Reading the City Against the Grain

Social Design Theory Course | Winter Semester 2025/26

with Christina Schraml | christina.schraml@uni-ak.ac.at

The city is more than its buildings. It is a palimpsest, a living archive of built structures, routines, and social relations. Beneath its visible surface lie hidden layers – everyday practices, memories, forgotten futures that shape urban life. From grand visions to banal park benches, the city is not only built, but continuously re-made – shaped by people and time. It is a complex tapestry of plans, informal actions, ruptures, fragments and gaps – waiting to be discovered.

To read the city against the grain means to attend to what is overlooked: the banal, the untold, the invisible, the erased. It means asking what is being noticed and what is being ignored, what is remembered and what is forgotten, who speaks through the urban fabric – and who remains unheard. The city, after all, is never neutral.

This course explores the city as a dense, multi-layered archive of built and social fabric – where visible structures meet the intangible, often invisible layers. What stories lie in the gaps?

Using Vienna as our urban microscope, each session will explore a different theme to uncover what lies beneath the surface. What perspective does Social Design offer to read the city against the grain – to listen to what the city does not openly tell us, and to critically engage with what already exists? Through critical readings, group discussions, and urban explorations, we will examine tensions between narratives and counter-narratives, presence and absence, everyday life and urban imagination, power and resistance, reality and dreams. Together, we will trace, interpret, and intervene in Vienna's incomplete narratives – contributing to a shared archive of overlooked urban realities.

Requirements are regular attendance (at least 80%), preparatory readings and presentation of texts, active participation, as well as contribution to the final output (further details in the first session).