Other Destinations. Translating the Mid-sized European City

The present collection of translations arises from our work within Writing Urban Places, a network of researchers interested in the different ways in which citizens appropriate meaningful built environments through stories, and in doing so are also better able to integrate with others. A key locus in this respect is what our network has termed the ‘mid-sized’ [or ‘intermediate’] European city. Often afforded only cursory attention in the discussion of both culture and society, overlooked in favour of more usual suspects, such urban places allow for a more de-centred, and on occasions regionally focused, view of urban practices, even as they play host to a significant element of contemporary European life and experience. The quest for meaningfulness and appropriation of the urban environment through co-creative, adaptive, and transformative processes (many of which have a textual quality) became central to the theoretical framework of this initiative. Between the individual places in which such processes could be observed and documented, we hypothesized, arises the problem of intermediation – the move from place to place, and its techniques. Translation, more than a textual practice among others, emerged as a structuring consideration of the project at a European scale. It is the outcome of this collective process that is presented here, offering entry into this work to an English-language readership for the first time. Our hope is that, even as they bring their cities of origin somewhat closer to a new readership, those readers will themselves be uprooted and moved some distance in the direction of these ‘other destinations.’