Strange Places is an art exhibition that is looking to pull off the difficult trick of melding academic discourse with art. The show, made up a series of photographs of cities from across the globe, is taking place at Kingston University's Stanley Picker Gallery with curator Alexandra Stara looking to explore the theory of alternative urbanism and how it is represented through art.

“Alternative urbanism is a new way of looking at how cities are understood, made and analysed,” she explains. “The way this was done in the twentieth century was seen as an exact science, something that was analytical, precise and based on number crunching. The problem with that is it is souless and reduces the richness of a city, which is a place to live in and all of the ambiguites that entails.”

Stara, a principal in architecture and landscape at Kingston University, hopes the work that she has collated by artists including Hannah Collins, Thomas Weinberger and Steffi Klenz, will give visitors to the Stanley Picker a chance to look at cityscapes from a fresh point of view.

“It is not about photographing action and people which has been a very done thing from the 60s onwards,” she says. “It is about spaces that are unusual and have a strangeness to them.

“There are many emerging artists who are becoming increasingly interested in photographing fragments of a city, buildings and in between spaces that are different from the conventional architectural photography and urban photography we are used to.”

The exhibition was dreamed up by its curator when Stara noticed the correlation between this particular academic theory and the work of a number of photographers, who she later approached about being included in the show.

“Some of the artists exhibiting in Strange Places are aware of the trend of alternative urbanism but crucially some of them weren't,” she adds. “It is not like they are all reading books on the subject and are then thinking let's do some art to represent those ideas - I think rather it is a spontaneous interpretation that is interesting to me because of what it is says about our culture.”

The list of cities photographed for the exhibition is a diverse one featuring many unusual images, including shots of New York, London and Dubai City - an element to the show that Stara says is vital to an understanding of alternative urbanism.

“It was importance of me to have as broad a range as possible because this trend I'm identifying is international and surprisingly coherent. While I'm not saying it is a method or religion, the main themes in the work are very similar and that means I'm confident in talking about this new trend.”

Strange Places, Stanley Picker Gallery, Faculty of Art and Design, Kingston University, until November 21, kingston.ac.uk/picker/gallery