Urban Representations

The Urban Representations Interest Group aims to explore, interrogate, contextualize, theorize, and pursue insights prompted by images of urban spaces. Our shared curiosities span historical and contemporary perspectives, ranging across various forms of static and moving media and various geographies around the globe.

Collectively the Group embraces a broad range of interests, addressing the manifold ways urban places have been represented in visual media, including drawings, prints, photographs, films, maps, charts, and physical or digital models. Historically, such images often present rare and rich evidence of sites that have radically changed in form and that help us track their evolution through time. They also provide evidence of the motives of their creators and consumers, of everyday urban experience, of the formation of collective and individual memory of the city, and many other phenomena that shape these representations and help us understand the cultural, social, economic, and political processes they embody.

The Interest Group has operated via casual and more goal-oriented exchanges during and between the biennial conferences of the EAHN and the Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana (AISU). We have experimented with several activities, offering an informal, workshop-like venue for brief discussions of what participants are working on within our shared rubric, and assembling short, thematically clustered presentations, ideally framing questions that invite participants to reflect on intersections with their own research. The meetings have also served as a venue for invited introductions to representations of the cities in which we have met, have offered opportunities to maintain an awareness of important new projects and publications within our ambit, and to propose and develop collaborative projects – from conference sessions and joint publications to virtual urban image archives.

We welcome the participation of those who share our interests and who will continue to reshape its activities at and between future meetings.