Introduction Adam Hansen (bio) In 2007, the United Nations issued a report into global population growth and distribution that contained some striking details: During 2008, for the first time in history, the proportion of the population living in urban areas will reach 50 per cent … The world urban population is expected nearly to double by 2050, increasing from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 6.4 billion in 2050. By mid-century the world urban population will likely be the same size as the world's total population in 2004. (2–3) In simple terms, this means that from now on, "for the first time in history," the majority of the world's population will live in cities. How can we comprehend the implications of this shift in human experience for individuals and societies? If we assume that part of the way human beings understand, reproduce and reshape their worlds is through the stories they tell about themselves and those worlds, then perhaps one way to address that question is to ask others: how have narratives, and our readings of them, prepared us for this? A city may reify the seemingly solid certainties of ideology and politics, where material reality plumbs the depths and scrapes the sky. How have narratives registered these realities? Given the rise of global cities, can they continue to do so? Cities are exciting, terrifying, overwhelming, lonely places, home and unhomely to millions: do [End Page 271] the structures of narrative mitigate people's estrangement from each other, or does narrative dislocation amplify the uncanny? This special edition of The Journal of Narrative Theory aims to contribute to answering these questions, aggregating diverse narratives on, and discussions of, cities imagined and real, including Shanghai, London, St. Louis, Edinburgh, Bombay, Calcutta, Madrid, Barcelona, and Tokyo. As will become apparent, this aggregation and diversity reflects the subject. In The Politics, Aristotle avers that the ideal polis, or city-state, "consists not merely of a plurality of men, but of different kinds of men"; moreover, it is not possible to create the polis "out of men who are all alike" (104). Comparably, in a prototypical city narrative from 1610, Samuel Rid, a London-based prose-writer, despaired and marveled at the cultural diversity of his potential urban readership, in bilingual terms that speak to and of that proverbial diversity (albeit in a gender-inflected way, as with Aristotle): "Thus, tot homines, tot sententiae: so many men, so many minds" (386). Perhaps the diversity of approaches contained in this collection might be considered problematic. Yet in cultivating diversity, we have not forgotten the etymological and social foundations of the city, or rather civitas—community. Cities may materialize separation and difference. Yet anyone who lives, or has lived, or even just read about living in a city, appreciates the necessity—and the difficulty—of negotiating spatial, material, economic, cultural, sexual, gender, ethnic and racial difference. Communities happen as much because of these differences as in spite of them. In turn, each essay offered here stands alone as a discrete piece of scholarship. But it is only by reading these essays together, with and against each other, that the complexity and plurality of the relationships between writers, critics, and cities can be realized. Community is as integral to this special issue as it is to cities. That said, perhaps the correlation of cities and narratives might itself seem misleading or inappropriate: how can any literary discourse now reflect or react to the complexity of contemporary, globalized, mediatized, urban life? The 2002 film London Orbital is a politicized collaboration between the writer Iain Sinclair and the film-maker Christopher Petit, comprised of footage of an endless motorway and seemingly vacant lots and dead spaces, disembodied voices, interviews, CCTV shots, and stills generated [End Page 272] from observations of the M25, London's infamous circulatory traffic system. Yet is this a visual complement to or compensatory supplement for Sinclair's book of the same name? Certainly, Sinclair's voiceover itself conveys his unease with literary modes, including his own: "The more polished the paragraph, the less I trusted the memory." Can writers recover and preserve what Sinclair and Petit dub in the film the...