The Visible City Project seeks to understand the different roles that artists play in imagining and helping to design 21st century cities. The project seeks to discern how art practices function in specific contemporary urban contexts as a tool for enhancing communication and renovating democratic citizenship. They investigates how art practices function in specific contemporary urban contexts to educate about and transform the experience of urban dwelling in light of the changing technological, economic and cultural experiencesof globalization.

Christopher Smith says:

As the contemporary cityscape becomes increasingly characterized by capitalist social relations mediated by postmodern permutations of the spectacle and monitored/regulated by the repressive regime of ubiquitous panoptical surveillance, there is an ever more urgent, critical need for creative, playful interventions that construct and present alternate ways of seeing, imagining and engaging with the city. By inter/dis-rupting and intentionally intervening in the everyday order of contemporary urban life, interventions are responsible for constructing new and creative models for what Guy Debord called the “conscious alteration of everyday life,” actively seeking to create moments of autonomy and sites of resistance, however fleeting, fragmentary, transitory or ephemeral. As a response to privatization, militarization, sanitization, and other imposed practices of hypercapitalist urban redevelopment, urban interventions provide instances in and through which to creatively re-imagine—and thereby re-construct and re-inhabit—the city.