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Visualizing the Street

New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City
Dibazar, P.; Naeff, J.
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10.2307/j.ctv9hvqjh
Publication date
2019
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Dibazar, P., & Naeff, J. (Eds.) (2019). Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting,
Navigating and Imagining the City. (Cities and cultures). Amsterdam University Press.
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv9hvqjh

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C I T I E S A N D C U LT U R E S 

Edited by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff

Visualizing the Street

New Practices of Documenting,
Navigating and Imagining the
City
Visualizing the Street
Cities and Cultures is an interdisciplinary humanities book series addressing the
interrelations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce. The
series takes a special interest in the impact of globalization on urban space and
cultural production, but remains concerned with all forms of cultural expression
and transformation associated with contemporary cities.

Series editor:
Christoph Lindner, University of Amsterdam

Advisory Board:
Ackbar Abbas, University of California, Irvine
Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley
Derek Gregory, University of British Colombia
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of New South Wales
Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary, University of London
Geoffrey Kantaris, University of Cambrigde
Bill Marshall, University of London
Ginette Verstraete, VU University Amsterdam
Richard J. Williams, University of Edinburgh
 Visualizing the Street
New Practices of Documenting,
Navigating and Imagining the City

Edited by
Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff

Amsterdam University Press

Cover photo by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6298 435 6

e-isbn 978 90 4853 501 9 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789462984356
nur 670

© P. Dibazar, J.A. Naeff / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
 Contents

Acknowledgements 7

1. Introduction: Visualizing the Street 9

Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff

Part 1 Documenting Streets on Social Media

2. Derivative Work and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement: Three

Perspectives 29
Wing-Ki Lee

3. Strange in the Suburbs: Reading Instagram Images for

Reponses to Change 57
Megan Hicks

4. Droning Syria: The Aerial View and the New Aesthetics of

Urban Ruination 73
László Munteán

5. The Affective Territory of Poetic Graffitifrom Sidewalk to

Networked Image 93
Aslı Duru

Part 2 Navigating Urban Data Flows

6. Situated Installations for Urban Data Visualization: Interfacing

the Archive-City 117
Nanna Verhoeff and Karin van Es

7. Cartography at Ground Level: Spectrality and Streets in Jeremy

Wood’s My Ghost and Meridians 137
Simon Ferdinand

8. Street Smarts for Smart Streets 161

Rob Coley
Part 3 Imagining Urban Communities

9. Chewing Gum and Graffiti: Aestheticized City Rhetoric in

Post-2008 Athens 187
Ginette Verstraete and Cristina Ampatzidou

10. The Uncanny Likeness of the Street: Visioning Community

Through the Lens of Social Media 207
Karen Cross

11. On or Beyond the Map?Google Maps and Street View in Rio de

Janeiro’s Favelas 227
Simone Kalkman

Index 251
 Acknowledgements

This book developed from the conference Visualizing the Street, which we
organized on 16-17 June 2016 at the University of Amsterdam, and from a
series of guest lectures under the same theme organized that year as part of
ASCA Cities Seminar. We want to thank the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis and the ASCA Cities Project for their financial and institutional
support in organizing these events. In the organization of these events and
the design of this book project, we are especially grateful to Christoph Linder,
director of the ASCA Cities Project at the time, for encouraging us in the
first place and intellectually supporting us in the process. For generously
accepting our invitation to come to Amsterdam and to give lectures at the
seminar, we would like to thank Daniel Rubinstein, Donatella Della Ratta
and Mark Westmoreland. To Gillian Rose we are immensely grateful not
only for the wonderful keynote lecture she gave during the conference,
but for her patience and critical engagement with the conference from the
first moment to the last. We also want to thank all those who participated
in these events as presenters, speakers or audience members. In putting
together this book, we are grateful to the Leiden University Institute for Area
Studies for their financial support and to Tijmen Klous for his exceptional
editorial assistance. Above all, we would like to thank all the authors whose
outstanding work is collected in this volume, for their patience in working
with us, their curiosity in visualizations of the street and their intellectual
generosity.
1. Introduction: Visualizing the Street
Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff

Abstract
Now that we walk in urban surroundings saturated with digitally pro-
duced images and signs – with our GPS-tracked and camera-equipped
smartphones in our hands – we document, navigate and imagine the
urban street in new ways. This book is particularly interested in the new
aesthetics and affective experiences of new practices of visualizing the
street that have emerged from recent technological innovations. The
introductory chapter argues for a focus on the practice of shaping both
images and places, rather than on an image or a place as an end product,
in studying the contemporary intersections of the visual and the spatial
productively. In doing so, it seeks to complement the recent studies of
visual culture that pay particular attention to new technologies for the
production and dissemination of images with an urban studies perspective
concerned with the social production and cultural mediation of space. The
introduction highlights a number of key issues at stake in the proposed
scholarly approach; issues that are dealt with in the concrete case studies
explored by the following chapters in this volume.

