We are thrilled to announce the launch of a special issue of Visual Communication: Recombinant Ecologies in the City. Volume 19 Issue 3, August 2020. The editorial is open access.

The contributions to this issue show that experimental visual communication can bear witness to practices and performance of cities by birds, bacteria, plants, atmospheres and people. Visual communication can also generate living archives of recombinant ecologies, contributing to the making of compassionate urban places, and mobilizing a politics that goes beyond the needs of humans.

In our own article, The not-yet-tropical: mapping recombinant ecologies in a Sydney suburb, we write about the project Marrickville Walks to show how plants redesign the urban landscape and engender everyday practices in the gardens, verges, and non-cultivated parcels of land and, in doing so, contribute to sensing the suburb as tropical.

We hope you enjoy this transdisciplinary special issue and find it useful for subject reading lists and further research. Please be in touch with any questions, feedback or suggestions.

In sum, the articles in this Special Issue raise questions of how cities might be imagined if recombinant ecologies were made more present by visual methods. They make ecoogical processes and relationships visible, tangible, and accessible, and in doing so can nurture ecological and recombinant ways of seeing and knowing the cities in which we live. 

Vanni, Ilaria, and Alexandra Crosby. “Special Issue Editorial:‘Recombinant Ecologies in the City’.” (2020): 1470357220916117.

Articles

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