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August 16, 2009
In The Future Gaze: City Panoramas as Politico-Emotive Geographies in The Journal of Visual Culture (April 2009, Volume 8, No. 1) André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist draw attention to the dreams and visions about the future associated with cities. They say:
Debates on ‘the city of the future’ or ‘the future of the city’ have recurred within urban theory, planning and geography for decades ..... Our argument is that neither the mediation of urban spaces, nor the ‘urban spectacle’ can be fully grasped without paying close attention to the role of affect and fantasies.... and to their importance for political and commercial interests in developing the city into a ‘world centre’ and a space of the future – a space of futurity...This perspective transcends notions of abstract space and spectacle, and allows for a more dynamic understanding of the interrelationships between the social appropriation of city space and the abstraction and mediation of the city into a visual sign or commodity.
In modern society, the gazes of people admiring a city skyline are mediatized, that is, scripted through public discourse (e.g. TV programmes) as well as more private media channels (e.g. holiday photos).
They say that in his Iis book The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear (2004), De Cauter provides an explicit elaboration of Debord’s theory, arguing that while cities have always operated as scenes, stages or theatres (of memory, power, everyday life and so on), what is peculiar about the neo-theatrical city is that the dividing line between spectacle and everyday life is sharpened. Contemporary urbanism, according to De Cauter, celebrates sealed, controlled spaces-as-images, and this social division threatens the city. The logical counterpart to the spectacular ecology of fantasy, or Disneyfication, is the ecology of fear, nurtured by surveillance technologies. The two logics support one another, reproducing an ideology of capsularization.
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