Visualizing city incompleteness: Incremental urban change in Central Sydney 1965–2020

Urban theorists and observers have pointed towards a persistent if elusive character of incompleteness within cities. This paper responds to these ideas both theoretically and visually. Building on a definition of incompleteness as encompassing a perceptual absence or missing, the paper addresses a gap in theoretical understanding of how incompleteness can be critically understood and depicted as a temporal urban process. The focus goes beyond a singular state or built quality towards continuums of re-construction, fragmentation and re-imagination. These notions inform a practice-driven interrogation of incompleteness in graphic terms. The case study is a five decade microhistory of ongoing change in a central city block in Sydney, Australia. An approach to analytical and speculative drawing is presented to enable a conceptual and analytical investigation of incompleteness as a regenerative process of city-making.