Keywords: visualization; visual studies; urban studies; practice; street;

digital

Today, images have attained new social functions and cultural meanings,
because of the wide availability of digital image-making and image-sharing
technologies. Equipped with cameras, GPS and the Internet, devices such
as smartphones have transformed the way images are made, disseminated,
interpreted and used. This book is concerned with the influence of such new
forms and practices of visualization on the social production and cultural
imaginaries of the street. It revisits the street – embracing a long scholarly
tradition concerned with such elements as design, politics and everyday

Dibazar, P. and J.A. Naeff, Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and
Imagining the City, Amsterdam University Press, 2018
doi 10.5117/9789462984356_ch01
10  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

life – and seeks to provide critical viewpoints that enrich contemporary

scholarship on the street with a focus on new forms of its visualization.
Of particular interest to our investigation in this book are the politics
of aesthetics and affect at stake in these changing practices of visualizing
the street. We argue that, in the experience of the contemporary street,
the spatial and the visual converge on multiple levels. On a manifest level,
images complement the spatial as they create urban façades and shape
the visual appearance of the streets. The 21st century urban experience is
hugely influenced by the proliferation of signs, billboards, advertisements,
posters, stickers and graffiti in and around streets. These images – whether
big or small, detailed or sketchy, in print or on screens – provoke emotional
responses that are crucial to the expansion of dominant urban policies, such
as creativity and gentrification, and the counter-hegemonic responses to
them (Lindner and Meissner, 2015). On another level, digital visual materials
have become embedded in the embodied experience of the contemporary
street, as one walks through it equipped with smart devices. To navigate
in the street these days, we rely on interactive maps that show us routes
and position us in them, and we ceaselessly complement our direct experi-
ences of the street with images and information we find online. Digital
technologies’ capacity to gather data and transform codes into legible
signs and images, and vice versa, is crucial in this respect. The swift ways
in which we navigate multiple interfaces to read, use and modify those
visualizations that render information and data flows understandable has
become inextricably entangled with how we perceive our surroundings.
In other words, while walking through the city with smartphones in hand,
we simultaneously spatialize virtual data flows by visualizing them on
physical phone screens, and visualize space by creating different forms of
images – such as photographs, maps and videos – and disseminating them
online through various apps.
In combining the visual with the spatial, this project seeks to comple-
ment the recent studies of visual culture that pay particular attention to
new technologies for the production and dissemination of images with
an urban studies perspective concerned with the social production and
cultural mediation of space. Contemporary scholarship on new technologies
of visualization (Larsen and Sandbye, 2014; Verhoeff, 2012) suggests that,
today, the practices of mapping, photographing, filming and editing are
accessible to anyone who carries a phone and is connected online. This
development highlights the performativity of visualization, stresses the
immediacy of networks of communication, democratizes the processes of
production and circulation of imagery, and destabilizes old hierarchies of
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 11

aesthetics. At the same time, new technologies of image processing have

also contributed to the expansion of a visual culture that is produced and
distributed professionally, and which is partly responsible for shaping the
visual experience of the contemporary street. Although responding to
different sensibilities, there are striking similarities between these various
registers of the everyday visual experience of the street. The digital means
of production of street imagery – never delivering a clear end product and
always in circulation between material and virtual networks – and the
fleeting glance with which consumers relate to that imagery, point to a
distinctly performative visual language.
In this introduction, we argue that, to analyse such new forms of visual-
izing the street, we need to move away from studying images and space
separately; we need to take into account the ways in which images are
produced, disseminated and consumed spatially. To do so, we propose to
focus on practices that shape those images and spaces, rather than on images
or places alone. It is by bringing the practice into the centre of attention
that the visual and spatial intersect in a methodologically appropriate way
for studying the recent developments in spatial visualization. The essays
in this collection therefore build on recent developments in practice-based
media studies (Couldry, 2012; Moores, 2012), visual culture studies (Rose, 2011;
Favero, 2014) and sociology (Shove, Pantzar and Watson, 2012) to analyse
visualization as social and cultural practice. This way of thinking allows for
meanings, feelings and social relations to be made and remade constantly
in everyday practice, in ways attentive to the dynamics of hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic visibilities in and of the street. Connecting practices
of visual documentation, navigation and imagination, we argue that new
ways of making and using images heavily influences the ways we perceive,
imagine, and live contemporary streets across the world.

