Manchester, NH, USA IV, 2020

This drawing presents an aerial view of Manchester rendered in soft graphite, emphasizing the city’s more idealized and picturesque elements. The viewpoint is drawn from Google Maps, offering a perspective unavailable at street level and commonly used to assess cities from a distance.

Overlaying this landscape is a diagram outlining key elements of successful placemaking, framing the city as a target to be evaluated. From this macro view, Manchester appears to contain many of the qualities often celebrated by urban planners and designers. At the same time, this perspective reflects how cities are frequently understood in simplified terms, shaped by data, diagrams, and visual appeal rather than lived experience.

Set against the more granular drawings in this series, the work raises a critical question. Without addressing inequity, the language of placemaking masks deeper structural failures.