Right now, I’m working on a project about landscape, bodies and power.¹

As part of this, I’ve been thinking about how to visualise how power operates in cities. Here’s a sketch:

Some of the ideas I wanted to explore or get across are these:

• Cities are ways of dividing up space into body sized units.
• The ideal citizen is the static citizen, occupying a particular space – an office, a theatre seat, a chair in a restaurant. Even when you move around a city you frequently do it sitting down – on a bus, in a taxi, a train, a subway.
• City spaces are uniform and regular. They’re designed to be the same so that all bodies can use them.
• You don’t see the sky much in cities.
• Cities can feel pretty claustrophobic.

Does it work?

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1. Heavy huh?