The city does not merely produce visibility; it also formats what and how we see. Who looks? Who is allowed to see? And what remains hidden precisely because it appears so obvious? Its public space is evidently not neutral – it is coded, regulated, staged. Whoever moves within it moves through fields of meaning, not only through streets.

As I move through these very streets, there are recurring moments in which I suddenly stop. Not because I encounter anything spectacular, but because the taken-for-granted character of the surroundings becomes strange all at once. A row of buildings with repeating façades; a square whose layout directs my movement before I have even decided where to go; construction fences announcing a future neighborhood, visualized on printed tarpaulins: people strolling, children playing, plants growing on balconies or rooftops. Everything appears familiar, yet oddly anticipated, almost prescribed. In such moments, I begin to sense that the city is more than a mere backdrop. It appears as a self-evident part of everyday life, yet the longer I look, the clearer it becomes that this apparent obviousness is the result of a series of decisions. Areas have been surveyed, investments made, uses defined; paths laid out, others blocked, lines of sight opened or closed. It becomes clear to me: the city is not simply there—it has been made, and it continues to be made: in political decisions and economic calculations, but also in (un)conscious, routinized actions. [1] With each observation, more and more traces of negotiation become visible, reinforcing the impression that the city is not simply given but requires explanation; façades bear revisions and ruptures, floor plans tell of divisions and conversions, sightlines are guided or obstructed; wherever something has been added, shifted, or concealed, questions arise as to who made these decisions—and in whose interest. For the fact that streets, buildings, and squares appear self-evident, and that their use often remains unreflected, is part of a deeply ingrained mode of perception in which landscape is frequently understood as the direct counterpart to the city—as a grown, seemingly natural space. Yet this very opposition—here the city, there the natural landscape—obscures the fact that both spaces are historically and culturally shaped rather than simply given.

In fact, the term ›landscape‹ in the late Middle Ages, especially between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, did not denote an aesthetic image of nature, but a political and administrative unit, that is, a territory within specific relations of rule. Landscape here referred to the rural hinterland dominated by the city as an agrarian zone serving merely to supply it. [2] Only with the early modern period, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, does its meaning shift fundamentally, so that landscape increasingly comes to denote a particular image of the environment in which less the territory itself is decisive than the manner in which it is perceived and represented in painting and literature. Landscape thus emerges—as the Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt argues—through cultural interpretation, in which individual elements are selected, filtered, and arranged into an image. [3] This pictorial quality—meaning the perception of landscape not only as physical space but as a coherent image formed from many impressions—becomes particularly visible in the tradition of idealized landscape representations and can be traced back to Roman antiquity, more precisely to the literature of the imperial period around the turn of the Common Era. [4] In the pastoral poems (Eclogae, 42–39 BC) of the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), Arcadia—a region already mythically transfigured since Hellenistic times and shaped in literature into an idealized pastoral and natural space—becomes a constructed space. [5] It no longer primarily describes a concrete geographical region, but a cultural ideal composed of recurring motifs such as trees, water, meadows, shade, and a calm, idyllic atmosphere. [6]

In European landscape painting, this principle continues from the seventeenth century onward, when independent forms of landscape representation emerge in Dutch and French contexts, in which landscape is depicted not as an unordered environment but as a composed pictorial space ordered according to aesthetic rules. [7] These representations often draw on the literary topos of the ›locus amoenus‹ (›pleasant place‹), which describes a harmonious natural setting composed of recurring elements, as already established in depictions of Arcadia. [8] The artist Beate Gütschow (*1970, Mainz, FRG) takes up this tradition in her work »LS#3«, 1999 and translates it into a contemporary photographic procedure (Fig. 18). Here, she does not present landscape as a documentary image of a specific place, but as a composed pictorial space that, although assembled from numerous photographic fragments and appearing familiar, eludes any geographical localization. Precisely this placelessness reveals that the depicted nature is not a real site but an image construction organized according to specific visual rules. [9] The apparent naturalness of her landscapes thus proves to be an effect of a cultural order established more than two thousand years ago.

