Platform for Research through the Arts and Sciences

research question: Why and how is illustration being used to portray the city? How can illustration generate knowledge about the city’s complexity as well as co-produce urban imaginary?

 

Cities have been a vital component of visual storytelling and reportage since illustration became a product for the masses disclosing modern urban life and its practices. Illustration as an exercise of critical, creative and artistic freedom allows for an intensive engagement between its creators and the city and simultaneously explores the potential to create discursive space revealing the city as a complex entity to its inhabitants/audience while enabling alternative and multiple perspectives. Combining theory and praxis this research intends to demonstrate how the phenomenon of “illustrated cities” can be found at the intersection between urban experience, place and illustration.

 

PhD-supervisors: Emilie Sitzia (UvA) and Carolyn Birdsall (UvA)