I am a practising communications designer who was initially trained as an architect. I have a Bachelor’s in Architectural Studies (1999-2004) from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; a Master’s in Communication Design (2012-14) from Central Saint Martins in London, UK; and additional training in new media design and web development at OCAD University, Sheridan College and the Copenhagen Institute of Design. This practice-led research project has been partly informed by my experience having one foot in each world for the past 20 years: I studied design in Canada and the UK and worked as a communications director for architecture studios in Toronto. I am also a freelance designer. Throughout my professional career, I’ve been involved in design in myriad ways, ranging from book, editorial and brand identity design to website development and exhibition design. As a communications director, I was responsible for architectural communications across a mix of material and non-material forms of expression and knowledge-sharing such as print, web, events—anything pertinent to how the studio connects with its audiences, which may be clients, consultants, and/or building users as well as city officials and planning authorities. This design work also covered visioning workshops and public engagements to support the development of architectural projects, providing a platform for communities-of-interest to give input.

What I have found from my experience as a communication designer is that, consistently, there is a significant gap between what is communicated by designers and built environment professionals and what is understood or interpreted by the ‘receivers’ of information, a challenging narrative gap that a well-designed pamphlet or book could not always bridge. In the design studios I worked, I noticed that there was also friction stemming from architects’ conception of the value of communication design, typically seen as a nice to have add-on if budget allows, but not essential. My practice is consequently grounded in this questioning, what is ‘communication design’ in the context of architecture and what is its value and relationship to city-making? This was also the question driving my academic pursuits. In 2017, this research project originated as an examination of the King’s Cross ‘urban megaproject’ in central London, the then new home in 2011 to Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, where I had completed my graduate studies. ¹ In their book The Grand Project, the Making and Impact of Urban Mega Projects (2019), editors Kees Christaanse, Anna Grasco, and Naomi Hanakata define urban megaprojects as “comprehensively planned, large-scale urban development projects with a range of uses” that are “newly built centralities” functioning as “urban landmarks” which “frequently create a new image for their cities and a link to global networks tied to the ground within their sites.” (p15) For more on King’s Cross, see (pp453-510) Gasco, ‘King’s Cross London KX-L’. The initial intent of my doctoral study was to expand upon the subject of the public communication of the King’s Cross development I had covered in my Master’s thesis, which examined the contrasts in visual communication between the existing communities’ experience of, and vision for, the area and the developer Argent’s representation of it through various texts and images they both produced.

In re-exploring King’s Cross at the time, a site that has been under the Mayor of London’s strategic oversight since it was designated an Opportunity Area in the first London Plan in 2004, I was led to the new London Plan whose draft was forthcoming Fall 2017. The opening paragraph of Mayor Khan’s introduction to the draft changed the course of my doctoral studies and re-oriented my communication focus. I was struck by the contradiction of his statement in the foreword that “many Londoners won’t know about or have come across the London Plan, but it affects our lives on a daily basis,” and yet, despite the lack of awareness, he deemed it “one of the most crucial documents for our city.” ² The Mayor’s remark, for me, broadly captured a significant communication gap and highlighted the disconnect that separated public from policy in public policy. Admittedly, I had only been tangentially familiar with the London Plan while studying in King’s Cross about King’s Cross. The plan’s public remit had escaped my notice while I focused on the developer’s publications and the development’s hoardings and public advertisements to potential residents, workers, and investors. My own lack of awareness of the London Plan’s importance, of which the King’s Cross development would not have materialised without its policy framework, revealed to me a blind spot perhaps as much in the designer’s gaze as the public gaze.

The need for a communication design perspective was made acutely apparent in my formal introduction to the London Plan public consultation process at a community-focused public meeting in early 2018, hosted by the GLA at City Hall on behalf of Just Space who were the event’s main coordinator. There, during a break between sessions, I met a representative from My Fair London, an organisation self-billed as “a group of Londoners campaigning for a fairer city.” ³ In our first exchange, when I had mentioned my affiliation with University College London and The Bartlett School of Architecture, he was unsurprised by the institutional presence. Indeed, there were many researchers of similar ilk in the room. Our conversation seemed to stall then, perhaps because, he may have assumed, we would be having the same chat as with the others, treading the familiar policy-focused terrain about the London Plan. However, his tone noticeably changed, and his interest was newly piqued, when I swapped my academia hat for my professional one to clarify my position—and the additional practice lens through which I was viewing the meeting proceedings—as a graphic designer who specialises in architectural and urban communications.