While Beate Gütschow makes the construction of landscape visible by assembling her images from fragments, the photographic works of Talisa Lallai (*1989, Frankfurt am Main, FRG) initially focus on real locations—coastlines, gardens, or parks (Fig. 19) in which nature and architecture repeatedly appear as elements of the landscape. Yet even if these places are not constructed in a technical sense, this does not mean that they can be understood as immediate representations of a natural landscape. Through selection, perspective, and framing—photographic seeing [10]—her real sites are shaped into pictorial spaces that show more than their geographical and architectural properties. Landscape in her work does not simply appear as a given environment but as a space in which memories, expectations, and cultural imaginaries overlap and form a kind of stage—a space that emerges within perception itself and, as in Arcadian landscape painting, operates as a structuring and meaning-bearing visual order (Fig. 20). It is precisely here that the boundary between nature and architecture begins to shift. If landscape is constructed as an image order, that is, as a particular way of seeing a place, architecture no longer appears as its opposite but as part of the same compositional logic—both are shaped through selection, arrangement, and perspective.

This structural proximity becomes visible in the paired image series »Trilogie von Stein und Zeit«, 1977–2011 by Klaus Merkel (*1940, place of birth unknown, German Reich). Tree trunks and architectural columns enter into a visual relation that highlights their formal similarities (Fig. 21 und 22). The vertical structure of the tree recalls architectural supports, while the column appears as an architectural translation of natural forms. Nature and architecture do not appear as opposites here, but as different manifestations of similar ordering principles, which can also be transferred to the city, as it too is a historically and culturally shaped space. The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre describes this connection in his theory of the production of space: space is not a neutral backdrop to social processes but itself a product of social relations. It emerges from the interplay of everyday forms of engaging with space – such as walking, dwelling, using, or appropriating—planning concepts such as urban designs and functional allocations, and symbolic meanings—that is, not only from how space is used and organized, but also from how it is sensorially and affectively perceived, imagined, and mediated through images. [11] Streets, buildings, and squares thus appear as expressions of social orders in which urban planning organizes their use and the movement of people, thereby shaping forms of coexistence. [12] A central aspect of what he calls the production of urban space lies in the relation between use value and exchange value. Cities are places of living, yet at the same time spaces of economic valorization: land is traded, buildings are turned into investment objects, and entire districts undergo transformation in the course of economic interests. Space thus appears not only as a living environment but also as a commodity. [13]

However, urban space is not produced only at the level of planning and capital; it is also generated in everyday life. Space acquires its meaning and function not only through planning or design, but through the ways in which it is actually used. This becomes particularly visible in walking through the city: by choosing certain paths or using places differently than intended, people inscribe their movements into spatial order. [14] A work that makes this practice tangible is »Random Walk«, 1997–1999 by Eyal Weizman (*1970, Haifa, Israel) and Christian Nicolas (*1971, Beesel, Netherlands), whose starting point is the movement of the body through urban space (Fig. 23). Walking does not appear here as simple locomotion but as an action within an already structured environment, in which streets, paths, and squares organize movement and define access. The »walk« is therefore not as »random« as the title suggests, but follows a structured logic. The city thus emerges through the interplay of different forces: planning organizes space, capital structures its development, and everyday practice transforms its use. Yet the city is not produced solely through architecture, planning, and use, but also through its representations. Renderings, competition designs, or photographic series show in advance what a place should or could look like, thereby shaping how urban spaces are perceived and what imaginaries are associated with them. They belong to that level at which space is not built, but organized through images, imaginaries, and meanings. [15] Here, images design the city before it is built—and preserve it even when it has long since changed. This becomes particularly evident in photography. Photographs have long appeared as immediate reproductions of reality, although they always represent a specific perspective on space. Framing, angle of view, and motif determine what becomes visible and what remains outside the image. Photographic images are therefore not neutral depictions of a city, but interpretations of its spatial order. [16] The British philosopher and sociologist Gillian Rose points out that images of urban spaces are themselves part of urban culture, because through their circulation in media, exhibitions, or publications they disseminate and shape imaginaries of the city. [17] At the same time, such images also hold the potential to unsettle existing orders by shifting familiar views and thereby revealing that urban structures are by no means self-evident.

