This critical introduction to the special issue examines the place and significance of urban modernity as a concept in contemporary urban studies. It draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate that the relation between the city and modernity developed within the western tradition of urban thinking has produced a geographically and historically uneven conceptualisation of urban modernity. This conceptualisation not only involves dynamics of othering, in which cities are differentiated hierarchically, but also obscures a vast array of possible understandings of contemporary urban living. The aim of this introduction is to question this way of thinking about urban modernity in light of globalisation and 21st-century transformations of urban space. It argues that it is crucial, now more than ever, to render the concept of urban modernity attentive to the lived experience of contemporary cities worldwide.

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Now that we walk in urban surroundings saturated with digitally produced images and signs-with our GPS-tracked and camera-equipped smartphones in our hands-we document, navigate and imagine the urban street in new ways. This book is particularly interested in the new aesthetics and affective experiences of new practices of visualizing the street that have emerged from recent technological innovations. The introductory chapter argues for a focus on the practice of shaping both images and places, rather than on an image or a place as an end product, in studying the contemporary intersections of the visual and the spatial productively. In doing so, it seeks to complement the recent studies of visual culture that pay particular attention to new technologies for the production and dissemination of images with an urban studies perspective concerned with the social production and cultural mediation of space. The introduction highlights a number of key issues at stake in the proposed scholarly approach; issues that are dealt with in the concrete case studies explored by the following chapters in this volume.

From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized. Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies — From Hong Kong’s streets to Rio’s favelas, from Sydney’s suburbs to London’s street markets, and from Damascus’ war-torn streets to Istanbul’s sidewalks — and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.

This paper outlines and interrogates the processes informing the design, teaching and learning of Culture Lab, an intensive field class designed to foster experimental learning in anthropology and cultural studies. The course’s object of study and site of learning is the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) and its multiple associations – the phenomenon, the city, and the forms of participation, debates and instances of urban change that occur during a specific iteration. It draws on problem-based and participatory approaches to learning and advocates approaches to teaching cultural anthropology and cultural studies that combine multi-faceted approaches to cultural immersion and discovery, while at the same time acknowledging the individual motivations of learners, by fostering and developing students’ interests and curiosity. This paper reports and reflects upon the course in its first two iterations of the course at Amsterdam University College, namely the field trips to Paphos 2017 and Valletta 2018.