He noted the rare presence of someone like me with concerns about communication and then opened up about his own concerns about the lack thereof in specific regards to design support for the publications and public-making activities of groups like My Fair London and Just Space. The rep pointed to the unevenness of production value between his A4-size, one-page flyer advertising the work of My Fair London and the glossy publications produced by the Mayor of London and the GLA. In that moment, I was equally struck by his assessment of the dearth of resources available to him in contrast to the latter’s perceived capacity for publicness, especially considering the London Plan’s general absence from many Londoners consciousness highlighted by the Mayor.

Subsequently, my interaction with the People’s Empowerment Alliance for Custom House (PEACH) left a similar mark. In the same crowd of that meeting were two PEACH members with whom I was able to later connect after learning about their work in community self-organisation for the betterment of the Custom House local area in Newham, east London. Emerging from my follow-up conversations with them, there too was an identified need for the contributions of a communication designer to help them share and amplify their work around the neighbourhood as well as across London, part of a larger endeavour to link up with the work of other community groups as those who participated during the consultation meeting.

PEACH, in my general impression, was reticent about academic collaborations because of concerns about reciprocity in community-university partnerships and the potential for power imbalances in institutional arrangements of knowledge sharing with vulnerable groups. However, they were open to my involvement and I was able to gain trust and access, what researcher Paul Maginn describes as “a foot across the threshold,” by asserting again my identity as a communication designer while suppressing my academic one. ⁴ We bonded over a shared desire for, and appreciation of, better communication in planning. I was able to spend time with PEACH, spread over a year, to develop graphic strategies and tactics that would help strengthen their communication efforts. This collaboration was funded by UCL’s Public Engagement Unit. While the final design outcome of our collaboration was stalled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, never coming to fruition, the experience underscored for me the challenges local communities face in trying to raise their voices about urban change. These encounters with My Fair London and PEACH moved my research project beyond the geographic confines of King’s Cross and widened its scope to look at other communication gaps. They raised questions for me about the understanding of communication design and the role of the communication designer in the bigger picture of planning in London, for Londoners.

Returning to King’s Cross for a moment, and the example of the public notice, it becomes clear communication design has also been missing from urban discourse as much as from urban practice. Media scholar Shannon Mattern writes of the importance of ‘humble infrastructure’ such as the lamp post or telegraph pole for hyper-local urban communication, the type that I saw in King’s Cross. ⁵ Media archaeologist and theorist Lisa Gitelman too speaks to the power of the telephone pole as not only “a scaffolding for the wires that connect our homes into global networks” but a place of also hyper-local community connectivity that happens on what Jacob Riis deems “the wrong end” of the pole—the bottom half where small business advertisements, yard sales, pleas for locating lost cats, and the like, call for our attention. ⁶ Disagreeing with Riis about its wrongness, Gitelman notes, “while the very infrastructures [of mass communication] have helped to articulate cities, nations, and continents, the staples on my pole publish to a neighbourhood eye … [T]he leaflets address a local more local than telephone area codes; they articulate a neighbourhood at the scale dreamt by Jane Jacobs.” ⁷

If such a ubiquitous communication tool is available, given “the intensity and flow of information at this lower, more neighbourly order of information,” as Gitelman describes it, why then don’t we see public notices about the London Plan—a document about how one’s neighbourhood will change—on every lamppost or telephone pole, in every neighbourhood throughout the city? The planning notice is presumably authorised to be posted because it is the only note attached to these poles, in contrast to the numerous lost cat pleadings or musical gig posters that compete for, and overwhelms, the limited real estate of other poles in the city, presumably not authorised to be there. The lamppost here appears to be a privileged space of communication for those authorised to communicate through it. It’s a deliberate choice to take on the visual language of the everyday. Given this authority, why doesn’t the Mayor and the GLA use it to their advantage? If an aim is to reach Londoners, then why has the London Plan team chosen differently than their peers in the planning department of Camden’s local authority? If it’s a matter of jurisdiction, such that only Camden Council can post on Camden lampposts, then surely the Mayor can post on the posts and placards in the Underground, a city-wide area that is under his charge. That he doesn’t, is also a deliberate choice.

Of public notices, Gitelman has wondered, similar to my inquiry, who puts up the notes and takes them down, who has taken note and acted upon the information given. In addition to these questions about encountering such media in the city, the ones I would also like to ask, and that I haven’t seen come up often in media studies or urban studies, stems from my practice as a communication designer: Who designs them? Why do they take the form of A4 sheet? What other forms or formats could they have taken? Why the telephone pole for public notices about planning, why not the telephone pole for notices about the London Plan? Of the many studies of the London Plan, such questions about the plan’s communication, form and format, layout and placement, and the overall design choices, have not been asked.