This entanglement of the city as built space and as visual representation forms the starting point of Karina Nimmerfall’s (*1971, Deggendorf, Germany) work »The Third City (Red Vienna)«, 2017. In it, the artist brings the Austrian housing program »Red Vienna« of the 1920s into focus not only as an architectural but also as a discursive project— [18] that is, one produced not only through construction but through an interplay of texts, images, and public debates. The basis of her work is an essay by the architectural theorist Manfredo Tafuri, on which Nimmerfall retraces the sites described in Vienna, re-photographs them, and thus establishes a connection between historical analysis and contemporary image production (Fig. 1, 2 und 3). Her interest, however, lies less in the buildings themselves than in the ways in which they were mediated and represented. To this end, she employs digital image-processing techniques to give her photographs a historical appearance while at the same time blurring the boundary between documentary image and construction. As a consequence, her images can be read neither clearly as documents nor as historical references. In juxtaposition with contemporary texts and publications, a constellation emerges in which the Viennese housing complexes—the so-called »Höfe«—appear both as built reality and as expressions of a political and social program. [19] Karina Nimmerfall names this level already in the title of her work »The Third City«—the »third city« that arises alongside the planned and the built city and manifests itself in images and texts as a medially mediated form of urban space. [20]

If images are involved in the construction of the city, then one’s own position as a viewer also shifts. The gaze is no longer neutral, but part of the processes that render the city readable, imaginable, and thus effective. Engagement with visual orders thus leads back to one’s own perception – to how we move through these images and spaces and how we are implicated in them. If I now walk through the city after these reflections, those moments of pause no longer appear accidental, but almost necessary: as brief interruptions of my gaze, which no longer accepts the »order of things« as self-evident. [21] It is as if the meaning of space itself reveals itself gradually with every step—as a shift in what is considered given. The question »How do we want to live?« [22] thus no longer appears as something imposed from the outside, but as something that emerges from one’s own perception of the city: as the consequence of an irritation that occurs precisely where the apparent self-evidence of the built environment begins to fracture. Through this rupture, it gradually becomes apparent that what surrounds us is the result of decisions – decisions about how living, working, moving, and seeing are organized. The question »How do we want to live?« stems from the insight that spatial structures always also determine forms of coexistence, that paths, access, images, and uses guide everyday life while at the same time opening and limiting possibilities; yet we ourselves, through what we do in the city, how we perceive it, and which images we produce and circulate, are inevitably involved in its construction.

It is precisely here that the potential for change emerges. Once the city is understood as something made, it no longer appears fixed, but transformable, open to being rethought. This potential becomes visible where other images of the city come into play—images that do not merely confirm order and function, but also make visible ruptures, detours, or ambiguities. Urban spaces might then appear not only as efficiently organized infrastructures, but as places of lingering; not only as planned environments, but as open structures that allow different uses; not only as clearly defined functional entities, but as spaces that change through use. Images can prepare such shifts by making alternative forms of coexistence and engagement with the city imaginable. Could representations that point to a structural proximity between grown and built forms also allow architecture to be thought differently—not as a rigid construction, but as a process that follows other forms and materials, those not primarily oriented toward efficiency and standardization, but toward human beings and their environment? And could this not also lead to an awareness of modes of construction and materials that are conceived not only technically but also ecologically, or to an architecture in which the separation of nature and culture is understood not as an opposition, but as a relation?