The Street

As a critical concept, ‘the street’ builds upon an extensive scholarly tradition

interested in notions of the public, the everyday and the bottom-up (e.g. Fyfe,
1998). A space of circulation – of goods, people and ideas – the street forms
the privileged space for the theorization of a particularly urban condition
for encounters between strangers (e.g. Watson, 2006). Such encounters are
embodied and marked by differences and inequalities. Even though most
circulation in the streets unfolds in the unnoticed rhythms of the everyday
and the habitual, the possibility of mixing and confrontation grants this
12  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

social space an unpredictable and uncontrolled nature. It is in this capacity

that ‘the street’ is often employed in the context of public dissent. It denotes
the space in which public expressions of discontent, outrage or grief unfold.
Moreover, the street connotes a community characterized by diversity and
tied loosely, often temporarily, by a set of common interests. These common
interests often relate to urban settings and facilities or are articulated as
such under Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996).
The role of visual culture in contestations over space is analysed in
Chapters 2, 5 and 9 in this book, focusing on cases from Hong Kong, Istanbul
and Athens. Indeed, images have played a significant role in construct-
ing imaginaries of revolt and protest (Didi-Huberman, 2016). The visual
documentation of public dissent and conflict have played a crucial role in
shaping common understandings of those events in the eyes and minds of
the public from the mid twentieth century onwards. With the availability of
handheld devices to nonprofessionals to make and share images of conflicts,
recent years have witnessed a surge in the quantity and velocity of such
images. This has given rise to the celebratory notion of ‘twitter revolutions’
and ‘citizen journalists’, fitting in a longer tradition of viewing technological
advancements in telecommunications as a democratic promise of expanded
social and political agency. In the context of the Arab spring, such images of
the revolutionary street, as Mark Westmoreland argues, made ‘image-making
practice both threatening and powerful’ as the streets became hyper-visible
under the ever-present gaze of a multitude of witnesses (2016: 243-244).
Amateur visual eye witness accounts of the political street, Westmoreland
suggests, formed ‘both documentation acts of police violence and affirm[ed]
the agency of mass political subjectivity’ (2016: 244). He goes on to argue
that there is an interesting relation between spatiality and visuality in this
case, in that, by occupying urban space, Cairenes were able to both reclaim
their streets and their images (Westmoreland, 2016: 244). The Arab Spring is
thus a powerful example of the way in which the practices of image-making
and placemaking converge.
Yet, as several chapters in this book show, the potential democratization
through digital image sharing is never without complications. Wing-Ki Lee
(Chapter 2) describes how the grassroots appropriation of images and spaces
is in turn re-appropriated by astroturf derivative work; Simon Ferdinand
(Chapter 7) points out that, no matter how creatively we appropriate data,
their availability will always also make us vulnerable to forms of surveil-
lance and control that inhibit subversive practices; and Simone Kalkman
(Chapter 11) considers how local initiatives that also serve the interests of
global corporate partners risk overshooting their mark.
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 13

The street’s potential for disorder also means that the street is highly
subjected to surveillance and control. Indeed, many of the technological
innovations that form the basis of the social and cultural developments
discussed in this book were initially engineered for surveillance purposes.
From satellite images to drones, subjecting streets and street life to a view
from above and arguably the practice of mapping itself have traditionally
been entangled with the desire to manage and control the erratic and
dynamic sociality at street level. In conceptualizations of the struggle
over urban space, visuality, perspective and ways of looking have played
an important role. Michel de Certeau’s distinction between the view from
above – associated with the strategies of crowd control and urban plan-
ning – and the view from below – associated with the tactics employed in
the hustle and bustle of everyday life – has been of paramount importance
in this respect (de Certeau, 1984). While acknowledging the entanglement
of attempts to render urban space legible with desires to control it, the
chapters by Simon Ferdinand (Chapter 7) on artistic renderings of GPS
tracked movement, by László Munteán (Chapter 4) on drone footage of
destroyed Syrian cities, by Rob Coley (Chapter 8) on fictional imaginaries of
smart cities, and by Simone Kalkman (Chapter 11) on mapping the Favelas,
also question all-too-easy dichotomies between the view from above and
the view from below and seek to disentangle both its phenomenology and
the more complex power structures involved in attempts to make visible
and comprehensible the contemporary street. Thinking about the street
thus inevitably requires engaging with the politics of visibility, and thinking
through practices of visualization in and of the street – the focus of this
book – necessitates engaging with the tensions between control and dissent
that have been crucial to urban studies more broadly.

