Non-relational regimes of urban modernization

ABSTRACT

Seen alongside Donald Gibson's plans for the rebuilding of the city centre in the post-war period, the recently commissioned Jerde Master Plans for Coventry's city centre (2008) provide some insight into the materiality of ideological and political frameworks and their affects on social space. With Gibson and Jerde's proposals for regeneration, I will consider the forceful and persuasive movement between images of newly designed cities to explore how these representations are deployed as active agents for social, economic and political systems of governance. Here the phantasmagoric image of the future city exists within a multiplicity of competing logics that rather than simply continuing in a linear cycle of modernization and urban renewal, coexist as distinct political and social systems.

KEYWORDS:

• image
• urban modernization
• non-relational
• space
• politics
• coexistence
• global cities
• logics
• restructuring