Land Survey Through Description and Beyond Description

The importance of description in urban and territorial research faces with the specificity of urban studies and requires peculiar tools of research. Photography, both in the form of street photography and social landscape photography, offers a good way to detect all those visible and invisible elements of passive and active segregation, thanks to its capability to keep together social and physical environment. The Rom camps and gated communities of in-between Milan’s territories are two typical cases of such research fields where public life cannot—or does not—want to fully show itself because of fear or discretion. Often, imposed segregation and self-segregation are not visible in maps, statistics, reports or testimonies but they still shape society and landscape. Even when openly declared, segregation has hidden aspects that must be detected through its physical reflection. Additional signs of segregation can be characterized by the use of land, the design of public and private space, norms and rules, messages, ways of moving and establishing or refusing relations. All this flow of data and outcomes must also go beyond description to find new ways to represent this complexity; on this matter visual figures probably offer a good opportunity to resume the intricacy and all the different territorial models’ implications into images.