City Representations

This thematic series encourages paper submissions on city representations. Photos of urban scenes and photorealistic renderings, such as those found on the Internet, have become ubiquitous and part of our everyday life. After a long journey begun during the Renaissance, it appears that “perspective” has finally triumphed as the medium for representing urban space. However, if we take a closer look, the impression begins to change. Instead of a space organised mathematically and from a stable point of view, the multitude of images is producing a fragmented world no longer capable of producing an organised scene. At the same time, other tentative representations of the city are appearing: ecosystem diagrams, time occupation patterns, density patterns, isochrons, shadow diagrams and descriptions of the intensity of communications. All of these enable us to understand aspects of reality that we could use to open up new realms of project design for the city and its components.