Seeing Like A City

Seeing Like a City (SLAC) metaphorically assumes the city’s perspective, to explore visual media and filmmaking’s potential for knowledge production on cities and civic action within them.

Intended as the entanglement of relations among human and non-human populations, it addresses existing vision problems within urban studies and planning.The project pursues an in depth critical study and structured integration of audiovisual methodologies in urban studies, to see how they can be key sites of urbanism in the making and produce change in the field.Capitalising on the generative intersections between filmmaking and urban studies, it seeks to visualize multiple, but often unseen elements, of city-making.

In so doing, it aims to decolonize urban studies and re-politicize planning.

It will focus on the specific declination of unseen that has to do with the city–nature nexus towards a more-than-human frame for urban studies.

It will rely on sensory ethnography, affective multi-modalities in storytelling and participatory and collective filmmaking as applied at the Sensory Ethnographic Labs and the Film Study Center (FSC) at Harvard.

Inspired by efforts to redefine urban studies through de/post-colonial notions and approaches, it will involve a secondment at the (C)artography Lab at Hamburg Universität (UUH).

While there, the project will design an audiovisual work that I will develop during the return phase to Italy’s Department of Architecture and Urban Studies- DAStU at PoliMI, which will be the pilot project of a new audiovisual urban lab which will be born at DAStU thanks to the MSCA post-doc grant.

The project’s novelty lies in this critical and action-oriented transdisciplinary aspect, mobilizing processes of radical openness (Sennett, 2018) and exchange between research in urban studies and audiovisual production as a potential tool of city-making, intended as that specific city design philosophy aiming at tuning the contemporary to the future (Laundry, 2009).