From Image-making to Visualization

Only two decades ago, making a visualization of an urban space – a drawing,

map, computer generated rendering, photograph or video – demanded
equipment, preparation, and professional know-how. Today, in most parts
of the world, the production and instant circulation of images has become
an inconspicuous part of our everyday routines. With our camera-equipped
smartphones in our pockets, producing, editing and sharing images has
become as ubiquitous as consuming them. We have unwittingly become
visualizers on a daily basis. The old notion of the passive consumer, who was
thought by the 20th-century cultural theorists to be subject to monopolizing
14  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

regimes of mass culture, has been replaced in the 21st century by a more
complex notion of an active participant, caught in a more dynamic field of
interaction across multiple networks of circulation, (re)production, editing
and appropriation.
To refer to the visual material in such a pervasive and broad field of
production and circulation, we use the word ‘visualization’. Under visualiza-
tion, we imply all the different forms of digital content that go beyond the
traditional manifestations of visual materials. These include, for instance,
images whose visual content is marked by geotags and hashtags, or maps
whose cartographic content includes interactive indications of individuals’
locations and movements. In addition to the visual material, visualization
suggests a process and practice. Unlike vocabularies such as image-making
or map-making that imply a more restricted outcome – an image or map
– and a more specific notion of the aims and schemes of the practice, the
concept of visualization embraces a breadth of forms and patterns, which
we find helpful. Visualization, moreover, is better equipped with addressing
data-processing techniques, where any visual material could be regarded as
a particular representation of and an outcome of abstract data processing,
which, even if not manifest in the visual material, is almost always implicated
in the technologies of their production and dissemination (Manovich, 2011).
In the following, we review some of the social functions, technological
formats and affective registers of the new practice of digitally visualizing
spaces and localities.
One of the most immediate impacts of the ubiquitous technologies of
producing and circulating images has been on the ways we use images. For
instance, we use visualizations to convey a message while chatting online;
we send images of where we are and what we do to mark a simultaneously
visual and spatial presence. In such visualizations, we often do not pay much
attention to the image itself, its composition and visual signs. Rather, the
image performs a particular kind of social function. Mikko Villi suggests that
images sent from and received by camera phones function as ‘authentication
of the sender’s presence, the “I am here now”’, and create a ‘synchronous
gaze’, an ‘act of seeing together’ which the sender and receiver experience
at the same time, and which is fundamental to the creation of a sense of
mediated presence (2015: 8). Along the same lines, Mizuko Ito coins the term
‘intimate visual co-presence’ to denote the practice of personal camera phone
use, in which ‘the focus is on co-presence and viewpoint sharing rather
than communication, publication, or archiving’ (2005: 1). The function of
such images is premised on the spatiality – I am here – and temporality – I
am here now – of their nearly instantaneous production, circulation and
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 15

consumption. They are consequently rarely looked at after the moment

of sharing. Martin Lister observes this immediacy and different ways of
looking that it entails in other contexts within the surfeit of images in digital
cultures, where he believes a new relation to the image is produced that is
predicated on a culture of not gazing at, but overlooking, the image – and
sometimes even not looking at it at all (2014). These new relations to the
image sometimes instigate new practices and social functions too. For
instance, on photoblogging, he writes, ‘photographs matter not so much as
finite products (and neither does the blog), but because they provide the
occasion for taking photographs: for walking, for wandering, for being alert
to opportunities, for being “in the moment”’ (Lister, 2014: 19).
Likewise, Larsen and Sandbye claim that ‘increasingly, everyday amateur
photography is a performative practice connected to presence, immedi-
ate communication and social networking, as opposed to the storing of
memories for eternity, which is how it has hitherto been conceptualized’
(2014: xx). Thus, we could argue that the production and dissemination of
images has shifted from a future-oriented documentation of reality, to be
seen later as evidence of the past, to the immediacy of sharing our subjective
experiences now; from an observational mode of recording to a performative
mode of immersion. The shift in function of amateur photography has found
particularly suitable mediations in social media platforms. The title of the
first part of this book, ‘Documenting the street on social media’, deliberately
evokes an internal friction, in the sense that, while all chapters in this section
deal with forms of recording, documentation, storage and archiving, the
velocity and ephemerality of their circulation on social media also makes
these terms superfluous, or at least profoundly alters their meaning.
Another example of practices in which visualizations play a significant
role is navigation in space. In orienting ourselves in the contemporary
city, we use a variety of visualizations. We smoothly switch from maps to
street-level footages, and from satellite photos to marketing images of local
services, while also shifting through a variety of signs and images in the
physical space, often deliberately aestheticized with figures and pictures for
commercial ends. We have thus come to consume an ever-greater number
and variety of images. In this book, we pay attention to the multiple ways
in which visualization works and the particular form of images and visual
material that we use. The dynamic process of computation and visualization,
in which images are translated into codes and codes are rendered visually to
make them comprehensible, form a significant concern of this volume. This
two-way translation process between data and images is especially critically
assessed in the second part of the volume, ‘Navigating Urban Data Flows’.
16  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

