Pedram Dibazar – författare

From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized. Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies — From Hong Kong's streets to Rio's favelas, from Sydney's suburbs to London's street markets, and from Damascus' war-torn streets to Istanbul's sidewalks — and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.

In Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran, Pedram Dibazar argues that everyday life in Iran is a rich domain of social existence and cultural production. Regular patterns of day-to-day practice in Iran are imbued with forms of expressivity that are unmarked and inconspicuous, but have remarkable critical value for a cultural study of contemporary society. Blended into the rhythms of everyday life are nonconformist modes of presence, subtle in their visibility and non-confrontational in their resistance to the established societal norms and structures. This volume is about such everyday tactics and creativity as lived in space, visualised in cultural forms and communicated through media.Through its analysis of familiar everyday experiences, Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran covers a wide range of ordinary practices—such as walking, driving, shopping and doing or watching sports—and spatial conditions—such as streets, cars, rooftops, shopping centres and stadiums. It also explores a variety of cultural formations, including film, photography, architecture, literature, visual arts, television and digital media. This book offers new ways of thinking about visual and urban cultures by highlighting a politics of everyday life that is conditioned on concerns over visibility and presence.