From a larger disciplinary perspective, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina (1996) and Mattern (2015, 2017, 2021) have each written extensively about architecture and media, approaching the crossover subject from the different ends of their fields of expertise, architecture studies and media studies. Urban geographer Kurt Iveson (2007) has written about publics and the city while cultural historian David Henkin (2003) has written about publics in the city. Geographer and social theorist Clive Barnett (2003, 2010) has written about democracy and communication, the production of communicative spaces and the formations of the public and has looked at mediated spaces of representation to locate “where is the public.” Geographer Scott Rodgers (2010, 2017, 2019) has examined the relationships of media and cities and the geographies of communication while media and communication theorist Scott McQuire (2008, 2020) has examined media, architecture and urban space. Again, they each approach the city from their individual fields and disciplinary lens—urban studies, geography studies, social studies, cultural studies, and communication studies—that sometimes cross over into one another.

These studies have all attended in some ways to the relationship between what Iveson imagines as the ‘public city’ and what McQuire calls the ‘media city.’ Iveson envisions “the public city as an emergent and contingent product of political labours which are conducted on behalf of particular forms of publicness” and on the basis of “connections between different struggles to make publics.” ⁸ McQuire argues the city is the media, in which media platforms are co-constitutive with the spatial logics and logistics of architecture and urban planning. ⁹ Together, the studies have contributed to a rich, multi-disciplinary and multi-layered understanding of the ways in which publics and media interact in the urban landscape and how they impact and transform the urban experience.

From their different registers, their work falls broadly within urban media studies, what has been recognised by media studies scholars Simone Tosoni, Zlatan Krajina and Seija Ridell as “an emerging and vibrant scholarly space for research that permeates the borders of both media/communication studies and urban studies,” that signal “the co-constitutive relationship between media and the city.” ¹⁰ This intersection is what Rodgers, Barnett, and sociologist Allan Cochrane refer to as the ‘media–urban nexus.’ ¹¹ For Rodgers, it’s an overlapping space of non-discrete notions of what is urban and what is media. ¹² Elsewhere, Krajina and urban researcher Deborah Stevenson argue that “the two domains, cities and media/communications, become more accessible for analysis when observed alongside, against, and in terms of, each other.” ¹³

I understand the field of urban media studies as the ‘bifocal’ research into the reciprocal and entangled relationship between city and media, aligned with Tosoni’s definition of “urban media studies as a space for examining media and communication, and urban processes together, taking as a starting point their co-constitutive entanglements in terms of historical developments, theoretical definitions, and ongoing structural transformations.” ¹⁴ I define urban media to be the environments, infrastructures, technologies, records and representations—material or immaterial, textual, graphic, visual, aural, oral, textural, and digital among others—that inform urban living and shape the routines, practices and functions of the contemporary city. I use urban media studies as an umbrella term to include urban communication studies, which is particularly concerned with, quoting Tosoni and Ridell, “the ways in which people in cities connect (or do not connect) with others and with their urban environment via symbolic, technological, and/or material means.” ¹⁵ Media here is understood to be as much about the site of communication exchange as the communicative ‘thing’ itself. My definition adapts media critic Helen Morgan Parmett and Rodgers’ spatial understanding of media production in terms of both geographies and objects, and McQuire’s understanding of media as environmental. ^{16 17 18} For example, in the instance of my King’s Cross encounter with the public notice, the lamppost, or the boulevard to an extent, is an urban medium as much as the laminated paper notice. This follows in McQuire’s footsteps of seeing urban illumination as a form of urban media, in the Marshall McLuhan tradition, as Scott Rodgers points out, of seeing electronic light as a medium without content, which underpins McLuhan’s famous dictum, “the medium is the message.” See Marshall McLuhan (1964), Understanding Media.

