ABSTRACT
Now that we walk in urban surroundings saturated with digitally produced 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.
