Key Points for a Visual Ethnography of Architectural Design and Urban Planning

This essay is intended above all for architects and urban planners. It describes the potentials in their respective fields of an ethnographic and, in particular, visual anthropological approach. In the first part of the text I will offer a summary description, useful above all to non-anthropologists, of the ethnographic method. I will also present a selection of keywords I consider particularly useful to establishing a dialogue between anthropology and the disciplines of architecture and urban planning. Finally, from among the growing number of experiments, I will propose a selection that may serve as models of diverse ethnographic approaches to the analysis and design of urban spaces.