From my practice standpoint, what’s missing from all the above is a communication design perspective. While the design of cities, as understood and articulated by architects and urban designers, does get extensively covered, the communication designer’s voice is glaringly absent from scholarly discourse. How can we expect to understand the communicative practices that have shaped and are shaping cities without tagging in the communication practitioner? Designers who have written about the city are usually urban and architectural design practitioners who typically focus on the spatial qualities and conditions and the urban dimensions of their design projects. Their contributions to urban discourse are notable. Less usual, however, is empirical input from graphic designers, book designers, typographers, and coders, among others—those articulating the urban texts, images, and surfaces and shaping their environments. They tend to stay behind as backstage players. One notable exception of “backstage players” stepping into the spotlight, is the collaboration between Marshall McLuhan and graphic designers Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore in the 1960s on The Medium Is the Massage (sic) and other experimental paperbacks whose publication design visually communicated McLuhan’s ideas to the masses, “an approachable, visually intensive translation of McLuhan’s writing for a nonspecialist audience.” See Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels (2012), The Electric Information Age Book.

The overlaps between urban media scholarship and communication design practice are few. Particularly, there is a general tendency in scholarship in London planning to focus on the content-meaning of the urban texts changing the cityscape, less so on the media-design of the writing / reading acts or the environments themselves and the textual exchanges between actors or across environments. While there has been significant attention paid amongst scholars on what’s been written about London, I note that many of these studies lack a design sensitivity to the media contexts and material histories in which the writing occurs. There’s abundant knowledge on what the policies of the London Plan mean, but no knowledge of when, where or, importantly, how they are written and read. Conversely, in practice, the opposite is true, the priority lies in optimising the form of design these urban texts take at the sacrifice of grasping the ways in which the choice of media affects the meaning of the content. For instance, the adoption of Drupal software as the content management system the GLA uses to make their website efficient, has implications on document access that have gone unexamined.

This thesis addresses these gaps and combines urban media studies with communication design practice. My aim is to expand the scope of scholarship on the London Plan to include an examination of the sites of communication and circulation and the types of communicators and circulators by bringing a designer’s sensibility and a practitioner’s eye to the discussion. I explore the potential of creative practice to inform, and be informed by, a critical design inquiry into how planners and planning officials communicate planning. Shannon Mattern has sought to “open up new methodological opportunities for studying media,” necessitating an alternative means of writing history, likewise I look beyond conventional ways in which to study the London Plan, and with this practical project, lay the groundwork for how a communication designer may alternatively approach it. ¹⁹ More than studying the plan, however, my hope is to impact its media design by asserting the importance of the communication designer and her necessary involvement in its future development. The thesis makes a case for a wider recognition of the role communication design and the communication designer can play.

Communication design is commonly known by its more familiar term, graphic design. In action, graphic design can be the placement, arrangement, and interplay of text and image alongside other media—a thoughtful combination of typography, illustration, and photography—to communicate ideas, to construct meaning and to transmit them to intended audiences. It can manifest as a visual outcome (a book) and/or an experiential one (an exhibition), which generates and circulates discourse. In this way, graphic design, a creative activity, is an act of public-making, the ‘make’ in making public. As a verb, graphic design can be what happens in the middle between an object or idea and its wide dissemination, resulting in the ‘show’ part of the know-show-flow equation discussed in the Introduction. As a noun, it can also be the context with which the object or idea comes into being, the circumstances of its production, the goals of its circulation, and the conditions of its publicness—the ‘know’ and ‘flow’ bookending ‘show’.

The genesis of graphic design has been well documented as it links to innovations of the printing press and developments related to the printed book. At the same time, arguably, it has long existed in some visual form through early writing technology that produced cave paintings, pictographs and alphabets. The practice of graphic design, as we know it today in the Western tradition, emerged out of European and American modernism. Compared to architecture, graphic design as an autonomous discipline is fairly young, with some of its roots in the first half of the 20th century in the avant-garde works of architectural radicals like members of the Bauhaus, the International Style, the Situationists and Archigram, seen in their graphically experimental, influential publications, as well as in art movements like Constructivism, de Stijl, Cubism and other abstract art. Architects often doubled then as graphic editors and book producers to spread their ideas in the visual style best suited to communicating them. This early close relationship to architecture is exemplified by the journal L’Esprit Nouveau, co-founded and co-edited by architect Le Corbusier in 1920. The writings would reappear in his work, Towards an Architecture (1923), influential to developing the International Style in modern architecture. In Catherine de Smet’s study ‘Le Corbusier as Book Designer’ (2015), quoting his own words, she highlighted that “a large part of LC’s [sic] creative work took shape in his books.” This reflects graphic design’s historical embedding in other design fields.

The graphic designer, as a distinct role, only really took off after the mid-century in parallel with the development of modern advertising. Because of a shift from the industrial age to the information age, graphic designer and historian Philip Meggs suggests, the requests for graphic designers increased and their activities proliferated. ²⁰ Beyond the book, their work expanded to film, television, and is as likely to be found in bus stops, train stations, and museums as on the back of cigarette packages and cereal boxes.

