City of Bits

Our cities are complex systems that interconnect social, economic, political, cultural, and infrastructural elements. Within these larger scale systems, we then build up own connections, seeking to make the city work for us. All these NETWORKS lie at the very foundation of cities as implicit and explicit lines drawn between elements, people, and places.

The mingling of various connections is what can turn a city into a web of interdependency allowing for well-being, creativity, and productivity in as many shared benefits as possible. Yet, the multi-faceted global changes of our time turn our cities into increasingly demanding places. Where are systems failing, lines disconnected, networks strained? 

Although deeply familiar for many, there is no single image or figure that could clearly articulate the contemporary urban complexity and express its myriads of connections.

Against these considerations, City of Bits is a journey to the very notion of our shared urban networks, its more visible as much as its hidden components, between economy, politics, infrastructure, ecology, technology, migration, commons, education, care, and our individual lived reality and shared narratives. During the seminar, we will set out to explore and decode the single ‘bits of the city’ across space and data, creating a visual-spatial vocabulary between macro- and micro-reading of the larger urban panorama and its specific details.

The seminar is all about stratifying various aspects of our surrounding networks and transform them into intelligible form across different media including maps, drawings, diagrams, writing, graphs, collage, and other audio and visual outlets that can be understood both individually and in its entity.  

The seminar will run through both upcoming terms (2026/2027) but can be attended independently. Its aim is the creation of a public display of the investigated networks, stripping detail out of, layering, systemizing, recording, dramatizing data, making it intelligible to be handing over the control of information to the viewer.

Key readings and references will be including Manuel Castells, William M. Mitchell, Mark Lombardi, Edward Tufte, Paul Klee, Igor Stravinsky, Guillaume Apollinaire, Bruno Latour, Marc Treib, and others and will be provided through the base cloud.

The seminar will be a combination of input lectures, student presentations, excursion(s), drawings/representation exercises, and close reading sessions.

For a successful completion, there will be an expected attendance of 80% of the seminar sessions, a final discussion reflecting on seminar contents as well as individual research/representation strategies, and a submission of the individually developed contributions to the collective visual-spatial display.