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  • SI Ruins of the Smart City FINAL FraserWilmott

    Rights statement: 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/

    Accepted author manuscript, 13.9 MB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Ruins of the Smart City: A Visual Intervention

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/08/2020
<mark>Journal</mark>Visual Communication
Issue number3
Volume19
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)353-368
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date26/05/20
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

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.

Bibliographic note

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/