Cities bear witness to social reality and cultural practices in a variety of ways. They create and re-create local traditions, they generate new things and, moreover, they provide a surface for the projection of hopes and desires. Cities are landscapes made up of signs. As such, they can be decoded and read. This quality of the urban, its readability, provides this interdisciplinary volume with ist focus. It brings together contributions to urban hermeneutics from social sciences, cultural studies, literature, film and media studies as well as approaches rooted in theories of architecture and urban planning.