Legibility, Mediation, and the Politics of Urban Infrastructure
In the Places the City Forgets examines how London’s essential infrastructures remain materially present yet culturally unreadable. Through walking, observation, and representation in the Lower Lea Valley, the essay explores how partial, mediated visibility can cultivate new forms of urban literacy without exposing or simplifying complex systems.
In the Places the City Forgets examines the Lower Lea Valley as a landscape shaped by infrastructures that are materially vast yet experientially absent. Wastewater systems, flood defences, electrical networks, and logistics routes structure everyday urban life but remain largely unreadable within public space. The essay argues that this absence is not accidental, but produced through modes of representation that prioritise efficiency, control, and invisibility. Rather than calling for full exposure or transparency, the project proposes partial legibility as a civic condition—a way for urban systems to be sensed, interpreted, and questioned without being reduced to spectacle or simplified explanation.
The essay combines theoretical reflection with walking as a critical method. Drawing on thinkers such as Kevin Lynchand Umberto Eco, it treats the city as a semiotic system in which built forms, thresholds, and surfaces encode authority, access, and governance. On-site observation, photography, overheard conversations, and diagrammatic drawing are used to register infrastructure through traces such as sound, residue, rhythm, and interruption rather than through totalising views. Insights from cinema inform this approach, particularly films that render complex systems legible through atmosphere, sequencing, and narrative rather than direct exposition.
Physically, the work is constructed as a two-part publication. An outer book operates as a counter-guidebook to the Lower Lea Valley, cataloguing overlooked objects and conditions encountered while walking. An inner essay provides the theoretical and analytical spine. After the essay, the outer book shifts into drawings, maps, and speculative diagrams that translate sensory encounters into structures of understanding. Together, text, image, and layout position architecture not as a solution to infrastructural opacity, but as a mediator of perception—transforming complexity into experience and legibility into a shared civic capacity.
In the Places the City Forgets examines the Lower Lea Valley as a landscape shaped by infrastructures that are materially vast yet experientially absent. Wastewater systems, flood defences, electrical networks, and logistics routes structure everyday urban life but remain largely unreadable within public space. The essay argues that this absence is not accidental, but produced through modes of representation that prioritise efficiency, control, and invisibility. Rather than calling for full exposure or transparency, the project proposes partial legibility as a civic condition—a way for urban systems to be sensed, interpreted, and questioned without being reduced to spectacle or simplified explanation.
The essay combines theoretical reflection with walking as a critical method. Drawing on thinkers such as Kevin Lynchand Umberto Eco, it treats the city as a semiotic system in which built forms, thresholds, and surfaces encode authority, access, and governance. On-site observation, photography, overheard conversations, and diagrammatic drawing are used to register infrastructure through traces such as sound, residue, rhythm, and interruption rather than through totalising views. Insights from cinema inform this approach, particularly films that render complex systems legible through atmosphere, sequencing, and narrative rather than direct exposition.
Physically, the work is constructed as a two-part publication. An outer book operates as a counter-guidebook to the Lower Lea Valley, cataloguing overlooked objects and conditions encountered while walking. An inner essay provides the theoretical and analytical spine. After the essay, the outer book shifts into drawings, maps, and speculative diagrams that translate sensory encounters into structures of understanding. Together, text, image, and layout position architecture not as a solution to infrastructural opacity, but as a mediator of perception—transforming complexity into experience and legibility into a shared civic capacity.