Spectacle and/as the New Urban Aesthetic

The notion of the urban spectacle has been approached in a number of ways, but it is often associated with the material seductions of capitalist urbanism: the glitzy spaces of shopping malls or the sensory intensity of fairs and expos, understood as overwhelming experiences that blind critical perception and deafen critical thought. Guy Debord had a somewhat different take, if equally convinced that the spectacle was a consequence of capitalist production. The spectacular, he wrote, referred to deeply alienated social relations mediated only by images that lead to a uniform “passive acceptance” and “hypnotic behaviour”.¹Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 8.

It’s certainly the case that contemporary urban redevelopment projects rely heavily on designing sensory experiences. Over thirty years ago, Pine and Gilmore, for example, described the ‘experience economy’.²B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1999). As cities and urban redevelopment projects continue to compete ever more fiercely on a ‘global catwalk’ for inward investment, and for residents and tourists, the feel or atmosphere of the city has become a unique selling point. Areas are redeveloped in order to generate more income and as that happens their sensory character changes: they get cleaned up both physically and symbolically, and existing cultural practices get replaced by new events from pop-up art studios to music events to farmers’ markets in order to attract more and new residents and visitors.³Monica Montserrat Degen, Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester (London: Routledge, 2008).

Digital images are central to much of this activity. In our recent book, we show how digital tools have become crucial to the working of the urban experience economy as they support, promote or alter the feel or atmosphere of places.⁴Monica Degen and Gillian Rose, The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). From carefully crafted computer-generated images, to marketing campaigns on Instagram, to tourist selfies and residents’ Facebook posts, the feel, the atmosphere, the sensoriality of cities is being captured, mediated, reframed and shared using digital devices.

We suggest that much of this activity is rather more prosaic – and rather more diverse – than the notion of the spectacle suggests, however. In particular, we emphasise the intimate entanglements of these digital practices with urban multisensory experiencing.⁵Sarah Barns, Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacmIllan, 2020). Senses are central ingredients in the organization of quotidian experience. The senses engage us with the city in that the interplay of different sensory perceptions in places contributes to our spatial orientation, frames our awareness of spatial relationships and facilitates the appreciation of the qualities of particular places. These fine-grained sensations build up into an urban lived experience where the physicality of the city constantly interacts, supports and collides with our bodies. Digital devices are increasingly part of this sensorial texture of everyday urban life. Bodies hold, carry and touch smartphones, tablets, laptops, gaming devices, ebook readers, smartwatches, fitness trackers… so we can say that bodies in many city spaces now simultaneously occupy both material urban spaces and digital, onscreen environments. Anna Munster describes this as a “double digital embodiment” — bodies inhabit a space grafted between the experience of being in online environments and the corporeality which enacts that experience.⁶Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, Interfaces, Studies in Visual Culture (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2006). This understanding of the digital mediation of sensorial urban space shifts attention somewhat from individual embodiments and towards the extension of sensory feelings in digitally mediated urban environments: to what we call the new urban aesthetic.

We elaborate our arguments by drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre⁷Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). and Jacques Rancière⁸Jaques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriuel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006). rather than Debord, in order to be attentive to the different forms that the new urban aesthetic can take. From Lefebvre, we take his well-known triadic notion of space: the perceived, lived and conceived to embed different aspects of spatiality and temporality into the formation of the new urban aesthetic and to conceive the experience of urban space as textured.⁹André Jansson, “Mediatization and Social Space: Reconstructing Mediatization for the Transmedia Age”, Communication Theory 23, no. 3 (2013): 279–96, https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12015. From Rancière, we take what he calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’ to focus directly on what is and is not sensible¹⁰Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 7. – what can and cannot be seen, heard, smelt – in a new urban aesthetic.

In our book, we feature three particular case studies of urban restructuring which exemplify three different kinds of digital mediations and three versions of the NUA: we analyse how computer-generated images are used in a large-scale urban redevelopment in Doha, Qatar; we explore how the UK city of Milton Keynes is retrofitting and branding itself as a smart city through the development of particular smart city apps; and we look at a cultural regeneration project in London, comparing the corporate branding practices on Instagram with the everyday postings of Instagram users. From those three case studies, we develop a conceptual vocabulary for understanding different manifestations of the new urban aesthetic and highlighting diverse experiential engagements.

This vocabulary is important because – unlike polemics about urban spectacle – the new urban aesthetic manifests differently in different cities and is experienced in manifold ways. Analysing the conceived aspects of the new urban aesthetic such as the production and content of computer-generated images made for a large urban redevelopment in Doha Qatar let us to define the particular aesthetic evoked in these computer-generated images as luminous glamour: acts of digital manipulation that allure audiences and investors in sensory ways in order to make “’ordinary’ objects, surfaces or people appear magical, elegant, effortless and establish the difference from the mundane.” ¹¹Astrid Huopalainen, “Manipulating Surface and Producing ‘Effortless’ Elegance — Analysing the Social Organization of Glamour,” Culture and Organization 25, no. 5 (2019): 333. Glamour is visual: colour, light, textures. Certainly one of the most striking aspects of these computer-generated images – one their creators struggled over – is the use of light, which helps to allure and immerse. This light needs to be accurate — for example, “the shadows in the Middle East are very important,” one architect told us. But also the animated light by the visualizer needs to be “poetic and dappled”, creating a “dreamy feel”.

