Cities of Stories...now brought to life

In a previous post I suggested that the importance of narrative to our experience of the city demonstrates one of the very real ways in which the question of urbanism exceeds the planners concern over particular configurations of architectural and infrastructural elements, that might be assembled to form a cohesive whole. The good folks at Digital Urban are demonstrating this right now in the London Festival of Architecture with their project Tales of the City:

Via the project talesofthings.com we have been capturing people’s memories of objects and playing them back via small readable and writeable QR codes and RFID tags. Tales of the City extends the concept into the urban realm with the architecture of the city able to replay memories and its history.

The project will enable participants to add their own tales to buildings and view stories that other people have left.

All you need to get started is the free Tales of Things app for your iPhone or Android, and a quick look at the tutorial below:

[Video - Trailer for Tales of Things by DigitalUrban on Vimeo]

While several sites across the city have been tagged since the beginning of the project in April, I understand that a trail of tags, beginning at St Leonard's Church in Shoreditch, has been set up especially for the festival. By following the tags from there you can participate in a personalised tour of the area to which you can add your own memories.

If you enjoy the Tales of Things app you may also wish to try the Museum of London's Street Museum app. This enables the user to see historic images of London from the Museum's archive superimposed on the present day location when viewed via your iPhone camera.

Many thanks to Digital Urban for kindly posting details of Urban Orienteer's own contribution to the festival.