Despite this intensification, general understanding of the graphic designer’s work is still limited to book or magazine layouts, promotional posters, album covers, etc, mainly side-lined to the surfaces of print material. Considered by some as the practical application of art for communicative purposes, graphic design is also sometimes called visual communication, graphic art, or graphic communication design. In attempts to reflect a more expansive view of the field, educators and practitioners have mostly settled on ‘communication design’ to encompass the fuller spectrum of the activities, strategies, inquiries and media related to human communication, including the artistic, visual, textual, aural, temporal, virtual and spatial.

Regardless of name, the status of graphic design is still unstable or uncertain in some design circles. Despite its shared modernist lineage with architecture, graphic design has been professionally de-coupled from it, setting the two fields apart in a polemic of 2D and 3D design. The common perception splits what graphic designers do and what architects do between working on a surface and working with/in space. Of the more simplistic interpretations, graphic design is perceived as fun and merely aesthetic, architecture as serious and technically rigorous. Design education tends to keep the two fields separate and professional practice has reinforced this division. While graphic design programs are predominantly taught in art schools, architecture is taught in engineering or building sciences departments. After graduation, architecture students have to go through a years-long licensing process before they can call themselves architects, whereas graphic design students can immediately claim the title of graphic designer without need to formally jump through hurdles of professionalisation. The average age when an architect becomes licensed is 32, according to a 2015 report by NCARB, The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards in North America. Similarly, in the UK, the road to architectural licensure averages 7-10 years. Meggs recounts, the graphic design profession has long had an identity crisis, struggling against its frequent dismissal as ‘commercial art’ (to distinguish from ‘fine art’) and struggling for recognition next to architecture.

This is in part because, whether graphic design draws its starting line at the industrial revolution or further back to the printers of the Renaissance, the medieval manuscript, or the cave painters, according to the authors of Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983-2011), the lifespan of ‘graphic design history’ as a distinctive field is only 40 years old. ²¹ Graphic design’s history, theory and criticism, as well as its documentation, is relatively new. It is especially wanting in contrast to the breadth and depth of writings on, and documentation of, architecture’s history, theory and criticism. Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli holds architecture up as an example for graphic design history, in his keynote address published in The First History of Graphic Design: Coming of Age, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1983. Encumbered by criticism of their profession’s enchantment with form, style and technique, usually alongside unkind accusations of shallowness, contemporary graphic designers and graphic design historians have been challenged on the meaning-making aspect of their work, to situate it in specific as well as broader social, cultural, historical contexts and discourses. For the argument for social and political engagement, see Daniel van der Velden, ‘Research & Destroy: Graphic Design as Investigation’.

In the past 15 years, there has been greater recognition and exploration of graphic design as a critical practice. Designers Zak Kyes and Mark Owens initiated one of the first cross-disciplinary inquiry of graphic design and architecture, called Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design. ²² The inaugural exhibition was held at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 2007, accompanied by the publication of the same name, before it travelled onwards to other European venues. It was billed as “a compelling selection of graphic designers whose work explores the mutual exchange and shared lineage between graphic design and architecture. This work is united by a shared impulse to reframe the circumstances surrounding contemporary graphic practice, using intuitive modes of investigation to probe the boundaries of the discipline.” The gatherings were popular and attended by architects and graphic designers.

All Possible Futures, curated by graphic designer Jon Sueda in 2014, was another discipline-questioning exhibition and publication. It “look[ed] at how graphic designers have expanded the parameters of the field by consciously taking a transdisciplinary approach […] to question the established boundaries of design concepts, processes, technologies, and form” in favour of “conceptually rigorous, research-based, historically informed practices.” ²³ Taking place across the Atlantic in San Francisco, many of the same designers from Forms of Inquiry were invited to speculate on ‘all possible futures’ for graphic design.

