Humans love telling stories. We’re really good at it. In fact, we’ve been telling stories for thousands of years, spreading them by word of mouth, then in writing, and latterly via our screens. Psychologists will tell you that stories follow recognisable patterns that fulfil a need to find meaning in the seemingly meaningless. Anthropologists say they are an integral part of our survival instinct, helping us understand and plan what to do when faced with danger and the need for quick decisions. And because we’ve been telling them for so long, our brains have adapted to look for stories or patterns, even when they don't exist. Stories let us feel as though we have control and allow us to share our understanding of the world and its history with others. But stories have another function too. They not only explain the past and the present; they also frame our actions and help shape the future.

Cities are the embodiment of why we tell stories. Our cities are unique, complex places that defy easy understanding or prediction. It's no surprise, then, that in order to comprehend cities we’ve made up stories about them throughout history. One popular narrative has cities as the springboard of civilisation, home to art, literature, drama and democracy. Another paints them as dens of iniquity and sin, or there is the story of the entrepreneurial city of trade and commerce, or the future city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Whilst there are multiple different narratives, there have been two dominant stories of the city over the past 150 years or so, the ‘city of the dreadful night’ and the ‘city of bright lights’.

The ‘city of the dreadful night’

The first story of the city is one of deprivation, bleakness and misery. In 1929 the celebrated and controversial English writer D.H. Lawrence put pen to paper on one of his favourite topics, the state of the English city. ‘The English are town-birds through and through’, he opined, ‘but they don't know how to build a city, how to think of one, or how to live in one’. For Lawrence, the city was more than simply the physical – the state of the city reflected that of its inhabitants: