Communicating the “world-class” city: a visual-material approach

ABSTRACT

In this article, I demonstrate my visual-material approach to researching the urban built environment as a medium of communication in its own right. Specifically, I discuss my research on second-tier cities with “world-class” aspirations, which highlights the significance of both symbolic and material resources in processes of urban regeneration and redevelopment. A visual-material approach draws not only from social semiotics and multimodality, but also from critical and material rhetoric to engage with the ways in which increasingly widespread “formats” of urban regeneration and redevelopment are mobilized to transform the urban built environment in the service of a globally appealing aesthetic. In doing so, this is also an approach that illuminates the dialectical relationship between cities’ perceived necessity to appear competitive on a heavily mediatized global stage and to intervene on their landscape in ways that mediate the everyday lives of urban communities in lasting ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban regeneration
• world-class cities
• second-tier cities
• visual-material analysis
• urban communication

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Giorgia Aiello is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the politics and potentials of visual, multimodal, and material communication. She is a lead editor of Communicating the City: Meanings, Practices and Interactions (Peter Lang, 2017; with Matteo Tarantino and Kate Oakley) and a co-author of Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (SAGE, 2020; with Katy Parry).