Although both exhibitions raised important questions about graphic design’s reach and impact, and they provided experimental alternatives to then-current practice to reconceptualise what graphic design can be or what graphic designers can do, the problem is that the ideas did not travel beyond the closed environment of the architecture school or the art-gallery. The knowledge they produced stayed esoteric within a clique of the already design-invested. Another related and stubborn critique of graphic design is its obsession with producing a limited, desired, collectible item. Even when the graphic designer’s eye turns to the architectural world, the trend has been to view her contribution as a fetishized design object, like the architect’s monograph sitting on coffee tables or the glossy poster proudly mounted on the wall in the architect’s studio or home. The out-of-print publications from these exhibitions are coveted. One of the last remaining print copies of the Forms of Inquiry book sells for £500 from its publisher, the AA School. The follow up publication, Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice: The Reader, which could be originally picked up for £10, is now available for £300. Their complete unaffordability makes certain the ideas contained therein stay esoteric. Forms of Inquiry has been credited with popularising ‘critical graphic design,’ a term itself criticised by graphic designer Francisco Laranjo for being vague and subjective, leading him to ask, critical of what? ²⁴ To that, in light of what I have observed in practice to be designers’ bad habit of talking amongst themselves, I would also ask, critical for whom?

The push for criticality since the mid-2000s, underscored in Laranjo’s doctoral research on design methods and criticism at the London College of Communication, nonetheless signalled the discipline’s maturation, marking “an important transition in graphic design practice and education: from the designer as author to the designer as researcher.” ²⁵ The transition speaks to the potential of graphic design as a critical mode of inquiry. More outward focused, there’s been a move in design schools as well as design studios to question graphic design’s value and contribution in connection with the wider world. This matched my experience during my time as a communication design student at Central Saint Martins, in which design projects were posed by students as research questions. Rather than the usual task of problem-solving related to commercial practice, as in finding a design-led or communication-based solution to a client’s problem, graphic designers use their skillset to address pressing issues of today, to set their own design briefs, to provoke and probe, asking new questions or old ones in a new way to produce new knowledge, engaging in what can be called, graphic design research.

As with graphic design history becoming a distinctive field, the road to graphic design research standing on its own feet has also been bumpy. Such a re-positioning and re-framing of the field has been met with resistance in some quarters, in particular in institutional settings for which certain normative rules must be navigated to qualify as ‘intellectual rigour.’ Graphic designer and design educator Rebecca Ross has raised the issue in the debate about what “counts” as research in the academic tradition by contemporary academic conventions and expectations. She makes the case for “a broader reconsideration of the definition and valuation of graphic design research,” arguing that, ²⁶

This research project is a critical inquiry set within this context of discipline and academic recalibration, approached methodologically to think with, and through, communication design. The project is critical of what a public document is—of why and how governments, specifically the GLA, communicate and circulate policy. It contributes new knowledge which is critical for both policymakers and their publics; for the former to better understand the reach and impact of their publications, for the latter on their opportunities to shape discourse through creative engagement with policy documents. In the growing constellation of emerging creative practices, the project also critically locates where additional potential lies for design and research to meaningfully intersect. It contributes new methods which may benefit researchers wishing to expand their ways of working with documents, archives, text and image, and at the same time may benefit designers wishing to ground their practice in academic research’s tradition of intellectual rigour.

There are many graphic designers who critically question the book form. Joshua Trees and Yvan Martinez of Books from the Future, Paul Soullelis, Catherine de Smet and Sara de Bondt, to name a few, have looked at the book as a literary object, an art form and/or a form of resistance, questioning models of book publication. However, there aren’t graphic designers who question the book form of government publications or the publication form that policy documents like the London Plan takes. A policy or planning document isn’t the usual desired object that captures a graphic designer’s attention; nor does it normally pique an architect or planner’s interest about what font size it uses and why. I think it should. Just as urbanism is about more than buildings, graphic design is about more than a font or book.

Fundamentally, for me, the act of city making—and the work of architects, planners and urbanists, and urban scholars and historians—is one of storytelling: how to tell the story of a building, a space or an idea. This is where graphic design, or its more expansive term communication design, can come in, and how it can be used to tell that story in a critical way or to ask critical questions of that story. Via the London Plan, focusing on its publication, the research project opens up what questions can be asked of urbanism through communication design, as well as what questions can be asked of communication design through urbanism, bringing the two fields into closer dialogue. Shannon Mattern, in her exploration of five thousand years of urban media, is attentive to “the role of communication in giving form to our cities.” ²⁷ This project is attentive to the role of communication specific to the London Plan in giving form to London.

To practise communication design as a critical mode of inquiry in urbanism, I am interested in doing so with writing and through text, but in a graphic or visual way. It should be noted that the word graphic comes from the Greek graphe, which means, to write, to draw. Writing is a drawing act. Thus, graphic is a drawing act, a writing act. My work has been centred in an understanding of writing, what it is or could be, somewhat aligned with the work of writer and artist Kenneth Goldsmith on ‘uncreative writing.’ He has highlighted a new condition of writing today that reflects my own graphic-visual practice.

