In the seminar Transformation II within the Master’s programme in Urban Design in the summer term 2025, we conducted an experiment in visualising theory, which I would like to briefly present here.

The theory seminars Transformation I and II in the first year of the Master’s programme aim to familiarise students with as broad an interdisciplinary spectrum as possible of theories of the urban and its transformation. Students read widely across disciplines and critically engage with the epistemological potential as well as the limitations of different approaches. Given the diverse disciplinary references (urban sociology, urban studies, urban anthropology, cultural and human geography, etc.), students encounter heterogeneous discourses. The question that arises is how to develop a coherent picture of this discursive landscape that provides orientation for navigating between authors, concepts and schools of thought.

For the seminar fostering critical thinking in urban studies, a selection of texts was compiled around the annual theme “dirt cheap”. Engaging with critical urbanisation, the seminar revolved around the overarching question of what constitutes a good city in an ever-changing and complex world. It was about gaining perspectives on how to look at the city and processes beyond the city. I organised four reading sessions around the following themes:

•   Planetary Changes: Refiguration, Transformation, Transition: In the first session, we read texts by Löw & Knoblauch (2024), Schmid et al. (2023), Mould (2023), and Escobar (2018). These readings enabled us to conceptualise urban change as processual, dynamic, multiscalar, non-linear and non-dichotomous. We critically assessed both differences and commonalities between concepts such as the planetary, refiguration, transformation and transition.

•   Contested Values I: What Is the Ordinary?: In the second session, we read texts by de Certeau (1984), Robinson (2006), and The Urban Popular Economy Collective (2022). This allowed us to discuss how norms are constructed and how distinctions such as dirty/clean, normal/abnormal, and formal/informal are produced. We reflected on the normativity involved in framing the urban as either ordinary or spectacular.

•   Contested Values II: Urban Pluralisation: In the third session, we read texts by Meier & Aytekin (2019), Wacquant (2008), and Birdsall et al. (2021) in order to address structural dimensions inscribed in the very fabric of the city, particularly through questions of segmentation and segregation.

•   Ecologisation: The Price of (Urban) Natures: In the final session, we read texts by Moore (2016), Gandy (2022), and Bode & Misselwitz (2022) to address urgent questions surrounding the valuation of nature and the relationship between nature and the city.

The selection of authors and schools of thought was deliberately broad and heterogeneous, allowing similar themes (such as social inequality, memory, or urban nature) to be approached from different theoretical perspectives. To relate these positions to one another, we conducted a mapping experiment in the final two sessions of the semester.

Criteria for the Diagram

The primary aim was, in a Bourdieusian sense (Bourdieu 1984), to position these discourses within a social space. This provided an opportunity to reflect with the students on the socio-institutional production of academic discourses and to identify parameters for our landscape mapping, including disciplinary anchoring; social-theoretical approach; national-linguistically bound knowledge cultures (as Keller & Poferl 2018 aptly describe them); thematic focus; and social struggles for positions, recognition and funding.

In doing so, we situate ourselves within an emerging field of visualising theory, which advocates visualisation as a means of improving theory-building through visual thinking (Becker 2007; Swedberg 2016; Silver 2020; Guggenheim 2022). Visualisation has a distinctive value in clarifying, expressing and memorialising theory in ways that text alone cannot. Well-known examples in sociology include Coleman’s boat depicting micro–macro transitions (Coleman 1990) and Bourdieu’s field diagrams outlining his theory of practice (Bourdieu 1997). Swedberg distinguishes three types of visualisations: theory pictures summarising an already developed theory; visual sketches used in early stages of theorising; and theorising diagrams employed to generate new theoretical insights (2016). What we pursued follows a similar conviction but operates at another scale: not within a single theory, but between existing theories. I therefore propose the term theory landscape as an attempt to situatively map a discursive space of urban studies.

Methodologically, we drew inspiration from Adele Clarke’s Situational Analysis (2005). In essence, we transferred her coding procedures for empirical data to concepts and authors, moving from a “messy situational map” towards a more “ordered situational map”, with particular emphasis on the relations between concepts and authors. Sitting together around a large table, we wrote key concepts and authors encountered during the seminar on separate index cards and gradually arranged them in relation to one another (see Fig. 1). Additional categories emerged over time, such as schools of thought or further authors brought in by students from their existing knowledge. With the help of Hanbaek Park, student assistant on the course, a digital more ordered version of the mapping was made (see Fig. 2).

Epistemic Potential and Pedagogical Added Value

The mapping exercise initially had considerable value as a recapitulative practice: all course contents were revisited, briefly explained, and positioned in relation to one another. In this sense, I understand the exercise primarily as a pedagogical device. The horizontal and associative approach offers several epistemic potentials.

• First, it enables lineages between authors to be traced, including their various branches: for example, within the neo-Marxist tradition from Marx to Lefebvre to Schmid & Brenner; or alternatively from Marx to Moore and Swyngedouw; or within Actor–Network Theory from Latour to Yaneva (architecture) and to Farías (urban anthropology).

• Secondly, it makes interpretative struggles between schools visible, particularly where differing social-theoretical premises are at stake. Examples include debates between representatives of critical urban studies (e.g. McFarlane, Brenner) and more ANT-informed positions (Farías), or within the German-speaking sociological context between critical urban sociology (Häußermann) and the cultural sociology of the city (the Darmstadt School around Löw). Debates and internal conflicts within schools were also addressed, not only in terms of epistemological differences but also in relation to positioning and profiling pressures within the academic field. Even love stories between authors were mentioned – a reminder that science remains a social practice.

• Moreover, certain authors emerged as bridging figures between different currents. For instance, Meier appears to connect cultural urban sociology with a pronounced interest in social structure, thereby building a bridge towards Wacquant and more broadly Bourdieusian traditions. Gandy, in a different part of this fragmented landscape, functions as an interface between historical perspectives and new materialism.

• Polysemic concepts such as assemblage, entanglement and the planetary were widely discussed. It became clear that these concepts are used by different authors and cannot be unambiguously assigned to a single school–hence their positions in the middle. The concept of assemblage, which enjoys considerable attention in Urban Design, requires explicit social-theoretical grounding: does one follow Deleuze and Guattari, Farías, or Kniess? All interpretations are legitimate, yet they are not identical and cannot be combined indiscriminately. Similar discussions arose around the flourishing concept of the planetary.

• The mapping also quickly revealed the blind spots of our specific reading list. Questions of decolonisation, as well as infrastructures and digitalisation, were only marginally addressed. In the mapping exercise, their relatively unanchored and somewhat “floating” position became clearly visible.

Limitations

Such an approach has clear limitations on several levels. First, it is strongly constrained by the sampling of texts and can only produce a snapshot of a highly complex discursive landscape. The mapping creates a visually ordered image of what is in reality a dynamic and not always coherent discursive space – in line with Strathern’s critique of diagrams, which may impose a “spurious logic” upon incoherent texts.

Secondly, the visual representation is limited to two dimensions and does not easily allow for the depiction of more complex interrelations between authors. Furthermore, we did not systematically reflect on what the axes (top/bottom, left/right) might represent – an issue that would need to be addressed in further development of the approach.