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
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
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 -