Urban Fragments

Between Citizenship and Consumption

Faranak Tiba
(faranak.tiba@gmail.com)

Artist Statement

The historical idea of the city in Western culture has long been closely linked to the concept of citizenship. From the Greek polis to the modern European city, urban space was understood as a place where citizens could meet, interact, and participate in the shaping of collective life. Streets, markets, squares, and neighborhoods formed the spatial foundation of civic identity and community.

In many contemporary urban environments, however, this relationship between the city and citizenship appears increasingly fragile. Urban space is often shaped by economic investment, tourism, and large-scale events rather than by everyday civic practices. Global financial architecture, commercial districts, and festival infrastructures increasingly define the visual and spatial character of city centres.

This shift also changes how people inhabit urban space. Where older urban imaginaries emphasised proximity, neighbourhood life, and shared routines, many present-day city cores are organised around short-term presence: visitors, event audiences, and transient flows. Even when people gather, participation can become more performative than civic, structured by curated experiences, commercial formats, and decisions made by limited institutional or private actors, rather than by citizens themselves.

This photographic essay reflects on fragments of these transformations across different European urban contexts. Some images depict corporate skylines and contemporary architectural landmarks that signal the dominance of global economic forces. Others show markets, restaurants, and urban festivities where public space becomes intertwined with consumption and spectacle.

At the same time, quieter scenes of empty streets, narrow passages, and human-scale urban details reveal another dimension of the city-spaces that still carry traces of older urban structures oriented toward everyday life. These images suggest both continuity and loss: the persistence of urban form, and the weakening of the social relations that once animated it.

By juxtaposing these urban moments, the project asks a question that has become increasingly relevant in contemporary urban theory: if the city is no longer primarily organised around the needs and agency of its citizens, what remains of its civic meaning?

Rather than offering a definitive answer, the photographs invite reflection on the tension between different urban logics: the city as a place of belonging, encounter, and lived routines, and the city as a landscape of investment, tourism, and programmed spectacle.

Author Bio

Faranak Tiba is a digital designer based in Sweden with a background in graphic design and visual communication. Photography is a personal practice through which she observes cities and everyday urban life.

She is particularly interested in how people move through urban spaces, how they interact with one another, and how architecture and design shape the atmosphere of a place. Her photographs capture moments that reveal different faces of contemporary cities.