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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.


  1. In the field of environmental assessment methods and tools, the space-based information systems have increasing importance, due to their capacity to organize knowledge according both to the representation of t...

    Authors: Giampiero Lombardini
    Citation: City, Territory and Architecture 2016 3:8

    The Erratum to this article has been published in City, Territory and Architecture 2016 3:11

  2. The paper introduces a new methodological perspective to the process of urban design, which reacts to the increasing interdependence of multipe scales in almost all facets of life. The production of place in t...

    Authors: Anne Wiese, Agnes Förster, Lukas Gilliard and Alain Thierstein
    Citation: City, Territory and Architecture 2014 1:13