We also discuss the case of Milton Keynes, which has for some time hosted a wide range of experimental urban technologies. More recently, the city has exemplified a version of the smart city as an urban lab. We looked specifically at a number of smartphone apps that have been designed as part of smart projects and found a massive emphasis on gathering and integrating all sorts of urban data in order to keep the city’s infrastructure moving in the most efficient way – which also assume that its human bodies should also similarly move, smoothly and efficiently, with that behaviour prompted by the data they are offered. The new urban aesthetic here took the form of a kinetic bodily experience of flow.

Lastly, we examined the online place branding of the Culture Mile in London and the configuration of a dramatized urban aesthetic. We looked at the Culture Mile’s official branding campaign on Instagram as well as at how the area is pictured on Instagram by the area’s visitors, tourists, residents and workers. In both cases, what we found was a third manifestation of the new urban aesthetic, this time lived as dramatic. The Culture Mile regeneration project promotes their regeneration activities by hosting events that can be posted on Instagram. Intense, in-the-moment experiences are central in the Culture Mile engagement of audiences, and are curated in the physical urban space as ‘moments’ that can be captured by a phone to be posted online.

These three examples of the new urban aesthetic are all somewhat banal, everyday, quotidian. But real power lies in this sort of production and policing of urban sensations. Some recent papers are particularly attentive to the exclusions that can be generated by specific new urban aesthetics – for example, the unhappiness of residents who have to put up with constant noisy events in Lisbon,¹²Daniel Paiva and Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros, “The Territoriality of Atmosphere: Rethinking Affective Urbanism through the Collateral Atmospheres of Lisbon’s Tourism”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46, no. 2 (1 June 2021): 392–405, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12425. or the use of Instagram for the performance of bourgeois white gentrification lifestyles (and in the case of many lifestyle influencers, white bourgeois femininity) in Amsterdam neighbourhoods.¹³Irene Bronsvoort and Justus L Uitermark, ‘Seeing the Street through Instagram. Digital Platforms and the Amplification of Gentrification’, Urban Studies 59, no. 14 (1 November 2022): 2857–74, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211046539. Neither of these conceived spaces are the same as the more diverse streets that currently retain many immigrant-run shops, but which do not appear online.

Because of that, we do think that versions of the new urban aesthetic require a proactive critical vocabulary. We argue for three tactics that focus enquiry on the effects of different aspects of the new urban aesthetic. The first is storytelling. Storytelling is at the center of many product marketing strategies and considered as a strategic branding tool for urban places as they engage audiences on an emotional and experiential level, indeed it is a “central tool for communicating the experiential value of place.”¹⁴Clara Bassano et al., “Storytelling about Places: Tourism Marketing in the Digital Age”, Cities 87 (1 April 2019): 10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.12.025. Storytelling organizes the temporality of the event being depicted and pitches a particular version of a place and its futures while concealing others. Thinking about the new urban aesthetic as in part a kind of storytelling prompts critical questions about the representational politics entailed in a particular distribution of the sensible and its exclusions and inclusions: Who is telling what kind of stories? Whose stories are heard? Which bodies and experiences are perceived in the visualisations of future city life and which ones are not? Who and what is presented in the story’s future and who and what are left out?

Our second tactic is to be attentive to the different forms of aesthetic labour involved in staging the particular sensory atmospheres. Inspired by Hye Jean Chung,¹⁵ Hye Jean Chung, Media Heterotopias: Digital Effeccts and Material Labor in Global Production (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). we suggest that paying attention to the different corporeal bodies involved in producing particular mediations of places is another way to disrupt their seductive surfaces, seeing app interfaces or computer-generated images as laboured over, patched together, created, maybe with errors or seams showing – seamfulness – looking differently to see different kinds of bodies and divisions of labour. And our third tactic is to focus on the ways in which the malleability and productivity of digital itself creates its own disruptions and glitches.¹⁶Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood, “Glitch Epistemologies for Computational Cities”, Dialogues in Human Geography online first (15 March 2022): 20438206221075710, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221075714.

These tactics return us to the question of power. The various manifestations of the new urban aesthetic are powerful, they have effects in how cities are built and experienced. Each production of these distinctive spatial-temporal forms of urban sensibilities displaces others. These tactics for critiquing the new urban aesthetic propose that no matter how glamorous, dramatic, smooth, seamless and fluid the new urban aesthetic feels – no matter how seductive and pleasurable – there are also always differences within it that allow us opportunities to render its production and its specificities more evident. Far from being uniformly hypnotic or accepted, the new urban aesthetic can fail, be side-stepped, breached, ignored, and displaced. We think that, especially in the context of branding urban redevelopment projects of various kinds, digital mediations take profoundly aestheticized forms – and with the exception of a handful of scholars,¹⁷Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press Books, 2019). urban studies hasn’t yet paid enough attention to the variable dynamics of sensorial aesthetic power in digitally mediated cities, spectacular or otherwise.

Monica Degen

Mónica Degen is Professor of Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London.

She has worked on many international research projects with architects, local councils, museum curators, neighbourhood associations and the general public to research the politics of urban regeneration and the role of the senses and experiences in framing architectural practices, urban planning, everyday life and culture in cities from Doha (Qatar) to Cologne, Barcelona and London. She is the author of Sensing Cities (Routledge 2008); The Meta-City: Barcelona – transformation of a metropolis (Anthropos) edited with Marisol Garcia and The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change (Bloomsbury, 2022) co-authored with Gillian Rose.

Gillian Rose

Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993) and Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010); the fifth edition of Visual Methodologies (Sage) was published in 2023. Last year also saw the publication of a collection of essays on Seeing the City Digitally, available open access from Amsterdam University Press, as well as The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change, co-authored with Monica Degen (Bloomsbury). She has written many papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces.

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