The optics of dispossession: urban precarity as political art

How are conditions of urban dispossession sustained and perpetuated by the way peoples on the margins of the world economy are imagined and brought to public visibility? With a focus on the works of European artists, this article explores the image-making projects whereby ghettos, shanty communities and favelas are represented as iconic lifeworlds of the poor. Competing representations of urban poverty are manufactured for public attention by aesthetic, symbolic and affective means, ranging from a romance of despair or humanitarian compassion to a nostalgic longing for premodern signs of a deprived but simpler life. In contrast to the racialised human form, which is central to iconographies of the North American Black ghetto, the shanty-town inhabitants and city builders of the Global South are typically rendered visually absent: a tropology of people’s disempowerment and dispossession. Although often encoded by a critique of intensifying inequalities, the globalised traffic in urban poverty-art relies on an image-making process that is grounded in a detachment from social life. The representations of urban dispossession tend to produce a repertoire of free-floating emblems and signs that can be variously deployed, assembled, appropriated and discarded. Such visual templates are globally consumed as works of art that can alter urban imaginaries, encourage tourism and local economic development as much as neoliberal subjectification. After analysing a range of such artistic endeavours, this article concludes by focusing attention on how an image-maker’s commitment to humanising optics of urban dispossession can transform non-representational art to become a practice of truth.

Artificial Landscape: in search of publicness through urban spectacle in Hong Kong

Screen technologies increasingly permeate the experience of public space in Hong Kong. Large media walls have occupied the façades of many buildings, rendering a cityscape with dynamic information visible as a new urban skin. This article is a case study on Artificial Landscape, a site-specific media art project located on Asia Pacific’s largest LED outdoor screen. The case sets an example of how a public screen can serve as a mediating agent. It provides an opportunity for artists to provoke absent ideas in the public space and explore subversive potential, including critical reflection on issues surrounding surveillance, consumerism and rapid urban growth. The case also exemplifies how a public screen can mediate the public to experience an alternative context through artistic intervention, where negotiations of perceptions and subjectivities are made possible. This article provides insights into a public screen’s mode of spectatorship, quality of public space and curatorial strategies in an urban context. This is achieved by illustrating how various artworks extend the notion of publicness and remediate the mutually constitutive relationship among the built environment, media technologies, artists, public and everyday encounters.

Enchanted encounters: moving images, public art and an ethical sense of place

This article examines site-specific moving images, particularly public artworks that engage windows and monuments as cinematic screens. Employing the concept of enchantment and Doreen Massey’s notion of a ‘global sense of place’, this article analyses how the physical experience of moving image media in public places can enrich and complicate our understanding of place. Artworks by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ofri Cnaani, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Tony Oursler are explored, in addition to recent protest projections and critical and theoretical investigations of place and enchantment.

Projection art and projection activism

This article explores the use of unauthorised projection-based artworks and messages as a form of activism, and as contextual street art. The issues of authority and permission that are central to the political nature of street art are unique in the case of projection artworks as the ephemeral and temporary nature of light-based installations skirt some of the fundamental objections to most street art and graffiti such as the damage to physical surfaces. Through the changes imposed on urban forms by light projections, the city is described as an animate entity, with various forces animating the surface at different timescales. The effect of street art is to democratise the alterations of the animate urban surface, and the effect of projection-based street art is to further democratise access to protected visual spaces, and to accelerate its animate nature.

‘Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global’: Writing Space in the Arab Gulf Region

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar are taking the lead in the urbanization boom that is drastically transforming the spatial fabric of the Arab Gulf region. Embedded in the ambitious urban development projects launched by the UAE and Qatar is an endeavour to ‘bring the world to the Arab Gulf region’. To this end, these two states are engaged in a process of collecting and borrowing antique objects and canonized artefacts, as well as reproducing and duplicating some internationally celebrated architectural sites and spaces. While some consider these projects to be ‘part of strategies to prepare for the post-oil era’, others hold that ‘Arab Gulf States aim to strengthen or … creatively (re)construct identitarian patterns’.1 It can be argued that Arab Gulf cities should be looked at as ‘political actors’ due to ‘the functions they fulfill as spatial command posts for globalized capitalism’.2 The production and organization of social space, in this sense, cannot be seen as a ‘dead’ or passive category with no influence over various dimensions of lived experience, including thought, politics and economy. Juxtaposing the UAE’s and Qatar’s urbanization projects with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of world exhibitions and fairs, this article takes the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Villaggio Mall as case studies to investigate the modalities of knowledge generated through processes of cultural and spatial (re)production and the impact of the latter on the construction of personhood and lived experience in the Arab Gulf region.

