In this guest post, Dr Sabina Andron (University of Melbourne, Australia), Dr Konstantinos Avramidis (University of Cyprus, Cyprus) and Mr Tom Ward (Uppsala University, Sweden) introduce their Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series “Walls speak. Are you listening? A research agenda for urban surfaces,” which brings together the Urban Surfaces Research Network (USRN) to develop a radical, interdisciplinary research agenda on urban surfaces.
The Urban Surfaces Research Network (USRN) is an international multi-disciplinary group of scholars, artists, and practitioners interested in the roles of surfaces as spaces of urban communication, governance, and political contestation. We explore how surfaces are designed, managed, valued, and contested as public assets, to enrich the diversity of public expression in global cities.
Drawing on the mandate of the Urban Surfaces Research Network, our Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award will establish communication and awareness of the multiple research agendas that operate with urban surfaces; foreground surfaces as a central research concept and field of study pertinent to numerous political, legal, social, architectural, and cultural concerns; and create a space for research exchange as well as consultation with non-academic actors (eg outdoor advertising companies, graffiti removal practitioners, street artists, and conservators).
Context
Urban surfaces are vital spaces of communication, governance, and political contestation. Taking place over three sessions, this seminar series will explore how urban surfaces are designed, managed, valued and contested as public assets, to enrich our understanding of the diversity of public expression in global cities. Taking urban surfaces like walls, roads, windows, fences and everything in-between as specific empirical foci, the series will bring together scholars from a diverse array of fields, such as geography, architecture, sociology, law, heritage studies, media and communication, to forge a radical, interdisciplinary research agenda that seeks to articulate and cultivate a vocabulary for understanding the material grammars of the surfaces of our cities.
The series will, for the first time, bring together scholars of the Urban Surfaces Research Network (USRN), facilitating a series of interdisciplinary discussions designed to bridge gaps between fields and identify generative theoretical interventions that can help account for the critical role played by urban surfaces as constitutive elements of our cities. The series will, as such, act as a space to establish communication and awareness of the diversity of research agendas in this empirical context, paving the way for collaborative and theoretically richer research that can be applied in policy and public contexts. These include graffiti removal policies, advertising regulations, public art policies, and other frameworks governing the visual dynamics of the city.
Given the dominance of the digital in a world where the screen is taking hold, an increasing number of actors are returning to the street, from marketers to artists, from the state to grassroots activists. This seminar series attends to the empirical site of the street by situating it within multiple scales and temporalities of analysis, focusing on how the surfaces of our streets, and the visibility they enable, are always disputed, always dynamic, always unstable, and always subject to a radical unsettling. We build upon existing work on the visual in urban studies—notably work on advertising, on the governance of images, on public art, and on territorology—by placing into dialogue multiple agendas on the surface, to embrace the potential offered by interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological exchanges. We will explore the meaning and materiality of urban surfaces in an age where the visible material is an increasingly contested resource of political, cultural, and financial hegemony.
Aims and outputs
Our aims for the seminar series are threefold.
First and foremost, our goal is to forge an interdisciplinary research agenda for urban surfaces: across all three workshops, we will together produce a manifesto that calls for and elaborates upon a radical re-imagination of what it means to be visible in the city, situating our empirical focus of the surface in multiple disciplinary fields and sowing the seeds of cross-disciplinary surface research to come. This manifesto will be shared with partners in design, maintenance, and creative public and private sectors.
Secondly, our goal is to lead international scholarly inquiries into urban surfaces. Work from these sessions will be published as a special issue in Urban Studies to assess and progress the state of the field, and our discussions will also be disseminated through The Conversation and a dedicated website for the project, to capture the creative and public-facing aspects of the workshops.
Finally, we will pursue this agenda by supporting early-career researchers. While workshops will be open to applications from scholars of all fields, at all career stages, we will give preference to early-career scholars when accepting applications, with the aim of boosting their scholarly exposure and strengthening and forging their scholarly networks in the context of an exciting, interdisciplinary exchange. Four bursaries are available in each workshop location to support travel and accommodation costs of early-career colleagues.
Sessions
Each workshop has been designed as a deep study session for approximately 20 participants. Calls for expressions of interest will be circulated ahead of each session. Call for Workshop 1 is open until 19 September 2025.
Workshop 1:
Location: Melbourne Centre for Cities, University of Melbourne, Australia
Dates: 3-4 December 2025
Themes: urban visual governance, street posters, and graffiti removal.
Workshop 2
Location: Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
Dates: TBC May 2026
Themes: surface heritage, narratives, and drawing.
Workshop 3
Location: Department of Human Geography, Uppsala University, Sweden
Dates: TBC August 2026
Themes: surface territory, economy, and maintenance.