The task of art, then, lies less in definitively explaining the city than in making visible those moments in which its apparent self-evidence begins to falter, thereby revealing the conditions under which it appears self-evident at all. I do not see in this a lack of clarity, but rather a shift: away from what is fixed, toward what becomes visible once we begin to look more closely. What then emerges—that the city is constructed rather than given – does not demand an immediate answer, but calls on us to take a position. And perhaps this is already where another way of thinking the city begins to take shape.

—

[1] Cf. Henri Lefebvre: »The Production of Urban Space«, 1975. In: Oliver Clemens et al. (eds.), Material on: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 2002, pp. 4–20, here pp. 4–6 [Link: last accessed: March 28, 2026].

[2] Cf. Lucius Burckhardt: Warum ist Landschaft schön? Die Spaziergangswissenschaft. Ed. by Markus Ritter and Martin Schmitz, Berlin 2006, p. 104, 114 f.

[3] Cf. ibid., pp. 19–21, 122.

[4] Cf. ibid., p. 21, 114.

[5] Cf. ibid., p. 114 f.; cf. Werner Busch: »Landschaftsmalerei«. In: Geschichte der klassischen Bildgattungen in Quellentexten und Kommentaren, vol. 3, Berlin 1997, p. 38 [Link: last accessed: March 28, 2026].

[6] Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius: Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern 1984, pp. 191–195 [Link: last accessed: March 28, 2026].

[7] Cf. Burckhardt, Warum ist Landschaft schön?, p. 116.

[8] Cf. Busch, »Landschaftsmalerei«, p. 38; cf. Curtius, »Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter«, p. 189 f., 192.

[9] Cf. Anna-Catharina Gebbers: »Larger than life«. In: Beate Gütschow: Z/I/S/LS, Heidelberg 2016, pp. 18–26.

[10] Cf. Gillian Rose: »Visual Culture, Photography and the Urban: An Interpretive Framework«. In: Space and Culture, India 2 (2014) 3, pp. 5 f. [Link: last accessed: March 28, 2026].

[11] Cf. Lefebvre, »The Production of Urban Space«, p. 4, 14–15.

[12] Cf. ibid., p. 24.

[13] Cf. ibid., pp. 14, 18 and 24.

[14] Cf. Marian Füssel: »Dead Places and Lived Spaces: On Michel de Certeau’s Theory of Space S. J.«. In: Historical Social Research 38 (2013) 3, pp. 22–39, here p. 30.

[15] Cf. Stuart Elden: »›There is a politics of space because space is political.‹ Henri Lefebvre and the production of space«, 1998. In: Clemens et al., Material on: Henri Lefebvre, Die Produktion des Raums, pp. 27–35, here p. 30 f. [Link: accessed: October 22, 2024].

[16] Cf. Rose, »Visual Culture, Photography and the Urban«, pp. 5–7.

[17] Cf. ibid., p. 5.

[18] The term ›discursive‹ refers to the French philosopher Michel Foucault and denotes that things are not simply given, but are produced through statements, images, and practices. Discourses determine what can be said, seen, and regarded as true, and often appear self-evident, although they are historically constituted.

[19] Cf. Austria Kultur International: »PHOTO IS:RAEL mit Karina Nimmerfall / Kulturforum Tel Aviv«, 2024. In: austriakulturinternational.at, 2024 [Link: last accessed: March 28, 2026].

[20] Cf. Karina Nimmerfall: »The Third City (Red Vienna)«, 2017. In: karinanimmerfall.com [Link: last accessed: March 28, 2026].

[21] The formulation refers to Michel Foucault’s book »Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines«, Paris 1966 (German: »Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine Archäologie der Humanwissenschaften«. Translated from the French by Ulrich Köppen, Frankfurt 1974), in which he argues that what we perceive as self-evident is based on historically constituted orders of knowledge that determine how things are ordered, seen, and understood.

[22] Referring to the title of the exhibition »Wie wollen wir leben?« by the Kunststiftung DZ BANK in Frankfurt am Main, June 3 to October 3, 2026.

Originally published in German; English translation by the author.