Tasteful Bunkers: Shades of Race and ‘Contamination’ in Luxury Design Sectors

In the days following the onslaught of the COVID-19 global pandemic, it became clear that this humanitarian health crisis would be accompanied by a financial crisis. In response to these inevitabilities, the industries that make up the consumer design sector – interior design, decor, architecture, fashion and so on – quickly turned their attention to aestheticizing our new, increasingly private and isolationist realities, launching advertising campaigns and editorials to address these new realities. Work-from-home edits, new ‘home office’ collections, wardrobes for video conferencing and ‘digital gallery hopping’ campaigns all began encouraging consumers to accessorize their domestic spaces as a bulwark against the threats marking urban environments and their contaminated bodies; bodies that, through the notion of ‘contamination’, drag along a set of inescapable racial and class-based assumptions. Echoing the ways in which interior design, architecture and media enabled America’s ‘white flight’ and suburbanization in the 1950s, luxury retailers are again inviting privileged populations to retreat and design their homes as comfortable bunkers, full of the accessories of art, travel and public life, without the risk of actual encounter. In this article, I argue that these luxury industries are complicit in renewing a post-pandemic racialization of urban space. In the contemporary moment, the luxury design industry’s entreaties to (re)design our homes to accommodate a newly public life led in private amounts to a symbolic suburbanization founded in the fear of ‘contaminated’ racialized bodies.

Revisiting Jane Jacobs’s Urban Complexity in Global Sustainability City Discourse

Since the 1990s, a recurrent trope of the ‘global sustainable city’ has emerged in popular and professional discussions of globalization, sustainable development and urban innovation. Published in commercial publications and grey literature on policy, design and global trends, the trope is also articulated in a genre of trade books by urban consultants and in public showcases that project the city as a socially, economically and environmentally beneficial entity – a sustainable complex system that is even promoted to be humanity’s best hope for solving the global ecological problems of the twenty-first century. This article traces how urbanist Jane Jacobs’s notion of urban complexity becomes an allusive reference in examples of popular global sustainability discourse that present the city as an evolutionary self-organizing entity of systemic networks and physical flows. It examines urban economist Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, and Greener (2011), urbanist Leo Hollis’s Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis (2013) and urban strategist Jeb Brugmann’s Welcome to the Urban Revolution (2009), as well as the smart building showcase of engineering multinational conglomerate Siemens, The Crystal. The article demonstrates how the trope of urban complexity is mobilized to project the city as a generic scalable entity of creativity and energy efficiency. It becomes the basis of an infrastructural imaginary of neoliberal innovation that supports entrepreneurial and ‘smart-eco’ agendas of urban design and governance that promise – but have yet to deliver – planetary ecological amelioration.

The Death and Life of UK Universities and the Cultural Spaces They Consume

The shift in focus in UK higher education since Thatcherism from the production of knowledge for civic betterment to the production and consumption of knowledge by the university for revenue generation can be read through the social rearrangement of space in the university town or city. A key spatial reconfiguration emerging from the shift in economic conditions is the collapse of the modern university as a singular, ideological construct. Like ‘the city’ before it, the modern university has, at its interior, been reformed into a newly defined, fragmented public–private social space, and, at its exterior, into a devourer of the space of the local community. This article showcases excerpts from a film made by the authors entitled The Death and Life of UK Universities – a title inspired by Jane Jacobs’s critique of great American cities. Our film is a cinematic database survey of the changing space of all British universities which considers this systematic spatial reprogramming of space within the city. The two-year research project is an audio-visual critique of the way in which neoliberalism, corporatization and commercial interests have co-opted the space of the British university. Referencing the films of Charlie Chaplin and Gordon Matta-Clark and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, the film focuses on university cities, critically observing the rise of university marketing material and the consumption of the city and of local community life for university student accommodation. We ask: How are UK universities being spatially reconfigured and what are the consequences?

Roleplaying to Improve Resilience

This article presents an approach to improve urban resilience by examining crisis dynamics through a role-playing game. The set of exploratory exercises extend the Archaria 2035 scenario and geographic information system model, which was developed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to advance concepts that support military operations. Participants (graduate students) worked in teams to identify and map critical relationships related to health, safety and welfare through a modified version of the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information (PMESII) framework. Next, each participant was given a one-page stakeholder profile that specified motives, kinds and degrees of influence, and connections to other stakeholders. This information was used to create maps that showed how each character understood the city. Crisis event details were revealed a day-and-a-half before the game. NATO staff contributed to the event by presenting courses of action to restore security and order. Participants gave opinions on how their characters might act during the event and react to the proposed military operations. Conversations created temporary collaborations among some stakeholders but also conflicts among others that could create additional problems. A post-game assignment asked participants to write memos on specific policies and plans that would reduce vulnerability to the crisis. As a matter of pedagogy, results the demonstrate the value of role-playing to consider multiple perspectives and second- and third-order effects of a crisis. Specifically, connecting gameplay conversations and results back to initial ideas about health, safety and welfare contributed to reconsiderations of assumptions about contingent relationships.