of literature play in the city as a machine for producing imaginaries, meaning, and sociability? The visibility of literary matter in the city results from official, memorial, or social policies that are necessarily selective and exclusionary. What forms of inequality or domination shape the inscription and reception of literature in the street? What kind of book city for those who cannot read? What lines of flight, what alternative pathways of reappropriation, are available to those left on the margins of this poetic and political space?

Literature also enters public space in more ephemeral or overtly artistic ways, notably through cultural displays (literary quotes, poems) and contemporary Street art. Numerous municipal or associative initiatives place fragments of poetry on walls, bus shelters, or shop windows, offering a more democratic access to literary creation. Some urban artists appropriate and twist well-known quotations or pay tribute to writers through murals or collages. This dialogue between literature and visual art reshapes literary creation and reception, while also reappraising spaces that may be marginalised. How does the literary decentre our familiarity with the city, inviting us to become “tourists at home” (Lucy Lippard)? What risks of political or economic appropriation does it entail? What forms of resistance do urban literary practices encounter? Contributions may examine how the spatial materialisation of literature in the city has contributed, historically, to the (de)construction of citizenship, sociability, and artistic practices.

Together, these official and clandestine inscriptions produce a cultural geography by rendering visible the material traces of literary creation within the urban fabric. Often inattentive passers-by are invited to read the city as a palimpsest where past and present coexist, where literature is being (re)written. How do official, memorial forms of literary inscription in the street, markers of recognition granted to certain authors as figureheads of shared cultural, moral or ideological values, interact with freer or more marginal circulations and practices? Does the presence of literature in the city also operate through counter-cartographies, counter-cultures, or counter-canons? Is the city not one of the spaces where literature is offered to all, radically contemporary, alive, and performative—our shared concern? The city can thus be conceived as a psychogeography, a space to be appropriated or reappropriated through the senses and the imagination, spontaneously or through oral or written mediation, a lived space to be read, dreamed, and, possibly, acted upon. Who are today’s urban readers and writers? Who inhabits the city as poet or poetess, and who are the contemporary flâneurs and flâneuses? Could the history of our literary shaping and inhabiting the city be written?

At a time when access to literature is globalised and texts are increasingly dematerialised, what are the stakes and effects of making literature accessible in the street? If “culture [is] a thing that acts upon humans and human societies” (Oakes & Price 6), what does the public display of literature do to individual and collective urban practices? Why does the book city hold such appeal in contemporary societies? How and why does the city take shape as an imagined space, an interweaving of discourses and images that shapes the ways we inhabit it? How does the city become a literary, poetic, and discursive landscape, and how is this landscape inhabited, circulated, shared, mediated—or avoided? What new geographies emerge from it? Contributions may address the tourism development of literary heritage and matrimoine, as well as the role of literature in the touristification of cities and in urban marketing, which promote the city as a space of stories as much as of history. What roles do literary guides and editorial collections devoted to writers’ cities play in these processes? They may also examine new forms of sociability emerging at the intersection of contemporary urban circulations and practices and evolving modes of reading and writing, such as book exchange boxes or short-story dispensers.

Finally, is the book city constructed, experienced, and conceptualised in the same way everywhere across the world and at all times, or should it be understood in the plural, through the diversity of its interactions with literary cultures, reading habits, infrastructures, urban uses, planning policies, and contrasting imaginaries? Where, how, and why does the book city foster not only alternative ways of inhabiting the city, but also forms of living better?

This issue aims to map out new ways of living poetically in the city. Contributions may combine different theoretical perspectives. Case studies, as well as comparative and diachronic approaches, are welcome.

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline (400 words & short bibliography) : 27 February 2026.

Please send them to both :

David Labreure : auguste.comte.paris@gmail.com

Caroline Marie : caroline.marie.up8@gmail.com

Notification of acceptance : early March

Full paper submission deadline : 15 May 2026

(Between 35 000 and 50 000 signs (summary and bibliography included). Each illustration equals 1 500 signs. Stylesheet : https://journals.openedition.org/gc/605)

Result of peer-review by 26 June 2026

Final paper submission : 18 September 2026

Articles may be written in French or in English (with a 800–1000 word summary in French)

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