Visual and Multimodal Studies of the City. Part I

Through focusing on the visible aspects of its different actors and their impact on the material environment, visual methods and techniques may definitely help to disclose the city as a multi-authored space, a hybrid of the planned and unplanned, of cooperative and competing actions, of past and present interventions. Direct urban experiences and mediated ones have become intricately connected and together ‘produce’ the city and life within the city in radical but as yet hardly documented new ways.

Therefore, this panel will invite examinations of sources, tools, and methods to capture, analyze, and communicate the visual dimension of urban environments, using existing visual sources as well as visual media as tools to both produce data (of material culture, media usage in an urban context, and human behavior) and communicate insights and views on the contemporary urban condition and experience. The application of these sources methods and techniques will yield empirical data and insights regarding the visually observable impact of urban planners, designers, advertisers, cultural institutions, local authorities, artists, protesters etc. as social agents in the (re)production of urban cultural processes on a day to day basis. The panel also welcomes visual ethnographies of everyday life in the city