Communicating the “world-class” city: a visual-material approach

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate my visual-material approach to researching the urban built environment as a medium of communication in its own right. Specifically, I discuss my research on second-tier cities with 'world-class' aspirations, which highlights the significance of both symbolic and material resources in processes of urban regeneration and redevelopment. A visual-material approach draws not only from social semiotics and multimodality, but also from critical and material rhetoric to engage with the ways in which increasingly widespread 'formats' of urban regeneration and redevelopment are mobilized to transform the urban built environment in the service of a globally appealing aesthetic. In doing so, this is also an approach that illuminates the dialectical relationship between cities' perceived necessity to appear competitive on a heavily mediatized global stage and to intervene on their landscape in ways that mediate the everyday lives of urban communities in lasting ways.

Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

“…'Ugly' architecture and the pluralities of un-Instagrammable urban aesthetics Scholars have written extensively about how the circulation of urban images via social media conditions urban desires and imaginaries in ways that inform reconfigurations of urban material aesthetics (Aiello, 2021;Degen and Rose, 2022). The rising circulation of digital-visual content via platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok shapes visual signatures of urban built environments by amplifying demands for and expectations of 'Instagrammability' that ensure social media circulations (Bronsvoort and Uitermark, 2021;Jennings, 2019;Rose and Willis, 2019).…”

“…More than a simple problem of theoretical vocabularies, we understand this to be a challenge of identifying and devising fundamentally new epistemological orientations that allow us to reclaim ‘frankenbikes’ and related urban materialities, practices, and artefacts as generative fissures within the logics of computation that exceed the tightly bounded normative imaginaries of digital mediations of cities as the preserve of the urban elite. We respond to this challenge by advancing the glitch as an epistemological vector for apprehending the significance of urban spatialities that appear not to reconcile with theoretical metanarratives or conditioned expectations of digitally mediated urban presences, aesthetics, and practices, yet which are nevertheless digitally mediated (transduced by digitality) and/or mediatized (circulated via digital media platforms; Aiello, 2021).…”

Platforms and/as urban communication: Mediums, content, context

“…The first strand focuses primarily on cities as sites and ‘collections of different modes [and media] of communication’ (Gendelman & Aiello, 2010, p. 257), including telecommunications infrastructures (e.g., Graham & Marvin, 2002), electronic and digital screens (e.g., Krajina, 2014; McQuire, 2008), and locative media (e.g., de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012). In contrast to these engagements focusing specifically on the presences of communication media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in cities, a second strand of urban communication research instead engages urban built environments as constituting forms of communication in their own right (Aiello, 2021a, 2021b; Gendelman & Aiello, 2010; Tosoni & Aiello, 2020). In this latter vein, scholars foreground how built environments express, reproduce, and also have the capacity to reconfigure hegemonic ideologies and social relations of race, class, capital, and other vectors of structural differentiation that shape urban denizens' everyday life spaces, practices, mobility patterns, experiences, and opportunities (Aiello, 2021a; Aiello & Tosoni, 2016; Dickinson & Aiello, 2016).…”

“…Urban communication work is methodologically diverse, spanning rhetorical, semiotic, somatic, multi‐modal, and indexical approaches (for a representative cross‐section, see Aiello, 2021a; Dickinson & Ott, 2017; Gendelman & Aiello, 2010). Scholarly engagements that focus on the urban built environment as communicative nevertheless overwhelmingly recognise urban communication to be inherently material.…”

“…As I empirically show, engaging with observable instances of platformisation in the urban built environment via this heuristic nuances our understandings of how platform enterprises and platform technology capital secure and sustain themselves in cities by aligning and deploying material resources that have become part of the fabric of urban built environments. That these materialities communicate – and how and what they communicate – matter because material traces of platformisation constitute the ‘physical, observable, and always shifting manifestations’ of how platform enterprises and platform technology capital both shape and are shaped by the social‐material fabrics of cities (Aiello, 2021a; Dickinson & Aiello, 2016, p. 1295).…”