Picturing place: The 596 Acres posters visualise all the publicly owned vacant land in Brooklyn and encourage neighbours to organise to request access

Picturing place: The mass cultural appeal of the exhibition and film helped enthuse the public to trust the future of the city to planner Patrick Abercrombie and architect JH Forshaw

Picturing place: The demolition of the Pruitt Igoe social housing project in St Louis is held as stark evidence of the failure of modernism, yet it cannot convey the social, political and economic mix that lay behind the unfortunate conditions at the complex

Picturing place: Lance Wyman’s pictorial system for Mexico City’s metro created visual links between familiar surface spaces and the more abstract subterranean space

Picturing place: The Three Magnets diagram has travelled widely since its original publication in 1898, but divorced from its original text the image has often been mis-read, highlighting the ease with which images can be isolated from their original context and be mobilised in new ways

Picturing place: In an age of intense competition between the world’s cities, authorities are focused on presenting a particular image for global consumption

Picturing place: The man-made islands of Palm Jumeirah appear to grow out of the coastline when viewed from space – this just amplifies the development’s significance to our built environment

Picturing place: A map can seem a simple thing, yet the act of holding it, studying and discussing the contents illuminates how they operate as practical and rhetorical tools for control, as demonstrated in South Africa during apartheid