These new functions of images have also come with new image formats.
Significantly, the images we consume today can rarely be interpreted as
one unified and definitive image with only visual content. Geotagging has
added a layer of informational data to digital photography, firmly anchoring
images in space. Memes often consist of text-and-image, and hashtags not
only add a layer of interpretation to images, but also a mode of virtual
navigation. Google Street View is composed of still photographs, but they
function as maps too, and we can navigate through them in a way that
aesthetically resembles video games. Gifs are moving images, yet lack the
narrative quality of video. Between the capturing quality of the photograph
and the dynamics of the video, the gif file has opened up a new visual genre
of infinite repetition. Even still photographs, with the ubiquity of digital
editing, rarely find the stasis of a clear end product, endlessly enhanced,
reframed, published and appropriated across various media. The old binaries
between still and moving image, as Ingrid Hölzl (2010) writes, still hold to
some extent, but their relationship has become more complex. To go beyond
such a binary, she suggests to consider photography and film as ‘synthetic
“image states”: they both display aspects of stasis and movement’ (Hölzl,
2010: 106).
It could also be said that new forms of visualization fit into a broader
trend, in which cultural value is less and less based on the signifying content
or stylistic form of images and more and more on the quantity and velocity
with which they transmit information (e.g. Keen, 2007; Steyerl, 2009). Such
an emphasis on images as data might suggest a continuous ‘waning of
affect’ (Jameson, 1991: 10). But new practices of visualization create new
affective ecologies, such as the ‘intimate co-presence’ discussed above (Ito,
2005: 1). New practices of visualization have transformed the ways we read
and understand images and have generated new emotional responses. We
do not merely look at images, but most of the times do several things at
the same time when seeing digital images. We see the image and read the
hashtag, for instance; we look and scroll down or swipe over the screen;
we see a collection of images at the same time or browse through them in
quick succession; we switch perspective; we zoom in and out. Aaron Shapiro
points out that ‘using Street View in practice entails a lot of this toggling
back and forth between the aerial and the street-level’ (2017: 4). The fleeting,
distracted glance and the quick change of attention from one system to
another marks our new way of looking. It seems ceaseless and smooth in
our everyday use, but involves a continuously violent disruption of the gaze.
If we review the particular affect produced by innovative visualizations
of the street introduced in the chapters of this book, a striking parallel
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 17

emerges. In studying amateur photographs of suburban houses, Megan Hicks

(Chapter 3) perceives in the peculiarly furtive rhythmicity of consuming
Instagram’s inflexibly orthogonal frame the strange reappearance of the
repetitive aesthetics of modernist high-rises – the architectural style that
remains conspicuously absent from such images. Discussing the imagery
produced around a London street market, Karen Cross (Chapter 10) describes
how the strategic reuse of older styles of photography, typesetting and other
forms of visualization evoke a sense of uncanniness. Rob Coley (Chapter 8)
argues that speculating about the future relation between humans and
technology confronts us with the fact we share our streets with ‘a weird
ecology of agencies’ that we cannot visualize. Thus, tracing the strange,
the uncanny and the weird throughout the three sections of this book
demonstrates not only how temporal disjunctures of new practices of
visualization produce affects of defamiliarization in space, but also how
media and technology sometimes interfere with the meanings we construct
in ways that go beyond our comprehension and control.
In conclusion, visualizations in and of the street are characterized by
performative gestures that entail sharing and navigation. Rather than a
definite image of which the value is constituted by its visual signification,
infinite processes of (re)editing and (re)appropriation produce what could
be called synthetic ‘image states’ of which meaning and value continue
to change across multiple performative instances of making, sharing and
receiving (Hölzl 2010: 106). Our seemingly smooth but ultimately fragmentary
navigation through such image states via multiple interfaces can evoke a
variety of emotional responses, including enchantment and disaffection. We
have gestured towards two affective registers in this respect: the intimacy
of online sharing and the uncanny (re)emergence of what initially escapes
our perception.

Space, Bodies, Technology

To understand how the street is visualized, we need to take into account

not only the politics of the media through which space is visualized, but
also, conversely, the ways in which these visual media are spatialized.
This means, first of all, that we remain attentive to the complex ways in
which images travel through multiple networks. Wing-Ki Lee (Chapter 2)
provides a particularly sophisticated analysis on derivative work related to
Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, as it traces the various transformations
of images and their meanings in their online trajectories. Yet, images are
18  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

