Urban iconography is focused on the city, a complex and dynamic artifact, whose forms are a transparent medium of social ideas, individual and collective needs, like dwelling or gathering for religious, economic or political purposes, needs to which different societies gave different answers.
After the exploration and the surveys of the iconography of single towns, research shifted to methodology, language, techniques, instruments, the relationship between word and image and between material structure and representation.
Promising research fields are opening up through the use of computer data processing, and the comparative study on the representation of urban space seems to be one of the next frontiers.
Collections of images of single towns began to appear the beginning of the twentieth century, but more recently urban iconography has been recognized as a methodology of research.
Dal Rinascimento al secolo XVIII, Einaudi, Torino 2011; H. Ballon, D. Friedman, Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe: Measurement, Representation, and Planning, in Cartography in the European Renaissance, a cura di.