Postcards are engaged as a vehicle within the narrative of this paper to interrogate the author’s lived experience of interconnected places. Within a narrative autoethnographic approach, these constructed postcards – as foci for personalized summaries of locations – are employed to challenge the essentialist notion of place as static and discrete.

A deep and grounded understanding of the experience of living in a place as part of a global network of other places is significant to contemporary urbanism and design discourse. This paper joins a growing group of voices in questioning the perspective of the embedded local as a universal model of urban experience. Instead, through a fragmentary and multi-located narrative, the fluid and intermingled nature of locations and experience is engaged with.

This paper tests postcards as metaphor, analytical tool, and structuring framework towards a PhD work. The larger project seeks to document the way in which distant fragments of places enrich immediate encounters, as part of the construction of everyday experience.

This paper takes the form of fragments of auto-biographical text, illustrated with invented postcards, and framed within a selected discourse of place, travel, and everyday urban experience.