The City Unsettled
"The City Unsettled is a design-research seminar that tells stories by exploring comics, mapping, intensive actor-network drawings, documentary work, visual journalism, graphic memoir, interviews, and investigation. We will work together unpacking histories and theories about comic, animation, insurgent rituals in cities, and urbanism. Collaboratively, we will develop sophisticated form and content by investigating modes of visual reporting on realities of the world, living or non-living subjects, urban marginalization, hybrid morphologies, and the other. What are existing barriers and deficits of our locality and how do we create better accessibilities to local resources, histories, and emerging prophecies?
By emphasizing the accessible image (Comics) and the Animated documentary, we will contest the idea of a single perspective or clear relationship with reality, instead creating a space where designers can embrace abstraction, combine nonfiction with fiction, and explore critical points of view in unpacking urban ecologies. Research methods around oral storytelling, ethno-ecology, radical mapping, and graphic animations can allow for the exploration of subjects in ways not available to typical architectural and urban research conventions. Notions of ‘truth’ will be investigated through the examination of the broad swathe of animated documentary and graphic journalism, with subjects ranging from family histories, “nature”, racial constructions, immigrant placemaking, war, sexuality, city, and/or play." - Tommy Yang, Professor