For me, writing is not simply about creating new words, but to question existing ones, to put them in new or different contexts, and locate where they dis/appear: ways of using word processing or databases, how to recycle words, appropriate them, intentionally plagiarize them—all things that for Goldsmith relates to modern technology and machines. It’s part of an emerging practice among designers, writers and artists in the Internet Age to work un/creatively with texts and to use the acts of writing, reading, and publishing—their textual processes—as a way to ask questions about other things.

In this reconfiguring of how we write and read, the movement and placement of texts is just as important as the content. This is something that book artist Johanna Drucker explores in her work, Diagrammatic Writing. ²⁸ She looks at the graphic form and format of texts. Using the space of the page, her work shows how texts can be visualised to reveal hidden meaning or uncover new or alternative ones. She considers how text size, placement, margins, and hierarchy, and the addition or emissions of words can amplify or alter intent. And so, reproduction as production of new knowledge. As it is for others similarly engaged with creative-uncreative writing, these are the things that concern me about texts: their placement, their movement, their form and formats.

Text has become the fruitful material with which I’ve been able to make inquiries into the storytelling of a place and into ‘the pages of space’, in order to ask questions like, who has a right to (write) the city. See Nguyen, Chi (2014). ‘Spatial Stories: Re-Writing King’s Cross’ in Unknown Quantities. My MA explored King’s Cross spatial stories, which was followed up with an experimental publishing project in collaboration with Rebecca Ross, called ‘King’s Cross: Authoring the Neighbourhood.’ Using existing text—developer promotional brochures in one instance and the Wikipedia page on King’s Cross Central in the other—both projects explored questions about: who are the authors of a city or neighbourhood, and who has the authority to write about it? These pages can be the sheets of A4 paper bound together to make up the print copy of the London Plan, or the screen version of its digital copy available in PDF. They can also be the web pages online users navigate to get more information about the Mayor’s other strategies and their relationship to other pages in other documents. These are the pages (with textual content) that would lead to the production of space, that would decide how high developers can build in London, direct where transit will go, or determine how much affordable housing or green space is available.

Additionally, they are the pages where other urban writers write back, which contain different sets of texts with different sets of decisions, directions, and determinations—dis/agreeing, critiquing, or contesting the Mayor’s vision. How these texts and pages come to be assembled or distributed or archived will impact how the debate will go. How documents are designed, what page margins are provided to write in notes, what tools are used to submit texts, will impact the quality of the debate. This form of interrogation—of the juxtapositions, interrelations, and oppositions of text/pages/documents—is what I call publishing as architectural and urban practice: using the space of the page to examine the pages of space.

Publishing as practice, broadly, is a recent development taken up by practitioners across disciplines, notably in the literature and art scenes. Writer Rachel Malik (2008) sees publishing as “constitutive of all formations of writing and reading. Publishing precedes writing and governs the possibilities of reading.” She challenges the dominant notion in literary studies of publishing centred on the book-object and theorises it as “a set of practices, processes, and relations”. ²⁹ Writer and artist Nick Thurston (2012), through exploring the critical and poetic praxis of independent self-publishing for writers, recognises publishing in itself as a specific field of practice and theory, akin to a ‘discipline’ in academia, which can “situate and critique the fluidity, intensity and constancy of the textualities (the qualities and uses of all of the many things we now conflate under the term ‘text’) that are made public in contemporary life.” ³⁰ Literary critic Annette Gilbert (2016) also recognises the ‘practice turn’ happening in the emergence of publishing as artistic practice. ³¹

The experimental practices and inventive displays of reinterpretation they all note, have expanded the concepts, possibilities, and ‘horizons of publishing’ (Malik’s term). Publishing as practice enables a wider engagement with questions of publicness and publics, collectives and commons, mediated environments, reproduction and representation, authority and authorship, and rights and accessibility. Cutting across material and media borders and disciplinary boundaries, experimental publishing facilitates new or alternative ways of thinking, making, and questioning. Concepts developed like Nicholas Thoburn’s ‘anti-book’—defined as a self-reflexive textual work of writing and publishing that critically interrogates its media form—offer examples of how to re-think publication beyond its aesthetic medium and test, problematise and push understanding of materiality. ³² Normative notions of knowledge production and dissemination have been interrupted and redirected, bypassing rote writing and editorial practices, as Goldsmith has signalled, to reconfigure standardised forms of making public.

