THE RIGHT TO THE SURFACE IS THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
A photo of me leading a walking tour has recently been featured in University of Melbourne's poster campaign for the Being Human Festival - which is all very meta, given that street posters have been one of my main research subjects in the past few years.
We are resuming our Urban Visual Dialogues event series with two presentations by my collaborators-friends-visiting PhDs, Tom Ward and Cecilia Brazioli. Cecilia and Tom are in Melbourne for 3 months and this is their main public-facing seminar.
Melbourne is full of framed bill posters and is arguably the best poster city in the world. How do these street posters work, how are they regulated? And what contributions do they make to the visual character of the city, alongside graffiti and other signage?
Are you a researcher or practitioner in the public or private sector whose work engages with urban surfaces? We are inviting expressions of interest to attend our 1.5-day workshop in Melbourne, Australia, on 3-4 December 2025.
Three incredible weeks of fieldwork in Kampala, Uganda, for the Urban visual cultures project.
I am thrilled to announce that the Urban Surfaces Research Network has been awarded an Urban Studies Foundation seminar series award for the project ‘Walls speak. Are you listening? A research agenda for urban surfaces’.
I organised the session "Urban surfaces: architectural perspectives on public walls" at the Society of Architectural Historians annual conference in Atlanta on my birthday - 2 May 2025.
Writer, broadcaster and educator Tom Dyckhoff and urban scholar Sabina Andron study transgressive aspects of the urban conditions — at vandalised and marginalised spaces as opportunities made and found in the city. This tender and candid conversation draws on personal experiences that drive their respective practices of writing about space.
Graffiti removal is the practice of removing, erasing or obliterating unauthorised displays from publicly visible urban surfaces.
