Imagining the city

Entitled Imagining the City, this special double issue of Visual Studies focusses on the urban environment through two complimentary lenses. Part one, entitled, The Spectacle of the Chinese City takes the notion of the spectacle as a framework to investigate the commodification of the newly build Chinese urban environment. A phrase commonly associated with Guy Debord (1967 [1995]) the ‘Spectacle’ has become shorthand for the superficiality of a society where social relations and everyday practices are received through or in relation to a pseudo-reality created by capitalist market forces. Adopting this term, the editors of Section 1, Dennis Zuev and Madlen Kobi, have compiled a range of articles that visually, conceptually and methodologically probe the notion of the Spectacle in relation to Chinese urbanisation and the ‘atmospheres’ these mega developments convey. Buildings, they note, ‘are not static bystanders’, rather, their full potential crystallizes through the ideas and practices of the people that make and inhabit them’ (p. 9). In recognising this, articles within this special issue move from macro analysis of full urban environments to the micro analysis of domestic interiors, from how workers engage in the construction of these environments and conversely, how residents live in them. In doing so, the collection of articles and visual essays opens an interdisciplinary space in which the analysis of Chinese urbanism as a visual phenomenon can be explored in a multitude of ways.

Part Two, edited by Geoff DeVerteuil and Brian Doucet and entitled Critical Visual Approaches to Understand the Complexities and Contradictions of the City, reflects a visual turn in critical and urban geography, recognising that for geographers to critically examine urban environments requires a multiplicity of visual lens, modalities and timeframes to fully grasp the physical, social and economic change that is underway. Adopting methods and approaches that have been long established tools for visual sociological exploration of community and urbanity alike, DeVerteuil and Doucet note that visual imagery has typically been employed as a ‘descriptive illustrator of a place, process or phenomenon’ by geographers, planners and urban studies researchers (p. 114). Acknowledging that there is now a growing trend in urban research, DeVerteuil and Doucet assert that the visual is no longer an appendage to more commonly applied and more traditional methods like statistical analysis or interviews to support findings towards methodological, theoretical and epistemological approaches. Borrowing from Emma Arnold (2019), they recognise that such methods now place a variety of visual imagery as the centre of ‘data’ used to analyse the changes, challenges, conflicts and contradictions of the city (see Arnold 2019). Like Zuev and Kobi in Part One, images and approaches throughout Section 2 are used to not only convey tangible aspects of urban environments but also to address human engagement and sensory affectiveness.

While Part One focusses exclusively on China, Part Two is a globetrotting collection of articles that fold in a host of visual approaches and methods. The section includes visual participatory community knowledge production projects examining gentrification in London, UK, and psychogeographic performances in Newport, South Wales, collaborative Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) in Bristol (UK) and Milan, Italy, as well as photovoice projects with marginalized communities in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark, and a Google Street View project in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The array of methods and approaches within this section underpins the importance and validity of multimodal visual research methods within geography and urban related discourses whilst reflecting the significance of Visual Studies both as a mode of study that transcends disciplinary boundaries and a platform for vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange.

In addition to the two guest edited collections, all the accompanying material within this special issue of Visual Studies are also thematically aligned. This includes two Picture/Talks, one visual essay, three supplementary articles and three complimentary reviews. The first of our two Picture/Talk features is a reflexive piece by Jane Brake. Discussing a photo taken by her research partner, John Van Aitken on a field trip to the urban village of Xian in Guangzhou, Southern China. Brake's text oscillates around the impulse to photograph and the ethical dilemma of unsolicited portraiture when one is presented with a scene that reflects the confluence of traditional and new cultures in a single frame. Our second Picture/Talk is from Luc Pauwels entitled Blackboard Voices and focusses on street photography from a 2019 visit to Philadelphia, USA. Propped up against a wall, the blackboard functions as a kind of exchange of ideas for passers-by to express their thoughts and feelings about the global society in which they live. A ‘visual record of materialized behaviour’ the blackboard ‘documents spontaneous reactions to an urban intervention’ (p. 113). As Pauwels notes, such interventions are valuable to visual social scientists because what may at first seem as anecdotal may ‘have greater external validity than responses generated in strict research contexts and using generic questions and answering categories on scales’ (p. 113). Like Geoff DeVerteuil and Brian Doucet, Pauwels recognises that a ‘more visual’ sociology, like a ‘more visual geography’ may offer a corrective to a social science that moves beyond a stubborn commitment to just asking people in very standardized ways about things they may not feel all that strongly about.

