Abstract
In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story My Cousin’s Corner Window (1822), the narrator visits his sick, disabled cousin in Berlin who lives in a flat overlooking the Theaterplatz. The story turns around the cousin’s observation of the goings-on in the street below, and his attempt to teach his visitor ‘the art of observation’ (die Kunst zu schauen). Like much of the work of the German Romantics in general and Hoffmann in particular, there is an almost prophetic aspect to this text, given the way that technology has provided us with new ways of experiencing the urban environment – or in the words of the title of this fascinating book, ‘visualizing the street’.
Arising from a conference held (and a series of guest lectures given) at the University of Amsterdam, part of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis’s Cities Project, the contributions to this volume, edited by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff, all explore the ‘new ways’ in which, thanks to our GPS-tracked and camera-equipped smartphones (and the ‘digitally produced signs and images’ they create), we ‘document, navigate and imagine’ the urban streets. To be specific, how do these recent technological innovations give rise to a ‘new aesthetics’ and to ‘affective experiences of new practices of visualizing the street’ (p. 9)? Central to the discussion in the pages that follow is the distinction drawn by the French scholar Michel de Certeau (1925–86) in his L’Invention du quotidien (1980), translated into English as The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), between ‘the view from above – associated with the strategies of crowd control and urban planning – and the view from below – associated with the tactics employed in the hustle and bustle of everyday life’ (p. 13). What becomes clear in the 11 chapters of this collection is just how dialectically complex this distinction really is.
Part 1, ‘Documenting Streets on Social Media’, explores the affect produced by documenting and sharing diverse examples of street images on such platforms as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Wing-Ki Lee discusses a type of visual image – ‘derivative work’, or internet meme, a visual and photographic manipulation of images to parody public events – that emerged from the Occupy movement in Hong Kong, exploring how the grassroots appropriation of images and spaces was re-appropriated by astroturf lobbying. Megan Hicks offers a reading of Instagram feeds that form visual archives of suburban facades in such Australian cities as Sydney and Melbourne, producing a kind of ‘mediated uncanny’. By contrast, László Munteán examines footage shown on Russian State Television of footage taken by drones hovering over the war-torn streets of Syria, assessing the new aesthetics of ‘urban ruination’. And Asli Duru explores the ‘Poetry is on the street’ (#siirsokakta) movement in major Turkish cities that involved scribbling or spray-painting snippets of poetry in public spaces, then sharing the image under a hashtag online: a kind of digital graffiti that opens up new relations between poetic text, electronic image and urban space.
In part 2, ‘Navigating Urban Data Flows’, three chapters explore how images allow us to navigate virtual geographies spatially – and how visualizations of those data flows allow us to navigate the social and physical space of the city. Nanna Verhoeff and Karin van Es propose a set of analytical concepts to analyse visual interfaces providing access to a layered urban reality, using creative media installations as a starting-point for their discussion. With reference to the CBS television crime drama Person of Interest and Jeff VanderMeer’s 2011 novel Finch, Rob Coley uses these fictional accounts to explore the technological imaginary of the ‘smart city’, pointing to the dark, unsettling and sometimes frankly ‘weird’ reality of city life. And no matter how creatively we appropriate data, as Simon Ferdinand points out, its very availability make us vulnerable to strategies of surveillance and control that inhibit subversive practices: to render urban space legible always brings with it the risk of desiring to control it.
And what of the people who live in these cities? The contributions in part 3, ‘Imagining Urban Communities’, investigate the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at play in these strategies of visualization and in the associations, narratives and imaginaries of the urban communities they forge. So Ginette Verstraete and Cristina Ampatzidou draw on the work of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière to discuss how, in post-2008 austerity Greece, the exclusionary ‘police order’ of neoliberal consensus is undermined by a more democratic aesthetics of redistribution; or, to put it another way, even chewing gum is political. Simone Kalkman examines the initiatives taken by Google Maps and Street View to map the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, thereby generating visibility, recognition and opportunities for these streets and their communities, while perpetuating the myth of the ‘divided city’ and reproducing precisely the exclusionary binaries they claimed to want to address. And with a nod in the direction of Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’ – for Freud, a notion evidenced by such specifically urban phenomena as catching sight of one’s own reflection in the wagon-lit of an overnight train, or returning (quite inadvertently, of course . . .) to the red-light district of a foreign town – Karen Cross considers the aesthetics of social media visualizations of a volunteer-led project to create an ‘alternative’ market in south-east London. (The notion of ‘the uncanny’ offers another link back to the figure of Hoffmann.)
In other words, the analysis of the city has come a long way since Georg Simmel’s work The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), and the game-changer in all this is, of course, technology, on which the various forms of visualization discussed in this volume are predicated. While admiring the verve, confidence and theoretical sophistication with which the contributors to this stimulating and thought-provoking collection of papers address the experience of the (post-)postmodern city, one caveat is the absence of any mention of its archaic dimension, something to which both Freud (in Civilization and its Discontents (1930)) and Jung (in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911/12)) draw our attention. After all, it does not take much (from the absence of a signal to the absent-mindedness of a smartphone’s owner who forgets to recharge its battery) for this dimension to reassert itself; in some senses maybe it really is still a jungle out there?