VISUAL REGIMES OF URBAN PLATFORMIZATION: AESTHETICS, GLITCH, COMMUNICATION
Agnieszka Leszczynski
- Visual regimes of urban platformization: aesthetics, glitch, communication
- Friday, 7 October, 14:00-15:30
- Live on Campus or on Zoom (link will be sent out)
Abstract
In this talk, I engage with the visual regimes of urban platformization as an emergent and crystalizing logic in cities. Drawing on a range of empirical instances from North American cities, I situate and trace urban platform visualities in three registers: aesthetics, the glitch, and communication. Docked bikesharing infrastructure in Vancouver comprises a serialized aesthetics increasingly co-implicated with the aesthetics of gentrification at the microgeographic, or sub-neighbourhood, scale of the city. What would appear to be a garish, performatively ‘ugly’ home intended to disrupt the homogeneity of an Instagrammable aesthetic nevertheless function to cue the production and circulation of value. And two additional instances from Canadian cities – signs indicating reserved parking for mobility platform vehicles, and posters calling for gig workers to unionize – materially communicate and are contextualized against the conditions of platform urbanism along axes of changing spatial and social relations in the city. I discuss how this visual-material perspective nuances our understandings of the co-generative dynamics of platforms and cities by foregrounding how platforms materially make and claim space, communicate, and mediate socio-spatial relations in urban environments.
Bio
Agnieszka Leszczynski is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at Western University in Canada. She is one of the editors of Environment & Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, and a former Co-Editor of Big Data & Society. Her current research focuses on the visual aesthetics of urban platformization in a comparative global context, and also examines how small cities are figuring as sites of digital experimentation.
Date: 7 October
09:30-11:30
Presentations from the Geomedia Research Group (closed session)
Venue: Minerva (12C608)
Lunchbreak
14:00-15:30
Open Lecture by Agnieszka Leszczynski
Venue: Erlandersalen (11D227)
Questions about the open lecture can be sent to the Geomedia Centre Coordinator
Also, please contact Cornelia Brantner for Zoom-link