Publications:
Design and the City: The Unnoticed Visibility of Graphic Design in the Urban Vernacular (2022) DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30246.23367
Urban Memory, Mobility, and the Imagination of Place
This research group investigates the city as a lived environment shaped by memory, movement, and symbolic representation. Rather than approaching the city solely as a physical infrastructure or planning system, the group understands urban space as a dynamic interface where social experience, historical memory, and everyday practices intersect.
In many contemporary cities, particularly those shaped by conflict, displacement, or rapid transformation, urban life unfolds within fragmented spatial conditions. Physical reconstruction does not necessarily resolve social division or collective trauma. Invisible borders persist within patterns of movement, behavior, and perception, shaping how individuals navigate public space and relate to one another.
This research builds on a long trajectory of artistic and conceptual work that examines the city as a field of discontinuities and narratives rather than a stable geographical entity. Projects explored the possibility of reconstructing urban experience from fragments, proposing alternative cartographies that reflect lived reality rather than official planning systems. These projects approached the city as a labyrinth of overlapping trajectories, memories, and imagined boundaries, revealing how urban life is structured by both visible infrastructure and invisible histories.
Within this framework, the city is understood as a site of negotiation between presence and absence, order and chaos, stability and transformation. Urban environments become spaces where individuals continuously reinterpret their surroundings, constructing meaning through movement, interaction, and visual communication.
Projects such as Beirut Mon Amour and Our Jerusalem extend this inquiry by examining cities as emotional and political landscapes shaped by collective memory, displacement, and everyday resilience. These initiatives explore how urban identity is produced through lived experience, cultural narratives, and the persistence of memory within the built environment.
Conceptual and Theoretical Orientation
This research group approaches the city as a communicative and symbolic system situated within historical, political, and cultural processes. It draws on interdisciplinary frameworks from media theory, urban studies, anthropology, visual culture, and critical theory to understand how urban environments shape perception and social behavior.
The city is understood not only as a collection of buildings and infrastructures, but as a network of relationships structured by movement, memory, and representation. In this sense, mapping becomes a cultural and interpretive act rather than a purely technical procedure. The experience of urban disappearance and transformation, setting the city as a space where identity and belonging are continuously negotiated within conditions of instability and uncertainty. The city becomes a place to live through rather than a place to inhabit securely, reflecting the fragile relationship between individuals and their environment.
Within this conceptual framework, the research group engages a broad set of theoretical references, including:
Henri Lefebvre, on the production of space and everyday urban life
Marc Augé, on non-places and transitional environments
Paul Virilio, on mobility, speed, and the transformation of spatial perception
Michel de Certeau, on everyday practices and the experience of walking in the city
Walter Benjamin, on urban memory and the historical traces embedded in modern environments
Bruno Latour, on networks and the agency of human and non-human actors
Together, these perspectives allow the research to examine the city as a dynamic interface between infrastructure, memory, and social imagination.
Research Areas
The research group may engage with the following thematic directions:
1. Urban Fragmentation and Invisible Borders
The study of cities divided by historical, political, or social boundaries that continue to influence everyday movement and spatial behavior.
Focus may include:
·Post-conflict urban environments
·Spatial segregation and demographic transformation
·The persistence of historical divisions in contemporary mobility
·The politics of urban reconstruction
2. Urban Memory and the Persistence of History
The investigation of how collective memory is embedded in streets, buildings, and everyday objects within the city.
Focus may include:
·Memory traces in post-war cities
·The relationship between architecture and remembrance
·Urban trauma and collective identity
·The transformation of historical sites into everyday spaces
3. Cities as Narrative and Imagined Spaces
The exploration of cities as narrative environments constructed through stories, images, and symbolic representations.
Focus may include:
·Fictional cartographies and speculative mapping
·Urban storytelling and narrative reconstruction
·The role of imagination in shaping spatial perception
·The city as a cultural text
4. Mobility, Disorientation, and Urban Experience
The study of movement as a central dimension of urban life, particularly in contexts marked by instability, congestion, or displacement.
Focus may include:
·Transportation systems and social behavior
·Urban disorientation and navigation
·Migration and everyday mobility
·The experience of living in transitional environments
5. Visual Communication and the Urban Vernacular
The examination of how visual communication systems shape the experience of urban space.
Cities are saturated with signs, images, and design elements that guide movement, structure perception, and communicate social meaning. Graphic design becomes an invisible infrastructure that organizes everyday life, influencing how individuals interact with their surroundings and interpret public space.
This perspective builds on research demonstrating that visual communication is embedded in the urban environment as a silent system of orientation and identity, shaping behavior and social interaction in subtle but powerful ways.
Methodological Approach
The research group encourages interdisciplinary and practice-based methodologies that combine theoretical analysis with artistic and empirical investigation.
These may include:
Urban mapping and spatial analysis
Artistic research and visual experimentation
Ethnographic observation and field documentation
Media and discourse analysis
Archival research and historical reconstruction
Participatory and community-based projects
Particular emphasis is placed on artistic and visual practices as diagnostic tools capable of revealing hidden structures within urban environments. Through creative experimentation, the research group seeks to make visible the social and symbolic dynamics that shape everyday life in the city.