Call for Proposals: Ways of Seeing: Graphic Narratives & Visual Essays on Architecture and the City

2025-12-18

Ways of Seeing: Graphic Narratives & Visual Essays on Architecture and the City

John Berger’s groundbreaking BBC series Ways of Seeing (1972) reshaped our understanding of visual culture by exposing the hidden politics, ideologies, and power structures embedded within the visual arts. It compelled us to question not only what we see, but also how we see. Since then, contemporary art has expanded the field of the visual, and popular culture has entered the canon. Significantly, Marshall McLuhan’s motto, “the medium is the message” (Understanding Media, 1964), had already synthesised the complex network in which visual production, technological apparatus, and cultural structures collide to generate new formats and meanings. How, then, can we approach the visual in relation to today’s media transformations? What happens when the frameworks we use to interpret the built environment collapse into the meanings they produce? And how can we shift from passive analysis to active, critical creation?

This special issue of the Writingplace book series will be dedicated to graphic narratives, visual essays, and illustrated storytelling that tackle urban, architectural, spatial, and landscape environments through this critical lens. It focuses on understanding the visual world both as a means of depicting spatial environments and as a critical, practice-based approach to its manifold media forms in the public sphere. Building on recent visual experiments in architecture publications such as MAS Context and Candide, or the graphic reportage of La Revue Dessinée, this issue invites contributors to employ visual and graphic strategies to reflect on the dynamic interplay between text and image in articulating architectural and urban discourse. It aims to amplify the voices of those who draw to think, write to see or photograph to understand, bridging the gap between scholarship and graphic/visual storytelling. By foregrounding the semiotic potential of the word & image relationship, particularly when addressing spatial and social practices, both analytical and experimental contributions are encouraged, yet also embracing the irreverent, the critical, and the beautifully drawn or captured, providing space for multiple collisions of perspectives and ideas, each one expanding how we see, read, and conceive the page of the book format.  

This experimental publication will explore visual narratives in two complementary ways:

  1. We encourage the critical exploration of our environment through visual and graphic means, whether through original or previously published material. 
  2. We welcome academic research articles, reviews, or interviews that focus on relevant themes, case studies, or authors who have historically shaped our visual environment on modernity and post-modernity.

Submissions may be individual or collaborative and can range from critical reflections to speculative fiction, from ethnographic observations to projective imaginaries, realised through text and graphic means, or hybrid formats. We welcome proposals from architects, urbanists, artists, desi photographers, writers, researchers, and interdisciplinary practitioners who engage with drawing, comics, graphic journalism, annotated sketches, photo-essays, photo-comics, collage, and other experimental forms of visual narration.

 

Themes of Interest (non-exhaustive):

  • Graphic Urbanism: comics, storyboards, or sequential art as tools for architectural critique or urban analysis.
  • Visual Fieldwork: sketches, diagrams, maps, or illustrated reportage capturing lived urban experiences.
  • Photo-essays: visual series investigating urban, landscape, and social environments.
  • Fictional Architectures: graphic storytelling that reimagines cities, buildings, or spatial histories.
  • Collaborative Visual Research: co-created works between architects, artists, writers, and communities.
  • Theoretical Doodles: hand-drawn essays that challenge textual conventions in architectural theory.
  • Visual Literacy and Word&Image Studies: analysis of compared graphic languages and their semiotics.
  • Digital Productions: new forms of visualisation, from data mapping to AI-generated imaginaries.

Submission Guidelines:

  • Proposal Deadline: 20/02 /2026.
  • Proposal Format: A single PDF document containing:
  1. A 500-word (max) description addressing the following:
  • How does the proposed contribution engage with the visual world and its practices?
  • What is its relationship to the means of representation and processes of mediation?
  • Why is the chosen visual format suitable for engaging with spatial reality?
2–3 sample images or preliminary visuals. A brief biographical note (approx. 150 words) for all authors. Final Submissions: Upon acceptance, final contributions may include 8 to 12-page research articles, graphic narratives, visual essays, or shorter vignettes (formats are negotiable). All images must be high-resolution (300 dpi) with proper captions and credits. Collaborative projects should include a brief description of the roles and methodologies involved.  Peer Review: Accepted contributions will be part of a blind peer-reviewed, full-colour publication. 

We strongly encourage experimental formats that blur the boundaries of academic, artistic, and narrative practices.


WritingPlace is an international book series examining the intersections of architecture, literature, and visual culture.

Editors of this issue: Carlos Machado e Moura, Luís Santiago Baptista, Onorina Botezat, Susana Oliveira.

References:

Berger, J. (1972, 1977). Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin.

Charley, J. (ed.). (2019). The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and the City. Oxford: Routledge.

Fraser, Benjamin, (2019) Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form, University Press of Mississippi.

McLuhan, M., (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.

Mendelsund, Peter, (2014) What We See When We Read. Vintage Press.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994). Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations. University of Chicago Press.

Oliveira, S.; Gadanho, P. (eds.) (2013). Once upon a Place: Architecture & Fiction. Lisboa: Caleidoscópio.

Pauwels, L.; Mannay, D. (2020). SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. SAGE Publications.

Candide - Journal for Architectural Knowledge, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. 

La Revue Dessinée, St. Gregoire, France.

Lus Arana, K. (ed.), (MAS Context #20 - Narrative (2013), Chicago IL, USA.

Vol. #20 - Storytelling (2009), Archis / OMA / C-Lab, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Havik, K.; Oliveira, S.; Mejia Hernandez, J.; Dale, H. (eds), WritingPlace Journal #8+9 - Writing Urban Places: New Narratives for the European City (2023), nai010 Publishers / TU Delft, Netherlands.