The three remaining articles include a New Media Review by Jenn Lindsey on the work of ethnographic filmmaker Jim Ault. Exploring Ault's work, Lindsey probes Ault's visual mission to ‘recognise problems and try to make a difference’ (p. 212), a mission that Ault has played out across a host of social and cultural backdrops. Yee Man-Lam's essay, A Study of Light-pollution discourse in Hong Kong, asks why light pollution discourse, which has the potential to be anti-ocular, fails to contest the continuous domination of vision and images in a metropolis cited as the worst place on the planet for light pollution. Our final essay in this special issue examines rebel street art in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Authored by Michelle Mansfield, Pam Nilan and Gregorius Ragil Wibawanto, Rebel imaginings: Street Art in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, examines graffiti in an urban Indonesian setting as a visual phenomenon that activates political change in three ways. First, it provokes the critical consideration of ordinary people who pass by the walls and surfaces of the city every day. Second, it suggests alternative futures within the context of achieving social justice and redress of past wrongs. Third, it challenges the mainstream elite artworld of Indonesia that is anchored in galleries and commodification. Linked to Pauwels' Picture/Talk, the urban wall in Yogyakarta, like his blackboard in Philadelphia, provides a space for political thought and discursive exchange in public space. Our final contribution, fulfilling our full cast of submission formats, is a visual essay by Taher Abdel-Ghani. Abdel-Ghani extracts clips from their own film, Prosody: An Ode to the City, shortlisted for the Audience Award at the 1st edition of the City Space Architecture Film Festival in Bologna, to examine a first-person perspective of different cities, Weimer, Germany and Shanghai, China between 2015 and 2017.

We conclude this special double issue with three complimentary book reviews. Seeing Cities Change: Local Cultures and Class (Routledge): a classic visual sociological text by Jerome Krase and reviewed by Michael Boar. Second, an important text by David Gissen entitled The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (Minnesota), reviewed by Kachun Alex Wong. Finally, a collective review by Joe Konieczvy & Avrom and Anna Yanovsky Teaching Collection of Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis' Wake up, This Is Joburg (Duke University Press, 2023).

As is customary now, we conclude our editorial with a reprint of the short prose that supplements our cover image submission. Typically printed on the inside cover of the physical, print issue of Visual Studies, the cover images are integral to our mission to enhance the development of visual research methodologies in all their various forms and formats. Taken by Dennis Zuev in 2023, the photograph reminded me of Luc Pauwels' suggestions that cities are a constant ‘work in progress’ made up of ‘different actors with competing agendas’ (Pauwels 2009, 1). I think this comment can be aptly applied to our cover image.

BEYOND THE WORK SITES AND PHYSICAL LABOUR OF THE URBAN SPECTACLE

The photograph captures an instant in the life of the construction site – ‘a building in a future tense' (Pink, Tutt, and Dainty 2013). These are the basic ingredients laid out on the ground as on a table cloth. One can only imagine what this specific assortment of ingredients and tools will produce. This is Cotai, a newly created territory on a landfill between islands of Taipa and Coloane in Macau Special Administrative Region of China. The construction boom in Macau has been part of the gaming hub's growth since 2002. The noise, the messiness and continuity of the construction are something that this image aims to convey. And also suggesting the constant transition and shifting urban landscape, that is marked by construction sites, promises of new life and future, mediated by the new buildings and new infrastructure.

China's transformation into an economic superpower would not be possible without millions of migrant workers that are moving from villages to bigger cities, from less affluent provinces to wealthier ones. But the continuous construction is also employment and promises life improvement for these millions of men.

Thousands of workers cross borders between the Guangdong province city of Zhuhai into Macau working on multiple construction projects related to Macau's gaming industry. But as Macau is being forced to diversify its economy, just across the river (also visible in the background of the photo) the new mammoth of the economic cooperation zone of Hengqin is being born with multiple skyscrapers of the CBD visually becoming the part of Macau and territorially becoming Macau's future for broader economic development and tighter embrace with the mainland.

This photo hints at the raw physicality of labour and heavy lifting behind the foundations of urban spectacle. The construction site is full of hardware that mean heaviness and pain of physical work – heavy machinery, long metal rods, heavy bases for the cranes.

The construction site is often obscured from the residents by high fences not only for safety reasons. The residents can rarely see the process of construction and the literal depths of the foundations being laid. This view from above reveals the initial stage of construction, a material composition of the site, the arrangement of machinery and social spaces, its messiness and order at the same time. The small containers with the aircon for the workers are very close to the actual action and active machinery. The scale of the site also does not allow to see the exact number of human figures.

This image emphasises not only the continuous renovation and re-configuration as part of the urban spectacle in China, but the creation of new places – in this case literally growing out from the seabed via dredging and reclamation. There is not only demolition but also the emergence of a completely new urban visual aesthetic. The aesthetic of China's Dream.