Lieven Ameel, born in 1978, is a senior lecturer in comparative literature at University of Tampere, Finland. He is co-founder and current president of the Association for Literary Urban Studies. In his research, he works on urban futures across textual genres, narrated experiences of space, and rhetorical structures in urban planning, among others.
Jens Martin Gurr, born in 1974, is a professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is co-founder and speaker of the Competence Field Metropolitan Research in the Universitätsallianz Ruhr (KoMet). His research areas include literary urban studies, theories and methods of urban and metropolitan research, model theory, literature and climate change as well as British literature of the 17th to the 21st centuries and contemporary US fiction.
Barbara Buchenau, born in 1968, is a professor of North American studies at Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany, where she is heading the research group »Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Interventions«, nicknamed City Scripts, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation, at the Universitätsallianz Ruhr (2018-2022). Her research is dedicated to the powerful alignments between literature and the land across the centuries.

Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Acknowledgements 7
Sources 9
Introduction 13
Ambiguity 17
Closure 21
Emplotment 27
Future Narratives 33
Genre 39
Metaphor 45
Model 51
Narrative 57
Narrativity 63
Palimpsest 69
Path-dependency 73
Placemaking 79
Polyphony 85
Rhythm & Repetition 91
Scenario 95
Scripts 101
Travelling Models 107
Utopia 113
Works Cited 119
Notes 133