[Hyperimages]
Visual ecology of urban environments
What images do in the city? How do images make the city? Since the middle of the 20th century, numerous researchers, designers and architects have studied the city through its images (Lynch 1960, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972, Baur 2005, Aiello 2019). These studies have shown that it is possible to understand urban form and its social uses by linking space, design and visual communication. (In both senses: Images of a city allow us to draw conclusions about urban form and its social uses. Conversely, it's the social uses and inhabitants that give rise to images). In this first description, "image" can just as easily refer to photographs, illustrations, advertisements, announcements of all kinds, as to texts, insofar as their visual properties (the shape of the letters, the design of the characters, the typographic organization) have a role to play in what we usually call "the message". Since the 1960s, the modern city has been transformed into a "global city" (Mirzoeff 2018), it has become globalized, accompanied by new ways of seeing and practicing public space. As a result, many of the images we encounter in an urban space are no longer specific to that space at all.
