Ghost Metropolis is a work of spatial and visual, as well as textual storytelling, so the structure of the work attempts to weave these kinds of narratives together.
Narratives are paths with implicit spatiality: we travel paths and these journeys are the grounding for storytelling. Mapping the past alone does not convey the meaning of that which has been mapped, nor the contribution of each topos to the grand ensemble of a global metropolis. Narratives do that, linking events and action that made the region what it is.
Narratives are stories told sequentially, but they are not always verbal-textual. Stories were spatial before they were verbal, and every journey of humanity--highly adapted with binocular vision and powerful visual neural processing--has been a visual journey.
There are many ways to narrate. Ghost Metropolis presents these three main types:
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Spatial Narratives
Narrative Essays
Textually, Ghost Metropolis takes the form of narrative storytelling largely on the model of Plutarch or Livy, but also on the model of Braudel. I have included forty (40) short "narrative essays," each averaging 12 typewritten pages. Much shorter than a traditional book "chapter," these are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne: literally
essais, tries or attempts, to recount what took place and to explain, by mapping the networks of actions that constituted each event, the shape of the past.
Narrative Paths
The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presented in multiple pathways. In the narrative essay and narrative pathways I narrate and analyze deeds of the great and the powerless alike, to assess their contributions to the inscribed lifeways and regimes of power from their generation to our own, 21st-century generation.