A Statement from the Periphery

In the context of urban research centered on informality and peripheral urbanization, drawing is not just a method, it is a way of seeing, knowing, and resisting. It challenges dominant narratives of city-making by offering an embodied, situated, and justice-oriented lens. Far from being a decorative or secondary technique, drawing becomes a fundamental epistemological practice: a way to imagine otherwise.

Drawing, as we propose, is not the same as designing. While design often carries a mandate to implement change or resolve problems, drawing operates at a different pace. It begins with observation, not intervention. It opens a space of inquiry that is reflective rather than prescriptive. It slows down the researcher, inviting them into a process of sensing and making sense of the built world. This difference is particularly significant when working with informal and peripheral territories, spaces often misunderstood or flattened by conventional tools of urban analysis.

Unlike mapping, which tends to align with scientific objectivity and quantitative precision, drawing embraces ambiguity and contradiction. Yet it is far from imprecise. When parameterized, it allows researchers to synthesize site observations, spatial analysis, testimonies, historical traces, and affective knowledge into one layered image. In this sense, drawing becomes a non-trivial form of cartography, one that reveals the invisible logics of space, power, and time.

Drawing is deeply rooted in spatial thinking. It foregrounds the everyday spatialities of urban life: circulation patterns, informal economies, architectures of survival. It helps researchers register the physical expression of complex systems—those often neglected or misrepresented in official plans and statistics. Importantly, drawing does not aim to fix a final image, but to order thought and to question. A drawing can uncover layered temporalities, interruptions, and erasures. It can become its own archive, constantly evolving with new insights.

Inspired by artists and collectives who use drawing as an investigative tool, research by drawing seeks to recognize the unseen, document the marginal, and challenge dominant aesthetics of power. 

It is about placing oneself within the urban condition, not as a distant analyst, but as a witness, a participant, a thinker with a pencil. It is a method that holds space for doubt, that draws in tension, and that always asks: what are we not seeing? In the study of urban peripheries and informal spaces, drawing invites us to slow down and look again. Not to fix the world, but to understand it more justly.

To cite this:

d'Avila, R. (2025). Research by Drawing: A statement from the periphery. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15761923

Wall atlas, a repository of research by drawing practices

What we consider drawing to be

1. Drawing as the starting point

2. Looking otherwise: sense of social environmental justice in our practice using drawing to see

3. Drawing differs from designing and mapping.

4. Above all, drawing is an essential tool for researchers—architects, urbanists, landscape architects, and others.

5. Drawing can be a parametrized qualitative way of research (learning from data driven research) 

6. Drawing as a local and justice centered way of research  

What can drawing be

1. Agency of drawing (Not drawing things, drawing is a thing)

2. Drawing can engage the question of temporality, althoug it is generaly a static media. 

3. Drawing can be seen and read in diferente ways

4. Several processes of research can be put toghether trough drawing: spatial analisys, site visit, interviews, aerial view.

5. Embody the spatial dimension as a center discussion.

Some guiding questions:

1. How do artists use drawing as an investigative tool to reveal information that would otherwise remain unseen and unnoticed? 

2. How does drawing add shape to ideas?  

3. How does the artist accommodate to the challenges and restraints of a particular environment?  

4. To what extent is a drawing complementary and continuous with its subject and where is it disruptive and provocative?