What tales do we use to shape our understanding and our experience of urban life?
We are habituated not only to tell stories, but also to compare them, accept or reject them and put them in context. (this may be partly an unselfconscious activity) many of the stories we tell are told about urban life – an experience likely to be familiar – everyday experience of ourselves as story-telling and story-hearing.
What happens when we are faced with unfamiliar story-telling?
We must work to recognise the conventions that shape it – to see the patterns in what the tellers and hearers experience as ‘natural’ – perhaps seen from a more distant view – drawing on wider cultural themes and narrative conventions – the personal stories of individual lives can be treated similarly.

Self-narrations – exploring story-telling processes for the 'creative constructing' of experience, with particular attention to personal narrations. Relate them to mythic themes about urban life – reflecting individual.