Supernatural cities: placing urban identities, memory and cultural crises.

This special issue builds upon a body of scholarship already developed from the Supernatural Cities project led by Karl Bell at the University of Portsmouth and his edited collection of essays, Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, published in 2019. The articles and creative pieces in this issue present and examine a series of case studies of material and fictional cities, exploring the symbiotic relationship between the supernatural and the city. The aim of the issue is threefold: first, to identify how the supernatural becomes entangled in a city’s identity, its storytelling, and its materiality; second, to showcase examples of how a city is consumed, toured and/or performed as a supernatural space; third, to explore how and why supernatural cities are constructed in response to social and cultural trauma.