Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City(Cities and Cultures)

About the Book

From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized. Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies — From Hong Kong's streets to Rio's favelas, from Sydney's suburbs to London's street markets, and from Damascus' war-torn streets to Istanbul's sidewalks — and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Visualizing the Street 1 Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff Documenting Streets on Social Media 2. Derivative Work and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement: Three Perspectives - Wing Ki Lee 3. Strange in the Suburbs: Reading Instagram Images for Responses to Change - Megan Hicks 4. Droning Syria: The Aerial View and the New Aesthetics of Urban Ruination -László Munteán 5. The Affective Territory of Poetic Graffiti from Sidewalk to Networked Image- Asl? Duru Navigating Urban Data Flows 6. Situated Installations for Urban Data Visualization: Interfacing the Archive-City - Nanna Verhoeff & Karin van Es 7. Cartography at Ground Level: Spectrality and Streets in Jeremy Wood's My Ghost and Meridians - Simon Ferdinand 8. Street Smarts for Smart Streets - Rob Coley Imagining Urban Communities 9. Chewing Gum and Graffiti: Aestheticized City Rhetoric in post-2008 Athens - Ginette Verstraete and Cristina Ampatzidou 10. The Uncanny Likeness of the Street: Visioning Community Through the Lens of Social Media - Karen Cross 11. On or Beyond the Map? Google Maps and Street View in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas - Simone Kalkman Bibliography, Index.

About the Author :

Pedram Dibazar is a lecturer in the Humanities with a focus on cultural analysis at Amsterdam University College.
Judith Naeff is Assistant Professor Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden University.