cityimage

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The City in the Image
Davide Tommaso Ferrando

The City in the Image gathers a variety of contents that we seldom find together. A quick look at these pages will make us wonder about the enigmatic relationship between the recent and brutal transformation of the suburban landscape under the pressure of financial urbanism and the codification of the city in Western culture visual memory over the past five centuries. As we dive into the contents, Davide T. Ferrando will be proposing many other associations between topics and images that, at first glance, might seem unrelated. Whether they are the sophisticated technical images of the digital age or the elaborate images created through traditional media such as painting, engravings or the first photographs, these visual materials serve the author to explore and underpin a single idea: that urban images, far from being neutral, are always a political fact. Modeled by our perception and at the same time outlining it, urban images can be read as the visual manifestations of deeply intertwined systems of territorial, social, cultural and media-related factors. As expressions of the way we understand, represent and transform the city, they also provide a valuable tool to reconstruct the complexity of the urban realm, bringing it to a thinkable dimension. Ferrando deploys these arguments-through close and tangible examples- in three autonomous chapters that shed light on one another. In them, he enters the invisible network of matter, people and messages that lies between the flat surfaces of what is visible, raising the following question: what effects do urban images have in the understanding and the very conception of the city and the urban realm, with all the social and political burden that this entails?

Bio Davide Tommaso Ferrando is an architecture researcher, critic and curator, particularly interested in the intersections between architecture, city and media. M.Arch in Advanced Architectural Design at ETSA Madrid and Ph.D in Architecture and Building Design at Politecnico di Torino, he is currently Research Fellow at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, as well as adjunct professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Innsbruck. Director of Viceversa Bits and of 011+, and editor of Realismoutopico, together with Daniel Tudor Munteanu he is founder and curator of the Unfolding Pavilion.

Editor Paula Victoria Álvarez
Publisher Vibok Works
Year 2018
Place Seville