Open City: these two words put together might evoke welcome and spatial breadth, conjuring up urban images devoid of barriers. But they may also be understood as a plea to literally open the city: to make it truly accessible, public, shared, and inclusive. In a war, Open City refers to a city declaring itself taken, the city becoming an “open city,”‘ abdicating to avoid further destruction. As a prefix qualifying the “city,” Open City also recalls other urban movements and their representations – Garden City, Ordinary City, Just City, Rebel City, Happy City, or the promised Smart City, one that itself brings forth other forms of connectedness and openness, namely, data-driven systems and responses that can be either open-source or proprietary. Open City might resides in the world of ideas: Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Virilio’s City of Panic, Branzi’s No-Stop City, or Ballard’s The Concentration City all bring forth crucial theories of collective human habitation. Open City may also conjure cities as a cherished topic of utopia which architects and urban thinkers have envisioned throughout history – critiquing, challenging, speculating, re-inventing, or exposing the cities’ foundations, systems, and networks – representations that open the city up to alternately challenge hierarchies and expose failures.

In other words:

    Open City is open to interpretation.

    Open City is yours to define.

    Open City is an invitation, an open invitation to rethink the city, or to lay its realities “open” for all to see, as though you are performing upon it a vivisection that exposes its innerworking – with all its beauties and miseries.

    Open City, this years’ Murray & Murray Drawing prompt, asks you to look at the city, a city, this city, or an imagined city—past or present. You may focus on any surface, corner, street, park, building, neighborhood, public, or protected space you wish, and … open it up to show us what you would like us to see.