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The course focuses on the connection between the development of the cities (operated by economical, social, political forces) and the construction of the “image” of the cities (with a focus on XX century documentary/landscape photography).

In his book “The city of the XX century” Italian architect and urbanist Bernardo Secchi draws three stories about the ways cities and territories changed, three different and overlapping stories that talk about the expansion and dissolution of the city; the end of the Modern city; and the relationships between city, individual and society.

We will take this book as a starting point to analyze not only the ways these changes influenced the perception of landscape and its representations, but also the connections between the latter and the political institutions. We will see how, according to the different periods, the population of centers and peripheries change, and we will investigate both the possible related reasons (ex. pollution). The peripheries expand in different ways according to the local welfare policies: the definite and functional idea of the modern city is over and the architects propose different alternatives to the city (cities that expand in the metropolis and grow further in the megalopolis, before exploding in some cases into urban sprawls).

Connected to the English journal The Architectural Review, the Townscape movement started around the 1950s to promote a newly formed attention towards the fabric of the city, its materials, its details, its infrastructures, its peripheries. Pivoting on this shift of attention from the monumental to the trivial, it is crucial to understand how the representation of the cities changed in the XX century and relate the new imageries to the emerging ecological movements (ecology as a transversal science connecting organisms and environments, where environments are seen as “wholes” made by fragments and include different scales: architecture, urbanism, country planning).

It is possible to draw a line between the Photography program established by Farm Security Administration agency in the USA, which involved photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans (just to name a few) from the late 1930s, together with The Architectural Review’s investigations of the 1950s in UK, with the Bechers’ photographic surveys in Germany, the DATAR photographic mission of the 1980s in France, the “landscape” photography of the 1970-80s in Italy to create a network of different imageries related to different contexts.

Confronting the centers and the peripheries, the monumental and the estates, the different scales (the private space of the house and the public space of the streets) with their respective imageries, the aim is to understand how the production of images is connected to urgencies to redefine the ideas of landscapes and ecology, to analyzing and cataloguing, to re-appropriation practices and/or propaganda policies; to understand the immediate and non-immediate connections between the politics and imageries.