TY - JOUR

T1 - Ruins of the Smart City

T2 - A Visual Intervention

AU - Fraser, Emma

AU - Wilmott, Clancy

N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Visual Communication, 19 (3), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Visual Communication page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/VCJ on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/

PY - 2020/8/1

Y1 - 2020/8/1

N2 - The visual imaginary of the future city is increasingly dichotomised between visions of hyper-technological digital urbanism and the city in a state of ruin, without people, overtaken by nature. These alternating imaginaries key into concerns over urban futures, as questions of sustainability and rising inequality come to bear on urban life. Such binary imaginaries produce volumes of visual material, lauding and critiquing philosophies of newness, endless progress and the city without decline. This article uses an inventive visual methodology to ask how these imaginaries become situated in the everyday ecologies of living. This methodology focuses on several so-called “brownfield” sites in Salford, United Kingdom; and the “smart” Oxford Road corridor in neighbouring Manchester, to playfully and visually map the entanglement of digital urban ecologies, through the themes of wilderness, play, and compost. These three themes relate to the pleasure of urban wilderness described by Rose Macaulay, reflecting on London’s wild ruins after the second world war; the playful contrast between smart urbanism and urban wastelands, understood through interdisciplinary visual methods; and Haraway’s notion of compost as the fertile ground of collaboration that marks a material-semiotic entanglement between place, people, and nature. We investigate how these frameworks reflect the diversity of urban ecology; animals, plants and humans) might provide an alternative vision of how the city could be, a vision built from how the city currently is.

AB - The visual imaginary of the future city is increasingly dichotomised between visions of hyper-technological digital urbanism and the city in a state of ruin, without people, overtaken by nature. These alternating imaginaries key into concerns over urban futures, as questions of sustainability and rising inequality come to bear on urban life. Such binary imaginaries produce volumes of visual material, lauding and critiquing philosophies of newness, endless progress and the city without decline. This article uses an inventive visual methodology to ask how these imaginaries become situated in the everyday ecologies of living. This methodology focuses on several so-called “brownfield” sites in Salford, United Kingdom; and the “smart” Oxford Road corridor in neighbouring Manchester, to playfully and visually map the entanglement of digital urban ecologies, through the themes of wilderness, play, and compost. These three themes relate to the pleasure of urban wilderness described by Rose Macaulay, reflecting on London’s wild ruins after the second world war; the playful contrast between smart urbanism and urban wastelands, understood through interdisciplinary visual methods; and Haraway’s notion of compost as the fertile ground of collaboration that marks a material-semiotic entanglement between place, people, and nature. We investigate how these frameworks reflect the diversity of urban ecology; animals, plants and humans) might provide an alternative vision of how the city could be, a vision built from how the city currently is.

KW - compost

KW - Donna Haraway

KW - ecologies

KW - play

KW - Rose Macaulay

KW - Shannon Mattern

KW - smart city

KW - visual methodology

U2 - 10.1177/1470357220919265

DO - 10.1177/1470357220919265

M3 - Journal article

VL - 19

SP - 353

EP - 368

JO - Visual Communication

JF - Visual Communication

SN - 1470-3572

IS - 3

ER -