The New Urban Aesthetic

Digital Experiences of Urban Change

Mónica Montserrat Degen, Gillian Rose

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350070851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art contemporain

The New Urban Aesthetic explores how cities worldwide are being transformed and reconfigured by the twin forces of digital technologies and 'urban branding' in the name of global capitalism. Both of these shifts entrain new sensory bodily experiences, and this digitally-mediated reconfiguration of what cities feel like is what this book terms the new urban aesthetic. Focussing on major case-studies of urban change from London to Doha, the book explores how different kinds of digital mediation play a central role in urban transformation, from smart city phone apps, to social media interactions, to computer-generated visualisations. The book reveals how different versions of the new urban aesthetic organize different sensory experiences of temporality and spatiality – leading to a new understanding of the way we experience cities today. The New Urban Aesthetic is essential reading for researchers and students in urban studies, architecture, digital studies, sociology, and human geography.

1

Introducing the New Urban Aesthetic

We’ve planned to meet a friend for lunch in a regenerated area of a large city in Europe. At home, we google the latest restaurant reviews, swipe through Google Map on our phone, look at various restaurants on Instagram, doublecheck hashtags, then book a table using an app. We plan the quickest journey there using Google Maps again. It’s a bit too warm to pick up a city bike, so we get a bus, paying our fare with a swipe card, gaze out the window, glance at the bus’s animated adverts on digital screens, glance at our phone, again, and emerge into a warm and humid mid-morning. Striding through a newly redesigned streetscape, running a bit late, irritated and slightly disoriented, our eyes frantically scan the phone in our hands, as our finger scrolls this way and that, checking map directions and trying to work out whether we are walking in the right direction, looking out for the restaurant. We pass billboards with computer-generated images showing new buildings in the future streetscape. Surrounding the blue dot on the phone’s map there is no sign of the pedestrians that jostle past, the hard pavement underneath our feet, the cars and buses grumbling along the roads. The engulfing labyrinth of real-world buildings is very different from the clean digital lines of the screen. We look up, glance back to the phone and try to relate to the clarity of a blue dot pursuing a gray line with the instruction to turn left and an estimated arrival time to our destination. Smells of coffee shops and surrounding rubbish, soundscapes of chattering friends, music from car radios and shop fronts, rough textured walls decorated with ripped posters and half cleaned graffiti: the chaotic cacophony of everyday street life mingles with the glowing phone screen and its digital interface.

1 Setting the Scene

Something is changing in cities. Something about how we feel in urban spaces is altering. In 2008, we asked people in a small market town in south-east England to describe its high street, and we posed the same question to visitors to a large shopping mall sixteen miles away. Their responses were richly sensory. They described the sounds, smells, and colors of the different environments, even their textures: one like stroking sandpaper, the other like a tile (Degen and Rose, 2012; Rose et al., 2010). This is what we call an urban aesthetic: a particular sensory experiencing of an urban environment.

In 2018, when one of us asked people visiting and working in an area of London undergoing significant change how they experienced its built environment (Degen and Lewis, 2020), the encounter was somewhat different. A third interlocutor appeared to be present. Around the same time as we were talking to people in the high street and mall, Apple had released the first iPhone in 2007. Ever since, smartphones have become more and more significant in how many cities across the world are experienced and, increasingly, managed. For many city dwellers now, leaving home without a phone (and possibly a spare battery or charger too) is unthinkable. Smartphone applications are part of very many everyday activities in very many cities. Travelling, communicating, eating, socializing, and working all entail embodied interactions with phone interfaces (Barns, 2020; de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012; Graham et al., 2013). They are “filters, control devices, organizers of social networks, locative technologies, and information access platforms” (de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012: 4). So, in conversations in that London neighborhood in 2018, people still described full and detailed sensory engagements with the materialities of built space and its activities, just like their counterparts a decade before. But now, their smartphones were intervening in those engagements. Many of those people didn’t only talk about the environment, for example: they photographed it. They were snapping their lunch or part of a building to post on Instagram. Others had chosen what to see and do on the basis of social media posts from friends, influencers, and local businesses. And the neighborhood itself was the site of highly crafted digital images, on billboards around sites destined for demolition, picturing the new buildings that would replace them in the near future. Our interviews were interrupted by the beeps and chirrups of phones, and some of those interviewees would have been aware that their phones were also generating data about their activities: their locations, their likes, their networks, and their favorites. Somewhere a database would be collating and analyzing that data, ready to make suggestions of how they could travel home, and of where to eat, shop, and drink on their next visit.