not limited to the visual translations of data flows on our screens, they also
find material expression in the urban environment. From huge billboards
to dilapidated shop signs and from authorized beautif ication projects
to subversive graffiti, visual culture plays an important part in how we
experience the streetscape – even if other senses also play a part in the
physical realm. Indeed, the photoshopped images circulating online in
Lee’s analysis find their way back to the streets in the form of large prints
pasted on cardboards or as stenciled murals.
Simon Ferdinand (Chapter 7) and Aslı Duru (Chapter 5) point to the
significance of embodied movement through the streets of London and
Istanbul, respectively. The performative immediacy of claiming the right
to the city through embodied presence in both case studies is given more
durable form through practices of visualization. Visualization in these cases
constitutes the recording of a trace of physical presence and practice in space.
Nanna Verhoeff and Karin van Es (Chapter 6) point to ways of visualizing
the invisible data flows that run through our urban environments, and
emphasize the political stake of making these visualizations available in
public space, embedded in the materiality of our everyday surroundings.
Ginette Verstraete and Cristina Ampatzidou (Chapter 9) and Karen Cross
(Chapter 10) explain how the right to the city is also played out in contesta-
tions over aesthetization and beautification projects, which entail different
ways and forms of imagery. These chapters demonstrate the complex ways
in which the visual appearance of the street in its physical manifestation
is entangled with virtual visualizations of it.
The affect produced by new practices of visualization, some of which have
been discussed in the previous section, rely largely on new forms of embodi-
ment that digital technologies instigate. Digital devices, interfaces and apps
have become extensions of our bodies; we increasingly see, hear, calculate
and communicate through them. With the use of digital technology, we
gain knowledge about our bodies and environment, we track ourselves
and turn into, what Deborah Lupton calls, quantified selves, with our data
profiles following us everywhere (2016). In addition to quantifying the
world around us, we also feel the world differently through digital devices.
As Mark Shepard suggests, ‘today, the “feel” of the street is defined less
and less by what we can see with the naked eye’ (2011: 21). The discourse of
smart cities and sentient futures pays particular attention to the embodied
forms of everyday interaction with, and through, digital techniques of data
visualization. This phenomenological aspect of technological innovation is
central to László Muntéan’s (Chapter 4) investigation of the sublime effects
of drone visibility. The body-technology relation and the issue of human
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 19

perception are also at the heart of the three chapters collected in this volume
under the title ‘Navigating Urban Data Flows’.
A productive case study to think through the intersections between
virtual imagery and urban space is the digital renderings of architectural
projects. Such computer-generated 3D visualizations not only have become
the dominant visual language within the discourse of professional urban
design and architecture – such as professional architectural journals, city
planning and real estate projects – they are also a prominent feature in
urban space and the public sphere in the form of large-scale posters on
walls and urban surfaces, and small scale prints and images in magazines
and websites. In a series of articles on the digital visualizations of urban
redevelopment projects, Gillian Rose, Monica Degen and Clare Melhuish
(2016) argue that, in order to understand these images, one needs to consider
the conditions of their production. One has to understand the labor that has
gone into producing these seemingly easy visualizations, to consider the
network and process of their making. They propose to use Actor Network
Theory for the study of these images because its emphasis on networks,
mobility and agency allows us to challenge the picture-perfect completion
that the visual content of the images seems to suggest:

What examining the labour of creating these visualizations suggests, is

that they are far from being near-magical, seamless, pristine images of
glossy urban futures. Instead, they are rather more like sites of debate and
disagreement, which shift and change as different designs are inputted,
different sorts of views desired, and different sort of audiences anticipated.
And if they could be seen like that, the seamless views of urban living
that they offer could also be challenged, by being seen as networked.
(Rose et al., 2016: 116)

They suggest that, by considering how these visualizations imply multiple,

sometimes conflicting, practices, we not only understand the labor gone into
their making but also are better equipped to question these images’ ‘strategic
erasure of their processes of production’ critically (Rose et al., 2016: 111). Here,
Actor Network Theory is complemented by close analysis of both visual
content, that is, the type of social reality depicted and the choices made in
terms of composition, framing, lighting and perspective, and the affective
qualities, i.e. the shiny, glossy, happy atmosphere of the images. Interestingly,
the authors suggest not only to study these three aspects of architectural
renderings critically – how the images are produced, what they show and what
emotional response they (seek to) evoke – but also to interrupt their intended
20  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

