A fictional narrative is an agitated space. A story world is constructed with attention to selection of detail and level of its description (setting and its establishment of tone, subtext and above all, physical place). The traditional role of the author has been to carefully use these tools to create the other world. The city is also an agitated space. A city is a collection of data and sub-text to be read in the context of ethnography, history, semiotics, architectural patterns and forms, physical form and rhythm, juxtaposition, city planning, land usage shifts and other ways of interpretation and analysis. The city patterns can be equated to the patterns within literature: repetition, sub-text shift, metaphor, cumulative resonances, emergence of layers, decay and growth.
Read more: http://www.neme.org/texts/narrative-archaeology