This book is about some of the ways in which digital technologies are part of a shift in the everyday sensory experiencing of urban environments. Those digital interventions are what we refer to as a new urban aesthetic. Digital technologies are not particularly new, of course, and cities have always been experienced with the help of technological devices, like maps, for example, or signage (Gordon, 2010; Mattern, 2017; McQuire, 2008). But interacting with a whole range of digital screens—particularly not only phone screens but also consoles, big screens, LED displays, and indeed printed images on billboards that could only have been made using software—is now integral to how many cities are experienced every day. And many of those screens gather data that shapes urban experience, from managing traffic flow to suggesting places to eat. This book explores how the everyday sensory experience of a city is mediated by digital technologies.

For Kember and Zylinska, mediation is “a multiagential force that incorporates humans and machines, technologies and users, in an ongoing process of becoming-with” (2012: 40). This book is about how digital technologies are shaping a particular kind of becoming-with for both people and cities. Mediation “becomes a key trope for understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technological world, our emergence and ways of interacting with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the world into media, agents, relations, and networks” (Kember and Zylinska, 2012: xv). This book discusses a few examples of how some digital technologies and their various users are co-producing particular kinds of urban worlds.

This co-production is caught up in two particular processes shaping cities now, and these processes are integral to the new urban aesthetic that we describe in this book. The first is a whole series of efforts in very many cities in different places, for different reasons and in different ways, to use digital technologies to manage how cities function. This is not particularly new: it can be traced back to the 1950s at least (Halpern, 2015). But ideas about the intelligent city, the smart city, and the platform city have gained increasing traction in the last decade or so. More and more city governments are attempting to gather and analyze big, real-time data to manage infrastructure like traffic, water, and transport. Many corporations have tried to design and sell hardware and software to enable that gathering and analysis, and indeed have proffered their own services to manage it. Social media platforms have provided a means for their users to share information about places in all sorts of ways: posting, reviewing, liking, and sharing (Caliandro and Graham, 2020; Carah and Shaul, 2016; John, 2016; Leaver et al., 2020). Being in the city for many people now is marked by tweets and Instagram posts (Boy and Uitermark, 2017, 2020). Many corporations—particularly social media networks—have been gathering data from that sharing and collating it, using it, and selling it for profit (Zuboff, 2019). Other platforms, from Uber to AirBnB to Deliveroo, broker relations between different users while smaller apps allow users to book taxis, pizzas, and haircuts. In her book Platform Urbanism, Barns points to what are now extensive “intermediations” between these many and diverse digital platforms such that “the city itself is rendered as a platform ecosystem” (2020: 121).

The other process affecting many cities now is the effort to sell themselves. Cities are competing on a “global catwalk” (Degen, 2008) for inward investment, for tourists, for spending, for residents. Again, this is a process with a long history. City agencies do this in many ways but over the past twenty years or so there has been a striking emphasis on the atmosphere of a city. Cities increasingly sell themselves on the feelings that they (claim to) generate (Balibrea, 2017; Kavaratzis, 2009). This is a marketing strategy, but it is also shifting the experiencing of a city. Areas are redeveloped in order to generate more income and as that happens their sensory character changes; they are cleaned up, events are organized from pop-up shows to the Olympics in order to generate urban excitement, noise, and buzz. This has been described as “the experience economy” (Pine and Gilmore, 1999) or what this book, following Böhme (2003), will call the “aesthetic economy.” Digital tools are now integral to these efforts, and have altered their feel (Degen et al., 2017). From artfully crafted, computer-generated images, to marketing campaigns on Instagram, to tourist selfies and residents’ Facebook posts, the feel, the atmosphere, the sensoriality, of cities is being created and shared using digital devices.

