Narrating and explaining urban stories through inherited visual urban vocabulary

Abstract

This article proposes and formulates the visual urban vocabulary for tacit, intuitive, experiential, but none-the-less fast, plausible, generative, informative, sketch-like composition and visualization of urban stories. Through visual and socially ‘inherited’ clues, the authors explain the complexities of urban spaces, their elements, interrelations and cause–effect phenomena to expert and non-expert public alike. The rules, syntax and overall advantages of such a vocabulary are grounded in the existing linguistic, cognitive, psychological theories, visual sociology and theories of urban design, combined and supported by the authors’ own research into visualizations and tools for evaluating, understanding and presenting urban spaces. With many illustrations, the article demonstrates the use for – and the use of – generic urban stories in discussions about urbanity, urban environments, livable places, etc. and positions them into educational, research and participatory planning and commercial contexts.

From Streetscapes to Sofas: Representations of Place and Space in Britain’s Benefit Blackspots

“…Visual grammar is based on the principles of social semiotics to analyse how meaning is made and understood through visual imagery (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006). More specifically, VGA generates data related to the ‘arrangement, location, colour saturation’ of visual elements (Friedman and Ron, 2017: 100) and the production of a narrative through the composition of presence, location, and flow of visual elements (Juvancic and Verovsek, 2017). VGA is appropriate here because locales and objects on streets and in homes that appear in FWT may appear incidental in the dominant narrative and may not be spoken about either in dialogue or off-screen narration yet perform a significant function in producing meaning.…”

“…For this article, we reviewed our data through an agnotological reading. Whereas VGA focuses primarily on presence, recent adaptations of the method emphasise the importance of omissions in narrative production (Juvancic and Verovsek, 2017). Agnotology gives weight to the function of omissions by viewing them in light of the production of specifically shaped knowledges (Slater, 2014).…”

Systematic creation of a city’s visual communication: logo design based on the phoenix flower in Tainan City, Taiwan

“…Juvancic and Verovsek (2018: 67) take a visual perspective; if the theme of a city can be captured visually, this empowers people to produce profound impressions of a city. One way of explicitly doing so is to develop a local brand, which typically consists of a significant symbol, a logo, or the creative graphic representation of a city’s name, images that readily identify and distinguish a place, consolidating and strengthening tourists’ emotional connection to the locality (Blain et al, 2005).…”