Social Science Research Council

2008 DPDF Research Field:
Urban Visual Studies

Urban Visual Studies draws on interpretive practices developed by the disciplines of architecture, art history, cultural studies, film and media studies, gender studies, and literary studies, while locating analyses within larger structures of empire, globalization, cultural exchange, and migration. Urban history and urban studies traditionally utilized quantitative research and survey techniques to elucidate shifts in demography, economy, and class. The emerging paradigm of Urban Visual Studies retains these concerns but investigates visual and cultural forms in and of the metropolis such as buildings, plans, maps, models, mass culture, drawings, art objects, photographs, and moving images.

As complex systems of large-scale dynamics and local experiences, cities present a unique challenge to identify evidence that can be systematically (yet non-reductively) theorized and historically categorized.  Urban Visual Studies productively relates the abstract sense of space to the intimate notion of place, the global network to the everyday, and the micro cultural detail to the macro context.  As an interdisciplinary research field, it recasts questions about space, agency, power, status, gender, modernity, and consumption investigated by history and the social sciences in light of the specific objects and ways of seeing investigated by scholars of visual forms.  Three broad but overlapping approaches constitute its methodology. One interprets images, forms, objects, and archives.  Another investigates the everyday practices, rituals, and social dynamics of urban vision.  A third  involves mapping, diagramming, and creating spatial and temporal simulations and databases.

We seek students across the humanities and social sciences in anthropology, architecture, art history, film and media studies, geography, history, literature, planning, sociology, urban studies, and interdisciplinary graduate programs working on a wide variety of topics, media, regions, and periods. Investigations of objects in the fine arts, material culture studies, comparative or cross-cultural research, reception studies, the identification of new objects and archives, institutional histories,  genealogies of morphological or generic change, critical interrogations of distinctions between urban and rural, digital modeling, readings of mass cultural representations, the analysis of canonical material utilizing novel or non-standard methodologies, or redefinitions of the city in response to changing communication technologies are some of the directions this research might entail.  Our goal is to explore diverse examples of urban visuality utilizing a wide variety of methodologies and disciplinary traditions.