This book explores just one aspect of these digital mediations of contemporary urbanism: its sensory experiencing, or what we call its aesthetics. We are interested in the “lived and deeply felt everyday sociality of connections, ruptures, emotions, words, politics and sensory energies, some of which can be pinned down to words or structures; others are intense yet ephemeral” (Kuntsman, 2012: 3). This book focuses on the feel of cities, their atmospheres, their sensory experiencing, and the embodiments they invite. As our opening anecdote suggests, much of that everyday experiencing now happens with various digital devices. Barns (2020) also describes the “intimate entanglements” of living and working in a city full of the screens and data flows of digital platforms large and small. This book asks: What does it feel like to inhabit urban spaces mediated by digital devices? How are urban aesthetics mediated digitally? With and for who? What or who is excluded?

We are not alone in posing these questions (Gandy, 2017; Mackrodt, 2019; Sumartojo and Pink, 2019; Thrift, 2014). But we are particularly concerned to think about how these processes are not the same in all cities, or in all parts of the same city, and they are not experienced in the same way by all people. Cities and bodies are mediated differently. Different processes are at work, using different technologies, with different consequences. Those two dynamics—the use of digital technologies in a city and the branding of urban experience—shape specific versions of the new urban aesthetic. The aesthetics of urban life are imagined, designed, and felt in different ways, and different sensoria induce different kinds of bodily experiencing. The main aim of this book is to develop a conceptual framework which is able to unpack different forms of new urban aesthetics in different places.

The next sections examine our three key terms a little more fully, and explain how the book addresses them. The next chapter will explore our theoretical framework in more detail.

2 The Urban: Materialities and Imaginaries

In this book we draw on a particular tradition of urban scholarship interested in the everyday life of cities. There has been considerable interest across recent urban studies in the sensory experiencing of that every day. Sumartojo and Pink, for example, have recently explored what they term urban “atmospheres” as “specific configurations of sensation, temporality, movement, memory, our material and immaterial surroundings and other people . . . how places and events feel and what they mean to the people who participate in them” (2019: 6). In particular they highlight how atmospheres need to be conceptualized as specific to particular places and experienced differently by each individual. Although embodied experience is central to this broad approach, “it is not just bodies that matter on the street, but a vital materiality that runs through and across bodies and things” (Hubbard and Lyon, 2018: 938). Urban atmospheres are constituted precisely through the intermingling of bodies, the environment and technologies.

This book is aligned with this more materialist emphasis in this work, which foregrounds the entanglements between the materiality of the street and the experienc ing of its inhabitation (Amin, 2014). In this approach, technologies are important mediators of how urban environments are experienced (McQuire, 2008). Street lighting, for example, allows the city to be visible at night, shifting the times that spaces can be occupied, and the different materialities of light—candles, gaslight, arc lights, LED—give different qualities to what is seen (Ebbensgaard, 2015, 2020; Otter, 2008). Different systems for managing sewage produce different olfactory experiences. A modern shopping center built with glass window walls and marble floors has a different tactility than a high street with a hotchpotch of buildings in brick, concrete, plaster, and wood (Degen and Rose, 2012). And now, as we have emphasized, digital technologies are mediating urban sensoria. Such an approach “render[s] the street as a fluid and fluctuating space” (Hubbard and Lyon, 2018: 939) that is constantly transformed through shifting relations between bodies, technologies, and urban materialities.

In this book we also emphasize the interpretive work of many kinds through which bodies, technologies, and cities come to have particular meanings. Cities are full of human invention and reinvention (Rose, 2017). As the rich and longstanding literature on urban imaginaries insists, the city is “both the actual physical environment and the space we experience in novels, films, poetry, architectural design, political government, and ideology” (Anderson, 2017; Prakash, 2008: 7)...