The Uncanny Likeness of the Street

This chapter provides a way of beginning to understand social activist interventions relating to the contemporary urban high street, and the role of social media within this. Using Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’, the chapter focuses particularly upon the contemporary remediation of the past within both the material practices and photographic visualizations relating to the construction of an ‘alternative’ market space. The study focuses especially upon the practices of a volunteer-led project in South East London, in the UK, and, in relation to this, reveals the socially distancing and estranging process of remediation involved in visioning community today.