Futures, imagined cities and emerging markets: the semiotic production of professional selves

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the emergence of “speculative architecture” as a distinctive strand within the professional field of urban studies, one that is future-oriented and claims to “create narratives about how new technologies and networks influence space, culture, and community [with the aim of] imagining where new forms of agency exist within the cities changed by these new processes”. In so doing, speculative architecture is conceived of as a discursive space for social performance and capital accumulation under conditions of late capitalism. I examine how a set of semiotic and discursive features that become emblematic of “doing speculative architecture” get “enregistered” or “stylised” in ways that regulate access to socio-institutional networks and associated material/symbolic resources. This approach is intended to shed light on the semiotic production of new professional selves while at the same time identifying the embedded forms of inequality that these may enable.

KEYWORDS:

• Speculative architecture
• professional selves
• political economy
• enregisterment
• stylisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Miguel Pérez-Milans is Associate Professor at University College London. His research has been published in books and journal articles in socio-/applied linguistics. Miguel has co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (2018). He also co-edits two journals, Language, Culture and Society (Benjamins) and Language Policy journal (Springer).

Notes

1 http://architecturediary.org/newyork/events/5633 (accessed on January 2020).

2 https://www.nextnature.net/2015/03/interview-liam-young/ (accessed on January 2020).

3 https://strelka.com/en/magazine/2017/06/01/what-is-speculative-architecture (accessed on January 2020).

4 “Becoming a professional in the new global market: Language, mobility and inequality”, funded by UCL Global Fund and UCL IOE Seed corn grant, University College London. Special thanks to Yu (Aimee) Shi, Du (Dery) Yunpeng and Kathleen Painter for their collaboration in this project.

5 The corpus data traces the links between Liam Young’s public performances and interviews concerned with speculative architecture, including the online reactions to these, over a period of 10 years from 2007 to 2017.

6 Note that this article uses the publicly performed professional persona of Liam Young as an entry point to describing how global networks of institutional, semiotic practices and shifting forms of knowledge get re-articulated under the very socioeconomic conditions that speculative architecture responds to. Thus, the focus of this analytical inquiry is not an individual per se, but rather the very situated processes that constitute meanings of professionalism vis-à-vis the larger structures of inequality that such processes enable, both with intended and unplanned consequences.

7 https://vimeo.com/144835155 (accessed on January 2020).

8 https://archinect.com/news/article/140004615/liam-young-s-triple-feature-review-of-city-everywhere-at-sci-arc (accessed on January 2020).

9 https://vimeo.com/184429206 (accessed on January 2020).

10 Text examples in this section are extracted from: https://strelka.com/en/home (accessed on January 2020).

11 https://thenewnormal.strelka.com/research/project/sever (accessed on January 2020).