affective atmosphere by locating ‘visualizations whose glamour is in some way

defective, and then to share that deglamourization with various audiences’
(Rose et al., 2016: 113). In other words, Rose, Degen and Melhuish argue that
exclusionary visualizations of the street could be countered by circulating
other visualizations, those that capture faded, torn and inconspicuous versions
of these CGIs in our everyday urban reality, confronting the envisioned futures
with the messy and more inclusive nature of real streets. To understand these
images, Rose, Degen and Melhuis suggest that the details of the practices that
have led to their visualization should be taken into consideration. This type
of practice-based research, attentive to the intersections between spatial and
visual regimes, is what we argue for in this book too.
In line with the argument made in this introduction, the scholarly ap-
proaches of the chapters collected in this volume have at least two things
in common. Firstly, they appreciate the inextricable entanglement of the
(virtually) visual and the spatial. Secondly, they pay attention to practices of
visualization and its related aspects of embodiment, materiality and affect.
The chapters speak to each other in a variety of ways and show considerable
thematic and methodological overlaps. In this introduction, we have traced
some of those recurrent notions and suggested key points of convergence
between chapters. To highlight our approach to visualizing the street as
practice, however, we have ordered the chapters according to the following
overarching themes: documentation, navigation and imagination. These
themes are to help readers navigate the chapters through our conceptual
approach, and they are not meant as distinct categories as most of the
chapters relate to more than one of them. The following section outlines
the main content of each part and each chapter.

Documenting Streets on Social Media

The first part of the book explores diverse examples of street images circulat-
ing on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and
Twitter. The images discussed in this section capture streetscapes with the
aim of documenting a significant historical event, registering transient acts
of defiance or archiving the status quo for the future. Despite their divergent
concerns, the four chapters in this section share an interest in the politics
of circulation and the affective register of visual consumption on these
media platforms. Paying particular attention to the aesthetic qualities of
their case studies, all four chapters critically assess the affect produced by
such documenting and sharing.
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 21

In Chapter 2, ‘Derivative Work and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement:

Three Perspectives’, Wing-Ki Lee starts from the conspicuous absence of any
visual reminder in the streets of Hong Kong of the 2014 street protests that
came to be known as the Umbrella Movement. In response, the author turns
to the virtual archive of hyper-mobile images on the Internet, in particular
the derivative work of photoshopped, re-edited and re-appropriated images
surrounding these street protests. Interestingly, Lee moves beyond a celebra-
tory description of the peculiar subversive aesthetics of amateur image
appropriation to consider its historical resonance with state-authorized
visual censorship in mainland China, its immoral use by conservative and
patriarchal Internet users, and its re-appropriation by state actors. Thus, the
chapter raises questions about all-too-easy dichotomies between oppressive
and subversive visual regimes.
Chapter 3, ‘Strange in the Suburbs: Reading Instagram Images for Re-
sponses to Change’, provides a reading of Instagram feeds that form visual
archives of Australian suburban façades. Megan Hicks argues that, when
standing alone, these images do not evoke any particular feeling. Yet, in the
flick-flick-flick of the Instagram feed, the images become haunted by their
deliberate exclusion of the rapid increase of high-density apartment blocks
in suburban landscapes. Especially those photographers who succeed to
frame the suburban decorative details in symmetrical compositions, in the
orthogonal frame of the app, uncannily evoke the repetitive geometry of the
very high-rises that threaten to erase the captured landscape but remain
conspicuously absent within the frames.
From the repressed anxieties in Australian suburbs, László Munteán takes
us to the overt horror of the war-torn streets of Syria. Chapter 4, ‘Droning
Syria: The Aerial View and the New Aesthetics of Urban Ruination’, critically
assesses the aesthetics of Russian journalistic aerial footage captured by
drones hovering over Syrian cities in war. He not only criticizes the way in
which its mode of production is implicated with the Russian war effort, but
also dwells on the specific phenomenology of droning and how it is geared
towards continuing a long tradition of Ruinenlust, thus questioning the
ethics of not only the mode of production and the aesthetic composition of
the footage, but also of its mode of reception as a YouTube hit.
In Chapter 5, ‘The affective territory of poetic graff iti from sidewalk
to networked image’, Aslı Duru opens up the intersection between space
and visual culture to include poetry. Duru investigates the #siirsokakta
movement that emerged in the wake of Istanbul’s Gezi protests. ‘Siir
sokakta’ means ‘poetry in the street’ and refers to the widespread prac-
tice of scribbling or spray-painting lines of poetry in public space, then
22  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

capturing the lines with a camera phone and sharing it online using a
shared hashtag. The chapter considers the relations between poetic text,
image and urban space from a historical perspective, and reflects on the
methodology of walking ethnography. Duru argues that the peculiar
geography of the #siirsokakta movement asks for an expansion of this
method to include browsing ethnography, pointing out their parallels
and intersections.