Like the pattern observed in the Introduction about publishing’s know-show-flow trajectory, the tenor has shifted from creating a publication-as-an-end-product (object) to performing publishing-as-a-verb (action). The new edges to publishing as practice also enable publishing as a research method; alternative, creative ways of interrogating the existing conditions and systems in which contemporary urban life operates. They present an opportunity to re-frame or re-orient public debates about our changing cities. Added together, it is the methodological approach taken here: a communication design examination of the London Plan through a critical mode of inquiry into its making and through the means of publishing-as-practice-as-research.

It’s a process of ‘not-reading reading,’ similar in spirit to the concepts of ‘un-creative’ and ‘anti-book’. To read can mean multiple things: 1) to understand something or someone—I read you loud and clear, 2) to interpret something—a reading of… 3) to be contextually or situationally aware—reading the room, or 4) in the literal sense of, to take in text—reading this page. This research project reads the London Plan 2021 and is a reading of it, by not actually reading it. Of the first three meanings, the project seeks to understand the London Plan and interpret it in the context of its publication, public interactions, and relationship to publics. Of the literal meaning, however, I have not read the London Plan cover to cover. I leave a conventional close reading of the plan to others to debate its content merits. The concern here instead is on reading the texts around the plan, collecting texts written in parallel or next to it, and producing new textual readings by reproducing existing text. Supplementing traditional modes of research are alternative practices, processes, techniques, and tools used to ‘read’ the London Plan.

In this way, I take a page, figuratively speaking, from David Henkin’s exploration of 19th century New York City public life and the role of public reading, and his view on city reading: the idea of cities as spaces of textuality. ³³ Sharing the view of Will Straw, Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University in Montreal, I “also think about cities not [simply] as texts, but as full of various kinds of textuality: a textuality that moves through the city in multiple ways, that attaches itself to walls and buildings, and that circulates through speech.” ³⁴ I treat the London Plan not only as a historical text or artifact in the literal sense, but to contextualise it as part of the textualities, or “textual environments” in Mattern’s terms, that make up the city. ³⁵ The London Plan is assembled texts collected from elsewhere, gathered from the accounts of a variety of publics and published in a wide range of public settings. Where and when these texts appear, or disappear, is as important as the texts themselves.

For the 25th anniversary of Representations, an interdisciplinary journal published by the University of California, Henkin reflected on the relationship between forms and media. In response to the rise of scholarship interest in the 2000s in the history of media, he identified the opportunity for interdisciplinary thinking about form. ³⁶ Where traditional scholarship before has been “concerned with the forms that knowledge and information have taken,” Henkin recognises that modern media studies are necessarily “doubly formalist,” concerned with both “the formal properties of media as well as the formal conditions of mediated messages.” ³⁷ My practical approach to the urban media study of the London Plan follows in that tradition, in this sense, the thesis is doubly formalist to co-analyse the London Plan’s formal properties and formal conditions of communication. Looking at the plan in form-sensitive ways allows for multiple interpretations of it that past content-focused readings alone have limited. Because, per Henkin, “media history, at core, is a study of the forms of circulation,” studying how the London Plan and associated ideas about London circulate will enrich understanding of the “critical relations between individual messages [the GLA produces] and the surfaces and networks along which they travel.” ³⁸

However, a formalist approach does have some shortcomings. The field of media archaeology, for example, is form-focused on the materiality of media and is particularly concerned with nonlinear histories of media. ³⁹ Mattern notes, media archaeologists turn their attention away from traditional interpretations of what’s on the page and screen and toward the page and screen themselves to focus on the hardware of media. But as Mattern highlights, one criticism of such emphasis on format and the technical means, is that they overlook the human experience in mediated spaces and “often bracket out not only the people with which, but also the environments within which, those media interact.” ⁴⁰ She adapts instead an urban media archaeology approach to examine the material history and culture of the mediated city, recognising what archaeologists-proper know well, that “artifacts don’t exist apart from their material environments and human agents; that ‘what is actually there’ in the archaeological field is not so easily extracted from its context and then reduced to data through clinical analysis.” ⁴¹ Thus, “what is actually there” in the London Plan isn’t reducible to only what is on the page or screen. For this project then, I am reading the London Plan off page and off screen too.

Considering the criticality of context, the opening chapter, Chapter 1 Public Planning, starts us off-page by surveying the public conditions with which London and the London Plan came into being, effected by the political climate and the institutional arrangements of a public planning system and a publicly elected Mayoral system. The first of many publics the thesis explores, the chapter puts down some initial visual markers for how to read the London Plan’s publicness relative to its various textualities.