Print City is a monumental, immersive installation built from hundreds of huge, hand-printed cardboard blocks that slot together to form an abstract urban landscape.  

The striking, monochrome designs and patterns were created through a series of public workshops held in Dundee, Scotland. In these workshops, citizens were asked to draw their visions of the city. Through pattern, mark making and drawing they visualised important stories, places or buildings and considered what their future city might be like.

The result is a vast cardboard city where visitors can walk through its streets or sit in its park, interact with others and experience new spaces. 

Print Festival Scotland is a collaboration between Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and the University of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD).  Print City was first staged as part of Dundee Design Festival.

This exhibition is the result of collaboration between the cities of Bilbao and Dundee within the framework of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, to which both cities belong.

Dundee was designated a UNESCO City of Design in 2014. Design has always been in the heart, mind and soul of Dundee. 

It is a city with a rich and varied design heritage in the fields of print and comics; textiles and fashion; electronics and digital gaming; medicine and medical research; and urban planning. Yet it is a city, like many around the world, which has suffered from post-industrial decline and the social and economic challenges associated with it. 

Through an ambitious £1bn waterfront regeneration, strong leadership and a fundamental understanding of the value of culture to successful places, Dundee is now known as the UK’s ‘coolest little city’.

Today, Dundee is recognised as a city which is bold, ambitious and committed to using design to address both the inequalities and opportunities that exist in the city. Dundee is engaging citizens in design, embedding design in services and championing Dundee’s designers locally and globally to ensure that the city is one of the best places in the world to live. 

As the UK’s first and only UNESCO City of Design, city partners uphold the values of UNESCO and publicly champion our commitment to placing design at the heart of our local development plans and to global cooperation working towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Dundee’s UNESCO City of Design designation is delivered through Dundee Partnership and supported by Abertay University, Creative Dundee, Dundee City Council, Northwood Charitable Trust, Leisure & Culture Dundee, University of Dundee and V&A Dundee.

In addition, the same space, in which this exhibition-intervention will be on display, will also host an installation created by designers and artists from this city, called Spheel.