In 2017 the fifth iteration of the International Visual Methods Conference was held at the Singapore Institute of Technology.

The theme, 'Visualising the City', brought together more than 110 participants from 26 different countries, with a combination of paper presentations, art exhibitions and walking workshops. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the conference theme sought submissions from the arts, humanities, social sciences and hard sciences.

This special issue of Visual Ethnography follows on from the conference theme, in which the contributions, again drawn from a diverse set of disciplines, approaches and theories, considers how (and why) we visualise global urban environments, and what are the implications for such methods. In this introduction we reflect on the conference’s theme, keynotes and papers, and how these have led to the formation of the issue. We seek to contextualise the issue’s articles and photo-essays within theories of visual methods in the social science and the city, and propose that visual methods in ethnographic traditions have particular strengths in revealing urban place-making through everyday praxis, subtle resistance and deliberate narratives.