Visible Cities: Exploring Local Citizenship Through Public Exhibition

In this thesis, design was used in public exhibition to critique modern city branding practices and explore accessible, affordable, and temporary methods for visualizing locality in public space. This was demonstrated through five speculative case studies which situate first-person narrative in urban space in order to visualize aspects of locale and create a canvas for subsequent future narrative. The public exhibition of this work created a temporary public commons that acted as a site of discourse for this work and its extensions. This thesis interrogated two crises of modern urban citizenship: the ways in which identity, experience, and locality are appropriated by visual manifestations of capitalist urban narratives, and how this action devalues and impedes unique, dynamic citizenship. Located at the intersection of design, sociology, and urban theory, its work explored how localities can activate personal narrative through public design.