The Open City Studio is an itinerant architecture and urbanism summer workshop focused on illustrating the influence of popular culture and folklore in the definition of communities worldwide. The drawings of The Open City Studio, collected from the workshops conducted since 1990 in fifteen different cities in the United States and communities across the world, constitute a comparative urban design series describing the extent to which the circumstantial and the vernacular appropriate and shape urban form and identity. The program has provided an opportunity for American students of Architecture and Urbanism to engage diverse communities and cultures globally and describe their experiences in drawings.
The Open City Studio has studied cities as different as New London, Cape Town, Mumbai, India, Shanghai, Kyoto and Tokyo, to name a few.
The drawings of the Open City Studio are a collection of digital and hand drawn illustrations of the salient and emblematic elements characteristic of particular communities and includes, in addition to buildings and urban places, elements of folklore, flora, fauna and popular culture
