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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 Graffiti from 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