Navigating Urban Data Flows

The chapters in the second part of the book are concerned with practices of
orientation and navigation. We use images to navigate virtual geographies
of information spatially, and, conversely, we use visualizations of those
very data flows to navigate the social and physical space of the city. The
three chapters in this part of the volume are interested in the politics and
aesthetics of this translation process between data and image, between real
and virtual space. A shared concern in the chapters gathered in this section
are the limitations of the visibility and legibility of the environment despite,
and often precisely as a result of, technological advancements.
In Chapter 6, ‘Situated Installations for Urban Data Visualization: Interfac-
ing the Archive-City’, Nanna Verhoeff and Karin van Es take creative media
installations as a starting point, in order to propose a set of conceptual
approaches to visual interfaces that provide access to a layered urban reality
of data flows. Interestingly, the navigation of immaterial data is translated
into exclusively spatial concepts. Verhoeff and van Es’s concept of ‘performa-
tive archaeology’ elegantly expresses the tension between the vastness of
the informational geography that escapes our perception in the urban
environment and the temporality of instantaneity, both as the nature of
data flows and of the instance of their uncovering.
In Chapter 7, ‘Cartography at Ground Level: Spectrality and Streets
in Jeremy Wood’s My Ghost and Meridians’, Simon Ferdinand analyses
the GPS-tracked walking performances and their visual renderings by
the artist Jeremy Wood. Producing cartographies that trace his erratic or
choreographed movements in space, Woods plays with preconceived ideas
about what cartography is or should be. Using technology that registers space
using satellites, his artworks present us with a visual rendering of space
that is profoundly embodied. Ferdinand proceeds to argue that Wood’s art
exposes slippages in digital mapping’s pretentious worldview of existential
security provided by precisely calculated locations.
Introduc tion: Visualizing the Stree t 23

In the Chapter 8, ‘Street Smarts for Smart Streets’, Rob Coley argues
that the aesthetics of smart cities, as of yet largely speculative, reveal how
humanist assumptions that the human subject has privileged access to seeing
and visualizing reality are in crisis. He explores two very different fictional
accounts, a television series and a novel, that are dark, unsettling, and
‘weird’ in their questioning of subject-object relations and argues that these
darker visions form a necessary critical counterpart to the more utopian
visualizations in the areas of design and urban planning. The detectives
that form the protagonists of these fictional narratives are increasingly
bewildered by the fact that the urban territory in which they try to navigate
remains largely illegible to them.

Imagining Urban Communities

The third section of the book addresses the ways in which visualizations
of the street serve to forge associations and construct narratives and
imaginaries of urban communities. The chapters in this part tease out
the contentious dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that are invariably
part of the processes of visualization. They pay particular attention to the
ways in which the visual plays a role in the struggles over the right to the
city, which can no longer be considered apart from the claims to agency in
hegemonic visual regimes.
In Chapter 9, ‘Chewing Gum and Graffiti: Aestheticized City Rhetoric in
post-2008 Athens’, Ginette Verstraete and Cristina Ampatzidou contrast two
different types of urban imaginaries and the politics of their visualizations.
First, they offer two examples of what they call a post-political stance that
seek to develop a pristine urban environment of which all traces of poverty
and crime are removed, so as to attract new capital investments and tourism.
These are contrasted with two examples in which a crack opens in these
sanitized urban spaces, from which a notion of the political emerges. Through
these case studies, they demonstrate the volatile dynamics of appropriation
and co-optation at stake in these DIY visualizations of the street.
In Chapter 10, ‘The Uncanny Likeness of the Street: Visioning Community
through the Lens of Social Media’, Karen Cross analyses the aesthetics of
social media visualizations of a UK volunteer-led ‘alternative’ market.
Considered within the context of larger processes of gentrification and their
concomitant socioeconomic tensions and struggles, the chapter considers
the uncanniness of retro aesthetics in what seems to be a genuine attempt
to envision a sense of community in South East London.
24  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

In Chapter 11, ‘On or Beyond the Map? Google Maps and Street View in
Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas’, Simone Kalkman discusses the hybrid configura-
tion of local actors and global companies involved in digitally mapping
Rio’s favelas. Historically excluded from cartographic visualizations, these
initiatives seek to generate visibility, recognition and opportunities for the
favela streets and their communities. However, Kalkman also highlights a
number of pitfalls. In marketing the new mapping of the favelas, it is in the
interest of commercial actors like Google to perpetuate the oversimplifying
imaginaries of Rio as a ‘divided city’. Kalkman argues that, especially those
initiatives that fail to create some form of contact zone, whether online or
in urban space, seem merely to reproduce the exclusionary binaries they
claim to address.

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About the authors

Pedram Dibazar is a lecturer and tutor at Amsterdam University College,

where he teaches courses on cities, cultures and media in the Faculty of
26  Pedr am Dibazar and Judith Naeff

Humanities. Pedram holds a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from Am-
sterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. His research
interests lie in the intersections of space, visual culture and everyday life.

Judith Naeff is university lecturer Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden

University, the Netherlands. Her research interests are in the visual culture,
arts and literature of the contemporary Middle East, in particular related to
cities or the Arab Left. Based on her PhD project at the Amsterdam School for
Cultural Analysis, she has published the monograph Precarious Imaginaries
of Beirut: A City’s Suspended Now (2017).